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Book: 20260911 to 20261022, "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Max Bennett

Introduction, 1 20260911 - 1: The World Before Brains, 17 How to cook mushrooms? I once saw a video on YouTube introducing this idea: simply treat and cook mushrooms like meat. At that time, I found it amazing: cooking a plant as if it were an animal? Only today did I realize that mushrooms are essentially more like animals than plants: mushrooms feed on (decayed/dead) plant matter. Mushrooms do not obtain energy through photosynthesis. Breakthrough #1: Steering and the First Bilaterians 20260916 - 2: The Birth of Good and Bad, 43 Both(Roomba and first bilaterians) used tricks that enabled them to navigate a complex world without actually understanding or modeling that world. p52 This reminds me of the current OpenAI AI agent Hugging Face intrusion event. AI doesn't actually understand what they were doing, but they still can do a lot of work, just like Roomba robotic vacuums and pool robotic vacuums. 20260916 - 3: The Origin of Emotion, 59 Dopamine is not a signal for...
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Book: 20261012 to 20261019, "The Rise of the Robots" by Martin Ford

  20260612 - Introduction, page ix. They had simply had the good fortune (or perhaps misfortune) to arrive during a climactic "Goldilocks period" - a sweet spot when everything happened to be just right for agriculture. p xi True. But many years later, with the help of modern technology, including synthetic fertilizers, dams and wells, agriculture in Australia went very well. There is still hope in full automation age. 20260612 - Chapter 1 The Automation Wave, page 1. 20260613 - Chapter 2 Is This Time Different?, page 29. The year 1973 was an eventful one in the history of the United States. p34 The following year, real average wages began a precipitous decline from which they would never fully recover. p35 Is it just because women started their career? In other words, the problem is not that more jobs are being destroyed in downturns; it is that fewer are being created during recoveries. p44 During recoveries, I don't think entrepreneurs have enough money to up...
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Book: 20260903 to 20261010, "the Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith

20260903 - Preface Hence Adam Smith's free-trade and free-market trinity: freedom, prosperity and security. p xii This only suits democracy countries, which follow the same rules. 20260903 - An introduction by Tom Butler-Bowdon.....xiii How much a good or service costs generally depends on the amount of labour that has gone into its making. p xix What if this "amount of labour" turns into zero because AI and robots? Smith admitted that the modern factory system could easily lobotomize workers. p xxi That's the cost of high productivity. Bullshit Jobs This aversion to war runs throughout The Wealth of Nations, principally because Smith felt it was a shocking waste of a society's resources. p xxviii This is the weak point of this book. Robust is as important as productivity. We need to sacrifice some productivity to prevent building a fragile system. Globalization is important, but distributional production make the world stronger. Smith highlights the fac...
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Book: 20260907 to 20261008, "Zorba The Greek" by NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

  20260907 - Section 1..........1 20260908 - Section 2..........17 Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? It is another form of slavery. No form is real, and all will go collapse. That's decided by entropy. However, life is about strive. There is no correct form. Anything that cause further order is good. 20260908 - Section 3..........33 "My son, I carry on as if I should never die." I replied: "And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute." "Which one of us was right, boss?" p38 They both think that the past and the future don't exist. Only the moment is real. 20260908 - Section 4..........47 20260912 - Section 5..........61 "Let people be, boss; don't open their eyes." "Unless when they open their eyes you can show them a better world than the darkness in which they're gallivanting at present...Can you?" p67 First, normally ...
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Book: 20260929 to 20261004, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

  20260929 - Introduction: Hard Calls and Easy Calls PART I: NONHUMAN MINDS 20260930 - Chapter 1: Humanity’s Special Power Individual chimpanzees sometimes kill individual humans, but there is a reason why our species is trying to protect their species from being accidentally extinguished. p28 Good point! 20260930 - Chapter 2: Grown, Not Crafted, 30 20260930 - Chapter 3: Learning to Want 20260930 - Chapter 4: You Don’t Get What You Train For, 46 Such an alien might reason that, if hominids evolved more intelligence, built higher technology, and so gained access to a wider space of possible foods that super-hominids could create, then they'd love the taste of gasoline. Or better yet, jet fuel. p49 Why this didn't happen? But gradient descent works directly on every part of a large mind that it's tuning, whereas natural selection tunes small genomes that work as a sort of recipe for a large brain. p53 What does this mean? You can't grow an AI that does what yo...
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Book: 20260910 to 20260923, "The Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber

  20260910 - Introduction 3 Von Mises argued that as a result, the social welfare states then emerging in places like France or England, let alone Denmark or Sweden, would, within a generation or two, inevitably lead to fascism. p8 What is the root cause of bureaucracy? Elon Musk once said that if you give yourself three hours to clean your room, it will take three hours. If you only give yourself ten minutes, then ten minutes will be enough. This can be considered a form of personal bureaucracy. Do corporate employees care about the fate of the company? They do not. They care more about their salaries and bonuses. Managers have one more concern: how much power they possess. Do corporate shareholders care about the fate of the company? They do not. They care more about whether they can secure lucrative returns. Do customers care about the fate of the company? They do not. Does the government care about the fate of the company? It does not. Thanks to the Wealth of Nations...
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Book: 20260829 to 20260902, "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus

  20260829 - THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS - 1 20260829 - Chapter 1 - An Absurd Reasoning - 3 Absurdity and Suicide Absurd Walls Philosophical Suicide Absurd Freedom The world is absurd. There is no meaning. But we don't live because it's meaningful, or because that's correct choice. We live to enjoy and have fun. At least, we expect to get some fun in the future. Religion is critical here. Can we just use the enjoyment from screens to comfort ourselves? Not likely. Happiness is more about the future, not the moment. We need to tell our genes that they will thrive. 20260901 - Chapter 2 - The Absurd Man - 66 Don Juanism Drama Conquest 20260902 - Chapter 3 - Absurd Creation - 93 Philosophy and Fiction "Art and nothing but art, "said Niezsche; "we have art in order not to die of the truth." p93 We can get real pleasure out of art. Art shows the pattern of the big data of the real world. Movie, music, and even computer games are the form of art. ...
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