The end of physical media is neigh


Very sad news for me personally.  Honestly this struck me as hard or harder than hearing about the death of a beloved artist.   With the advent of machine learning and AI controlling our music listening we are becoming a world without any control at all over our music or movie culture.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/lg-stops-making-blu-ray-players-marking-the-end-of-an-era-limited-units-remain-while-inventory-lasts

erik_squires

By  the way listen to this video as suggested by our friend and if you conclude A.I. is "intelligent" in a human sense you need to read books , a lot of them in all fields :

Language were called a pre-intelligent engine by the great linguist Gustave Guillaume  80 years ago , language in human is grounded in meanings whose levels are between the gesturing body the society and Nature.

In A.I. as it is for now it is a stastistical engine able of artificial attention(transformers) which make it able to refocus his direction according to any prompt as content...

Calling A.I. more intelligent than human is an abuse of the concept by  conflating thinking and perceiving with computations..

Something maybe  cute for  some engineers in need of funds in this race  but ridiculous for philosophers or artists or true scientists...

A.I. is the speaking web with an artificial ego...All information exceed any human brain...This has nothing to do with intelligence in human term nor with the soul (affective life) not with the spirit life for which A.I. cannot even have a word because spirit life is only silent ...LLM are designed to fool us as "normal" person by the refined adjustment they are able to makes in one second and giving us the wishes answers... The alignment problem is not solvable no more than the hermeneutical circle by computations....it is illusory...

There is another problem about A.I. in which i will not enter which is related to A.I. already existing and acting  in the cosmos, in John C. Lilly , Rudolf Steiner and Nigel Kerner among other interesting writers. 3 convergent perspectives exactly but with no concertation between them at all ...

And there is also the spiritual problem linked to the relation between  all spiritual entities in the cosmos and their relation. Listen to Jerry Marzinsky psy in the most hard jail for 40 years. Ouija board game here will give you a hint ...

 

What is fascinating to me is the parallell between coding language by numbers and the Godel theorems meanings....

Most engineers dont see what was clear for Roger Penrose in his books "Emperor's new mind " the brain dont compute...I read it 37 years ago...I recommend it to you...Godel the greatest logical mind since Aristotle thought the same...

And in India right now Anirban Bandyopadhyay the writer of "nanobrain" a book so astounding i felt off my chair 4 years ago, create non Turing machine rooted in Godel insight ...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPZh9BOjkQs

 

LLM is built by absorbing human language and creativity and spew it out like the Bill Gates steak improper to human needs...

Not true. Gates' meat is inferior. However, AI improves human language and creativity for most people. A PhD had an equivalent of his doctoral thesis produced in an hour. A normal person can write something and have AI rewrite it in the style of Shakespeare in seconds. I had Gemini graphically lay out the floor plan of my new house with a four-sentence prompt. Also, AI is now learning from synthetic data.

Regarding your statement about intelligence, no one is claiming AI is intelligent yet. That's what AGI is, and no one is claiming to have reached it. But AI is already smarter in several areas than all but the smartest of humans.

I started programming the Internet in 1995, and I'd say we're at the 1997 level of AI. Once you understand LLMs and how transformers work you understand why it's growth will be exponential. I look at AI as an improvement of human intellect. Imagine one human who knows every piece of information that has ever existed and doesn't forget any of it, and multiply that by millions of AI agents.

Regarding "art", it will make movies far cheaper and suggest plots that people won't think of because it recognizes patterns far better than any human. As far as music, it already generates better music than today's bland monotonous pop music.

I see AI's potential as an improvement in all but three ways. And they are very big. I don't know how people will make a living, and from all my study of post-labor economics I don't think anyone does. I don't know how many people will find fulfillment in place of jobs and hobbies made insignificant by AI. And I think ASI is an existential threat.

There's no use complaining about AI. It's not going to stop or pause because no country or entity is going to risk others jumping ahead of it. We are no longer in an arms race. We are in an intelligence race.

@ghdprentice 

I'm right there with you. Literally, just before reading this thread, looked at my CD collection and said to myself I need to get rid of that. Same for my Oppo 105 and all my DVDs, Blurays, etc.

Physical media remains the gold standard for visual and audio fidelity unless you own a Kaleidescape. I envision a future where physical media retains its value, much like the resurgence of vinyl records. While we can debate whether streaming surpasses analog, the choice ultimately lies with the individual. If you love a particular format, that’s all that matters. I enjoy the versatility of digital formats with Roon/Qobuz alongside my Oppo, Kaleidescape, and vinyl setup. I've even dabbled with setting up a local streaming server—though rewarding, it’s undeniably a labor-intensive endeavor.