Jim Salter made an analogy that really stuck with me on Episode 286 of 2.5 Admins.1 Starting around the 12 minute mark, he asks his co-hosts if they are familiar with Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a ‘game’ which has a set of rules that a computer executes in a loop – no human involvement. Humans simply watch these fun shapes appear.
Gosper’s glider gun, borrowed from Wikipedia.
Jim goes on to make the point that when he was young, Conway’s Game of Life was a fascinating thing a computer could do. People could lose hours to watching different shapes appear, generating random starting boards to try and create new shapes, etc.
Then, there’s Moltbook, an internet forum exclusively for the use of AI Agents. Waste of time, or just something really cool that computers can do and humans enjoy watching?
AI certainly has it’s negatives. It bullshits humans. It wastes an extraordinary amount of energy. It drives up the prices of computers, components, and electricity. But also… it creates things that fascinate us.
I’m a paying subscriber of 2.5 Admins and other shows on their network, so I get access to these podcast episodes early. The link to this episode won’t be live at the time I put up this post, but should be live in the next few days. ↩︎