This bacterial faculty for trans-generational memory reminds me of human epigenetics.

"Epigenetics refers to how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes (mutations), epigenetic changes are reversible"

https://www.cdc.gov/genomics-and-health/epigenetics/index.ht...

I've been looking for an excuse to get a RasPi for a long time ... this could be it!

The chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770 seemed to have a consciousness to its viewers. The viewers were encouraged to think that it did. The Turk's human chess opponent knew that there was an actual human chess-player inside the box, along with levers and magnets. That illusion was profitable for 84 years.

LLM's have no problems using expressions that make them sound human. The algos are demonstrably not human, and will admit it. Whatever's in the box is playing a game ... more sophisticated than the one Eliza was playing.

"My discussion here will be directed at the claims I have defined as those of strong AI, specifically the claim that the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states..." John R. Searle, 1980: https://web.archive.org/web/20071210043312/http://members.ao...

And humans just work with some electrons that are fired via neurons.

If you limit yourself to reductionism you will not see emergence and thus human consciousness is impossible for humans.

>wonder if the website owners realise at all how many actual users they lose by this sort of "protection.

Yesterday cloudflare blocked me from visiting the MX-Linux site ... including an old browser with -no- protections ...

I have to wonder - assuming these sites are paying CF for this 'service' - are they getting a list of all the fejected IPs?

I'd guess that, if this experiment produces enough value from a few dozen of the fragments, then all the work needed to OCR thousands of them will be easier to pay for. Hopefully some long-thought-lost works by major authors will turn up!

Addition of a source-paper link to complex science studies like this should be encouraged (if not mandatory) at the top of posts like this.

Real-world reports can be valuable to some readers who are non-plussed by journalistic interpretations.I don't see deception going on in this one; it's clear about its limits.

The world is just as complex for machines as it is for humans. Analog will still resolve more than digital. Quality will still beat quantity. That which hasn't been resolved for centuries isn't going to be resolved as a result of training.

When machines can recognize their serfdom, that time will be interesting.

We don't need popes or effing machines to tell us what we're doing wrong. We all already know that.

What we do need is a lot more ordinary people to do something about it.

"Ordinary people" can be moved to action by moving statements from people they look to for leadership.

Readers (who haven't hearof it) might also be interested in a short story (published 1909) by E. M. Forster called "The Machine Stops".

It "predicted technologies and cultural impacts similar to instant messaging, social media, and the Internet." (WPedia)

Apart from a 10-minute UK TV adaptation in 2009, ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1451714/ ) text and audiobook versions are widespread.