The conditions that made possible the war of 1914-1918 appear to exist again today.
1. Mutual defense alliances: especially N.A.T.O.
2. Imperialism: today the American and Russian empires
3. Militarism: in America and Russia
4. Nationalism: American, Russian, Ukrainian
5. Immediate cause: The war in Ukraine drawing in more and more military aid from N.A.T.O. countries.
Will this lead to a catastrophic global war?
It has always been my intention (hope) that in retirement the only thing that would change would be that I would teach (much) less. I have been in partial (if unofficial) retirement for years in that its been a decade or so since ESU had any summer courses for me to teach. In moving my books and research files out of my ESU office I have to sort out (and discard) all of the old and unneeded materials that I can. (Although its a lot of work moving does have the benefit of forcing you to weed out.) I was short of lab and office space even before retiring. That will be an even bigger challenge now.
In the monograph Strong Artificial Intelligence: The approaches to supermind* Alexander Vedyakhin et al argue that the human brain employs a prototype theory of categorization, comparing observations to previously stored representations of categories. A.s.a. H. is such a program. At each time step attribute bundles (features) are learned and causal relationships are learned across multiple time steps.
* Intellectual Literature, 2021
In his paper "Reward Is Not Enough: can we liberate AI from the reinforcement learning paradigm?" Vacslav Glukhov argues once again* that a scalar utility like money is unsound. These arguments also constitute important arguments against the whole capitalist system.
* arXiv:2202.03192v1 3 Feb. 2022
