Author Archives: GMS

AI computers and our own view of life – 2nd Digression

Leia essa digressão em português.

Humans vs Computers - Brains vs AI

I read this comic last week and I asked myself: “What’s the big deal here?”
Machines overcoming humans, what’s the meaning of this, exactly, and why it matters?
For starters, this is something pretty unique in Earth’s history, I would say. Because this would most likely be the first time that a creation overcomes the creator. (No, I’m not going to start discussing about God and humans and who created who and if, in the possibility of God having actually created the humans, if humans are overcoming him. Not now, at least. And I’ll likely transcribe a digression about why I didn’t capitalize the “h” when I wrote the personal pronoun that is referring to God.)

Right, but what can machines do exactly? A lot, right? Yes, but what can they do by themselves? Only what humans tell them to do. So what’s the problem here if we create a machine that is better than humans at playing chess, go or even jeopardy? Even a simple calculator can do math better than most humans and I don’t see people complaining or worrying about it…

But Continue reading

Estimation, the Moon and the power of 10 – 1st Digression

Leia esta digressão em português.

A few months ago I watched this Veritassium video where Derek went around asking people to place where the Moon (tennis ball) is in relation to the Earth (basket ball) scaling for the size of the balls.
Not so surprisingly, everybody (besides one guy, I’d say) placed it much, much closer than it actually is and Derek gave a brief explanation of why people’s estimation of this distance is normally off and showed what would be the most correct answer.

It was only a few days later that it came back to me and I started thinking:
“Would I make a correct estimation? What if the Earth was of a different size?
And more importantly, how far the Moon actually is from the Earth?”
Continue reading

Welcome to EDSM



Else, hope you enjoy your stay and have fun!