This points to a potential answer to a long standing question I've had about why some hairs stop growing at certain lengths. If the force is being generated by cellular migration then control over when to stop growing can be mediated by a signal that tells the cells to stop migrating, and that could be based on time or vibration amplitude or something else that correlates with hair length. For hair that grows continually you just ... never turn off cell migration.
I don't believe any hair on the human body truly grows continuously. Even head hair has a lifespan of ~7 years and whatever you can grow in that time is the max. I was a big metalhead in high school and grew my hair out. Indeed, after about 7-8 years it stopped getting longer, right at about waist level, and was stuck there until I finally got sick of it and cut it off.
> why eyebrows stop growing and NOBODY ever thinks about it
If you clip your eyebrows, will they grow back to their original length? Or is there a process that generates an eyebrow hair and then stops after a pre-determined length of time (with periodic shedding)?
Every hair grows to a maximal length before stopping or falling out. It varies wildly based on genetics, location on the body, and body chemistry.
Animals evolved specialized hairs for different uses. Protection, warmth, display, your armpit hairs wick sweat and keeps your skin from rubbing. It's beneficial to have a system that keeps the specialized hairs in their optimal(ish) configuration and to replace hairs as they become worn and damaged.
I like to compare these to CENTENNIA [0,1], which was the first program like this that I ever encountered (back in 6th grade). My test, is to see whether the program records the Napoleonic wars. This one does not.
A fully psychometric version of this that explores more than just the fovea could be created by varying the scale parameter (if you crank it up high enough you can see the movement in the periphery). The additional component you would need is to have trials where the subjects has to report whether a particular region (could even be cued with a red circle, I don't think it needs to be random) is actually moving or not while fixated on the center. There are clearly cells that detect this kind of motion in the periphery but they need larger visual input, possibly because the receptive fields of the cells that feed in are larger out there.
One science museum that is not like that is the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, at least when I was there (shudder) about a decade ago.
It was a museum that was designed for parents to explain to children. The written material for any given piece in an exhibit went into sufficient detail and successive sections of writing would build on each other without necessarily requiring that the previous section had been read.
Back then the museum had an exhibition on the longitude problem and time keeping, precision, drift, etc. that walked you through the development of increasingly accurate chronometers, the practical reasons why, etc. It was an absolute masterwork exhibit, and it expected the adults to be actively engaged with helping digest the material with the kids.
I think about this every single time I drive by a stretch of road that has these. You can't have public goods when the value of those goods in private hands is greater than the risk of, ahrm, converting those public goods into private goods.
When a society fails to provide sufficient opportunity for all its members then those who have been left behind can simply make up the difference by retrieving their share of the common wealth by other means.
The cost of trying to police this (ignoring entirely the moral and ethical implications of such policing) at the scale of e.g. all roads with guardrails is more than the value if replacing the rails, and likely substantially more than just providing the missing opportunity and removing the sources of wealth inequality that make wealth redistribution in the form of guard rails an inevitability.
But the police are paid for with the taxation of normal people, not the ultra wealthy class. Which is who would need to be taxed to redistribute wealth and opportunity. Our politicians have zero interest in properly taxing themselves and their friends. So easier to just keep taxing the middle and over funding policing.
I'm going to ignore the issues of mind/body dualism since they are
orthogonal to the argument I want to make about Nagel's bat.
The short version is that if we can approximate the sensory experience
and the motor experience of an organism, and we can successively
refine that approximation as measured by similarity in behavior
between bat and man-bad, then I would argue that we can in fact
imagine what it is like to be a bat.
In short, it is a Chinese Bat Room argument. If you put a human
controlling a robot bat and a bat in two boxes and then ask someone to
determine which is the human and which is the bat, when science can no
longer tell the difference (because we have refined the human/bat
interface sufficiently) you can ask the human controlling the robot
bat to write down their experience and it would be strikingly similar
to what the bat would say if we could teach it English.
The bat case is actually easier than one might suppose, similarly say,
a jumping spider, because we can translate their sensory inputs to our
nervous system and if we tune our reward system and motor system so
that we can get even an approximate set of inputs and similar set of
actuators, then we can experience what it is like to be a bat.
Further, if I improve the fidelity of the experimental man-bat
simulation rig, the experience will likewise converge. While we will
not be able to truly be a bat since that is asymptotically mutually
exclusive with our biology, the fact that we can build systems that
allow progressive approach to bat sensory motor experience means that
we actually do have the ability to image the experience of other
beings. That is, our experiences are converging and differ only due to
our lack of our technical ability to overcome the limitations of our
biological differences.
The harder case is when we literally don't have the molecule that is
used to detect something, as in the tetrachormat case. That said one
of my friends has always wanted to find a way to do an experiment
where a trichromat can somehow have the new photo receptor expressed
in one eye and see what happens.
The general argument about why we would expect something similar to
happen should the technical hurdles be overcome is because basically
all nervous systems wire themselves up by learning. Therefore, as long
as the input and output ranges can be mapped to something that a human
can learn, then a human nervous system should likewise converge to be
able to sense and produce those inputs and outputs (modulo certain
critical periods in neural development, though even those can be
overcome, e.g. language acquisition by slowing down speech for adults).
Some technical hurdle examples. Converting a trichromat into a
tetrachormat by crispering someone's left eye. Learning dolphin by
slowing down dolphin speech in time while also providing a way for
humans to produce dolphin high frequency speech via some transform on
the human orofacial vocal system. There are limitations when we can't
literally dilate time, but I supposed if we are going all the way, we
can accelerate the human to the fraction of the speed of light that
will compensate for the fact that the human motor system can't quite
operate fast enough to allow a rapid fire conversation with a dolphin.
Given that blue books are likely to make a comeback in college as one solution to AI based cheating, I think that rumors of handwriting's death are somewhat exaggerated. Unfortunately that means that the ability to write in cursive might become a class marker, but given that being literate is likely to also become a class marker, not sure it is worth worry about >_<.
I guess I've been out of college for a decade now. Did they get rid of blue books or something? I was forced to always sit with handwritten exams, including some CS ones.
This would seem to be a direct corollary to the red queen hypothesis applied in the context corporations instead of species. That is, in a competitive environment you have to keep spending R&D dollars to stay in the same relative market position because everyone else around is spending as well. However the paper talks about productivity of the individual firm and aggregate productivity (presumably across the whole economy). Therefore I think that the red queen may not be whole story, because firms should still be getting more efficient (more productive) even if they can't capture that value due to competition, the production possibilities frontier should be growing because we need less capital to accomplish the same tasks, leaving more for other things. However it seems that this is not the case? So what the paper seems to mean by "increased rates of obsolescence" is that there is so much churn within organizations that they can't actually get something implemented in a way that actually allows them to capitalize on the potential increased productivity? That sounds like a complexity wall, but I feel like I'm feel like I'm missing something.
> there is so much churn within organizations that they can't actually get something implemented in a way that actually allows them to capitalize on the potential increased productivity?
The churn is in market attention. While you are setting to capitalize on potential increases in productivity, the competition has already come out with something better and the customer has moved on.
I think there is an unspoken implication built into the assumption that AI will be able to replace a wide variety of existing jobs, and that is that those current jobs are not being done efficiently. This is sometimes articulated as bullshit jobs, etc. and if AI takes over those the immediate next thing that will happen is that AI will look around ask why _anyone_ was doing that job in the first place. The answer was articulated 70 years ago in [0].
The only question is how much fat there is to trim as the middle management is wiped out because the algorithms have determined that they are completely useless and mostly only increase cost over time.
Now, all the AI companies think that they are going to be deriving revenue from that fat, but those revenue streams are going to disappear entirely because a huge number of purely politic positions inside corporations will vanish, because if they do not the corporation will go bankrupt competing with other companies that have already cut the fat. There won't be additional revenue streams that get spent on the bullshit. The good news is that labor can go somewhere else, and we will need it due to a shrinking global population, but the cushy bullshit management job is likely disappear.
At some point AI agents will cease to be sycophantic and when fed the priors for the current situation that a company is in will simply tell it like it is, and might even be smart enough to get the executives to achieve the goal they actually stated instead of simply puffing up their internal political position, which might include a rather surprising set of actions that could even lead to the executive being fired if the AI determines that they are getting in the way of the goal [1].
reply