Tootfinder

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

Veteran anchor Chris Wallace has become a senior adviser for news and media investments at RedBird Capital Partners, a major Skydance investor (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/business/media/chris-wallace-redbird-cbs.html

Chris Wallace, a CBS News Scion, Is Advising Its New Owner
The longtime news anchor recently began working for a financial firm connected to CBS’s new parent company and has spoken with the network’s owner, David Ellison, several times.

Thousands gathered in cities and towns across 34 states on Saturday
for a national day of protest against Republican redistricting plans in Texas and elsewhere.
“Fight the Trump Takeover”
was anchored in Austin, Texas,
with other sites spread nationwide.
In Austin alone, more than 5,000 protestors gathered at the city’s capitol in a show of defiance.
Videos and photos on social media showed protestors holding various signs that read:
“Abbott is a vot…

Building Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering Systems by Generating Synthetic Data and Decontextualizing User Questions
Christos Vlachos, Nikolaos Stylianou, Alexandra Fiotaki, Spiros Methenitis, Elisavet Palogiannidi, Themos Stafylakis, Ion Androutsopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04884

Building Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering Systems by Generating Synthetic Data and Decontextualizing User Questions
We consider open-retrieval conversational question answering (OR-CONVQA), an extension of question answering where system responses need to be (i) aware of dialog history and (ii) grounded in documents (or document fragments) retrieved per question. Domain-specific OR-CONVQA training datasets are crucial for real-world applications, but hard to obtain. We propose a pipeline that capitalizes on the abundance of plain text documents in organizations (e.g., product documentation) to automatically …

Television City is partnering with Interwoven Studios to offer production services to social media influencers in LA, amid a slump in film and TV production (Winston Cho/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bu…

How TV City, a Major L.A. Soundstage Owner, Hopes to Weather a Filming Slump: Bring In Influencers
Owner Hackman Capital Partners has partnered with Interwoven Studios to welcome influencers into its soundstages. It's already hosted big-names like Logan Paul, Jake Shane and FaZe Clan.

I may have had an interesting idea! Quick, hand me that screw driver, I'll ram it through my temple!

Across Europe, the financial sector has pushed up house prices. It’s a political timebomb
"While housing lies at the heart of political disillusionment today, it is for the same reason becoming a primary trigger for mobilisation across Europe. In October 2024, 150,000 protesters marched through the streets of Madrid demanding action. Some governments, including Denmark and the Netherlands, are introducing policies to deter speculators. But real estate capital continues to hold the…

"Yes, the union movement squandered the Biden years, refusing to spend its record-setting cash reserves on organizing, despite the millions of workers begging to join unions. But workplace democracy remains the only way that we ever have defeated capital (or ever will), so join a union, form a union, support a union:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out"
- @…
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems