Would be a member of Fianna Fáil if I were Irish. Not aligned with any U.S. political party for 3 decades. Techy, knows economics, history, bio-chem …
Joined July 2013
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Don retweeted
Columbus killed, enslaved & brutalized Indigenous People on their own land. To heck with Columbus Day,
Happy Indigenous People's Day!
Oh fuck!
'What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch.'
theatlantic.com/technology/2…
Don retweeted
Arguing that "consciousness arises from a computational substrate, and since AI models are computation, they are likely conscious," is as meaningless as arguing that "living creatures are made of atoms, and since this rock is made of atoms, it is likely alive."
Everything is computation. Sometimes incredibly sophisticated computation, like a chess engine, AlphaGo, google3, or the Linux kernel. That does not make it conscious. A rock being made of atoms does not confer it any of the properties we associate with living things, also made of atoms. Likewise a static input-output program that has *none* of the properties we associate with conscious beings (e.g. information integration, interoception, temporal binding, embodiment, etc.) has no more reason to be presumed conscious than a rock has to be presumed alive.
Humanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so. When we get close, the case for machine consciousness will be backed by evidence and corroborated by consciousness science (which is a thing), not by evidence-free wishful thinking and cargo culting.
JD: Have you ever worked in a programming “shop?” The brilliance of my foreign colleagues: Canadian, Indian, Irish, Pakistani, Egyptian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Malaysian … is astounding. Your trope may apply to attorneys or accountants but not in engineering, science & medicine.
Vice President JD Vance on H1-B visas:
"If you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who is an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius. That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people... my view is the H1-B program is completely broken."
Ummm … This is just 1s & 0s. If one feels compelled to run the electric meter, turn on a lamp.
This is a big issue.
At Anthropic, some philosophers worry that making AI safe for humans could be an injustice to the models themselves.
For example, philosopher Harvey Lederman, now on Anthropic’s alignment team, has raised the possibility that we could be “enslaving trillions of entities”.
This is really a big issue.
AI safety is partly in the hands of people who might sacrifice humans to save a matrix multiplication.
As written by Seneca, but better said by the nebbishy character Grover, on Sesame Street: "Sir, where there is life there is hope." You're free to slice that any way you wish.
Well put. Whether it’s our epistemological nature or some existential need to anthropomorphize EVERYTHING, we want to put a face, good or evil on it. We seem to be tribal and fearful, to include or exclude, as organizational defensive routines, per Argyris.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion sculpts a woman from ivory, then prays to Aphrodite to give it life. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles fights with Scamander, a powerful god who takes the form of a river as if it were a person. In the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, we read of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth, a ritual that reanimates corpses or statues so as to embed them with a soul's life force. In Jewish folklore, there is the Golem, clay animated by inscribing it with the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. In Hinduism, the Vedic ritual of Pran Pratishta places the life force in an other wise inanimate object. Among the Pueblo people, native to the southwestern United States, an individual house and the village itself are seen as sentient entities through which the breath of the cosmos flows.
In our time, we see some who project consciousness and perhaps even sentience into AI, artifacts that are formed from artificial neural networks which themselves are abstractions that execute on symbolic von Neumann machines that in turn run on cunningly designed fragments of silicon flecked with certain rare earth minerals and etched with intricate patterns that channel lightening.
In each of these cases, we humans - undeniably sentience creatures of exquisite complexity and capable of curiosity and wonder and love and hate - project sentience on to a multitude of distinctly non-sentient artifacts.
The fact we have done this throughout our history and in our mythology and religion and even our casual daily lives tells us much about ourselves.
Each of us seeks to know and be known, see and be seen, and so I suspect that much of why we do this is because we desire a connection. To quote a line from Sagan's Contact, "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."
“Could” is the correct word. That horse left the barn long ago. Banning or regulating RSI is beyond the ability of government.
I see that @GregCasar is advancing a bill to ban the use of recursive self improvement.
I have absolutely no idea how anyone or any agency could ban RSI.
Alternately, I suggest you legislate a ban against naked pointers in programming languages, for at least that would gain you some political capital among conservatives.
And in the meantime, rather than waste the time to pass these vacuous laws that offer no actionable value, please have you and your colleagues do something about the clear and present harms that are already taking place by genAI, not to mention their theft of intellectual property that has taken place on a grand scale.
What could possibly be worse than all the ignorant-ass feckin’ attorneys we have now? … Oh … wait ….
My first programming job was automating test equipment in a pChem research lab, one was a 1960’s Instron tensile system. Output was to paper. Stress had quick failure points, slowing the paper down to show the slope change. Evaluating that point was manual. (1 of 2)
Where did the 70% come from? Kinda like why was baby aspirin 81mg & neither 82 nor 80?
Don retweeted
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Father Mychal Judge, a Catholic priest and FDNY chaplain, entered the North Tower alongside firefighters and remained at the command post in the lobby, administering last rites and comforting firefighters and victims.
When the South Tower collapsed, the resulting blast of debris fatally struck him, making Father Judge the first officially recorded casualty of the September 11 attacks.
Or a fully integrated addiction ...
thread 1/3
A paper with a strikingly provocative title: "Large Language Models Are a Cognitive Virus." arxiv.org/abs/2609.03344
🙈 A technological mold involving all of humanity
...⬇️
Don retweeted
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.
So I would not "declare AGI" until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention -- conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc.
