Tootfinder

"Underprepared: AI doesn’t have to be sentient to pose a threat — sentient actors are the threat. The 2024 election is going to be the World Cup of online disinformation, as AI supercharges these tactics."
https://www.profgalloway.com/forewarned/

Forewarned | No Mercy / No Malice
For years, we’ve been making predictions. The objective isn’t only to be right more than we’re wrong, but to catalyze a productive dialog that might shape better outcomes. If you get most/all your predictions right, you’re not predicting … you’re stating the obvious. Also, predicting societal ills, or worse, can highlight a threat and inspire […]

This article by a former OpenAI employee makes a powerful case that AI exploits the same clever game design that can make Furbies, dinosaurs, and even triangles seem sentient. It's not about modeling a brain's complexity; simpler systems can ironically feel more intelligent.
https://www.

When they first legalized advertising prescription medicines in the U.S., I was kinda shocked by the whole phenomenon, but it had one clear upside: for each TV ad, someone had to pay musicians to provide cheery musical distraction through the required 90 seconds of listing side effects. I assume “AI” will ruin that.
From: @…

big tech companies:
"we need more power... for... uh... AI stuff"
[luddite electricians about to shut off power]
"you can't shut off our datacenter... there's... uh... a sentient being inside"
"noo, please"
[hal-9000 powers off]

Eliza: A Robot Story - complete series 🤖😢💜
Dramatized scifi | Total listening time: 5h 23m
When a robot called Eliza falls in love with Him, they work together to make her fully sentient. But consciousness doesn’t come without consequences. As Eliza gets caught in a web of both loving and abusive relationships, she has to fight to surviv...

Eliza: A Robot Story - complete series 🤖😢💜
Dramatized scifi | Total listening time: 5h 23m When a robot called Eliza falls in love with Him, they work together to make her fully sentient. But consciousness doesn’t come without consequences. As Eliza gets caught in a web of both loving and abusive relationships, she has to fight to survive. Produced in partnership with Manchester Women's Aid, and released during Domestic Violence Awareness month. It's a multi-award winning show - most notably winning Best Audio Drama at the Indepe…

The weirdest thing about the AI hype is the claims that computers will become sentient and human-level intelligent.
There’s zero evidence that the human brain (the only thing that we know of that is capable of human-level sentience and intelligence) works like a computer or that it could even be simulated by one.
Some neuroscience points to quantum mechanical effects being at the core of how neurons work, which basically means that we don’t have a clue how the brain really works.…

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.
They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.
I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)
Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.
The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.
Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.
Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

"Many scientists and philosophers have argued that humans’ limitations — as a species with a dense internal monologue, a reliance on sight and a culture built on spoken language — can blind us to how sentience might work in other species."
It’s ‘irresponsible’ to ignore widespread consciousness across animal world, dozens of scientists argue | The Hill

It’s ‘irresponsible’ to ignore widespread consciousness across animal world, dozens of scientists argue
There is good reason to believe fish, amphibians, molluscs and insects are sentient, according to a new declaration signed by three dozen scientists. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness argues that current scientific research indicates such widespread animal consciousness is a “realistic possibility” — and that scientists and policymakers must take that into account when considering risks to…

The Terraformers (2023) by Annalee Newitz is set in a far future where humans are built instead of birthed. Destry is an ecosystem ranger on a planet that's being terraformed over centuries by a corporation that's basically a real-estate developer. She has implants that can connect to the network of sensors that permeates the ecosystem. Her companion is a sentient moose with an anti-gravity organ that lets him fly. 1/

Midnight Burger - Season 4 coming soon 🍔🌌⏳
Dramatized scifi comedy | Total listening time: 40h 21m
Every day Midnight Burger appears somewhere new in the cosmos with it’s staff: a galactic drifter, a rogue theoretical physicist, a sentient old-timey radio, and some guy named Caspar. No one knows who built it, but when it appears there’s ...

Midnight Burger - Season 4 coming soon 🍔🌌⏳
Dramatized scifi comedy | Total listening time: 40h 21m Every day Midnight Burger appears somewhere new in the cosmos with it’s staff: a galactic drifter, a rogue theoretical physicist, a sentient old-timey radio, and some guy named Caspar. No one knows who built it, but when it appears there’s always someone around who could really use a cup of coffee. Nominated for a 2024 Ambies Award for Best Fiction Podcast. 3 seasons, 41 episodes as of Nov 14, 2023.