Just joined up today. My name is Ben, 39 from the Hunter Valley in Australia—grew up and lived most of my life in Sydney a few hours away. I have a BA majoring in philosophy and political science and an honours in philosophy which focused on compelxity, coordination and reflection on the societal scale as envisaged by Jurgen Habermas and Nikals Luhmann. I also finished a Masters in Public Communication a couple of years ago.
My main reason for registering here is to discuss and learn about AI safety, which is what I wish to spend my life contributing to. I have ideas in this area and am keen to learn many more, refine my thinking and connect with others. Like many here, I believe AI safety deserves far more attention and resources than it currently recieves and am keen to be part of rectifying that.
So, hello all. I look forward to getting involved and becoming less wrong about some of the things which matter most :)
Not from Canada but you have a fascinating topic. Wish I could be there.
What I found most intriguing about r/place is that my intuitions were that at the end of the experiment a lot of the canvas would still be in flux or highly controversial / conflict prone. This was very wrong. If I recall, the majority of the map was reasonably settled by the end with many participants defending what had already been created from interference, along with some lingering pockets of dynamic change right up to the end. The emergence of large scale order was a surprise, for me at least.
I think that part of the reason for this was that many of the representations had been collaboratively created, so there were groups of participants whose incentive to maintain their collective creations and relatively higher capacity to ‘spend’ pixels to do so, often outweighed those organised capacities for those who would disrupt their creations.
Another reason may have been the tendency for borders between representations to get settled as participants on either side adapted their creations to prioritise ongoing stability than ongoing conflict, given their goals to create.
Seems to share some self organising properties with other collaborative crowd intelligence experiments such as Twitch plays Pokemon.
Best of luck for your Meetup Yohan!