It is hard to imagine that the ultra right white supremacists aren't already happier than clams with the maga-klan. But I guess not....
"Alarm as US far-right extremists eye drones for use in domestic attacks"
"Experts say extremists openly talking of how home-built drones will be critical tool in so-called second civil war"
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
#razer builds amazing notebooks, especially their batteries are extraordinary 👍
They don't get smaller, they grow, it's pure magic...
#razersucks #worstsupportever
moviegalaxies: Moviegalaxies, movies 410-466 (2018)
Social graphs for over 700 movies from the moviegalaxies.com website. Each node represents a character in a movie and each edge is a same-scene appearance between two characters in that movie. The weight gives the number of same-scene appearances. Networks are extracted from movie scripts automatically.
This network has 40 nodes and 152 edges.
Tags: Social, Fictional, Weighted
Digitalisierung diskutieren viele, doch wenig klar bleibt: Digitale Souveränität ist keine nettes Extra, sondern Überlebensfrage für Staat und Gesellschaft. Der Staat muss seine Handlungsfreiheit sichern – und das heißt auch, Lieferketten, Datenschutz und Infrastruktur robust zu gestalten. Wer das vernachlässigt, verliert am Ende mehr als nur Daten. Nils Ole Oermann #FAZ (€)
I had an air filter attached to the rear of my #Kombi, and then I realized that I couldn't shift. One of the cords that I had used to secure the hepa filter was on the derailleur. It was an easy thing to fix, but it reminded me just how much I hate derailleurs (and any kind of external gears in general).
dbpedia_team: DBpedia athlete-team affiliations
Bipartite network of the affiliations (employment relations) between professional athletes and their teams, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 935627 nodes and 1366466 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
https://netwo…
kegg_metabolic: Metabolic networks from KEGG (2006)
109 metabolic networks of various species, as extracted from the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database in March 2006. Nodes are substances involved in enzymatic reactions present in the organism, and edges represent reactant-product pairs as extracted from the KEGG ligand database and matched against the present enzymes.
This network has 863 nodes and 2100 edges.
Tags: Biological, Metabolic, Unweighted