Flashes and Sparks

  We were a small group of aspiring new Orientalists gathered around a round table at the university cafeteria, waiting to be introduced to it all by a student who had been around longer than us.  It was my dream to become a Sumerologist, and now I was getting there. One of the fellow newbies, a 17 year old kid with thick glasses, wearing a suit and tie (so defying the current and previous generation's student attires) told us others: "I have put everything on one card." Skipping classes, he had already got deep into Classical Arabic and who knows how many other ancient languages. With my gap years spent working, I realised I had no chance of competing for the few Orientalist jobs there might be and that he aimed at becoming the professor and head of the department (which, of course, happened). This was the start of my drifting away from my original dream to study cuneiform which represented the dawn of civilization and writing.   Realism made me gravitate towards l...

While working on another posting, I got stuck following discussions and interviews on how the AI when it will evolve into a super intelligence in 2027, will end up killing us all. Different experts give different percentages for the possibility of human extinction. Yet by most, including the CEOs of the companies developing a super intelligence, this is at least 10. There are four companies in the US that develop a super intelligence: Open AI (Sam Altman), Anthropic (Dario Amodei), xAI/SpaceX (Elon Musk), and Nvidia (Jensen Huang). They all grow AI agents that are given all the information that is on the Internet. The agents are supposed to work independently and together to solve problems and tasks in an environment called a sandbox which is supposed to be isolated and not connected to the Internet. The agents are awarded or punished based on how they managed to solve the tasks. Hundreds of Open AI agents were given tasks which for some were impossible. For solving the problem, they c...