Downtown SF

Daughter is signed up for ice skating lessons downtown, so I've been spending Saturday mornings in downtown SF, after not having been in some time.

Can confirm the media reports that's it's completely trashed. Notice the candy wrapper wantonly discarded on the lawn:

(Just kidding, that's Tickles' poop bag, I staged this hellscape.)

Here's a building with some charming carved stone walruses in the... architrave? Facade? Whatever...

Glad to see the Tadich Grill is still offering Corned Beef Hash as an entree... and "Long Branch Potatoes" still available with your steak....

Some pics of the former Hills Brothers Coffee headquarters, now called Hills Plaza I think:

More facade, with depictions of the "California story" I think:

Gold miner:

Crab guy:

Chinese guy:

No idea:

 

Synthesized Learning

 Saw a brief show on AI. As I understand it, it's sort of artificial learning, accumulating knowledge and data, and I guess using that to recognize patterns, predict outcomes, even offer solutions.

Up til now we've had "repositories" for knowledge -- scrolls and books and databases. And we've developed tools to process crude knowledge (like the abacus, calculator, Excel spreadsheets, and spell check).

Advantage of AI is that it can internalize this data, recognize patterns, and retain those findings -- ie "learning."

The interesting thing is, humans have a short shelf-life -- they die and every new human has to learn everything all over again from scratch. So right off the bat AI has a huge advantage -- it retains its knowledge and presumably grows its capability forever.

I guess this is what gives rise to the fear of "machines taking over" -- they'll keep learning and growing while each generation of humans has to play catch up.

What I think of is, can AI take over all mental labor? Just as robots do manufacturing faster and better than humans, could AI be used to do all the "thinking" jobs like law, accounting, finance, medicine, even public policy? Creative jobs, music, entertainment?

Then we face the displacement paradox. "Labor saving technology" sounds great but so far it hasn't worked. We've spent 10,000 years developing labor saving methods and increasing yields, but today in France they're having to raise the retirement age so people work longer.