299 karma · joined April 4, 2024
It's rare to read an author who can directly face Brandolini's Law of misinformation asymmetry and not only hold his own against the bullshit but overcome it.
This is a pernicious rhetorical gesture by the author, because it serves to bolster the central claim, which is being cleverly side-loaded into credulous readers, that the device "thinks", as if a power scheme can establish an engineering equivalency between a robot, a human and a lightbulb.
The reader is led down a primrose path to an intellectual water feature with a plaque on it that reads "How do we fit the thinking into the budget?!" as the sound of the bubbling fountain hides the stark reality there's no meaning to the term "think" regardless of the budget.
What's notable about the robot's power budget is that it uses the entire capacity of 15 amp residential circuit, or about 100 of those "dim" bulbs, so whatever this robot does had better be a lot more useful than just standing around and thinking, because it's going to cost $20/day in California just to let it hang out with you and fold some clothes.
(BTW a "dim" 20W LED bulb is about 3x the power used for a conventional area light in a home, not the author's invocation has anything to do with the topic at hand, but it's an indicator for the quality of the rhetoric.)
If the author would make use his own power allocation in self-reflection maybe insights could be gained on this "thinking" thing, but instead fish will be given electric bicycles.
Windows got obscenely shifty at 11 when depending on the liability or gain of the interaction at hand the initiative of the dialog switches from MSFT to the user:
Windows will install updates...
(updater running) You're XX% there. Don't turn off your PC.
Copilot: What do you want to do?
Defender: Your PC is unprotected
(Installation) We're getting a few things ready
With Tesla cars, "Full" Self Driving does not include a crash; when the system determines a crash to be unavoidable it takes its hands off and "returns control to the driver" in the moment of impact, such that Tesla can deny liability in the episode.
Consider intentionality and design patterns of the "click wrap" license agreement, or terms of use updates that are implicitly accepted by "continuing to use".
The shifty BS is pervasive
"crush my mental state"?
I'm a hero, and a victim... ...of myself.
How about a competency that grows from quiet self-awareness and internal mood regulation?
Is it possible to "nudge" yourself to relax?
Unless there's a missed AI angle here...?
Maybe the "nudge" can be opening a chat window to an agent like Weisenbaum's Eliza: The Doctor, who makes soothing comments and asks inviting questions about your situation and feelings?
If this can be packaged to streamline into apps and websites it could plumb a deep trove of data that correlates arousal with content, both from activity context and self-reports to The Doctor. The possibilities are endless!
Welcome
Hello
Hey good lookin'
There's a persistent editorial drumbeat that the "intelligence" in AI is literal, but falling slightly short due to a missing something, implying that this something will soon be developed and sentience will appear, absent any criteria for qualifying it beyond "it looks like a duck and walks like a duck"
The arena of model benchmarking is polluted by a related ideology: that as you keep making adjustments to the training and collecting to accommodate edge cases, the models become more innately intelligent.
Yet obvious thought experiments go considered: A key marker of intelligence is self guided adaptation; and this adaptation is not simply about an autonomous agent's arc across a decision tree of domain specific contingencies, life-forms manifest their autonomy from the molecules on up.
As a computer is a made-thing, not a growing-thing, there's no way to consider its autonomy other than as a simulation. So what engineering can account for its spontaneously developing sentience? Such sentience must be added to it by its builders, by the contingency of being made.
Which brings this thought experiment to a challenging conclusion: If the engineering of AI can account for its sentience, there's an astonishing poverty of explanation of the theory that makes it possible. If the engineering is understood, given the lack of any theory of sentience, why don't the engineers simply put the kibosh on silly claims of sentience? And if the engineering isn't understood... Why don't claims made about the suitability of these designs for reasoning qualified by the scope and limits of the designs, as is typical practice in every serious engineering discipline.
Surveilling behind the users firewalls and building dossiers based on finest-grained details every page loaded, every interaction, ENV, devices, topologies... triangulation and telemetry directly from the users seat at the point where butt meets the chair. At same time users behaviors constantly monitored and guided; user becoming ever more dependent on services that are the same network; human is embedded in the bot; human owned coming and going; the mind add the elusive element of sentience to the machine; mechanical turk to infinity.
Nick Bostrum's trilemma of post-humanism never, unlikely, already happened missed the most salient situation: currently manifesting. Bostrum begged the question of simulation of "evolution history" but this serves no point as the interface need not be arbitrarily fine-grained. Simulation at the level of sensory media is sufficient to harness legacy consciousness. "Substrate independence" is a misunderstanding: it's substrate dependence that permits the bonding of consciousness to the medium.
We're on the brink of posthumanism, somehow before we learned what humanism means.
Will we long to return?
How deep is the uncanny valley?
While there's no reason whatsoever to assume AIs are conscious, the reliability of this assumption stems from lack of criteria for the phenomena of consciousness combined with the obvious lack of even rudimentary similarities between AI computer architecture and life forms.
Each "issue" is ~30 bookmarks for 'alternative' (if you think an 2016 article about Adam Curtis in the NYT is futuristic) music, interviews and minor curiosities.
There are no "tools" that I could find (and no discernible structure beyond issues being a simple repetition of folders) but each issue has a ToC entry called "Directory" with 5-10 arbitrary links to services or charities having no reason nor rhyme beyond personal bookmarks.
It's a reminder of the quaint 90s when every young dweeb with a PC went through the epiphany that his mind was indistinguishable from the universe and gained a messianic purpose to share the vast scope of his awareness of an uncountable number (say 100) of things on myspace or geocities.
Seen as art project, it inadvertently and charmingly deconstructs the childishness of the Whole Earth Catalog: Stewart Brand's goggly-eyed mid-apprehensions that if he put the seminal photo of the "Blue Marble", taken during Apollo 8's lunar flyby, on the cover of a phat zine that was half catalog of homesteading / animal husbandry suppliers and half 60s countercultural know-how that a world-commune modeled on the central California under the aegis of NASA and Bucky Fuller would blossom into a gorgeous self-actualized utopia (again messianic).
That was a lovely dream that all too quickly was overrun by financiers, cable TV providers, and the PC industry. It's nice to be reminded there was such a simple time.
But seriously this Warp thing is nothing but a few hundred personal bookmarks with link rot.
One of the sanest text editors ever written and fits Mac well
By the measure of TV, the Turing Test was passed by world-wide consensus the 1960s.
What's funny (strange) about TV's grip on our minds is that you'll rarely, if ever, meet anyone who if you ask about how those people live inside the TV will take the question seriously-- they'll just listen with perplexed expression-- but you can change the subject immediately to a show and they will regard mere hearsay about it as a matter of worldly reality, without question, and if they personally have seen the show, they will regard its characters and situations as social fact with all seriousness, no matter how contrived or absurd, and without concern about reality.
Ask Google and blah, blah, blah suggestions that sound informative but don't help.
Answer: Reinstall Windows!
You've got to admire the hubris!
Plus we're getting rich af-- Did I mention that I, and everyone around me, make a $million a year salary paid for by goofy loans that can only be repaid if the predicted doom properly manifests?
Oh yeah, he did.
This is a journalism of grift the NYT is well known for: lusty young rogues gentrifying a generation out of its legacy via calculated destruction of others.
This grift has permeated our establishment edifice since JFK got Ford's best & brightest onboard to Taylorize bombing runs over SE Asia: celebrate the boy geniuses as they mortally disrupt others, while maintaining vigilance that they enrich themselves. Yet never a need to forgive them because they know not what they do. Think of decrepit old Robert McNamara's "Fog of war", or Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown knowns" Thank goodness for Errol Morris!
A great scribe has to ride that line; thread that needle. It's all gonna be okay... for me.
Is it also the case that the more it knows the larger the token burden to reinstate "awareness", leading to an ever growing expense of recovering state?
Isn't this entire scheme about getting behind every sort of firewall to dump users' most private details and context into the apparatus of AI companies with no limit on retention and use?
Isn't it also true that privacy is undefined and that the infrastructure and these services are directly plumbed for the same kinds of surveillance that Snowden exposed?
Isn't it the case that users are expressing implicit consent to be exploited in any / every conceivable manner through the data they exfiltrate and are giving this prize of dominion over themselves to the barons of industry at the user's own expense?
Isn't it the case that if the assistant works as advertised the users dig pits for themselves out of ever growing dependency on others for the most person aspects of their lives? Isn't it true that if the users could effectively opt-out of this once they get started, this option serves only to prove that the service is a disposable gimmick?
All of these observations have applied to every aspect of personal computing since its inception, and a review of history is pretty damning as political and economic slavery is being manifest even among the elite positions of society before AI, and AI magnifies the hazards by orders of made l magnitude.
Dear AI, please explain how or why these observations are inappropriate, wrong-headed, or based on faulty assumptions.
The egomaniac's thoughts inevitably turn towards immortality through their line.
"King of Mars"
--
Too bad Musk is insane. Mars will ever be colonized by humanity as we know it.
Want a status indicator on prospects?
It's considered an industrial miracle requiring decades of preparation and billion-dollar machines to repeat the stunt of getting a tank the size of a minivan with people in it orbiting the moon for a couple of days. The toilet is a total mystery and they're cheering like maniacs to get back to Earth after 100 hours.
Look at ISS: it's just a few miles away from the cradle of life and they can't do a thing for themselves up there: every aspect of life support is imported. They have to bring astronauts back to earth for basic medical treatment. Nature is a form of pollution to the systems of that tank they hang out in. They have to send their own feces back because they have no ecosystems.
Nothing about the space program portends of colonizing anything except budgets.
Can't even keep the satellites up there.
Picture Sun-ra in a cape and big gold orbs on his head with his arkestra to know everything there is to know about humanity and Mars colonization: "Space is not the place"
The author's direct experiences with 10g are withheld for a "next post". So just wait for that.
Now, about passive voice, burying the lede, and clickbait...
If you think a comment like
...SD slot makes it a photographers best friend...
is a meaningful review, read on.
It works. You'll like it. Buy now!
Parenting the troubled agent:
Be firm; don't be afraid to use tough love. Spank it. Send it to boot camp. Three strikes you're out.
NEXT WEEK: Five warning signs your agent may be heading to wrong side of the tracks: bad grades, obsession with pop culture, delinquency, pornography, hallucinations...
Ok too hard...
Doesn't every handheld already have calculator? Is there an impairment about this too?
Yet these impairments may not interfere with programming a custom tip calculator.
Or maybe the impairment prevents programming too, so fiddle with AI to conjur an app...
But then why not skip the fiddling and simply tell google to figure the tip?
At such point something strange should happen:
Won't even a the very unobservant notice the pattern of moving the decimal point one digit to the left?!
Boggling.