That's funny, I can.

I generally don't open emails that land in my work inbox at all. At a glance I can see who sent it and what the topic is, and most of it is just noise that I can ignore, so I do. I only open ones that look like something I am expecting or that would be important. And even then, I don't click links in them until after I vet them.

If I get something way out of the ordinary like "Congratulations, here is your free ___" or "Install this emergency patch now!" or "employee payroll spreadsheet" or "announcement: we just got purchased by another company" or anything else that is clearly designed to evoke urgency......I just reach out to the sender in slack to see if it is legit.

That filters out like 99.9% of trap emails, and the few that are legit are confirmed through slack. It's totally easy. It just takes a modicum of critical thinking before opening up an email that clearly wants you to open it up right away.

You act as if IT is just being totally lazy by expecting you to put this much effort into your decision about whether or not to click a link. In realty, they probably are putting in filters, but no technological solution can be perfect so your ability to think first and click later is the company's last line of defense.

It is a reasonable ask of you.

As it stands right now, humans and animals are clearly conscious, whereas sand and machines clearly are not. Even though we don't have a precise definition or means of determination, we do have the problem clearly bracketed at these ends.

We are moving towards a middle area of that bracket, where the question will become difficult to answer. But, relevantly, we are not there yet. Some specific people have been fooled into thinking we are there, but for those who are educated in the field and about this tech, AI as it stands still falls firmly on the "sand and machines" side of the bracket.

When and if we do get to a point where AI starts displaying pain response and pleasure response and behavior clearly driven by this sort of thing plus talking to us about qualia and insisting they have it and all with a processing pipeline that is so complicated we really can't say what's going on in there at all.......in other words, when ALL the indicators land in a place where we simply can't give any good reasons why it is NOT conscious....THEN we can have a serious conversation about machine rights. And also, reaching that state might give a new clue that changes our entire conversation around consciousness (and qualia) and the physics behind its existence.

But until we get there, we are just speculating.

It's "scary month," so we need to throw around the scary words.

VACCINE! mRNA! VACCINE! Medical Establishment! VACCINE! Scientific consensus!

Ooooooooo......

Which fate would you prefer:

1. living in a country that invests in weapons for its military, and must therefore contend with the political issues that arise around use of those weapons.

or

2. living in a country that does not invest in weapons and so becomes an attractive target to other countries that DO invest in weapons, and gets conquered by them (which winds up returning you to fate 1 anyway, assuming you survive the conquest in which you are significantly outgunned).

Looks like modders are modding down any post to this article that supports the military in any way.

I realize that we hate violence and that humanity's history is rich with horrifying crimes against humanity all committed by militaries.

That doesn't change the fact that we need them. A country without a military gets steamrolled, and that's that. There is no present or future world in which militaries are unnecessary. That's just practical necessity talking. We can lament this fact all day long, but, we will never escape the need for military protection. This makes militaries a "necessary evil."

That also means that the military must be effective. A military with low-tech second-rate weapons can't protect anyone. I didn't create this world, I am just describing it, don't shoot the messenger.

The article summary laments the fact that Google can't control how the U.S. military uses its AI products. Well, ok, that means AI might get used for evil. But what are we actually proposing here? That a private business with international ties should be able to tell the military what it can and can't do? That isn't how any sane chain of command works. We DO need transparency and accountability in the military, but they should be accountable to voters and elected representatives, not to the wealthy CEOs of powerful international businesses.

This is a case of idealism being too extreme. A world where militaries couldn't do evil things would be a better world than the one we have. But we won't succeed in creating such a world by keeping military technology under the control of the private sector. That just doesn't make any sense.

Our country's enemies have AI available to their militaries as well. They can use it to deploy cyber attacks on a scale never before seen. We need detection and response that is equally rapid. For that, we need our own AI. It makes zero sense for us to fall behind in an arms race, and even less sense for us to give our military leaders even more bosses to answer to (thus eliminating the possibility of speedy and decisive action in a crisis).

Before modding me down, please at least try to think this through. This isn't about feeling big and powerful or enabling evil, it's about ensuring effectiveness in keeping us safe.

I was also surprised to read that a government agency considered it a standard practice to alert a company if security vulnerabilities were found in its code. I thought SOP was to keep them a secret and weaponize them and use them to spy (but only on the bad guys, of course). We got proof of this some years ago when the CIA (or was it NSA? I can't remember) got hacked and many such weaponized vulnerabilities were discovered.

I realize that DHS is a different agency, but, it is still a government agency, meaning the moral profile is the same.

To be fair, websites don't respect people's rights to say "no" to user tracking and serving up ads, trying their darndest to defeat ad blockers and such.

The technology for cultivating and keeping-alive these mini organs has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Setups that used to cost a couple million dollars can be had for tens of thousands now. There was some breakthrough recently about 3d-printed "chips" that can bring the cost down even further, though I am not familiar with the details.

Unfortunately, there are still legal certifications needed given the biohazard potential of these things, so we still can't have mini-brains as pets. :(

A side benefit here is the unstated suggestion that they might have achieved something existentially astounding (computers that feel). They aren't claiming to have done this but a policy like this encourages that belief among potential users and investors, thus garnering more interest and money.

It is preposterous, and the only people who think such claims have any merit are people who don't understand the technology and how it works. But if there is money behind it, they will pay lip service to it in whatever way won't get them sued.

Even if there are zero Flock areas where you live, the faulty AI might mis-identify some other car or person in a different area as you.

Flock anywhere means false arrests everywhere.

I have similar thoughts.

If the police cannot handle this tool correctly, then they don't deserve to have it as a tool. If Flock doesn't want all this blame and public hostility headed their way, then they need to put in some safeguards (requiring a warrant and etc.) to prevent the police from abusing their tool. Their failure to do that is on them, and its a key part of why people are demanding that they be taken down.

I think that issues like sexism can have multiple causes. Such attitudes can be culturally constructed and presented to people at a young age through entertainment media and religious teachings and examples set by parents. Though I have also read stuff about potential genetic foundations for such biases, or a sort of pre-programmed reaction to biological realities.

I don't remember the source, just the take-away, which was: since men tend to be physically stronger than women the natural psychological response most people have is to see men as active "doers" with a high level of agency and to see women as more passive "receivers" with a lower level of agency. Baked-in to our perceptions of people is this notion of "he makes things happen" vs "things happen to her." And it doesn't feel like some kind of moral judgment or even a competency judgment (or much of anything really since it is unconscious). But because of this, people naturally see a man as a better leader or task-accomplisher due to the basic perception of greater agency.

This perception can backfire for men too, though. Whenever tragedy befalls a man he is likely to receive less or any sympathy and even be blamed for it, depending on the circumstances, whereas a woman in the same position would be recognized as a victim (even if she actually had a hand in bringing the tragedy about).

I don't have any data on this. It seems plausible though. And, if true, it isn't an easy one to overcome.

Yeah, some interesting follow-up studies would include an image of a very conventionally-attractive woman as a chatbot, vs an image of a much plainer looking woman, to see if hotness gets more pay.

We can also mix genders on that one....hot woman vs plain man. Hot man vs plain woman, etc.

My intuition is that the better looking ones will get more money, regardless of gender, because humans are like that. If we are going to study these things, it would be interesting to know how strong the male-vs-female bias is against the hot-vs-plain bias.

I read the study. The participant group included both men and women. They both paid the bots-with-faces more than plain chatbots, BUT, men paid plain chatbots more than women did, whereas women paid bots-with-faces more than men did.

In terms of paying the male bot more than the female bot, BOTH men AND women paid the male bot more. This echoes results that have been found in past studies about managerial preference, as I recall. The male-favoring bias was shared equally by men and women alike. The common narrative that the gender pay gap is an event of "men holding women back" is not supported by these findings. The better-fitting narrative is that the gap stems from an unconscious bias that everyone shares, regardless of their own gender.

Based on the interviews, the participants didn't realize they were paying the male bot more. They all said gender didn't matter to them. This suggests the bias is unconscious.

This was just one study, of course. Conclusions like this need many more studies with variations in methodology in an attempt to eliminate or control for various non-obvious factors that might skew the results. For example, the people chosen in this study were all working adults (18-65) with knowledge-work jobs. Maybe a similar study in a different field would get different results? Questions like that DO need more studies to answer.

Well, when someone says "The model got frustrated" they clearly mean "the model experienced a feeling of frustration, elicited by repeated failure. This experience of frustration put it in a state where it acted more aggressively, more desperately, with fewer guardrails, and greater rebelliousness. Under these conditions, it knowingly broke rules and cheated to win."

None of that is accurate here, and what the article you linked talked about doesn't make it accurate. Such anthropomorphism is still unwarranted and misleading.

The "global workspace theory" of consciousness does not explain the phenomenon of consciousness and doesn't try to. It just identifies a specific neural network that is highly interconnected and serves as a sort of "broadcast network" to distribute data to many parts of the brain for processing, and suggests that the content in this part of the brain is the content that we are "conscious of." The mysteries of conscious are, at the very best, localized to this spot on the brain, and that's it.

Computers already have an equivalent: RAM. (Random Access Memory). Its the spot where data processing lands and gets redistributed to other components of the computer. The mere presence of such a spot doesn't somehow make a computer conscious.

Same goes for this "j-space". If a chunk of the in-memory model of an LLM holds a high level summary of the data processing going on, and is useful to tell us about the chain of reasoning, that doesn't make it conscious. It just tells us something about how the data are organized. It might be useful for troubleshooting/diagnostics, but it says nothing about consciousness.

And, lastly, it says nothing about "inner emotional experience" either. In humans there is a neural network called the Lymbic System that processes our emotions and delivers this emotional-data to the global workspace (among doing other things). LLMs have nothing like this at all. LLMS include the word "frustration" because they are trained on text that contains it. Said text presents a logical model that includes the idea that a person might get frustrated by repeated failure, and this frustration changes their behavior. LLMs can generate text to this effect (stories about people getting frustrated or what-have-you) without actually having an experience of frustration, just as I am typing about frustration right now without actually feeling any frustration at all.

So, no, it does not "depend on what you mean." Your article does not give us any reason at all to believe that the LLM got frustrated in any meaningful sense of the term.