「 A more imminent threat, he told the Times, is the one posed by American AI giants to cultures around the globe. “These models are producing content and shaping our cultural understanding of the world,” Mensch said. “And as it turns out, the values of France and the values of the United States differ in subtle but important ways.” 」
I'm not sure "most of us think this way about the world we want for our kids"... at least I don't. Not at all. I find this toxic optimist "vision" utterly naive & disgusting. /1
Excellent papier de Maya Kandel dans @mediapart. Prolongement des papiers @oliviertesquet dans Télérama, de l'essai de Jen Schradie sur la droite #tech... qui est une menace réelle pour nos démocraties.
NIST staffers revolt against expected appointment of ‘effective altruist’ AI researcher to US AI Safety Institute
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is facing an internal crisis as staff members and scientists have threatened to resign over the anticipated appointment of Paul Christiano to a crucial, though non-political, position at the agency’s newly-formed US AI Safety Institute (AISI), according to at least two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous.
Good for them! #longtermist / #EffectiveAltruist / #TESCREAL people are cultists and have no place in government. They're obsessed with fantasies like #xrisk that are disconnected from reality and distract from the actual harms #AI is already causing here on Earth. It's precisely the same phenomenon as holding endless discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while ignoring that people are suffering. It sounds like Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo might be a Kool-aid drinker herself or is sympathetic to the viewpoints of the Kool-aid drinkers.
From her Wikipedia entry:
Gina Marie Raimondo...an American businesswoman, lawyer, politician, and venture capitalist
Emphasis mine.
It's alarming that this is even happening, and you know the fix is in because they tried to rush the appointment without informing staffers ahead of time. I hope #NIST staffers prevail.
If you'd like to understand the link between the current #AI fixation of Silicon Valley billionaires and its roots in #eugenics and racism I highly recommend reading this series of articles. The term #TESCREAL has been created to summarize the different movements, some of them decades old, that are in play here. Eye-opening, alarming stuff, to be sure. https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/ Warning: This isn't something for fast consumption, other than most websites people link to these days.
"Everyone's talking about AI, how it will change the world, and even suggesting it might end humanity as we know it. Dave Troy is joined by Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, two prominent critics of AI doomerism, to cut through the noise, and look at where these ideas really came from, and offer suggestions on how we might look at these problems differently. And they also offer a picture of the darker side of these ideas and how they connect to Eugenics and other ideologies historically.
Together Émile and Timnit coined an acronym called TESCREAL, which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism — and yeah, that's a lot of -isms. But it ties into other topics that we have covered in this series, including Russian Cosmism and Longtermism.
Dr. Gebru came to prominence in 2020 after she was fired from Google for speaking up about the company's lack of ethical guardrails in its AI development work. Émile Torres studies existential risk and has been a critic of the "longtermist" movement for several years."—Dave Troy >
"Les milliardaires actuels de la Silicon Valley ont grandi en lisant la science-fiction classique américaine. Maintenant, ils essaient de la rendre réelle"
Musk, Bezos, Zuck, etc. : These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens
🛸 Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
ᐅ @cstross
「 These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions 」
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.
I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.
One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.
But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?
Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.
Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death because of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.
Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things well; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.
The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.
They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.
"They’ve wrapped “#AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the #cottongin, the true costs are hidden."