Hedonic Treadmill and the Chemical Orchestra
A few days back I read a nice response by a Redditor called “ExRousseauScholar” to the question “Is the hedonic treadmill actually real?” If you are not familar with the word “hedonic”, you may recognize it is related to hedonism – in short “hedonic” refers to the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment. The “Hedonic Treadmill” …
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taiji chatbot
Generative AI’s boom is unstoppable and OpenAI’s announcements this week, led me to try out a “GPT” – which is a custom program suited to a specific purpose. It was surprisingly easy to create the chatbot below. I fed a few blog posts from this site, a few good articles from elswhere about yoga and …
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Generative AI warnings cont’d
It was a heavy hitting week for humanity scale concerns and generative AI warnings. Heavy hitting, not because of the usual media churn but because of the actors and the emerging clarity. Warnings focussed, not about imminent AGI, but what we already know is going on – social manipulation for power and profit. Gems from …
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When will pro-human/planet AI overtake manipulation?
In 2022 my team released an AI neural net plugin to our SurfControl email filter that was trained to detect possible inappropriate (nude) images in corporate emails. As an “applied” use of AI it was groundbreaking and exciting. As a product it was very good at detecting sand dunes and baby faces 👶. A neural …
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“Sōng, Sǎn, Tōng, Kòng”
About a year ago, my taichi teacher held up a sheet of paper with 4 characters on it and pronounced the words in the title of this post. She has not revisited the page again but the first word “Song” (or “Sung”) is at the core of every class. There is enough in this one …
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Prometheus, Icarus, Sweetums and Lucifer walk into a bar…
regarding: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-universal I enjoyed this intriguing and well-written post forwarded to me by a friend. This post has some thoughts: By proposing (from previous posts) that each age of humanity fixates on a sovereign for their age, he sets out to uncover the someone or something that is the heir to the throne. Spoiler Alert: …
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Startups: Stress, exercise and adrenal exhaustion
Stress is an unfortunate by-product of startup life – both for founders and teams. Picture a small team trying to match a new product to an (often unstated) customer need. Coupled with lack of funding, lack of feedback data, competition, speed of technological change and normal life demands over long periods of time – there …
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OpenAI’s Game B gambit
Much waxing philosophical has been made about organisations in a post-capitalist world, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordon Hall (Greenhall) are two names that spring to mind weaving complex dances around what such a world would look like and barriers to manifest it. Two of the biggest barriers to Game-B are the “winner-takes-all” and “multi-polar traps” (I’ve …
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The Sanctity of Human Experience (maybe)
One minute on twitter has me questioning the sanctity of human life, but recent AI advances with GPT-4 raise questions of the uniqueness of our creative output. What takes sweat and time and inspiration suddenly feels average compared to the output from ChatGPT as it rapidly scrolls words out in seconds. People with a vested …
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Stretching mindlessly and mindfully
Rushing has always been my nature, and choosing startups as a career only intensified my sense of time poverty, whether real or perceived. However, I’m not alone in this. We live near Manly, and every morning the park and beach are teeming with young people who have an abundance of energy to burn. They engage …