Is this Tom Stoppard's last act? - The Spectator World

“The minimum IQ required to destroy the world drops by one point every 18 months.”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky ( reflecting on Talking .C****)

I’ll leave you with this quote from Bronze Age Mindset:

No, don’t jump in Aetna or Mauna Loa or Puyehue or Eyjafjallajökull, Titans of the world, even if you get yourself to do it, it won’t work now. These portals are closed for ages. But! Other doors are closed to you too. What Mount Aetna was to Empedocles–is there something like that to you? Is there something like that at all anymore?

~ Geohot blog

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting.

Funny how this only applies post enlightment. Technology is the only thing that changes, everything else is constant. Culture is downstream of technology. And it is technology that only swims forward.

So whether it’s me, Elon, one of you, or someone who isn’t born yet: we will build the robots. There will always be some kid who thinks the hole is the greatest thing ever…

And the line of progress will not stop at human level. As it was for chess, “human level” is a meaningless point. The world doesn’t care how you feel about this fact. AlphaZero didn’t just learn to be superhuman, it learned to be superhuman without any reference to human chess; the books, the opening theory, the personalities. It didn’t just learn to play chess, it relearned all of chess culture.

And so it shall be for human culture.

FASTER, PLEASE:  Scientists Have Developed a Wearable Ring That Repels Insects.

Is this Tom Stoppard's last act? - The Spectator World

Which brings me back to Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, just opened on Broadway last month. If this play does not convince the theatergoing public of Stoppard’s preeminence, then I am not sure what could. Stoppard — born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 to secular Jews in Czechoslovakia — has crafted a play that dramatizes the process of memory in time as incisively as Pinter ever did. And through the subject of Jewishness — not Judaism, exactly, since many characters are not practicing — he elaborates a favorite theme of his, the ebb and flow of history, with characteristic ebullience. This show is a marvel. Hats off to Stoppard, director Patrick Marber and all involved.

[ In a dystopian, polluted, hyper-consumerist, overbearing bureaucratic totalitarian future somewhere in the 20th century, Sam Lowry is a low-level government employee who frequently dreams of himself as a winged warrior saving a damsel in distress. 

One day, shortly before Christmas, a fly becomes jammed in a teleprinter, which misprints a copy of an arrest warrant it was receiving. This leads to the arrest and death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle instead of renegade heating engineer and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle. ]