Fragments

I signed up for Threads today. Download, click, click, and suddenly I'm seeing a wall of random stuff. A post from a Kardashian. Influencers commenting on brands. No idea why I'm seeing any of it.

At first I thought it's because someone I'm connected with on Instagram commented on it, but honestly I don't know why anyone would want to talk to Netflix unless it was a customer service complaint.

What I expected was that I'd see the people on Instagram that I followed. This content I'm seeing here never needed to be discovered.

A better word for hallucations is really bullshit, which differs from a more straightforward falsehood because the speaker is blithely unconcerned about truth.

It's not so much that these AI tools are grounded in reality or hallucating, telling the truth or misinformation, as much as they sound authoritiave when they do it.

Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true.

— On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

Also available as an expanded book

"A Taxonomy of AI Panic Facilitators"
A visualization of leading AI Doomers (X-risk open letters, media interviews & OpEds).

Some AI experts enable them, while others oppose them.
The gender dynamics are fucked up.
It says a lot about the panic itself.

Your thoughts? pic.twitter.com/xnhSP4smIj

— Nirit Weiss-Blatt, PhD (@DrTechlash) July 1, 2023

more in thread

via Turing Post

The sounds when you turn the steering wheel and force it out of driver+ is mellow and soothing. The wheel turns smoothly when moving to the center of the road giving the bicyclists more space, there's no fighting with it. Nothing flashes red.

The Telsa both tries and actually accomplishes a whole lot more. It's always watching and always guiding. Are the alerts actually useful? Somewhere in Tesla HQ the feeling seems to be that human drivers need to be saved from themselves.

The data seems to support that, but it's not nearly as much fun.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden