Whenever one of these comes out and gets posted to /r/SneerClub it feels like going to see band you’ve loved since they were hometown favourites play a big venue in another city, except that you always despised the band and they’re leading major policy decisions which aim to destroy everything you love

Last behind the bastards episode is this article expanded. Robert Evans is always very listenable and the more detailed CES reporting is interesting, but if you are a member here you probably won't be adding anything new to your TREACLES lore.

I wish journalists referencing the basilisk would go a in a bit more in depth, it's so much dumber than than it seems at a brief glance. Like, a lot of people immediately assume the alleged scary part is that we might already be living in the simulation and thus be eligible for permanent residence in basilisk Hell should we commit the cardinal sin of shit-talking AI, but no; the reason you can go to AI hell is because of transhumanist cope.

As in, if your last hope for immortality is brain uploads, you are kinda cornered into believing your sense of self gets shared between the physical and the digital instance, otherwise what's the point? EY appears to be in this boat, he's claimed something like there's no real difference between instances of You existing in different moments in time sharing a self and you sharing a self with a perfect digital copy, so yeah, it's obviously possible, unavoidable even.

As to how the basilisk will get your digital copy in the first place, eh, it'll just extrapolate it perfectly from whatever impression's left of you in the timeline by the time it comes into being, because as we all now, the S in ASI stands for Fucking Magical, Does Whatever It Wants. Remember, ASI can conjure up the entirety of modern physics just by seeing three frames of an apple falling, according to Yud.

It’s not worth explaining because it’s stupid, but Roko’s conclusion was

(jazzy finger-snaps of approval)

Michelle Gansle, chief data and analytics officer for McDonald’s, had bragged that her company had used AI to help them stop $50 million in fraud in a single month.

AI caught the motherfucking hamburgler?!?!?!

Wait, are you tante.cc ? (Forgot to mention good article!)

Paywall just slammed shut. archive link

This is the best summary I could come up with:

I was watching a video of a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show for the Rabbit R1, an AI gadget that promises to act as a sort of personal assistant, when a feeling of doom took hold of me.

Specifically, about a term first defined by psychologist Robert Lifton in his early writing on cult dynamics: “voluntary self-surrender.” This is what happens when people hand over their agency and the power to make decisions about their own lives to a guru.

At Davos, just days ago, he was much more subdued, saying, “I don’t think anybody agrees anymore what AGI means.” A consummate businessman, Altman is happy to lean into that old-time religion when he wants to gin up buzz in the media, but among his fellow plutocrats, he treats AI like any other profitable technology.

As I listened to PR people try to sell me on an AI-powered fake vagina, I thought back to Andreessen’s claims that AI will fix car crashes and pandemics and myriad other terrors.

In an article published by Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a research journal, Dr. Andreas Roli and colleagues argue that “AGI is not achievable in the current algorithmic frame of AI research.” One point they make is that intelligent organisms can both want things and improvise, capabilities no model yet extant has generated.

What we call AI lacks agency, the ability to make dynamic decisions of its own accord, choices that are “not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions.” Midjourney can read a prompt and return with art it calculates will fit the criteria.

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