Because more AI-generated SEO garbage is exactly what the Internet needs.
268 karma · joined February 2, 2022
AI, on the other hand, is already being used by every hustler looking to make a quick buck, by students who can't be bothered to write a paper, by teachers who can't be bothered to read and grade papers, by every company who can get it to avoid paying actual people do to certain jobs... Personally, my problem is not with AI tech in itself, it's with how easy it is to get your hands on it and make literally anything you fancy with it. This is what a lot of the "AI for everything" crowd can't seem to grasp.
The misaligned incentives to publish frequently to have a nice-looking list of articles to show when you next apply for a grant means there's tons of flimsy research that goes unquestioned. It's also fairly attractive to jump on specific bandwagons and publish noise just to get your name out there. A lot of these meta-studies are looking inward, at the field itself and what is currently accepted, and finding that a fair bit of it is of very poor quality, if not straight-up nonsense.
I think, overall, it's a good thing. Research should not be focused exclusively on new knowledge. We should also be validating what others put out there, to make sure it's worth listening to.
If you think about it in an evolutionary timescale, the way most of us live in the West these days is horrendously incompatible with the sort of life we evolved to live. Thousands and thousands of years were spent out in nature, in small communities, eating certain types of foods, engaging in physical activities, etc.
The sit-on-a-chair-all-day, look-at-screens-all-day lifestyle is a comparatively new development, and neither our minds nor our bodies are suited for such an existence. That's enough to cause us a fair amount of trouble. Add all the socioeconomic issues you mention into the mix, and it all starts to make perfect sense to me.
I'm not sure how photo hosting services doing this for the past 2 decades is related to this when the author of the post explicitly mentions he doesn't use Apple cloud services or products that would trigger such behaviour. This was the OS analysing someone's images, stored locally on their personal computer, and calling back to an API for no discernible reason.
I guess if grading papers is "a waste of time", then we shouldn't be surprised that students can't be bothered to write the papers themselves in the first place. Which raises the question: if students use AI to write their papers, and teachers use AI to grade them, what's the point of any of it?
Despite what founders and CEOs might think, most employees have no interest in working towards their "vision", particularly if that requires a large sacrifice of personal time and energy in exchange for barely enough money to survive and nothing else of any importance. Probably an unpopular opinion to express on this site, but it is what it is.
Don't expect people to "work hard" for you, especially if you're not going the extra mile yourself to compensate and acknowledge said hard work.
I'm interested in psychology and philosophy, so I'll watch videos on those subjects every so often. Naturally, the Algorithm™ becomes obsessed with recommending me Peterson videos soon after. I'm 98% sure the "Do not recommend" and "Not interested" buttons are just there for show, because I keep seeing those suggestions whenever I wander off into psychology and philosophy videos.
To this day, one of my favourite things to do for relaxation is playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 while listening to old Coast to Coast AM shows from the 1990s about aliens, or demonic possessions, the Georgia Guidestones, or doomsday prophecies about some catastrophic, civilisation-ending event happening at the turn of the millennium. It's better than watching a movie or a TV show for me.
Maybe it's because I don't keep up with this stuff anymore, but it feels like modern conspiracies have a very heavy political (and partisan) component, and that sort of thing just repels me. Used to be that governments, no matter their political leanings, were part of the cover-up and not to be trusted. Now it seems like half of the conspiracies are political ads for one side or the other.
I keep seeing talk of artificial consciousness with nothing more than a vague outline of what said "consciousness" would entail, or a hand-wavy "we'll know it when we see it." This is, of course, not that surprising considering we don't have those answers for our own consciousness.
At this stage I'd say we're way more likely to end up developing a system that can trick us into believing it is conscious, à la LaMDA and Blake Lemoine, than an actual conscious entity (whatever that means, exactly). And, if that were to happen, I don't think we'd have a way of knowing that's the case. We could just carry on believing we created artificial consciousness because our not-at-all-conscious robots are too good at saying the right thing with the right prompt.
javascript:void(open('http://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location)))While I was waiting on that, I finally paid for a proper email service and migrated my domain, so I have a copy of my Gmail data and a working, Google-free email service now.
As it turns out, Google is not sufficiently convinced that I am in fact the owner of the account, so it refuses to let me download the data. I don't feel inclined to spend time trying to figure out this nonsense, but thankfully none of the information in that account is particularly important. I'll take it as a sign that I should just move away from Google, because next time the information on an account could be actually important, and I'd be screwed.
It's really won me over, I can say that much. When I was using Windows, I favoured buying games from GOG over Steam whenever possible. DRM and all that.
Ever since I moved to Linux, it's been the opposite. GOG couldn't care less about Linux compatibility, and while you can get their stuff going through some combination of Wine/Lutris scripts, the experience I get with Steam is so much better.
This is how it begins, isn't it?
Edit: Now Žižek is going on about full scale war between humanity and machines:
> the alternative is either mutual annihilation or we continue in our present nonhuman forms. This would have been the only way to a true human—I don’t know what the right word is. Yes, I would have said, yes, let's get rid of them all!
This sounds like a good idea, honestly. Companies' reactions to vulnerability disclosures can be... unpredictable. If security research is not your area, it might be easier to get someone from that industry to handle the disclosure.
> but I'm extremely hesitant to simply because of what could happen if this gets out without being patched.
If you found this vulnerability, odds are someone else will run into it too sooner or later.
I am not familiar with hydranencephaly so I might be wrong here but, from what I can find, patients with the condition usually have some cerebral structures intact, it's just the cerebral hemispheres that are missing. Patients appear to be conscious, and react to varying degrees to their environment, though their sensory and cognitive abilities are severely impaired or outright missing. The exact degree to which they are conscious strikes me as unknowable, but there seems to be at least some level of consciousness there. All good.
Wouldn't this situation lend credence to the materialist explanation? A human being born with only basic cerebral structures intact displays only basic levels of consciousness.
The author claims that these babies are "interactive, and show a full range of emotions" and uses that as evidence for a dualist view of consciousness. He seems to conveniently ignore the severe limitations that these patients show, which appear to track fairly well with the severity of the condition. No dualism required here, at least in my view.
Now, if the author were to show evidence of a patient who displays some level of consciousness while missing all cerebral structures, I think he'd be onto something. But that's not a thing, as far as I'm aware. A materialist view should be able to explain how these patients appear to be conscious while missing large parts of their brains, and it hasn't done it so far. That is not an argument in favour of the opposing view.
It also depends on the geometry of the orbit — an object in a circular orbit will move at a constant speed, while an object in an elliptical orbit will move faster or slower depending on which point of the ellipse it is.
I understood the parent comment to be focused on an Earth-centred perspective, since they were talking about Kessler syndrome and Earth-orbiting debris. I was trying to address that point from an Earth-centred perspective too, but I appreciate how that can be confusing.
Objects in higher orbits are slower[1] than objects at lower altitudes, and debris from a hypothetical collision between two high-orbiting objects would not accelerate to a speed "far greater" than the originating objects, because that increase in speed would require some form of acceleration. One satellite smashing into another would not add sufficient energy to the debris to alter its speed significantly. Any change to the speed of the resulting debris, if it were to occur, would also necessarily alter its orbit. The object's speed and its orbital altitude depend on each other.
> So failure at very low orbit might add a lot of debris to higher orbits that might trigger Kessler syndrome.
It should be noted that "failure" does not mean "exploding into a thousand pieces", so a malfunctioning satellite by itself is not that much of a problem. Low altitude satellites such as Starlink are actually better from a space junk perspective — their altitude means the effect of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft will eventually (within months, sometimes) cause it to re-enter the atmosphere instead of just hanging around in Earth orbit forever, like dead satellites do at higher orbits.
Kessler syndrome would be more likely to occur with satellites in medium and high Earth orbit, since there is no drag to bring the dead spacecraft or debris back down to Earth. Anti-satellite weapons are particularly dangerous here, because they're likely to target high-orbiting satellites and leave debris fields behind.
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[1] As pointed below, in terms of pure kinetic energy this is not correct. I was referring to apparent speed vs an object in low-Earth orbit.
This is the first time I'm hearing about the warning, but I thought I'd run `egrep` and `fgrep` on my Arch system. Sure enough, both result in warnings: `egrep: warning: egrep/fgrep is obsolescent; using grep -E/-F`
So it's made its way into Arch, at least. Though, like I said, this is the first time I'm hearing about this.