The Beginning of the End

• ChatGPT clearly is a big deal. We are nearer the Singularity now than we were a couple of weeks ago. ChatGPT is important because it is the first time that the We have got to play around with these kinds of Large Language Models. This isn't even GPT-4 and there are obvious ways of making ChatGPT better like giving it access to the FoAK and other sources canonical information sources. This is going to be big. Kurzweil's prediction of 2029 for the Turing Test to be passed seems very reasonable at the moment. A 2045 or 2038 Singularity can hardly be excluded. Think of this like Lynx in 1993 or, perhaps, better, Archie and Gopher in 1992. You get from there to Musk's Twitter in 30 years (also all the other stuff). Could Stephenson or Gibson have predicted it? Perhaps, but we wouldn't have believed it. So, who knows by 2052? I'll be 84. I am hoping that's the New 44. Also, natch, AlphaCode. It's not yet coding at superhuman levels, but as with go back in the mid-2010s, being able to code at the level of the average programmer is, in its way, solving programming.
• the National Ignition Facility reaching breakeven might be a big deal. We kind of know now anyway that with the magnets currently available an ITER-like system should work (presumably ITER with its outmoded magnets too, but it's clear there's a roadmap with better ones). Having different fusion paradigms is good. What would it like to work for a fusion startup? Plus, of course, AGI-like systems should help here. I wonder if inertial confinement fusion  might be better for Daedalus-type fusion rockets. Getting fusion rockets "soon" (20 or 30 years) would be a thing. It would be great to see people in Jupiter space in the 2050s. We probably don't need fusion to solve the energy crisis - we need to go from Fermi's pole in the University of Chicago squash to the commercial power reactor at Calder Hall in 15 years (13 for the submarine PWR on the Nautilus). That's 2035. Come on!
• Artemis 1 completed its mission, so no reason not to do a crewed test now. I guess you are still going to have to do an uncrewed lander test. I can't find my earlier post from about 2006 talking about the NASA Moon programme announced back then that I spotted earlier today. But it's taken a decade and a half or more to get here and, of course, we don't need Orion or SLS any ,ore. But still good to see this finally reaching fruition and very likely we are going to have a Moon landing 2025 or so. He-3 mines anyone. (James Nicoll dies a little very time someone suggests those, but come on...).
• David writing 1995 and All That, 17 years ago. Ten years is a long time or not depending how you look at it. I mean things feel very, very very different for me sat 54 than at 37. We were boys then, but didn't know. If we could go back... I think there is a phase change when you get to your mid-50s and realise there is nothing left to look forward to, but the grave. See this article by Justin Erik Halldór Smith. Edvard Munch, In the Tavern, 1890 via https://www.berfrois.com/2022/12/justin-e-h-smith-hell-yes-life-is-good/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email. That's pretty much how I feel and look all the time these days. But he's only 50 (and has already given up the sauce) and gets to research and teach cool things (Russian cosmism!) and has already had an asteroid name after him (how did he wangle that?). "I am co-author, with D. Graham Burnett and Catherine Hansen, of a work of historiographical metafiction, appearing in 2021 from Strange Attractor Press." What? There's always more. How had I not heard of him before? I mean that's the thing. Why not I get to personally hang out with these people? Would I be way of the pace? How can I get to meet them? Yes, this is essentially the theme of Little, Big. Indeed. There's something there. Smith mentions Kieran Setiya's Midlife: a Philosophical Guide, which I should get. Then again is there any point when you are living through it. Is it going to tell me anything helpful. And, more to the point, how come all the people interviewed in the classic studies of midlife crises are in the 40s or younger? They are children. Why is no writing about us? What am I supposed to do or feel at 54 when I am staring into the void and it seems terribly, terribly close in a way it didn't even a year ago? Humh... We shall see.