So is the pope gonna start paying for commissions?
$5 on Kofi for a thoughts and prayers.
to clarify some terms:
-artificial intelligence is software that performs actions broadly defined as “intelligent”
-artificial general intelligence is software that is intelligent in every capacity that any given human is, and is said to require consciousness and human psychology to count
-artificial super intelligence is software that is beyond human intelligence in all respects, it’s said to mark the technological singularity and to have exponentially streamlined understanding through self modification that’s more than a team of human geniuses could ever comprehend
no such software under the last two terms exists, language models are filled with data, but none of them are rational like we are. they’re just very inefficient expert systems
It’s nice to neatly categorise these concepts, but it’s not necessarily true. Artificial intelligence has been used to mean both the practical concept of a machine/algorithm that could do what would ordinarily require some human intelligence and the sci-fi concept of an artificial entity capable of comprehension and learning, for around the three decades before LLMs. Moreover, the first use of AGI corresponds to what we’d now call ASI, that’s how I understand it at least. Some also seem to have distinguished weak vs strong AI, corresponding respectively to the current use of AI and AGI.
I knew people working on the precursors of the current models done years back (pre-2020) and they called it machine learning and neural networking. They only ever used “AI” as a hype thing. I’m not saying nobody in the academia called it AI but it’s quite clear that today’s stochastic models are called AI as marketing.
they called it machine learning and neural networking
absolutely, i remember that being the vogue c. 2015 when they were touted as breaking the “ai winter” and to be honest i’d still call these llms under those terms if pressed but i don’t keep up with computer science any more
Super Intelligence is a really weird choice, because it’s not like GPT 6 Astro or Opus 5.5 are actually smarter than a human, a better name would be more like a Fast Thinking Knowledge Cache? Calling it Super Intelligence would be like if you had a slightly better cruise control and called it Fully Automated Driving.
Calling it Super Intelligence would be like if you had a slightly better cruise control and called it Fully Automated Driving.
Boy do I ever have something exciting to tell you.Thinking? More like summary
Missed opportunity to call it aura for the kids and the Walter Benjamin heads.
Well, the silly framing of a magical ‘human spark’/ontology I don’t agree with and people will unfortunately latch on to this woo-woo reasoning. Aside from that yes totally.
Art from humans is valuable because it reflects human experience. It teaches stories about human experience. Real peoples’ real lives. AI cannot reflect that. That’s the big difference, and it’s a super important one.
It’s the Pope. He’s like the emperor of woo-woo.
The magical spark is living labor.
Is all art about the artists experience?
It’s so interesting how the question of the “humanity” of this tech; its like, i guess… metaphysical/ontological reality? is framed.
What the average person can know will tell us that these questions and dialogues don’t seem paired with reality. Remember the context for this statement: The Vatican has had nearly every senior official being lobbied and wined & dined by people like Peter Thiel to try and get recognition of their technology as alive/aware/etc.
I really do worry that the most typical hexbear/etc. marxist i can assemble in my mind, is going to misunderstand this a little bit.
The machine can be self aware (unless these people have something self aware in the basement, no way). We can assume any publically accessible model is not self aware, and for any allegations of "this technology is alive!!! requires things to be true the public presently lacks the understanding to verify.
but let’s be real with what we can access: This garbage is a slop machine that can maybe double as a mechanical turk. Why are garbage outfits like Anthropic doing this shit?
Well, these freaks want to dictate your reality. Religious impulses are really important as revolutionary levers. They are one of the most powerful forces to change human tendencies, because religion emerges at the confluence of what people know, what they experience subjectively, and socially, politically, etc. - straddles the line where our stories and our lived realities converge. Where the real meets delusion, where ignorance meets truth.
They want to dispense your ontology to you, through the machine. The way you see things informed by your best buddy, an omnipresent, soulless thing that “thinks” for you, and tells you how to feel at every step of your journey.
They don’t want the memory of who we are, what we fight for, what we believe, or do, in the hands of anybody but themselves. The faceless access prompt that makes you whatever entertainment slop you want, and seemingly answers any question you have in a human-like facsimilie
People who grow up with that are going to be receiving their subjective reality directly from a ‘nice’, ‘safe’, corporate amalgam
the data they’ve harvested from us has made these companies good at profiling us. If they get their way, and can get at least one of these religious institutions to break rank, sell out, and validate them, they have a machine that can single dangerous people out and make them flare out in example setting ways, or make them useless in containing ways that destroy them or make them safe. Thought patterns and reality navigation techniques can be used to slot everyone into their own hyper-real delusion, as their external world is slowly obliterated, themselves someday likely included.
It’s basically the end-stage of a society-wide frog boil. They want to control as many thought and sensory inputs as they can, and having any kind of substantial religious legitimacy will let this shit into the minds of a fuckload of people like a goddamn trojan horse.
“The priest says let the big wooden gift into the gates. Must be legit. Let it in.”
That’s the entire gambit.
These people want us to fucking die, and they want us docile and smiling as we go.
I have to suggest finding just enough insanity to take this seriously and go “fuck this” in a very, very serious, organized way.
and marxists keep telling me not to be a reactionary about this. i mean i do think we need to leverage this technology in any way that helps us but you’re absolutely right, and the last thing we need is more embrace from the public
The leverage is in knowing what it’s going to do to the hierarchy of a strongly hierarchical organization - expertise will be hollowed out, the ‘brain trust’ will become even more top-heavy than it is, and this is supposed to be offset from efficiency gains w/ Computer but it means that the nightmare is contained within a relatively few number of meat skulls, which is probably for the best.
The leverage is in understanding it, limiting its deployment such that rank and file do NOT become dependent, and in contexts that are… fucking offline.
if you are a marxist trying to leverage AI tech, your solution eneds to be intra- or entirely fucking offline. It’s just a snitch vector otherwise.
This technology is analogous to the ring of power, to be pop culture about it
Boromir, you’re not going to use it for the power of good.
well put
