onfocus

The media has provided OpenAI with an aura of vast authority, with its executives publicly proclaiming that its tech is poised to profoundly change the world, restructuring the economy and perhaps one day achieving a superhuman "artificial general intelligence" — outsize claims that sound, on a certain level, not unlike many of the delusions we heard about while reporting this story.

Hadn't made this connection before. Yeah, if you claim your new technology is going to reorder society—and media outlets credulously parrot it—you're going to trick people into thinking they're tapped into genius. Some healthy skepticism about new technology is important.

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

I think this article article helps bring many background assumptions of the AI mindset into the foreground. I've found thinking about AI as an ideology rather than a technology helps me process our current moment. Highly recommended.

Really what we’re dealing with more than anything else is the corrupting effect of an unprecedented level of wealth concentration. I’ve been covering wealth concentration my whole life, and it’s just exploded. And so it’s one thing to be like, “OK, a CEO is making 200 times what his workers are making,” which is like the kind of math that I was doing when I started becoming a journalist. But when you think about the levels of wealth that are now concentrated in the hands of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, I think they truly believe that they’re gods. The point of their wealth is to be able to exercise a kind of absolute power.

Yes, I think it's hard to understand exactly how dangerous this wealth concentration is.

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

ok, this isn't just weird memes and goofy youtube videos anymore. This is cult brainwashing shit.

Reference to due process first appeared in a statutory rendition of clause 39 in 1354 thus: "No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law."

People have been working to curb our worst human impulses for a long time. Let’s learn from history and keep that going instead of continually rediscovering why people have been working on it.

Trump has never had the majority of this country behind him. He has no genuine overwhelming support for his ideas because all his backing comes from fear, not inspiration or agreement. Americans overwhelmingly reject what he and Musk are doing to our government.

"We get to save the country." Some good framing advice from the framing folks.

If the uncertainty is getting to you, I have the plainest and most time-tested advice which is: Unless or until clarity about the most crucial levers becomes available, do what you can reach. Make the calls. Care for the people you can find. Hold on by hanging onto each other.

Great advice, and some good resources to check out.

…screens and all the technologies that accompany them are tools to make the world seem more predictable and less uncertain: infinite scroll; autoplay; the always-on “live” news cycle; the steady drumbeat of notifications; the apps that summon servants to our doors, hiding all the labor and improvisation and accidents (often involving blood and bone) that go into moving atoms from one place to another. These tools train us in convenience, which is training in predictability, in the facade of certainty. And when that facade inevitably breaks, we often find ourselves at sea.

Strategies for living with uncertainty.

It is not the case that “AI gathers data from the Web and learns from it.” The reality is that AI companies gather data and then optimize models to reproduce representations of that data for profit. It’s worth preserving distinctions between the process behind building software systems and the social investments that aim to cultivate the human mind.

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The learning myth downplays the role of data in developing these systems, perpetuating a related myth that data is abundant, cheap, and labor-free. These myths drive down the value of data while hiding the work of those who shape, define, and label that data.

I want to quote this entire essay. So many great points about how generative AI is sold to the public to consider.

Rage suffers abuse and then decides, not that abuse should end, but that the existence of somebody else, who is also already suffering from similar abuse, represents an unacceptable existential threat, one that deserves violence.

A.R. Moxon is making a case here for a distinction between useful anger vs. destructive rage.

This overview of the historic origins of these Artificial General Intelligence boom or doom cults by Timnit Gebru should be required viewing. We have a real world with existing needs that these ideologies ignore. The result of these scifi inspired beliefs is promoting authoritarian politics. As mentioned in this video, the main question to ask: who benefits now?

See also: The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn.

Given all of this, given Trump’s increasingly explicit rhetoric about shifting the chief executive position toward authoritarianism, it seems difficult to understand how he’s still running even with President Biden in early polling — or, in some cases leading him.

My guess on why: the US is a nation with a culture of violence and toxic masculinity and many people have abusive fathers as a model for how the world works. It’s hard to break free from the familiar systems we were raised with, but it’s important to try to create (and vote for) a better world.