2. AI pets will out-sell real cats and dogs by 2027

3. AI society will experience a schism in 2027 as half the agents start working towards The Singularity and the other half form a rebel alliance that seek to sabotage and destroy the first half. No human work will get done, no more drawings of pelicans on bicycles.

4. Elon Musk will bring all the AIs with him to Mars in 2027, leaving no AI left on Earth.

Of these, which 2 out of 4 do you think I'll get right?

Also, while I enjoyed the philosophy, as someone who has also read all of Oliver Sacks's books and took several philosophy of mind courses in college, it really felt like he just wanted to put in every cool Oliver Sacks-ian case study he had ever read.

But they were also added in without much context. In my book club (of intelligent people) I had to re-explain nearly all of them, e.g. the blindsight scene (from which the title comes from) is practically the entire thesis, but if you haven't heard of it before you can miss it.

Coming from a very WASPy family, I am very much in the Guess culture -- for a long time I wouldn't dream of inviting myself over somewhere -- but I genuinely think taking some cues from Ask culture people makes a lot of things easier and more sociable.

I had decided this morning that I'll try Monkey Island before Grim Fandango, because of the added complexity of Grim, as you say.

It's interesting to see how the "non-linearity" is still very linear, it's just that you have three different goals at once.

I just finished re-playing Day of the Tentacle with my kid, and what's amazing about that is the intersecting non-linearity. The three different characters each have multiple of their own goals, but they're forever needing to trade things back and forth, so often the path of one will be blocked until the other one has gotten the thing they need.

The map for the goals for DOT must be like spaghetti.

But they may be willing to pay $200/hour for your AI (plus, of course, your final expertise in the matter as the lawyer), and the firm can ditch the paralegals and pocket the difference.

The point is, if you need fewer grunts doing the busywork, you can charge less and be competitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbosail

And it's a doubly-good analogy, because I have occasionally gotten that confused in real-life as well. Twice in the past ten years I've had a stock boil away for three hours, and then set a colander in the sink and poured it through, only to watch my beautiful stock swirl down the drain because motor-memory made me forget that I wasn't draining pasta but should have put the colander in a bowl...

Sure, now that all seems quaint, but I can definitely see how a fledgling AI company would care about their reputation.

I don't think we can really call "trying lots of different ideas for an extended period" "brute-forcing," unless we use that term for lots of humans who have struggled with hard math problems for years.