Premium 129: Whammies for Drugs

Murder the gods and topple their thrones. This is the trillbilly shit I'm here for

Josh Aych

Most of the hype around AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) the kind that Tom was referring to (i.e. the cat being out of the bag) is much farther away that the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist folks would have you believe. The more urgent problems, besides bias and the explainability of these of ai and machine learning tools, include issues such as effectively eliminating the right to be forgotten or unrecognized, and related privacy concerns. As far as the nightmare scenarios go, Nick Bostrom writes about instrumental convergence: essentially, it's not that these AIs are too smart, it's that they are too stupid to know when to stop. These narrow AIs have one very simple function (typically) to optimize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Ahmad Ragab

I know this makes me a shitty Marxist, but after hearing about Resource Generation and checking their website, I want to buy the bro-est bro-truck that ever bro'd it up at a brodown to cut doughnuts and roll coal on their headquarters.

T.A. Martin

This nyt featured reminded of another interview in nyt magazine in which Nicole Kidman actually said she does not see herself as a celebrity.

Just want to celebrate the fact that Aaron is alive. You all are a beacon of light in dark times. Best wishes comrades. ☭︎

[NUMB3R TH30RY]

When will our dear Tanya return?

boycrusher

The whole thing with these woke heirs reminds me of a story about a wealthy young man who got radicalised at university in the 1970s and joined a British Trotskyist group. He obviously wanted to bring his money to the party, but mumsy and pappa were concerned enough about his political leanings that they wrote terms into his trust fund that it could only be used for a profit-making enterprise. The Trot group came up with a scheme where they would start a commercial printing operation which would of course put out their various publications gratis. But actually getting commercial contracts proved difficult in a cutthroat market, so the only other things they managed to print were skin mags, rather undermining their friendly relations with radical feminists and so on.

Jim Macfarlane

I used to work for an AI startup, including the famous autumn of 2016, and we were all surprised to find on Wednesday evening after Trump's election that we were on the verge of solving 'fake news detection', according to our CEO on some back-of-beyond TV news interview.

Jim Macfarlane

“the hoffa”

carl

Just wanted to let Tom know, the thing with AI is it's all a smokescreen where charlatans assure investors and the public that their dogshit computer program will be able to predict when people are going to shoplift or something. They're incapable of thought and at best will operate a drone that will maim the wrong targets 30 percent of the time overseas. They are scary because when they fuck up they can harm people, and are capable of doing some fucked up things when they work, but overall it's... scary for different reasons I guess

Dogmoth

That walrus Our Planet scene, sympathies that's special sad

Tristan Ryan