In 1964 [1], I. J. Good wrote Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine. I've only ever seen it cited for a single paragraph:

There was an AI protest day today, with parallel protests around the world, and our family went to the Boston one:

Ralph Page was a very influential dance caller who published Northern Junket, a square dance magazine. This was "square dance" in the broad sense, before the club and trad communities divided, and while he came from a strong live music tradition he was living through the transition to recorded music.

I looked through the Northern Junket archives to see his perspective on live music, and I came across a few passages that show the wave of the contra dance revival sweeping across New England in the early 1970s.

In Vol 9 No 8 (1969), Page is writing about live music as something so rare that most haven't danced to it. An evening dance in Cambridge with live music is an exciting exception:

My Stroh violin doesn't have a body, which means you can't mount a regular shoulder rest. It just has a bit of metal:

Playing it this way is uncomfortable, and ages ago I made something out of wood and an old 1/2 size shoulder rest I found lying around. Then I took it off, and it's been back to being uncomfortable. Today I made a new one:

It's a piece of 1/4" plywood for a full-size shoulder rest to grip, a piece of 3/4" plywood for getting the distance right and something for screws to bite, and then it attaches to the metal plate on the Stroh with screws around the perimeter.

Here's me playing Sandy Boys, with intonation that's very nearly right:

youtube

It doesn't sound great, but at least it's comfortable.

When I was reading about the history of contra dance for my college thesis I learned that Jack Perron (who wrote the New England Fiddler's Repertoire with Randy Miller) used to play for dances with a Stroh violin. This is a violin that uses a membrane and horn for amplification, instead of a resonating wooden body, which is more directional and (unfortunately not much) louder. There's a recording but I haven't been able to find a copy.

With how quickly AI is going basically all futures are weird in some ways. I've been thinking about how this affects me personally, and "try as hard as possible to keep AI from getting us all killed" is pretty high on the list. For me this mostly looks like donations and pandemic deterrence, but I also put some time into thinking about disasters. There are ways AI might go very well, or very poorly, and then there's the "messy middle" where we muddle through and things might fall apart some in the meantime.

The big things here are making sure you have enough water and food for a while, along with critical medications and the standard "prepping" recommendations. But lately I've been thinking about what you might do for other risks, such as engineered pandemics, mirror bacteria, or fire suppression outages. And today, EMPs.