It seems an odd coincidence that so many religions/philosophies/ways I've chanced upon emphasize - often to the point of revolving around - a need to see self/consciousness/awareness in a way other than what seems to be the default way for, well, selves.
Christianity speaks of a need to die and be reborn - to the point of what is allegedly "The Son of God" demonstrating it in meat-space spades. Gurdjieff/Ouspensky spoke of "i-dentification" as near what might be called "the center of The Problem". There was a time I was fascinated with Schopenhauer, and now can't remember why, but I suspect it had something to do with something about "the self". A favorite author that went by the pseudonym of "Wei Wu Wei" wields eloquent verbal precision on the theme that rather speaks to me. Ditto with Ramana Maharshi. The Lankavatara Sutra's "mind only" thing posits what we consider our very being to be no more than an elaborate thought - complete with seemingly infinite nesting levels referred to as "discrimination".
These laws of Robotics were Asimov's ingenious way of exploring the ethical implications and potential dangers of advanced artificial intelligence. They ensured that robots, imbued with intelligence and autonomy, would prioritize human safety and well-being above all else.
Fast forward to the present, and we find ourselves amidst the age of Language Models. LLMs born from the vast amounts of data and deep neural networks, with the ability to understand and generate human-like text. However, unlike the physical robots envisioned by Asimov, LLMs exist as purely digital entities, interacting with us through text-based interfaces (at least for the moment).
I randomly found this webpage today while I was researching some old software libraries.
It stuck out to me because how the page was structured, it felt very similar to what I see in gemini documents.
Since I keep dumping digests of events once a month or so here, it was tricky to pick a title, but finally gathered multiple news on software dependencies, so they will dominate this digest.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.