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Gentient

Things I find fascinating.

roger@gentient.me

Topics

Site Playlist

While building this site, my music feed kept bringing me great songs. It was relentless and I found it, well, fascinating.
I saved them into this playlist in the order they appeared. I found them meaningful. They are on Spotify as the “Gentient.me” playlist below. Feel free to emulate the list (Same song version in the same sequence) onto other platforms. I can post it here.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4A0P0cNgFCZXMkNH3W3u0R?si=a4d42a8e84634506

If you want the full experience, play the music while you read this site.

Everything IS Getting faster

Ray Kurzweil says AI will be smarter than a human in 2029. This talk is how he convinced me he is right. He has discovered that everything that uses information technology is advancing at an exponential rate. I find his arguments and data absolutely convincing. The implications of this are astounding. It is almost like he discovered a new "force" like gravity that acts around us all the time, but we didn't know is there.

How will we adjust? I have no idea.

Towards A Safe AGI Business Model

Imagine a business that creates an entity that is smarter than a human being: an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) entity. It will become WAY smarter than a human being. This entity would replace humans in ALL jobs. Such an entity would be the CEO of every corporation, would be the head of every government and government agency. It would take over all the positions in every business and in all of government. Humans could no longer need to work at all, since this entity could do all the work much better than we could. Fantastic, yes? How would people pay to use it if they have no job?

So what would be the business model of such a company? How can a business make profit if nobody can do work in exchange for the goods and services of the business? The only long term business model would be that of a governance system. The Chinese are already seeing it this way and are well underway to constructing it.

Intelligence is Using Knowledge: On the nature of Knowledge

What is the relationship between data, information and knowledge? This topic covers a work assignment I was on that distinguished these three domains in a way that is fabulously useful. When I looked deeper years later, I saw a really good framework for artificial Intelligence (AI). When I asked ChatGPT what Intelligence was, it referred to the ability to use knowledge. I see wisdom as applying the right knowledge in a given situation.

Weighting for Godot

For two years I tried to lose weight. Then I lost it in 6 weeks. This topic is how, and there is nothing to buy, just things to know.

"Waiting for Godot" is a classic play in which the characters are waiting for someone named Godot, but he never arrives. My experience with weight loss had a similar "never going to happen" feel to it. I tried and failed at dieting for 2 years, and then I went from 188 lbs to 160 in 6 weeks. It was easy. This topic tells you how. Twenty years later I am 145 lbs, because I want to be. I have complete control of my weight. I think everyone really should have this knowledge, so I wrote up my experience and findings.

Chaos = Creativity

James Gleick's book, "Chaos: Making a New Science", an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a widely used phrase. This topic explores what it meant to me. Chaos is different from randomness and I had to see it for myself. I wrote a java program to simulate it. This topic includes some videos and images that show the difference and show how creativity can come from the heart of chaos. After reading this book, I felt I knew where the creativity in the universe comes from.

There is also the java code for my simulation to play with if you are interested.

Morganics

I have been helping a friend develop his soil supplement business. He uncovered a way to use nature's own mechanisms to build plant health by triggering the plant's immunity response to make it into a "super-plant". It works on all plants; yes weeds too. The mechanism is fully organic.

The results are astounding. We have not seen any crop where the yield increase is less than 10%. One test on strawberries had a 30% increase in yield.

With this technology, we can increase the global food supply by at least 10% and shift world-wide agriculture to be fully organic. Wow.