I keep finding more interesting people to follow on Micro.blog and because there are no follower counts and tracking, it’s easy to unfollow if you so desire without feeling guilty.
I keep finding more interesting people to follow on Micro.blog and because there are no follower counts and tracking, it’s easy to unfollow if you so desire without feeling guilty.
I just read Dario Amodei’s convincing “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Much has to go right in his plans to create measurable effect, and with our current administration against policing AI companies for fear of giving China an advantage, I’m less than optimistic.
Good thing I read this piece by Cal Newport to dampen the effect of the rhetoric and balance things out.
I’m in agreement with @manton. I think Dario Amodei and Sam Altman agreeing to “pace the frontier” is a big step and also a necessary one if anything is going to change.
As someone born in the mid-seventies, I almost entered this world with a predisposition to like Sylvie, the project of Ben Schwab (Golden Daze, Drugdealer). The band was inspired by finding tape reels recorded by Schwab’s father John and his band Mad Anthony in a barn in 1975.
Since there is a non-trivial chance that humanity will be wiped out by the end of the decade, I might as well splurge on these floral-accented Dia De Los Muertos Vans shoes.
Charles Homans takes a different perspective on the changes brought about by 9/11. In fact, he argues that much of the changes we attribute to the attacks we actually brought about by technology.
These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone.
It’s taken for granted that things really changed after the September 11th attacks, and it’s measurably true. But how much of that is actually due to the attacks is highly debatable.
Sean Hollister from The Verge reminds us that Final Fantasy VII shipped on 3 discs. Man, it was glorious.
Cal Newport believes much of the fearmongering that is done by tech executives in the A.I. space is due to their backgrounds in Rationalism and related philosophies.
This reality, that Rationalism deeply influenced many of today’s major A.I. companies, helps us calibrate the unnerving language we’ve been hearing from their leaders. When Mr. Altman declares their pending models will be “sobering” for humanity or Mr. Amodei frets that this technology “will test who we are as a species,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they discovered frightening new evidence that something catastrophic is imminent.
I listened to Newport expand upon this theory on the Not Dead Yet podcast. He’s got a convincing argument that the Rationalist movement has so strongly influenced these executives that they are simply parroting its talking points. He points out that tech execs who don’t come from those backgrounds — such as those in China and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — speak in an entirely different way about A.I. Newport’s view seems to explain a lot about the rhetoric we’re used to hearing from certain quarters.
Finished reading: The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman 📚. It was interesting to see the genesis of many of the trends we are now experiencing. Klosterman makes a wise choice by ending the decade at September 11, 2001.
