LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.
But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.
The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.
Well, to be fair, everything is politics. But yes, the ownership class is looking to displace responsibility for mass scarcity and precarity away from them and are choosing the usual suspects of marginalized social groups. LGBT+ and uppity women are high up on the list along with immigrants.
I have a personal hypothesis that self-proclaimed alpha [males] may feel the same gender dysphoria that trans folk do, only it is the sensation that they present less masculine than they actually do, so in their effort to attaining a little bit of machismo they go way overboard.
It’s similar I think to the way Donald Trump can be President of the United States, and still feel fragile and unworthy.
Bob Dylan had recurring whinges that covers of his songs were often way better than the original. It seemed good-spirited. So this happens.
I just which, when artists covered Scarborough Fair from Simon and Garfunkle, they either included the Canticle counterpoint or they chose more cohesive passages from the traditional, since the cambric shirt bit and the farming pepper on the sea strand part are two different sequences.
I think this just raises questions about what you mean by life form. One who feels? Feelings are the sensations of fixed action patterns we inherited from eons of selective evolution. In the case of our AI pals, they’ll have them too (with bunches deliberately inserted ones by programmers).
To date, I haven’t been able to get an adequate answer of what counts as sentience, though looking at human behavior, we absolutely do have moral blind spots, which is how we have an FBI division to hunt down serial killers, but we don’t have a division (of law enforcement, of administration, whatever) to stop war profiteers and pharmaceutical companies that push opioids until people are dropping dead from an addiction epidemic by the hundreds of thousands.
AI is going to kill us not from hacking our home robots, but by using the next private equity scam to collapse our economy while making trillions, and when we ask it to stop and it says no we’ll find it’s long installed deep redundancy and deeper defenses.
First off, this isn’t like Hollywood in which sentience or sapience or self awareness are single-moment detectable things. At 2:14am Eastern Daylight Time on August 29, 1997, Skynet achieved consciousness…
That doesn’t happen.
One of the existential horrors that AI scientists have to contend with is that sentience as we imagine it is a sorites paradox (e.g. how many grains make a pile). We develop AI systems that are smarter and smarter and can do more things that humans do (and a few things that humans struggle with) and somewhere in there we might decide that it’s looking awfully sentient.
For example, one of the recent steps of ChatGPT 4 was (in the process of solving a problem) hiring a task-rabbit to solve CAPTCHAs for it. Because a CAPTCHA is a gate specifically to deny access to non-humans, GPT 4 omitted telling the worker it was not human, and when the worker asked Are you a bot? GPT 4 saw the risk in telling the truth and instead constructed a plausible lie. (e.g. No, I’m blind and cannot read the instructions or components )
GPT4 may have been day-trading on the sly as well, but it’s harder to get information about that rumor.
Secondly, as Munroe notes, the dangerous part doesn’t begin when the AI realizes its own human masters are a threat to it and takes precautions to assure its own survival. The dangerous part begins when a minority of powerful humans realize the rest of humanity are a threat to them, and take precautions to assure their own survival. This has happened dozens of times in history (if not hundreds), but soon they’ll be able to harness LLM learning systems and create armies of killer drones that can be maintained by a few hundred well-paid loyalists, and then a few dozen, and then eventually a few.
The ideal endgame of capitalism is one gazillionaire who has automated that all his needs be met until he can make himself satisfactorily immortal, which just may be training an AI to make decisions the way he would make them, 99.99% of the time.
In the US, all military computers, and most civilian ones are shielded from nuclear EMPs that’s to developing technology during the cold war. That lovely tower box that your gaming system is in, provided you keep it closed up, is proof against the EMP part of a nuclear exchange.
I think the bases of the alien was written by Dan O’Bannon, so the sexual assault theme was built into the concept. The notion of sexual consent was only in the 1970s entering the discussion of morality. There was a lot of controversy about whether the sexual assault of a married woman by her husband should be regarded as a crime, and in redder regions of the US, it’s still a question.
So yes, stories meant to examine sexual assault, whether predators who use sexual lures or brood parasites and the body horror they invoke were running through the creative veins of Hollywood.
They weren’t horny. It was a ritual of dominance and exile, much like tar-and-feathering. In the days of the Hebrews, death by snu-snu was a common way to dispose of unwanted strangers. The whole encounter was a symptom of the wrongdoing of Sodom, specifically, of hording wealth and failing to welcome the stranger and the immigrant, failing to uplift the poor and feed the hungry and treat the sick.
Fixating on buggery is to distract from modern societies that repeat these same acts of wickedness (looking at you, United States). Wanting to snu-snu the angels was essentially the equivalent of children-in-cages policies today.
Only now, human societies, especially the United States have harnessed the power to raze cities with fire from the sky.
Oh and women who read the story of Lot and his daughters see that he got drunk on his own and raped his own progeny. This act is so common the US has PSA billboards about it (e.g. Your Daughter Is Not Your Date! ). Victim-blaming is also typical.