Catholic social ethicist of new technologies, special focus on AI and transhumanism and the plight of the poor. International, but from US West Coast
Hong Kong
Joined April 2015
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I suppose if I'm going to review 70s sci-fi, I should make the threads accessible somewhere. So I'll be putting them here.
One of the worst parts of sci fi/comics writing is when we make something “super” (e.g. strength, speed) we have some sense of what that looks like, but the writer’s “super intelligence” is always just what the writer thinks is smart, which is usually uncreative and stilted.
Well, kabukicho was an experience. Solicited by 3 Madams and 3 bar scammers while walking around on my own. Lots of theme bars and restaurants. Saw a dead rat on the street in the morning. Fits the bill of “seedy,” but has its own charm.
Although this message is ironic coming from Strickland, it is very important to tel our LGBTQ siblings not to compromise the truth of who they are to be loved by bigots in society.
I used to hear that to be good at computers, you had to be good at logic, but AI guys are so bad at analogies that I’m gobsmacked that computers work at all.
The economist Irving Fisher has famously said "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" a few days before 1929's financial crash.
Here we're at the next level, i.e. saying existential risk is only a thing randos believe a few days AFTER tons of top world-class AI leaders signed a statement voicing this precise concern.
In Science in Action, Latour says you should follow socio-logics rather than logics to understand how things are. Don’t try to make logical sense of what’s going on with AI. Just follow the money.
I'm finding @80000Hours's reasoning hard to follow (excerpt from recent email).
AI was the top problem because it was huge + neglected.
Now it's an even bigger problem because it's ... not neglected?
Hard to see how this goes both ways. At least, this isn't a good framework.
I’m starting to think some of the smart “I told you so people” are not as smart as they think they are…
Dr. Jackets retweeted
Happy #PrideMonth! We celebrate all LGBTQ+ identities and reaffirm our commitment to being a welcoming, safe and supportive place for ALL members of the Notre Dame family.
We see you. We're glad you're here. You are an important member of our community.
ALT The sun shines on the Golden Dome of the University of Notre Dame glinting bright in front of a rainbow crossing the sky behind it and the spire of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame.
Climate change: several specific problems predicted based on clear empirical data collected by hundreds of scientists across the world over several decades.
AI: CEOs say they have a bad feeling about it (while still promoting it).
I may work full-time on climate, but definitely see AI as the bigger risk. It's not even close. Warming is bad, but human extinction is not on the list of outcomes.
Not sure what your intention was @_david_ho_ but we ofc can and should work on several problems at the same time.
Marvin Minsky, an MIT AI researcher who actually helped coin the term AI 70 years ago,
1. Received grants and other support in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein
2. Literally collaborated with Arthur C Clarke for shaping his AI theory and Clarke’s sci fi
An example of the second. @merbroussard also talks about this collaboration in “Artificial UnIntelligence.”
youtu.be/NWrz6kqJiQQ
There’s realistically only a couple ways AI poses an “existential threat”:
1) we keep devastating our planet through energy and resource-intensive machine learning ventures to create more sophisticated text and image generators. Sacrifice the planet for AI infatuation.
3) we utterly upend the economy by employing machines to do labor, failing to understand how the market works and what value generation means, leading to economic disaster (which could lead to war or other disaster)