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Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 109

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 146

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re:Ha Ha (Score 1) 19

Biting the hand that feeds them.

They'll bitch about lack of tax revenue and want to raise taxes (again) once all the data centers are being built in North Dakota or BFE.

Ha ha!

Oh my sweet summer child you really believe that the tech companies pay taxes on those data centers?

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment Re:A classic example (Score 1) 373

No idea how they came to the conclusion that millions of people are facing a prospect of ruined homes and businesses. The UK gets hammered by massive winter storms with 80MPH plus winds several times a year every year and has for as long as I remember. Quite interestingly and fact that she failed to mention is the extreme weather hits the UK from the west having travelled from the Caribbean, and the south having travelled up from the Sahara. The UK could reduce it's emissions to zero today and it would make absolutely no difference at all.

Comment Stop expanding AI and datacentres. (Score 1) 373

No matter what we do moving to renewables it's all getting undone by the continual ramping up of demand by AI companies and data centres. We're literally destroying the planet faster so people can make funny cat videos. Then there's the rampant consumerism, all the mountains of shite people buy that ends up in the bin or a cupboard never to see the light of day again within weeks or even sometimes days. It all needs to end.

Comment Closing the door after the horse has bolted... (Score 1) 55

the company is now monitoring all traffic and paging security if live internet access is detected.

Unfortunately by the time it's detected that and someone has blocked the internet access the damage may already have been done given the speed these models work and the bandwidth they have available to them.

Comment Don't forget everyone.... (Score 4, Insightful) 48

Don't forget that we've not got to waste energy, we've got to make sure we use low energy light bulbs, change to energy efficient appliances, make sure that we don't leave stuff turned on unnecessarily because it all contributes to climate change. But that only applies to us lowly serfs. Meanwhile if you're a mega corp that's made a net zero pledge you can just waste as much as you want.

Comment Re:Unpopular Opinion (Score 1) 37

Which loss of functionality are you referring to?

HDR if you choose X over Wayland and if you have a Nvidia card you're using a hell of a lot when it comes to DLSS, especially because there's no Nvidia App that can automatically over-ride the game's DLSS version on a per game or global basis. Those are just two I can think of OTTOMH.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

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