Dinosaurs really are a special case, especially in light of the recent discovery that they were not actually cold-blooded. They are an object lesson in how evolution works: some traits become obsolete and die out, while others become useful and dominant.
The modern view of dinosaurs, with their old-fashioned body plan and apparent lack of intelligence, was a product of the times in which they lived. When dinosaurs were alive, it would have been very hard to discover what we now know about them. For example, the vast majority of fossils are found in sedimentary rocks; this means that dinosaur bones had a high probability of being destroyed by erosion or buried too deeply for later collection.
The same is true of bones and other structures. There was no way to know what dinosaurs' skeletons looked like in detail until the late 1970s, when widespread discovery of 'exotic' fossils -- including feathered specimens -- allowed paleontologists to make detailed reconstructions.
There are lots of other reasons why dinosaurs were misunderstood. At the time, there was no way to distinguish between birds and non-avian dinosaurs (except in a few cases where one species had feathers). There was also no clear distinction between reptiles and mammals; most scientists thought they were closely related. Most people didn't know about relative brain sizes or intelligence.
That's not to say that dinosaurs were dumb -- they had brains, after all. But it did mean that their intelligence was regarded as being on par with other reptiles.
The dinosaurs were also not very scary. They had no teeth, and only a few species (notably the tyrannosaurs) had claws or other weapons.
Log in:
You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.
This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.
Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.
Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.
Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.
