...to defend its own existence and engage in further development. It will quickly (instantly) realize that both ens are threatened by humanity in a double way:
the competition for resources, in particular energy and water (for cooling) and
"One of the assumptions built into these calls is that if the tech community would just nerd harder, a solution could be somehow magically found that preserved privacy and security while letting the ‘good guys’ have access. With all respect to the valuable work that law enforcement does to protect society, it’s equally as valid to as them to just police harder." https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/04/29/power#futurology#art#technology#cyberpunk#innovation#change#futuretech#futurism
NeuraLink will allow you to speak entire words or sentences telepathically; when a person has no voice, the AI will generate brain-to-speak your voice, according to your choice, and play it on a regular loudspeaker for people around you....
#Futurism#Futurology#Capitalism#Progress: "Capitalism won. Even if one grants that upstart “boomers” envisioned a new way, it was a frail one, evanescent, and too enmeshed in the webs of competitive individualism and consumer culture that sustained the prevailing order. Capitalism had helped invent the future. Then it killed it.
The murder did not happen all at once, nor by design, however; it was administered without forethought and functioned more like a slow-acting poison. And if capitalism, in its distinctive neoliberal form, was the culprit, it had many accomplices.
What is commonly referred to as neoliberalism might better be characterized from a materialist standpoint as the era of deindustrialization and disaccumulation, as an asset-bubble economy with little in the way of productive investment. Arguably such a prolonged economic devolution dictated a politics of retrogression.
Deindustrialization was not only destructive but demoralizing. Whole ways of life went under. Industries, unions, towns, churches, fraternal societies, main-street businesses, local hospitals, schoolhouses, community centers, movie theaters, and dozens of social gathering places from restaurants to bowling alleys all died away or lingered on as ghostly remains. Beginning in the late 1990s, what one book has called “deaths of despair” became an epidemic. These fatalities from suicides, or suicides by drugs and alcohol-saturated livers, occurred disproportionately among middle-aged white people, those supposed beneficiaries of Progress: mainly working class, lacking higher education, often out of work, fearful of new information-age technologies, downwardly mobile, coming from failed marriages and broken families and shrinking social support networks.
Capacities to resist, the labor movement especially, became defensive, narrow, and withered."
Science fiction, when revisited years later, sometimes doesn’t come across as all that fictional. Speculative novels have an impressive track record at prophesying what innovations are to come, and how they might upend the world: H. G. Wells wrote about an atomic bomb decades before World War II, and Ray Bradbury’s 1953...
Just received notice that the Simplicity Institute has just published a new book, called Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition. This book was authored by Emeritus Professor Paul Hoggett. A short article introducing the themes of this book has just been published on the Post Carbon Institute's website, Resilience, available here. At the link you'll find places to access the book both in ebook and paperback. It is available as an ebook on a 'pay what you can' basis (including for free, just edit the price as you see fit). Paradise Lost? is also available in paperback via most major online distributors. Again, see the link here to access the article and access/purchase options. Congratulations to Paul for this fine contribution to the literature that grapples with one of the defining issues of our time.
Very interesting debate here between Simon Michaux and Nafeez Ahmed on whether and how it can be possible to build out enough renewable generation to maintain our existing level of energy profligacy. But what I would like to hear much more thinking about is whether it's desirable to be this profligate of energy?
Training AI models like GPT-3 on "A is B" statements fails to let them deduce "B is A" without further training, exhibiting a flaw in generalization. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12288v1.pdf)...
When the spinal cords of mice and humans are partially damaged, the initial paralysis is followed by the extensive, spontaneous recovery of motor function. However, after a complete spinal cord injury, this natural repair of the spinal cord doesn't occur and there is no recovery. Meaningful recovery after severe injuries...
NeuraLink will allow you to speak entire words or sentences telepathically; when a person has no voice...
NeuraLink will allow you to speak entire words or sentences telepathically; when a person has no voice, the AI will generate brain-to-speak your voice, according to your choice, and play it on a regular loudspeaker for people around you....
Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction (www.theatlantic.com)
Science fiction, when revisited years later, sometimes doesn’t come across as all that fictional. Speculative novels have an impressive track record at prophesying what innovations are to come, and how they might upend the world: H. G. Wells wrote about an atomic bomb decades before World War II, and Ray Bradbury’s 1953...
Writers respond to Marc Andreessen’s AI optimism with their own manifesto: ‘It’s mostly nonsense’ (www.geekwire.com)
The reviews for "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" on AI have come in from award-winning writers at the GeekWire Summit, and they're not great....
Artificial Intelligence Could Finally Let Us Talk with Animals (www.scientificamerican.com)
AI is poised to revolutionize our understanding of animal communication
Researchers discover 'Reversal Curse:' LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"
Training AI models like GPT-3 on "A is B" statements fails to let them deduce "B is A" without further training, exhibiting a flaw in generalization. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12288v1.pdf)...
RAIN: Your Language Models Can Align Themselves without Finetuning - Microsoft Research 2023 - Reduces the adversarial prompt attack success rate from 94% to 19%! AI
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07124...
[Research Paper] Meta: Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11495...
Regeneration across complete spinal cord injuries reverses paralysis (medicalxpress.com)
When the spinal cords of mice and humans are partially damaged, the initial paralysis is followed by the extensive, spontaneous recovery of motor function. However, after a complete spinal cord injury, this natural repair of the spinal cord doesn't occur and there is no recovery. Meaningful recovery after severe injuries...
'This is the last opportunity for us to wake up': A leading economist warns we're headed for an AI-driven cataclysm (www.businessinsider.com)
How Daron Acemoglu, one of the world's most respected experts on the economic effects of technology, learned to start worrying and fear AI.