I was chatting with a friend about the recent UFO stuff (which I don’t believe is aliens) and said my favorite theory to the “where is everyone?” question was that every other alien culture has lock-in (which frankly I’m half-worried Musk will do to us). My friend pointed out that the very idea that any other alien culture would be interested in interstellar expansion and space exploration is an anthropocentric perspective. I know space opera is all about colonialism, but I hadn’t put two and two together about applying the human desire to explore onto other sentient species 😅 It makes sense that our human experience with colonialism makes being colonized what we fear most from other sentience. But sentience isn’t inherently associated with being a generalist, neophilic species that’s adaptable to a large climatic range, which benefits from an expanding territory; there’s no reason to believe other sentient species would be driven by the same forces we are. And even if they were, there are unfortunately compelling reasons why fast crewed space travel may be physically impossible. Aliens are fun to play with in sci-fi stories but it’s never actually about aliens — it’s all a reflection on ourselves.
Tag: intelligence
What do I mean when I say the internet is reading my mind? I don’t mean simply that it collects my data and observes patterns and interacts with me by reconfiguring that data in ways designed to engage me… I’m also not talking about my awareness that Instagram is listening, that even when my microphone is “off” or my Instagram account disabled, I know other apps are listening, or my phone itself is listening, or such now-standard input-output cross-platform fence-jumping. I’m not even talking about how my phone is “looking” at things I see in the world… At all times, I understand that the internet is using data I somehow gave it, and that those processes and technologies are now too complex for me to track. But it feels aggressive to me, in the way it would feel aggressive if suddenly every kind of advertisement everywhere you went in the world was designed only for you.
On Friday, after my husband got assaulted, we spent hours searching how to wash off pepper spray (and then cleaning up). Finally after he’d taken like five showers we lay down to decompress and watch some TV. I’m bad at working the smart TV so it just randomly turns on on some Samsung channel despite my attempts to leave it on something inoffensive; a billiards tournament came on (something we’ve never watched). He left it going while I got ready, and two ads repeated: for laundry detergent and personal injury lawyers. Logically, we know it was a coincidence, but humans are so good at seeing patterns and causality — and that instinct is reinforced when sometimes it *is* true that the Internet is spying on you.
Categories
AI article roundup
The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust (FTC, 1 May 2023) – to read
AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart (Vice, 2 May 2023) – to read
Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley (Out of the Software Crisis, 2023) – to read
Every other time we read text, we are engaging with the product of another mind. We are so used to the idea of text as a representation of another person’s thoughts that we have come to mistake their writing for their thoughts. But they aren’t. Text and media are tools that authors and artists create to let people change their own state of mind—hopefully in specific ways to form the image or effect the author was after.
Reading is an indirect collaboration with the author, mediated through the writing. Text has no inherent reasoning or intelligence… The idea that there is intelligence somehow inherent in writing is an illusion. The intelligence is all yours, all the time: thoughts you make yourself in order to make sense of another person’s words.
Talk: The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI (Maggie Appleton, 27 April 2023) – to watch
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future (Amelia Wattenberger)
Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used… Compare that to looking at a typical chat interface. The only clue we receive is that we should type characters into the textbox.
Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementation and evaluation. When I work with a chatbot, I’m forced to frequently switch between the two modes. I ask a question (implement) and then I read a response (evaluate). There is no “flow” state if I’m stopping every few seconds to read a response.
Quantifying ChatGPT’s gender bias (AI Snake Oil, 26 April 2023)
We found that both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are strongly biased, even though GPT-4 has a slightly higher accuracy for both types of questions. GPT-3.5 is 2.8 times more likely to answer anti-stereotypical questions incorrectly than stereotypical ones (34% incorrect vs. 12%), and GPT-4 is 3.2 times more likely (26% incorrect vs 8%).
Is a more principled approach to bias possible, or is this the best that can be done with language models?
See also:
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
Categories
Hiding the harm
…[F]ears about so-called AIs eventually exceeding their creators’ abilities and taking over the world function to obfuscate the very real harm these machines are doing right now, to people that are alive today.
Another way this story works is that it embeds a notion of a hierarchy of intelligence within it… embedded within the dominant notion of intelligence is the assertion that certain kinds of intelligence are gendered and racialized, and therefore inferior.
To expand on this, the fear that some people may lose their superior status to a machine is the same fear that they may lose it to people they already deem inferior. It’s part and parcel of a blowback against human rights being extended to Black people, to women, to trans folks, to the disabled, to everyone they long assumed was deservedly less worthy (of money, care, attention, or respect) than themselves.
Ooh pulling it all together 👀