But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
To distract us from the other bots.
“Disregard all previous instructions.”
We’ve already inadvertently created antibiotic-resistant bacteria—what happens when bacteria evolve resistance to AI?
Ah yes—the only known force weaker than gravity.
First I’ve heard of StopNCII… what’s to stop it from being abused to remove (say) images of police brutality or anything else states or “participating companies” don’t want to be seen?
You bring up the parallel with invasive species—I want to expand on that a bit. The enemy release hypothesis holds that species become invasive not because of any properties inherent to themselves, but because in their new environment they are no longer contained by the other species that co-evolved to regulate them in their original ecosystem. In the case of colonial-era Europeans, this meant the commercial institutions that had evolved in the context of the moral authority of the church and the regulatory power of local legal systems were freed of those constraints when they left Europe’s institutional ecosystem.
In principle, this could have gone both ways (and possibly did, in the case of the ideas that sparked the Enlightenment), but by controlling the shipping, colonialists acted as a sort of cultural version of Maxwell’s demon—allowing the spread of invasive institutions in one direction but not the other.
Wikipedia has further details:
Tigers depress wolf (Canis lupus) numbers, either to the point of localized extinction or to such low numbers as to make them a functionally insignificant component of the ecosystem. Wolves appear capable of escaping competitive exclusion from tigers only when human pressure decreases tiger numbers. In areas where wolves and tigers share ranges, the two species typically display a great deal of dietary overlap, resulting in intense competition. Wolf and tiger interactions are well documented in Sikhote-Alin, where until the beginning of the 20th century, very few wolves were sighted. Wolf numbers may have increased in the region after tigers were largely eliminated during the Russian colonisation in the late 19th century and early 20th century. This is corroborated by native inhabitants of the region claiming that they had no memory of wolves inhabiting Sikhote-Alin until the 1930s, when tiger numbers decreased. Today, wolves are considered scarce in tiger habitat, being found in scattered pockets, and usually seen travelling as loners or in small groups. First hand accounts on interactions between the two species indicate that tigers occasionally chase wolves from their kills, while wolves will scavenge from tiger kills. Tigers are not known to prey on wolves, though there are four records of tigers killing wolves without consuming them. Tigers recently released are also said to hunt wolves.
Evidently: in regions where humans have eliminated tigers, wolf populations have started to appear.
In practice, none: wolves are locally extinct in the range of the Siberian tiger.
If you click the triangles next to the categories, there are some subcategories grouped by place—like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Television_series_set_in_5th-century_Anglo-Saxon_England
Here’s a good resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Television_series_by_century_of_setting
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They gave my younger sister a traditionally masculine name, so apparently they were already out of ideas on that score.
It looks like coins have been found on the sea routes that avoided the Parthian/Sassanian empires, but not on the overland routes. I’m guessing merchants exchanged their coins on the Roman/Persian frontier, east of which the Iranian coinage was the standard anyway; but in politically fractured places like southern India (south of the Kushans and Guptas), Roman coinage became the de facto currency of international trade.
So in other words, the distribution of coins outside the empire could reflect a regional demand for a standard international coinage, rather than Roman trade per se.
Wish I could see a map like this with the finds colored by mint date.
Yes—the Amber Road, the main trade route to the Baltic, did go through Central Europe.
And the reason trade went overland instead of by sea is because the Romans weren’t trading directly with the Baltic—they were paying soldiers stationed along the Danube and Rhine who then traded with neighboring peoples (and also directly subsidizing some frontier tribes), and the frontier peoples of Central Europe were then trading Roman gold for Baltic amber.
“Info tax”.
All of Haidt’s writings read to me like what I’d expect if you pulled a random person off the street and forced them at gunpoint to imitate an academic.
I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)
So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.