The Human Condition
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Sam Altman on How Great It’s Going to Be
From a NY Times interview with Sam Altman: Sam Altman: Yeah, I actually don’t think we’re all going to go extinct. I think it’s going to be great. I think we’re heading towards the best world ever. But when we deal with a dangerous technology as a society, we often say that we have to
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Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories
I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that
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Some Thoughts on ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic? I would expect it
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Why It’s Hard to Admit You’re Wrong
“We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have any evidence.” –Rudy Giuliani, as testified by Rusty Bowers in the J6 Committee Hearings After more than 60 lawsuits brought by the former president and his allies failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Cudd’s brother Jarrod thought, “Maybe she’ll come back off the ledge
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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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Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere
[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics
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Civilization and Its Discontents
It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that
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Reactionary Chic
Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional