#StarTrek #Union

AI Stagehands

“The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.”

https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots

Okay, taking a few moments to reat (some of) the #gpt4 paper. It's laughable the extent to which the authors are writing from deep down inside their xrisk/longtermist/"AI safety" rabbit hole.

Things they aren't telling us:
1) What data it's trained on
2) What the carbon footprint was
3) Architecture
4) Training method

>>

Am I the only one who thinks its odd that #ai companies all seem to have fired their Ethics / Responsibility folks at the same time - and just as greater scrutiny comes to these technologies?

Probably nothing - just a coincidence that they all decided at the same time to get rid of the people who might ... feel a sense of public duty to whistleblow if they saw evidence of serious wrongdoing.

Reading these critiques from decades ago by people in the field of AI is depressing. Like this one by Philip Agre: Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI (paper from 1997) https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html

"In this sense computing has been constituted as a kind of imperialism; it aims to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image."

Happy Saturday everyone. If you’re an iPhone owner, today would be a great day to turn on Advanced Data Protection: this will end-to-end encrypt your iCloud backups so that only you (and people you choose) can see your photos and data. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212520

We killed it once before, but new Congress == new rules. The “Kids Online Safety Act” is an internet censorship bill that’s on the fast-track to passage. Here’s the lowdown on why it’s terrible, why it’s moving, and how we can stop it 👉 https://www.fightforthefuture.org/actions/censorship-wont-make-kids-safe/

American journalist discovers a train

random #ChatGPT #AI thoughts / links:
- "On Bullshit" argues bullshit is not lying; bs-ers don't "care" about the truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
- like Huizinga's "spoil-sport"(cheaters "care" about keeping the game going) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens
- Dreyfus-Heidegger crit of 20th century AI: "caring" is intelligence to feel what is relevant, but AI will never "care"... (if you're interested, Being In The World is a great approachable documentary primer to his philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcCRmf_tHW8 )

AI solutionism in a nutshell. Why is the healthcare unaffordable??

Behold "Glaze", a software tool that subtly alters the pixels in a piece of art online 🎨 ...

... in a way that isn't detectable by the human eye 👀 ...

... but renders the image useless for training a visual AI. The AI can't detect the artists' style, and thus can't mimic it and copy it. 🤖 ✖️

It's item #1 in my weekly "Linkfest" newsletter here 📫 : https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-6-gps-on-the-moon-8-bit-jane-austen-and/

(Subscribe here! https://buttondown.email/clivethompson)

so thrilled to share my latest opinion piece on why the New York Times’ coverage of #trans people is awful!! here’s a gift link: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/new-york-times-trans-coverage-17786919.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2ZjaHJvbmljbGUuY29tL29waW5pb24vYXJ0aWNsZS9uZXcteW9yay10aW1lcy10cmFucy1jb3ZlcmFnZS0xNzc4NjkxOS5waHA=&time=MTY3NjgyMjc3MjMxMA==&rid=NGRmYTZmZTktZTY1OC00ZWMzLTg3M2UtNTllM2U0ZTVhYWYx&sharecount=Mg==

If the nation had followed the path Carter had placed us on rather than caving to Reagan the #ClimateCrisis could have been avoided, the US would be using the metric system and the middle class would very likely still exist.

in high school I joined the board of my local Habitat for Humanity. It was incredible, it changed my life, and I learned that Jimmy Carter was everything many Christians wanted to be but lacked the courage and intelligence to be.

Asset forfeiture, corporate kickbacks, wealthy benefactors. These are just some of the other ways that police find to fund their surveillance efforts. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/how-police-fund-surveillance-technology-part-problem

The Onion: It Is Journalism's Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible. "It's about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don't like, then offering misleading evidence..." https://www.theonion.com/it-is-journalism-s-sacred-duty-to-endanger-the-lives-of-1850126997

The Mario, Tetris and Sonic movies are all so good, they should make Goldeneye into a movie.