How Australian rock art warns us about 2023
... There is throughout a poignant dissonance: because these haunted paintings show fearful humanity encountering something alien, strange, highly advanced – and utterly unknowable. ...
Recently a sibling of GPT3, a LLM designed by Meta/Facebook, started defeating humans at Diplomacy – a game requiring deep verbal skills and the ability to deceive. ...
GPT4 might be so powerful it will appear entirely and flawlessly intelligent to everyone; that is to say, it will breeze through the Turing Test ...
A few decades after the first contact art appeared in Arnhemland, the Aboriginal people were largely swept from their homelands by the economic forces and political changes brought by European settlers. But not everyone deserted these silent red canyons and bright lilied waterways. In the 2000s, the last native speaker of the local Amurdag language, Charlie Mungulda, returned to the Mount Borradaile rockfaces to paint a symbolic and final hand, a scarlet print which says remember us, because we were here. With this ritual, he signalled an end to 50,000 continuous years of Aboriginal art in West Arnhemland. Nothing has been painted in Mount Borrodaile since. Nor will it be.
See the full story here: https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/how-australian-rock-art-warns-us-about-2023/
