2016 — 22 May: Sunday
Today's adventures should include a tiny spot of Python hacking, and the hunt for the next well-fired loaf of bread. Plus (possibly) some further 4K screen agonising. And another cuppa.
Despite what I said yesterday, it now turns out that Philips do a new, slightly larger, 43" screen, but this time with a higher bandwidth HDMI 2.0 input, thus allowing untroubled 60Hz refresh at the full 4K resolution. With (I would hope) no further obnoxious video tearing or lag. This should suit Skylark and its new nVidia GTX950 graphics card. (I already know BlackBeast Mk III manages 4K/60Hz with the DisplayPort 1.2 output from its older Radeon graphics card.)
Yesterday's...
... evening entertainment1 was Jugando con el Corazón — a not-quite-idiomatic translation of the English title "Playing by Heart" of this lovely 1998 film — I'm almost afraid to admit I recall the noun Corazón from (of all things) the treasure map in that wondrous earlier spoof "Romancing the Stone".
Guilty as charged?
Seems about right to me. I note Floridi was twice cited in that interesting 56-page "light reading" PDF "The Singularity: a philosophical analysis" by David J Chalmers that I mentioned a while back under (what else?) the heading "Existential Risk".
This turning point is known as a technological singularity, hence the name. Both the nature of such a superintelligence and the exact timeframe of its arrival are left unspecified, although Singularitarians tend to prefer futures that are conveniently close-enough-to-worry-about but far-enough-not-to-be-around-to-be-proved-wrong.
Interesting essay. [Pause] While this gives a new spin on Pandora and her pestilential box:
The capstone of Hephaestus's laboratory was a female android requested by Zeus. Zeus wanted to punish humans for accepting the divine technology of fire stolen by Prometheus. And their punishment, created by Hephaestus, was Pandora ('All Gifts'). Each of the gods endowed her with a human trait. Pandora possessed beauty, charm, musical talent, knowledge of healing and other arts, intelligence, daring and, of course, insatiable curiosity. Pandora is the gods' AI Agent. She comes in the form of a lovely young woman, and she is sent to Earth carrying a sealed chest, which contains another set of 'gifts'.
Including "Hope" if I recall my Tanglewood Tales.