I asked Gemini about the likelihood of population centers becoming decentralized as the value of cities for things like access to opportunities and to utilities decreases. The fact that it reinforced my intuition is perhaps just sycophancy, but Gemini’s response actually aligns quite significantly with what I had been thinking without me making those thoughts known to Gemini first. Here is the response…

I asked Gemini (I have a monthly subscription and have conversations with it just about every day) to identify strengths and weaknesses in the essay I have posted on this website titled “AI Has a Value Problem.” Ignore all of the nice things it says. I still found this really quite interesting…

Let me be clear.  I know zip and pip about artificial intelligence, but I nonetheless have a hunch about what is going on, and I am crazy enough to think that this hunch is one that others should be talking about.  The hunch is this: developers of AI share two philosophical biases, and I think both are costing them billions and sending them down false paths toward the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI).  The first bias is that valuation, the pursuit of purposes, is epiphenomenal.  That is, it is assumed that value is just a mirage that gets added to our understanding of the world, and that the pursuit of purposes is just one way to describe certain instances of the mechanistic and deterministic march forward of a world governed exclusively by the laws of nature…

I recently came across a short reel by Brian Greene, the very well-known and very successful science author and expert in string theory, explaining why he thinks we have no free will.  What I really admire about this explanation, even though I strongly disagree with it, is its effort to be clear and concise.  Here is a transcript of the reel in its entirety…