@rysiek@timnitGebru
I used to keep doubting myself, I would read about it and think “but this is basically a ponzi scheme” (specially with stuff like random generated links to monkey pictures being valued at hundreds of thousands); Then I’d look at all the articles and hype and think again “there must be something I’m missing, they can’t all be wrong”...
And at work there were people trying so hard to use blockchains on something, anything, just so we could say we were using it.
@timnitGebru i'm reading the paper now (oh savory baby jesus, it's not just a dumb tweet, but instead an entire dumb paper, wtf), and he's got a lot of statements of the form:
"if [fantasy scifi thing happens], then [terrible consequence]"
and i keep thinking, "well, there's lots of reasons why the fantasy thing won't happen, but i guess i'll keep reading this outline for your novel"
@timnitGebru What worries me the most, is how some influential researchers seem to be ok with that idea... as though the only trait that is worth preserving was intelligence.
Anyone else here wanting to preserve love, joy, friendship, hope, beauty, fun, buttered pancakes, and consciousness in all its complexity?
@timnitGebru If you want to sell something, you have to identify an insecurity and convince the person with the insecurity that you can fix it.
Sometimes this is easy; "I have no $MATERIAL-NEED" is easy to sell into.
If you're grifting—selling nothing at high prices—during the end of the world, you have to come up with a worse existential threat than the material one we've really got.
Which is why the coordinated hype machine encouraging panic over stuff that doesn't exist.
@timnitGebru I get the “am I in the Twilight Zone” feeling every time I talk about AI with somebody in tech. Then I turn around and talk to people outside of tech where “AI” has become synonymous with “garbage” or “badly made”. The difference in attitudes is jarring.
@timnitGebru 8.05 billion of us are still living in that planet, it’s just that the other 100,000 are white guys who read too much Vernor Vinge in their youth and then lucked into getting rich enough to live in their own heads full time
@Paxxi@timnitGebru
In principle, non-biological von-Neumann machines may be subject to natural selection as well if some additional requirements are met (at least mutation and selection pressure, but more may be required).
But AIs are not von-Neumann machines and the additional requirements do not seem to be met.
@timnitGebru if it was a human that wrote that headline I'm a little relieved because maybe in the future we won't be able to compete with machines in the field of intelligence but we will always excel in the field of stupidity
@timnitGebru I get that journalists policy makers are swayed by so many seemingly serious people taking it seriously, but their continuing breathless credulousness is really starting to depress me.
@timnitGebru Do these people know that natural selection is an actual mechanism that has been scientifically described? Do they realise how stupid this sounds to a biologist?
@timnitGebru Truly the worst thing for me personally about being online today is having to suffer the absolute horseshit coming from the fail-upwards class of white males in tech. We get it, you wrote a program in Python that worked once. It doesn’t make you Aristotle.
@timnitGebru I wonder after the initial excitement and investment and under delivery for self driving AI vehicles, how businesses seem to be going full bore to a “this time it’s different” promise on trying to apply it in even more varied situations.
Part of me thinks it’s a cynical ploy to cut salaries and benefits regardless of if the promise of the current crop of AI never delivers.
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