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@KimberlyHirsh I personally quite enjoy a sudden E-minor chord 🎵with abrupt lighting change right before I get my stack reference—the black glue, the ümläüts, the whole 💀 thing. ❤︎

@Burk shrewd manipulation of the timeline is my guess. I’m staring bewitched for the last five minutes and it’s just a picture.

@JohnPhilpin thx for posting about this. The most tragically cinematic climate disaster I’ve ever been alive to witness. LV has an affectionate nickname, “ninth island”, so it really hits home here.

@campegg One more thing…it’s not that the author is incorrect about all of the unnecessary suffering caused by this state of affairs, but in every case improvements came exclusively by way of a better shared language among the speakers.

@campegg Me again. I think I've muddied things up with my last reply more than made anything clearer. Let me give it another go.

Apart from the mechanical issues you mention, animals also do not posses the ability to use language propositionally. We understand that they are intelligent through different means than question and answer sessions. So when I say “detected and accepted” I’m speaking of human intelligence.

And, finally, longwindedly, I agree with the author's effort to alert the public to the dangers of assuming machines which appear to be using language actually are using language. Much peril there awaits.

@campegg yeah, I think I agree too! 🤣🤓 Many layers and mirrors and trapdoors...the definition process...but, yes, both intelligence and language agency of some sort can be ascribed to many creatures not only some bigger mammals. Of course I'm willing to stretch the meaning of language to include other phenomena we would normally consider completely out of domain. DNA is a sort of language to describe how to build stuff, in this view.

But I find it inescapable that for any intelligence to be detected and accepted it must come through the medium of language.

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