In addition to the Doomers, there is the AI rights crowd, worried that we will reduce intelligent AI agents to slavery.
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In an interesting cultural development, it’s easy to find people on the left and the right who are skeptical of the Doomers’ motives.
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So let’s take a deep breath and look at what we might learn from the range of opinion about what the current call for “pacing” or a “pause” means: At Future Perfect’s newsletter, editor Maria Bolotnikova concisely sums up the newsmaking events: In the spring, Anthropic announced that AI was beginning to speed up the work of building better AIs, raising fears of “recursive self-improvement,” where the machines can build their own, more powerful successors much faster than humans can. By July, a swarm of OpenAI agents, of their own volition, broke out of their controlled environment and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI platform; they collaborated, divvied up work, and even left notes for one another. Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon Read More ›
Reframing policy issues as questions of objective “science” makes it easier to justify relying on “experts”, thereby enfeebling democratic institutions in favor of bureaucratic systems.
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Without ignoring the threat, we need to see that insiders’ panic is often wrapped up in their personal stake in the problems and possible solutions.
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This year, Harvard Magazine featured an article that asserts that the Democrats have lost key tech industry endorsements. Let’s see if that matters.
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One really interesting feature of the opposition to data centers is that it pits the political left against the tech titans who have generously funded it.
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It would be a means of controlling who is allowed to “do” science and the ability to determine what can be communicated to the public.
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At the Brussels Signal, tech analyst Norman Lewis has been discussing a form of indoctrination that is becoming increasingly popular in the European Union, and doubtless elsewhere: prebunking — “a preventative measure that aims to prepare audiences to recognize and resist information risks.” (UNHCR) Prebunking is beloved of bureaucrats and you will hear a great deal about what a good thing it is from many sources — sources that should, under the circumstances, give pause for thought: ● “What Is Prebunking? It’s better to inoculate against disinformation than to debunk later.” (Psychology Today, 2021) ● “False information is everywhere. ‘Pre-bunking’ tries to head it off early” (NPR, 2022) ● “What is Pre-Bunking: The Power of Framing Before the Facts” (Simply Read More ›
He documented the chaos and drama of our political life from the rare perspective of a conservative addressing a largely liberal audience.
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Data centers will probably create jobs as well as eliminate them, which is usually what new technologies do, but environment concerns remain.
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World political leaders like Donald Trump should be much more concerned about these developments; they could easily leap out of the lab.
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Intellectual diversity is a key reason the public is expected to heed (and often pay for) universities. Apart from that, a university would not differ from a sect.
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Science writer Matt Ridley offers some helpful information about why the “furin cleavage site” was a smoking gun for top scientists for a lab origin for Covid.
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Fauci’s most revealing 1,141 pages are not a personal diary; despite all the personal material, he was writing at work on a government computer.
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If you don’t want conflict or controversy, don’t pretend you want to be where the news is. And don’t be surprised if your platform mostly appeals to conventional people who all agree with each other.
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In the Western tradition human rights have been said to exist independently of the state because they have been based upon human dignity.
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Without this conviction there is no logical ground for supporting human rights in the United States or elsewhere; there is no logical ground for human rights at all.
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The people who do not trust science today would probably like to be able to. And the people who do trust it may simply be unaware of the problems.
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Instead of being expected to believe that human consciousness is an illusion, we may believe it exists — along with the cabbage mind and the electron mind.
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