Our new sucker-tentacled overlords.

+1 Insightful

It seems like most big changes are set in motion by elites who benefit from them, with the teeming masses convinced a) to go along and b) that they’re driving. Historically this could be because elites have had a pulpit, either from holding office or having access to publishing and more recently broadcasting. In really recent times the masses finally got access to a broad audience via the Internet, but since they mostly use it to post boobs and complain about game companies, elites are still in the driver’s seat.

It’s possible that being led around by a privileged few is just how humans work, and it’s up to enlightened individual elites to make parts of the world better for short periods while they’re alive.

That actually sounds like a good personal motto. For a long time mine has been, “There’s always more than one way,” but you’ve got me thinking.

No, the salutes happen after people already let it die.

Oh good point, tbh I didn’t even remember it was also MLK day - but I thought that a National holiday? Maybe only in “woke” blue states IDK.

Honest opinion: IDGAF where people login. Market share is for corporations to worry about.

I just noticed on my calendar that Inauguration Day is a “regional holiday”. People get a day off for this, but not to vote?

The history of the Internet and computers in general is full of investors willing to take seemingly insane chances on overvalued speculative ventures.

Won’t enforce it when, today and tomorrow?

“Very fine balls on both sides.”

Must be talking about a dwarf Trump pays to wipe his ass.

I know it’s not actual “intelligence” - and I complain about this terminology all the time - but for the sake of conversation I use the term AI. Even though all it’s really doing is remixing content it has been trained on to produce something convincingly like what a human can do, it’s often useful enough to replace human output. In practice that’s what’s significant - good enough to replace human labor and much cheaper. I have a software dev friend who uses Claude all the time in his work. During a recent in-person D&D game he had it generate a SQLLite database and scripts to help map some things we were dealing with - without even interrupting the game. I agree that people grossly overestimate AI, especially with wild theories that it’s about to take over the world or that it’s already self-aware - that’s just media-driven and movie-driven fantasy - but there are many routine parts of people’s jobs that the stuff we currently call “AI” can handle at least as reliably as a person.

If you’re brutally honest you’ll probably admit that you do most of your job on autopilot. Unless something interesting happens and you have to make a judgement call, the main thing is just getting through the day without screwing up. AI could almost do the routine parts already, and just nudge you as needed. It could probably do most office jobs that way. Employers will pretty soon realize they could run a 20-person department wtih AI and like 3 consultants to put out occasional fires. This will spread more and more to production jobs as industrial automation catches up. But what does an economy do with all the employees it suddenly doesn’t need? I know the cliche that the goal of capitalism is to make money without employees, but without a certain critical mass of people getting wages they can spend, oligarchs can’t rake in profits and governments can’t rake in taxes. So at that point how do we make the economy work? I think that’s a conversation we’ll be having sooner than we think, and it’s better if we have it before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.

No, shit for brains, giving up your job is an actual commitment. Virtue signaling is a token gesture that costs you nothing - like throwing a million dollars at an inauguration party when you’re worth billions.

My point was only that the Turing Test was not invented by Alan Turing, it was made up based on misunderstood remarks he made. But more than that, the principle is the same as saying a convincing sales pitch means a good product.

Not sure how you define getting “hung up” but there are tons of poorly informed people who believe/fear that AI is about to take over/conquer/destroy/whatever the world because they think LLMs are as smart as humans - or just a few tweaks away. It’s less about the word “intelligence” than about jumping from there to collateral issues, like thinking LLMs are “persons” that deserve rights, that using them without their consent is slavery, and other nonsense. Manipulative people take advantage of this kind of ignorance. Knowledge is good, modern superstition is bad.

Martha Wells… cool, thanks!

Brilliant thought experiment. I never heard of it before. It does seem to describe what’s happening - if only there were a way to turn it into a meme so modern audiences could understand it.

Yes I think that’s generally what Alan Turing meant - he was careful not to define what “intelligence” means, and was discussing practical perception of machine behavior.

Eliza, a chatbot psychiatry emulator written in the 1960s, convinced many people it was a real person.

Various versions of Eliza are online - including this quaint, retro looking one