After-Orts #136

I Am Not I
     by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)
 
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.
 
Yo no soy yo.
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo,
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedará en pie cuando yo muera.

-----------------

It's a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing. And especially when you think that human beings are soon going to be eclipsed. It felt as if not only are my belief systems collapsing, but it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon. People ask me, "What do you mean by 'soon'?" And I don't know what I really mean. I don't have any way of knowing. But some part of me says 5 years, some part of me says 20 years, some part of me says, "I don't know, I have no idea." But the progress, the accelerating progress, has been so unexpected, so completely caught me off guard, not only myself but many, many people, that there is a certain kind of terror of an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all humanity off guard. … you know, we may have already gone too far. We may have already set the forest on fire. I mean, it seems to me that we've already done that. I don't think there's any way of going back.
     -- Douglas Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach), on AI, in a terrifying podcast interview posted June 29 2023:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-hofstadter-changes-his-mind-on-deep-learning-and-ai      and
https://www.lesswrong.com/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DlfXxzAVtdpU%26t%3D1763s     or
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6e08RnJyxo&t=0s  for the same interview without annoying background music