I get permitting these blogs as part of a commitment to avoid censorship - someone with non-mainstream but far less extreme opinions can look at them and say “If Substack doesn’t censor even these guys, it definitely won’t censor me.” With that said, I’m still surprised that Substack apparently doesn’t manually curate its push notifications.
I’m not necessarily supportive of Thiel - he does some things that I oppose, and also some things that I think are silly. He’s not a very likeable man overall. I’m supportive of transhumanism. The substance of this article is merely that:
Peter Thiel hesitated when asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure.”
The article doesn’t even say what his reply ultimately was, but the implication is that even considering that a transhuman future would be better is somehow horrifying, and that’s the implication I’m surprised to see supported here.
Lemmy as a whole is more seems to attract neo-Luddites but I’m still surprised to see someone so against transhumanism in c/technology.
Are there currently any government contracts put at risk by this? I didn’t think that the feds were major spenders on AI. And is Trump aware that Musk is currently the one man trying to provide the sort of AI that Trump wants?
It’s not unreasonable to simply dismiss what Trump says entirely, but it’s a different matter to assign it a meaning other than the meaning that can be inferred from context. You’re just putting words in his mouth at that point.
I think that then we actually agree.
I haven’t noticed this behavior coming from scientists particularly frequently - the ones I’ve talked to generally accept that consciousness is somehow the product of the human brain, the human brain is performing computation and obeys physical law, and therefore every aspect of the human brain, including the currently unknown mechanism that creates consciousness, can in principle be modeled arbitrarily accurately using a computer. They see this as fairly straightforward, but they have no desire to convince the public of it.
This does lead to some counterintuitive results. If you have a digital AI, does a stored copy of it have subjective experience despite the fact that its state is not changing over time? If not, does a series of stored copies representing, losslessly, a series of consecutive states of that AI? If not, does a computer currently in one of those states and awaiting an instruction to either compute the next state or load it from the series of stored copies? If not (or if the answer depends on whether it computes the state or loads it) then is the presence or absence of subjective experience determined by factors outside the simulation, e.g. something supernatural from the perspective of the AI? I don’t think such speculation is useful except as entertainment - we simply don’t know enough yet to even ask the right questions, let alone answer them.
This isn’t the Cthulhu universe. There isn’t some horrible truth ChatGPT can reveal to you which will literally drive you insane. Some people use ChatGPT a lot, some people have psychotic episodes, and there’s going to be enough overlap to write sensationalist stories even if there’s no causative relationship.
I suppose ChatGPT might be harmful to someone who is already delusional by (after pressure) expressing agreement, but I’m not sure about that because as far as I know, you can’t talk a person into or out of psychosis.
Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”
Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can’t comprehend the human concept called “love”?
*Or “sentience” or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.
I think that generally to make something like this work, you have to be much more tied to a specific location than middle class Americans tend to be. You won’t be able to find a new commune (and certainly not a new extended family) if you move for work every few years.
Not unusual doesn’t mean desirable or inevitable. It might just mean a lot of other countries made the same mistake.
I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn’t big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn’t the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.
There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn’t get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row…
I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn’t fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don’t think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.
He also admits that federal grants make up less than 7% of his budget (and, if I understand correctly, that most of that 7% is not in the form that has been threatened).
I don’t see a good argument “against cowardice” in the article. How can a university like Columbia which would be effectively destroyed by Trump’s attack respond defiantly when Trump would be happy to destroy it? He wins either way, but one way leads to a great deal of hardship for thousands of people. Why should a university pick that way? Ideological purity I suppose, and perhaps to be an inspiration (but also a warning) to others? He doesn’t really say.
That would be a very frightening snake.
Where is the grammatical mistake? It’s unusual to use the contraction “I’m” in a sentence like this rather than writing out “I am” but it’s not technically wrong.
They left out the first half of the quote.
Some of the things that you claim to be are, in fact, impossible!
No. Everything I am is possible.
Riveting Storytelling for All of America.
Pathetic.
I very much doubt that Bezos likes or respects Trump. I wonder if this is humiliating for him or if he just doesn’t care anymore.
One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We’re so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it’s pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn’t expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it. I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014, so I can actually quantify how much they want to share it: our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.
Were people actually outraged less frequently before social media? “Viral” outrage was limited to spreading through in-person interactions, but there was still mass media designed to generate outrage.
Edit edit: it’s all in the article, darnit. Sorry.
It is? I must have missed it but I can’t find any discussion of motivation even on a second read-through.
I know people whose grants have been put on hold and these people don’t even know if they have health insurance anymore, since grant money pays for that too. This is wild.