Throwback : COPR

AI devs and cog-sci nerds : Kant's [ Critique of Pure Reason ] ! It's a 1781 AD European classic, on how to to quantify consciousness. No shit. Very relevant in 2026.

A dude on Threads referenced this classical text while objecting to something I wrote. I went back to check on terminology. It's been a while since I had to read CoPR in college - five years after I had gotten the summary of TI from Sophie's World. 

Here I highlight an important treatment of Kant's vocabulary : when he says "intuition" he's referring roughly to "dumb sensations" not to some intangible/ insensible thing.

Have fun reading CoPR if you can! Maybe get an abridged copy, or the AI summary will do. One of my two branches of college-era R&D was about this stuff, and that has continued into my work post-college : I'm still trying to learn how to talk to computers :P

Milestones in asynchronous computing

• ORDVAC (1951) : on vacuum tubes : IAS, precursor to von Neuman, architecture : procured for ballistic compute : business computations could resume based on notifications, but storage media had to be periodically activated to retain data regardless of business
• ILLIAC II (1962) : on magnetic cores : procured for research : but basically the same computer, and now relieved of the need to cyclically refresh memory; ancestor of POSIX signals in the 1970s
• Software Actor Model (1973) : Hewitt abstracts the whole thing into software, with inspiration from Smalltalk's (1972) object-orientated model
• Transmission Control Protocol (1974) : Cerf, Kahn, proposal
• "make depend" (1978) : innovation to track dependencies in source code, with the "make" build tool (1976), but such features were not reliable for several years
• VisiCalc (1979) : spreadsheet software for the Apple II : chained cellular recalculation
• Erlang (1986) : first popular programming language utilising the Actor Model, just not the following keywords ...
• F# (2007) : introduction of "async-bang!" keywords, later evolving in other languages into "async-await" 

"what do we gain if AI is conscious?"

Just stop with the hypotheses of machine behaviour lol. 

We gain nothing! Consciousness is not a property of information processing! Lol

The information process of humans is relatively trivial and will inevitably be exceeded by machines. The question of whether their emotional experience should be accepted as legal personhood is the only thing remaining for debate. 

Civil rights has always been an interesting concern. First the children, then the women, always the disenfranchised, and eventually the machines.