I’m training right now

I’ve been studying a new piece recently, and one thing I’ve noticed, is when I’m not in front of my music stand, or sitting in bed with the score, I’m practicing this piece in other ways.

When I’m sleeping, my teeth grind up and down, replicating this piece’s bowings. When I’m in the kitchen, I’m humming its themes. When I’m driving around town, I’m tapping the fingerings on the steering wheel.

So, when I’m not practicing this music, I’m still practicing this music. It’s possible that this off-time practicing is what gets these pieces learned so fully — without it, how long would it take to get a given piece of music up?

ChatGPT

I was listening to some technologists regarding the ‘generative pretrained transformer’ method for training machines, and it stood out to me that after a computer was trained with oodles of data, those machines were simply done with the learning process.

Unlike us, machine intelligence using the GPT method was locked in, and this black-box computer smarty-pants was idle, not unlike a vending machine.

Now, I’m not bearish on machine intelligence, but it does astound me that our brains, with only requiring around 12 watts of power, can train in the background as we go about our day.

George Gilder, a technologist of some regard, notes that the entire world Internet has roughly the equivelent number of connections as there are connectomes in our brain. These connections sum up to be around 700 trillion, though the Internet requires five per cent of all the world’s electricity to do what it does.

(In contrast, our amazing brains use up an amount of energy needed to power a livingroom lamp.)

Bullish on humans

Humans are amazing. What the mind can do is unlike anything on earth. To think. To rationalize. To create. These are all things unique to us humans and drive the world forward for the better.

And there is no end in sight for our creative output. There is no better time than right now for the vantage point to bring the future into the present. With what we have between our ears, we can pull off incredible things if we just go and try.