“biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence” is it though?
I'm gonna give my quick-and-dirty opinion on this, don't expect a lengthy defence.
Short answer, no. Long answer: no, intelligence cannot be created by blindly imitating it with mere silicon
Nitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience?
"Hating Black People" would be a more fitting name.
“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”
(Considering how many rationalists are also methheads, this joke wrote itself)
Ed Zitron's planning a follow-up to "The Subprime AI Crisis":
(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)
EDIT: Swapped the image for one that's easier-to-read
This is pure speculation, but I get the feeling Microsoft's gonna significantly downsize, if not collapse, by the decade's end.
This recent move's gonna kneecap Microsoft's ability to function as a company, and their heavy investment into AI mean they'll likely take the brunt of the impact when the bubble bursts.
New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:
Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it's giving them a moderate advantage
That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery ("nuts", "shove your concern up your ass") and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects
Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists
But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is "like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw"
Whatever
EDIT: Found out where Baldur got the "table saw" quote from - added it accordingly.
Artificial intelligence and cheating/lying: two great tastes that go together
New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:
You want my opinion, Zitron's on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.
For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:
On one front, they're gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires' bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires' attempts to destroy labour once and for all.
On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.
On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, "literally cannot tell good from bad".
Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believer^tm^ email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:
You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.
That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.
I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.
This sounds like its going to be horrible
Ah, good, I'll just take his word for it, the thought of reading it gives me psychic da-
The closest thing I have to a coherent response is that Boondocks clip of Uncle Ruckus going "Read, nigga, read!" (from Stinkmeaner Strikes Back, if you're wondering) because how breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to miss the point that fucking hard