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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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The arc of history bends towards machine dominance in all tasks. Just the other day we had OpenAI's contender come second to some Polish genius who was practically sweating blood in an invite-only programming optimization contest.

https://officechai.com/ai/openai-places-second-behind-human-coder-at-atcoder-progmming-event/

But we can't retrain Psyho for 10,000 years of subjective time on more optimization. His brain is capped at 20 watts or so, just like the rest of us. God isn't going to release homo sapiens max (now with denser neurons and a bigger cerebrum!). The bioethics brigade won't let us step it up and nobody has the balls to ignore them, plus it's too late now. In contrast, Nvidia has a 2-year release timescale.

One would think after watching various chess masters get crushed in the 80s and early 90s we'd have learnt. But it's like you said, nobody learnt anything 'Oh it can beat an amateur but a master has deep conceptual understanding' -> 'oh it can beat a master but Kasparov has deep intuition' -> 'oh it's a nothingburger, let's move on to text'. We continue to not learn the trend even today when progress is much faster and in many more domains. Gary Marcus somehow still has a following, he's the Gordon Chang of AI.