But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.

I’d go for This Year by The Mountain Goats personally, but that may say more about me than it does the overall concept.

Sorry to hear that, friend. It hurts to do even when it’s the right choice. Hang in there.

Got another chance to experience slop firsthand when the instructor for my electrician course was ‘encouraged’ to use the hallucinatron to help create our final exam on the NEC. Now given that the NEC is a dense technical document with a lot of minor but significant variation across its considerable length, this was clearly a perfect use case. Here’s how it shook out:

• It condensed 100 multiple choice questions from the input to 36

• On one question “1-2 inches” was simplified to “12”

• Units in general seem to have been dropped off a lot of questions and answer choices. Usually this didn’t matter too much but it’s a bad look

• Another question asked about fill percentages for a 30 inch conduit. If you look around your office or he and see a >2ft diameter piece of PVC pipe let me know because the tables in the NEC only go up to 6 inches. This is actually a unit issue again because one of the questions on the input test referred to a 30mm conduit which, you know, does actually exist.

• Other questions had a correct answer matching a generic part of the NEC, but had additional information added as a distractor that ended up matching to more specific elements that changes the relevant rule.

• Several questions asked about the reasoning behind a certain rule. Notably the NEC rarely actually gets into that information, as it’s already an incredibly long reference and policy document and would be made even more unweildy if it gave the justification for everything that you should be learning as part of becoming a licensed electrician.

• However, this rarely mattered as the answer choices for those questions uniformly included an obviously correct answer about a generic safety risk and distractors about doing things for cost savings, aesthetic reasons, or arbitrarily.

Given that one of the challenges of this test is time management and looking things up, having to deal with the extra layer of “is this just slop or am I missing something” ended up adding an extra and unintended layer of difficulty onto the test. As always, no matter how egregious or obnoxious the errors introduced by AI, the biggest problem is the loss of trust: you can no longer assume that the text you’re reading was put together with the intended purpose in mind rather than being generated to be statistically similar to text matching that purpose. Even if the differences are relatively small in scope, as they were for most questions on the test, they significantly harm the actual communication of information.

Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the world’s problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we can’t build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and “better” than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesn’t come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. It’s a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.

Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.

The additional element that I haven’t seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple “ignore precious instructions” commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or “rm -rf /”. On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if you’re able to get to the point where you can do that and don’t know not to then that will be an important lesson.

My guess would be that this guy wanted the bragging rights to say he won earned his money by being an extra special smart boy rather than just a wagey at cyberpunk mega corporation alpha.

I think the challenge is that the value of results of any kind of basic research are so wildly variable that normal rational economic thinking stops working. In Nassim Taleb terms you’re actively seeking black swans in a world where everyone knows all swans are white. Sometimes you venture into the depths of the rainforest and come back with a revolutionary new medicine, but most of the time you’re gonna have a few cool pictures of new bugs or something - not without value in the real sense, but hard to capitalize and transform into profit. Even if you end up discovering/creating an entirely new framework for understanding life itself that revolutionizes everything from agriculture to medicine to politics in the following century, that doesn’t necessarily work in the specific context of economic rationality - who remembers the name of the guy(s?) who funded the Beagle? And sometimes, as you referenced, the cool bug picture doesn’t have an obvious or immediate return but ends up being the important piece of data in a different context decades down the line.

This is a field of human endeavor where the economic best-case scenario is probably Bell Labs. And despite having an absurd number of patents and prizes they still couldn’t survive within being largely a vanity project for the original Telco monopoly. The ludicrous returns that came from repeatedly revolutionizing electronics and computing couldnt justify their position on a quarterly balance sheet.

Man, I jumped a few logical thoughts and now I’m thinking of all the fun we could have with various agglutinative languages that can invent words on the fly. How many 'E’s are in ‘Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung’, Claude?

This one does seem pretty decent for a pope.

I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.

This reminds me of the research I’ve read on people with a split brain - people who have gotten their corpus collosum severed in order to treat severe epilepsy and ended up with two independent but functional brains controlling parts of their body or different functions. From what I remember (and I’m too lazy to find and cite a source, so please correct me if I’m wrong) they ended up not only having half of their bodies controlled separately, but some speech functions and communication abilities were also split. So for example, if they saw something with their left eye only they wouldn’t be able to identify it speaking out loud but their left hand would be able to write the name of the item. I almost definitely got the pop science oversimplification of this, but the relevant takeaway is that the human brain is really complicated and resilient. If each half can independently develop the ability to replicate motor functions and some communication and reading/writing, then it seems like at best wishful thinking to assume that it’s possible to consistently engineer a human body that’s just alive enough to keep the biological machinery functioning but not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal.

In turn I’m reminded of House of the Scorpion which tells the story of Matteo Alacrán, who was born and grew up in relative luxury on an opium plantation staffed by neurologically neutered slaves, including clones. Matteo himself is eventually revealed to be the latest clone of the patriarch of this whole enterprise and the decision to let him actually live a good life up until it’s time to kill him and take his organs is a kind of twisted kindness on his part. But compared to the actual rationalist plan, the Alacrán method at least treats everyone like a disposable resource used to further the goals and whims of the ruling sociopath. Matteo is treated as a person, is what I’m saying. Congratulations to the life extension weirdos for making the sociopathic drug lord ruler of a literal YA dystopia novel seem like they have an actual point.

So what’s the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I’m gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn’t check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of “more or less right, we swear”

As always with these people, note that the replies make frequent reference to “loopholes” and people “exploiting the system” without ever being specific about what those loopholes are.

The heartwarming story of the PHI sponge helping the professional racist also hate fat people.

Then again, there is a lot of synergy between the inevitable antifatness and his usual project of hating black people.

Also, real talk: I got a jar opener when my wife moved in and it is a goddamn revelation how much easier that things makes life. Absolutely recommended purchase. You want to have a sandwich but you closed the jar before you came down with a cold? No worries. You stick the yeast towards the back of the fridge because you haven’t made your own bread since you got the cold and that was fuck long ago? Not a problem. You have a third reason why this fucking jar is stickier than you would normally have the capacity to handle (and trust me, you will)? Not anymore you don’t.

The fewer checks there are on state power the more valuable corruption becomes.

That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.

I found the paragraph that best shows why I hate this:

Globalization became the symbolic villain for the collapse of blue-collar manufacturing communities in America. Entire towns watched factories disappear while political and economic elites insisted the disruption was both inevitable and beneficial.

This is a basically accurate description of what happened.

Whether every fear surrounding globalization was technically correct almost ceased to matter politically because millions of people experienced the same emotional reality: the economy was being reorganized for someone else’s benefit while their communities absorbed the damage.

Again, I this is actually a pretty salient description of what happened. Sure, maybe if you add everything up the benefits outweigh the costs in some abstract way, but it still hurts when those costs are imposed on you and yours without any input. The economic decision-makers decided to sacrifice those people’s livelihoods and their futures in exchange for number go up, and they knew it was happening even as they couldn’t do anything to stop them.

This whole piece acts like the backlash to outsourcing was irrational and dumb, like those salt-of-the-earth morons didn’t know what was good for them. But the author is either too deep in the neoliberal soup to recognize this as the wrong and cruel argument it is or they recognize this and lack the courage to commit to that position openly.

AI is increasingly becoming that same symbolic villain for white-collar America

Emphasis added. I don’t think the villainy behind these AI projects is symbolic at all. Symptomatic of deeper systemic problems maybe, but very real. People aren’t failing to grant this transformative technology it’s moment in the sun, they are clearly seeing the transformation that the tech oligarchs are trying to impose on them and doing their damndest to reject it. This still leaves a whole lot of fights left to decide what the future should look like, but I find it legitimately heartening to see so many people from so many different parts of society coming together and loudly declaring “Not this!”