It feels like we're well past the election of Hitler and speeding along past the Nuremberg Laws.

P.S., GPT-3, whose accomplishments have been much ballyhooed in popular media [footnote], belongs to the class of transformer nets, many-layered encoder/decoder networks that have proven extremely useful for tasks such as language translation and language production. However, it is extremely important not to confuse language production, or even translation, for language comprehension [once again, see the footnote]. GPT-3 was trained on a corpus of texts it would take a human being over 3,000 years to read. It's only representation of linguistic meaning is in the co-occurrence statistics of words in sentences across corpora. For those who know what this means, GPT-3 is the very embodiment of the most extreme version of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that thought comes from language. (A moment's reflection will tell you how absurd this hypothesis is: It states that, instead of talking about things we think, we think only because we can talk.)

Footnote: A Google employee was recently reprimanded for declaring that GPT-3 had achieved "sentience" based on its ability to "converse". He has hired it a lawyer to represent it as a sentient being. This case is going to be heard by SCOTUS, a body of people decidedly unqualified to opine on the question of machine intelligence. More recently still, GPT-3 was asked to write a scientific paper about itself. The only (barely mentioned) flaw in its ability to "write" said paper is that its creators had to coax it into the process by asking it a series of detailed questions. In other words, it could not craft the paper on its own. This is no surprise: Doing something as complex as writing a paper entails having an understanding of the structure of an argument--an ability that is well beyond GPT-3, which is basically only capable of responding to simple questions/requests. (More formally, it is capable of computing mappings from inputs, including questions, to outputs, i.e., answers.) By contrast, composing a whole paper requires a cognitive architecture that can form goals and organize its knowledge hierarchically--tasks that are well beyond the abilities of any simple input-output mapping engine. For students of the Philosophy of Mind, the strengths and limitations of GPT-3 are a wonderful demonstration of the limitations of the Turing test of machine intelligence.

I'm (among other things) an editor. That bullshit right there is job security. 😉

@Bob Lai Original Trek owes a lot to Shakespearean drama. I remember when one episode involved an actor who was using more modern acting technique. He did not vibe at all with the show. He deserved his over all respect as an actor, but he disappeared into the background on Trek by not using the prevailing acting style.

@Muse Prospero's Incantation from The Tempest ('Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves ...') is my current monologue used for auditions.