Bihag Dave

Trying to be useful.

[John Ennis @johnennis]

Please stop calling the AI companies “labs”

They are not labs

They are venture-backed for-profit entities

Calling them “labs” really obscures what is happening

[James Rosen-Birch ⚖️🕊️ @provisionalidea]

reading the pained responses of mathematicians, there’s a real cruelty in the way the labs have pursued this. not least because the attempted outcome in dropping so much unvalidated and poorly-written work (per the comments) is to push some of the world’s most passionate problem-solvers to be fact-checkers to a machine, as a kind of cynical cheap-as-free RL environment-by-nerdsnipe. dump a bunch of shit in public, call it solutions, get the experts to pore over it, painstakingly review and critique, scrape their efforts and use it to tweak the model, all while stoking terror about the future of the profession. it’s fucked up.

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

Economist Daron Acemoglu says AI should be designed to help people do their jobs better, not make them expendable. He also suggests interventions like a tax code that incentivizes hiring real people. https://t.co/uFxSKrVli9

[🅱️askerville @WB_Baskerville]

The only institution responding thoughtfully to AI is the 2000 year old Roman Imperial Church.

[Luiza Jarovsky, PhD @LuizaJarovsky]

Unpopular opinion: AI companies are pushing society to accept an unacceptable level of risk for a non-essential technology.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There were a lot of things that only worked because there's a limit to the rate at which humans can operate. We're about to find out what all of them are, as they break.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

[Bihag Dave @BihagDave]

@apoorv3E @grok @amessiaffair @NeilDossa Yes sure, I'm curious.

[Bihag Dave @BihagDave]

IMO the most important question, if we seek to not keep repeating history.

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Second question on AI.

We are told repeatedly that AI is going to transform every aspect of our lives – jobs, productivity, inequality, science, communication, daily activities, social order, and politics, among others.

But this promise (or threat) is coupled with the rhetoric that such an important technology, with all of the risks and competitive pressures that it entails, should be left to experts or to “technocracy” (perhaps construed broadly to include some regulators).

These two statements are hard to reconcile in a democratic society.

If anything is half as important as AI is said to be (and I agree, AI is potentially very important and transformative), then involving democratic voice is essential. If something will shape our future in a democratic society, then its direction is for democratic institutions to decide.

My instinct is that democratic voice is essential, and relying too much on technocracy could be both dangerous and counterproductive.

The counterargument that AI’s direction can and should be entrusted to technocracy would go something along the following lines. First, democratic decision-making has become imperiled in our age of polarization. Second, AI is sufficiently complex that most citizens won’t have a deep enough understanding to meaningfully contribute to the debate (and even to the question of what we want from AI). Third, competition between different labs, and perhaps competition between the US and China, creates enough discipline for a socially beneficial direction of AI to be adopted. Fourth, today’s AI leaders are enlightened and ethical enough that within the framework created by competition, they can be broadly trusted.

There are many aspects of this counterargument that I do not find convincing. Taking them in order: polarization can be overcome, and big decisions and challenges sometimes bring societies together; in fact, delegating key decisions to technocracy without democratic input may diminish trust in institutions and experts, and may worsen polarization. Second, democratic voice does not require citizens to write code or design new models; the debate should be informative enough that citizens can weigh in about what type of future they want and how they trade off the costs and benefits of different options. Third, competition doesn’t seem to be a good disciplining framework; on the contrary, competition sometimes brings the worst out of both organizations and people. Fourth, if three decades of work on political economy and institutions has taught me anything, it is that we should not bank on the ethical grounding of unconstrained leaders.

But, still, I do not mean to immediately dismiss the technocracy option if there are more compelling arguments for it.

The question is, then, whether there are any circumstances under which such important decisions can be delegated to AI experts and technocracy.

One final secondary question: even if we managed to get democratic input in the United States or even in Europe, AI will shape the lives of everyone on this planet. How do we ensure that the voice of nearly 6 billion people who don’t live in the US, Europe and China also contributes to the debates on AI?

[Dan Brooks @DangerBrooks]

This piece points to a problem I regard as central to AI: it's being built by people who believe the purpose of life is to be productive at your job. Many of these people are, at best, confused by claims that other stuff might matter.

[Martin Bauer @martinmbauer]

If this is the level of education offered, students will simply learn from AI directly

[Bihag Dave @BihagDave]

The resentment for so many things human has been very surprising to me.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

A lot of messaging around AI (by its proponents) enthusiastically frames it as a form of destruction, obliteration even: "AI just killed XYZ" - "It's over for XYZ" (in reality, this is practically never accurate)

The way regular folks perceive AI is very much shaped by such takes. The backlash is inevitable.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

A lot of messaging around AI (by its proponents) enthusiastically frames it as a form of destruction, obliteration even: "AI just killed XYZ" - "It's over for XYZ" (in reality, this is practically never accurate)

The way regular folks perceive AI is very much shaped by such takes. The backlash is inevitable.

[Dal Riata Capital @ReganCoda]

Maybe it's just a sign of our affluence and technological sophistication but the fact that so much brain power and money is being spent trying to 'solve' such meaningless problems as restaurant reservations is depressing. We used to send people to the moon.

[Bihag Dave @BihagDave]

@mountain_rats @apoorv3E

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It's a specious claim that artificial superintelligence will benefit everyone. Humanity's problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg. It's like a serial killer telling us we can stop serial killing by making serial killers smarter.

The argument hinges on the premise that humanity is suffering because we're just not smart enough to come up with the right solutions, when in reality that hasn't been the case for a very long time. Humanity has had the technology and resources to solve all its major problems for generations; we've just chosen to use our technology and resources making rich people richer instead.

We've long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. This hasn't failed to happen due to our lack of superintelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.

No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. Give them artificial superintelligence and they'll just use it to grab up more money and control, just like they're doing with the AI of the present day.

We can already see that AI is not making the world a better place. It's already taking away jobs, facilitating war crimes and mass surveillance, poisoning art, and making people crazy and stupid. We're already witnessing the results of more intelligent AI. Continuing to say we just need the AI to be more intelligent is like taking a pill to get healthy, having a terrible reaction to the medicine, and then deciding we just need to dramatically increase the dose.

Artificial superintelligence isn't going to solve all our problems because our problems don't arise from insufficient intelligence. We don't need artificial superintelligence, we need basic human kindness. We need justice. We need ethics. No matter how much intelligence we add to the AI soup, it's never going to magically add up to simple human morality. Which is what we're actually going to need if we're going to create a healthy world.

[Bihag Dave @BihagDave]

I am so glad we had an explosion of the arts well before we developed AI to this extent. I have a lifetime of incredible music, books, movies, and games to go through, before they were turned into soulless 'content'.

[nicksaraev @nicksaraev]

I am not joking when I say this.

Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over.

AI music is now very, very good. You just don't know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago.

Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.

[Proton Pass @Proton_Pass]

YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ‘BRICK’ A FRIDGE

[João Mendes Vasconcelos @joaomendesv]

Quem dotou a raça humana de tanto sentimento

[k @Kaartikkkkk]

POV: It’s 2:00 PM on a summer day. Your mom is taking a nap, the house is quiet and you’re wandering around trying to find something to do.