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

Semantics-Aware Human Motion Generation from Audio Instructions
Zi-An Wang, Shihao Zou, Shiyao Yu, Mingyuan Zhang, Chao Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23465

Semantics-Aware Human Motion Generation from Audio Instructions
Recent advances in interactive technologies have highlighted the prominence of audio signals for semantic encoding. This paper explores a new task, where audio signals are used as conditioning inputs to generate motions that align with the semantics of the audio. Unlike text-based interactions, audio provides a more natural and intuitive communication method. However, existing methods typically focus on matching motions with music or speech rhythms, which often results in a weak connection betw…

Canonical Thermodynamics
Arnaldo Spalvieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21650 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21650

Canonical Thermodynamics
In the paper, thermodynamics of canonical systems is derived from the multinomial distribution of the occupancy numbers of quantum eigenstates. The cathegorical distribution (i.e. the one-particle distribution) on which the multinomial distribution is based, should be derived from the maximum entropy principle, but, being the multinomial distribution intractable, the paper proposes to take instead the Boltzmann distribution as cathegorical distribution, discussing the reason why the entropy of …

LowKeyEMG: Electromyographic typing with a reduced keyset
Johannes Y. Lee, Derek Xiao, Shreyas Kaasyap, Nima R. Hadidi, John L. Zhou, Jacob Cunningham, Rakshith R. Gore, Deniz O. Eren, Jonathan C. Kao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19736

LowKeyEMG: Electromyographic typing with a reduced keyset
We introduce LowKeyEMG, a real-time human-computer interface that enables efficient text entry using only 7 gesture classes decoded from surface electromyography (sEMG). Prior work has attempted full-alphabet decoding from sEMG, but decoding large character sets remains unreliable, especially for individuals with motor impairments. Instead, LowKeyEMG reduces the English alphabet to 4 gesture keys, with 3 more for space and system interaction, to reliably translate simple one-handed gestures int…

Cost Effective Designs For Next-Generation Radio Telescopes
G B Raghavkrishna, Deeptangshu Banik, B Ravi Kumar, D Veeraswamy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22398

Cost Effective Designs For Next-Generation Radio Telescopes
Radio astronomy has entered its golden era, with many revolutionary facilities such as SKA, ngVLA, and LOFAR2.0 coming online in the next decade. These facilities are certain to redefine radio astronomy. However, on smaller scales-such as at institutional or amateur levels-radio astronomy is still mostly practiced for educational or personal interest. The primary reason small-scale radio astronomical experiments rarely produce cutting-edge scientific results is the limitation of funding availab…

StyleAdaptedLM: Enhancing Instruction Following Models with Efficient Stylistic Transfer
Pritika Ramu, Apoorv Saxena, Meghanath M Y, Varsha Sankar, Debraj Basu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18294

StyleAdaptedLM: Enhancing Instruction Following Models with Efficient Stylistic Transfer
Adapting LLMs to specific stylistic characteristics, like brand voice or authorial tones, is crucial for enterprise communication but challenging to achieve from corpora which lacks instruction-response formatting without compromising instruction adherence. We introduce StyleAdaptedLM, a framework that efficiently transfers stylistic traits to instruction-following models using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). LoRA adapters are first trained on a base model with diverse unstructured stylistic corpor…

People Are Highly Cooperative with Large Language Models, Especially When Communication Is Possible or Following Human Interaction
Pawe{\l} Niszczota, Tomasz Grzegorczyk, Alexander Pastukhov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18639

People Are Highly Cooperative with Large Language Models, Especially When Communication Is Possible or Following Human Interaction
Machines driven by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to augment humans across various tasks, a development with profound implications for business settings where effective communication, collaboration, and stakeholder trust are paramount. To explore how interacting with an LLM instead of a human might shift cooperative behavior in such settings, we used the Prisoner's Dilemma game -- a surrogate of several real-world managerial and economic scenarios. In Experiment 1 (N=100), part…

Chain-of-Experts: Unlocking the Communication Power of Mixture-of-Experts Models
Zihan Wang, Rui Pan, Jiarui Yao, Robert Csordas, Linjie Li, Lu Yin, Jiajun Wu, Tong Zhang, Manling Li, Shiwei Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18945

Chain-of-Experts: Unlocking the Communication Power of Mixture-of-Experts Models
We propose Chain-of-Experts (CoE), a new Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that introduces sequential expert communication within each layer. Unlike traditional MoE models, where experts operate independently in parallel, CoE processes tokens iteratively across a chain of experts inside a layer. To support dynamic expert selection across iterations, CoE employs a dedicated router at each iteration step within a layer. This design allows tokens to re-evaluate and select different experts dur…

in the 18th century, some wealthy landowners hired ornamental hermits to reside on their estates. they'd sometimes be asked to make themselves available to guests, answering questions, providing guidance, or intrigue alone. but in some cases, the hermit would not communicate with visitors at all, functioning instead like a perpetual stage play or live diorama. life lived as background dressing to another, in exchange for just enough to keep it going.

High-Density EEG Enables the Fastest Visual Brain-Computer Interfaces
Gege Ming (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University), Weihua Pei (Laboratory of Solid-State Optoelectronics Information Technology, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Sen Tian (Suzhou Nianji Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Xiaogang Chen (Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Medical Sci…

High-Density EEG Enables the Fastest Visual Brain-Computer Interfaces
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology establishes a direct communication pathway between the brain and external devices. Current visual BCI systems suffer from insufficient information transfer rates (ITRs) for practical use. Spatial information, a critical component of visual perception, remains underexploited in existing systems because the limited spatial resolution of recording methods hinders the capture of the rich spatiotemporal dynamics of brain signals. This study proposed a freque…