Did they ever go back to the metal? I think the last album I listened to was Shadows of the Sun. At that point things had only gotten more experimental. I wasn't really able to get into either Blood Inside or Shadows of the Sun, so I haven't listened to their even newer releases.
Themes From William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Perdition City are both permanent parts of my psyche.
If our definition of intelligence is something like the ability to represent a sufficiently complete mental model of reality to allow description and prediction of the real world, then I think the approach of trying to create a mind in a purely textual bubble is probably hopeless. I suspect the best you could get is some kind of pseudo-mind capable of producing text as if it were an intelligence with a useful model of reality. It's only mental model is of what text has been written about reality. It can only be a disconnected, imitation of a mind.
But I actually do think that the weighted neural network model has a fair shot at producing intelligence. We only have one example of one type of system that produces intelligence, and this approach wisely takes that as it's inspiration.
Which brings me to your point. I'd wager the missing piece is the variety of inputs that natural minds use to develop their own mental models; sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and also the symbolic inputs we get from language.
I understand that the current ML models use tokenized words as their input, and I have no idea how one could adapt that system to synthesize values from that kind of diversity of inputs, but I suspect the answer to that problem is the missing piece.
This is exactly what needs to happen. Every government fundamentally runs on the voluntary cooperation of the people involved. Every government is susceptible to a breakdown of that cooperation. "Or what?" is not the biting political analysis you think it is.
But I'll spell it out. The administration will comply with the order or they'll be found in contempt. If they're found to be in contempt, they'll either comply with the remedies, or we'll have ourselves a proper constitutional breakdown.
The point is that it's all on the record, black and white, in public. If things really go wrong it is critically important that every media outlet, and every civic institution can point to these public facts so that it is abundantly clear that the administration has become lawless.
It would be much worse if the courts were already so submissive to the will of the executive that they won't even rule against them. Then maga would get to continue doing what they're doing with a pretense of legitimacy, and it would be many times harder to muster public resistance.
This is not true. The United States v Trump ruling was that a president can not be held criminally liable for their exercise of the powers of the presidency. It does not mean that anything the president does is legal. It does not even mean that every presidential action is legal. Courts can still rule that a president's actions are illegal and order injunctions, or even find contempt if court orders are not followed. This has already happened several times in the last month.
It's a bad ruling but making it more catastrophic than it actually is does nobody any good.
Sure there's the maga cultists, but that is not the majority of people who voted for Trump. I honestly think a self-inflicted recession may turn out to be a good thing.
Right now Trump is behaving like, and being treated by the opposition like he's invincible. But I do not think we are at the point where maga has such a hold on power that they can withstand being broadly unpopular. There is still a lot of the government and civil society that remains intact, and could be a platform for stopping the authoritarian takeover, but they are going to need a huge amount of public support. Causing a recession when your mandate was to improve the economy may be enough for this.
The longer this festers, the more maga will be able to destroy or compromise the state and civil society. I think we need to force the crisis sooner rather than later.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/united-healthcare-ceo-killing-poll