Technology

And Meanwhile in the AI Bubble . . .

I suspect that the most important thing happening right now has little or nothing to do with politics. Although AI executives commonly speak of the coming AGI revolution—referring to artificial “general” intelligence that rivals or exceeds human capability—they notably have all at this moment coalesced around real, albeit loose, deadlines. Many of their prophecies also
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AI and How Washington Works

Effective Altruism (EA) gets some attention from Politico for being a "hot new philosophy" funded by deep pockets: EAs are particularly fixated on the possibility that future AI systems could combine with gene synthesis tools and other technologies to create bioweapons that kill billions of people — a phenomenon that’s given more traditional AI and
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Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek: In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to
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Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

“I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test
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Young Socialist Intellectuals

Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo– What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular. … Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard
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Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes– I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when
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Is Magic a Thing?

I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted
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Basic Premises

I wrote out these premises or base points for my thinking in response to Jonathan on a previous thread, but I thought I'd lay them out here, and let whoever wants to take shots at them. They are all debatable, needless to say, but it's how they all work together that underlies most of my
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Shlain on Our Disembedding

. . . and re-embedding? I first posted this McLuhanesque lecture by Leonard Shlain in 2010. I think it's worth another look because of the way it treats themes discussed this week. Lecture starts around 2:30 minute mark. He doesn't use the term 'disembedded', but that's what he's talking about. Great images. I've posted
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The Obamacare Mess

So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800
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