Paul Cantrell
This Schmidt Shit is going to go down in history as emblematic of…however our present era is viewed in hindsight, and it won’t be kind.
“We can’t stop the planet from dying, so society should dump all its money into my Ouija board business!”
It’s crap on the level of “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” Nero fiddling as Rome burns, “We must join with Sauron.”
From @breadandcircuses: https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/113277705558752831
David Andersen
@inthehands @breadandcircuses the silicon valley billionaire echo chamber is a really frightening thing to watch.
Paul Cantrell
Agree with @dave_andersen, it really is — and I think my Ouija board comparison is not off the mark: the SV billionaires locked in a small room sniffing each others’ farts are strongly reminiscent of the way the wealthy of the 19th century got sucked into the rise of “spiritualism” (seances, etc).
Paul Cantrell
I’m not the first person to notice the connection between spiritualism and AI mania. I remember seeing a thoughtfully worked out blog post on how LLMs exploit some of the same cognitive traps as magic tricks, but I’m now struggling to find it. I did find this interesting-looking book, though:
https://academic.oup.com/book/35192
Especially relevant:
https://academic.oup.com/book/35192/chapter-abstract/299570171
Paul Cantrell
Aha! This is the one I was thinking of:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
Note that one section is titled “Many psychics fool themselves.”
CheddarCrisp
@inthehands Eric Schmidt is straight up professing a religious faith. He believes super intelligent AI will solve everything with no rational support for this belief. It doesn’t matter that his god would be tangible if it existed. If it existed there’s no reason to believe it would do what he thinks it would, nor is there any reason to believe that it could or will exist. He’s operating on 100% religious faith.
And it’s the worst kind of religion, the kind that supports him being a bad person.
FeralRobots
@inthehands @breadandcircuses
For me it's just a rationalist version of 'let go & let God', where 'God' is whatever vague thing Schmidt thinks he means when he says "AI".
Paul Cantrell
Once you see the connection between LLMs and psychics / seances / spiritualism, it’s hard to unsee. At the center: people •want• to believe, and that is powerful. Thinking of modern-day SV, listen to some of the stories of how con artists used spiritualism…
…as a business: https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters
…as wartime subterfuge: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-234-the-seances-9-8-2023
…as almost a kind of therapy: https://thisiscriminal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Episode-79-Secrets-and-Seances.pdf
Paul Cantrell
@cheddarcrisp
That right. And the worst kind for a second reason: it’s a con.
Paul Cantrell
Is there a “there” there with LLMs and other contemporary forms of AI? Consider this story of a photographer who prepared hoax photographs of ghosts in the early days of photography, and suckered even Mary Todd Lincoln:
https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-159-spiritual-developments-2-26-2021
Is there a “there” there with using double exposures in photography? Sure! But step zero is completely giving up on the idea that you’re photographing ghosts.
Paul Cantrell
The trouble is that giving up on the promise of photographing ghosts won’t let you extract •nearly• as much money from investors.
Paul Cantrell
Sevoris
@inthehands I think you are thinking of https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ by @baldur ?
Paul Cantrell
A great point here:
https://mastodon.social/@tantramar/113278385211586464
One of my favorite picture books is “Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like.” This book is frequently mis-summarized — including by the publisher’s own blurb! — and the mis-summarizing perfectly illustrates @tantramar’s point:
Paul Cantrell
The blurb:
❝Because of the road sweeper's belief in him, a dragon saves the city of Wu from the Wild Horsemen of the north.❞
That is flatly wrong.
What the road sweeper actually says to the old man who claims to be a dragon (but nobody believes him) is:
❝I don’t know whether you are a dragon or not, but if you are hungry and thirsty, please do me the honor of coming into my humble home.❞
The dragon saves the city not because of the road sweeper’s •belief•, but because of his •kindness•.
Paul Cantrell
@Sevoris
Eh, good to know others have my back!
Sevoris
@inthehands I saw a minute later, but I thought I knew precisely what you were talking about when I saw the tweet, and dove down my highlights archive to get it. :D Sorry for the redundant post.
Paul Cantrell
The story couldn’t be clearer on this point. Isn’t it fascinating that our culture consistently sets people up to misread it so?
Paul Cantrell
@robcinos
“Action rooted in compassion.” Could any lesson be simpler, or more important?
Paul Cantrell
@robcinos
(It is perhaps also useful to note that in the story, the road sweeper gives his one daily bowl of rice to the old man, after all the wealthy and powerful people in the town mocked him and turned him away. The road sweeper, who by the way is just a kid, would rather go hungry for a day than let a stranger suffer. Not action, but an extraordinary act of generosity.)
Michael Busch
@cheddarcrisp @inthehands It continues to be striking, although I have long since stopped being surprised, to witness a group of mostly self-identified atheists re-invent very specific varieties of Christianity but with "AI" in place of a god.
(Eric Schmidt is Jewish; but the lines he is using in that interview are right out of the LessWrong apocalyptic AI cult, which is a group of people who say they are atheists imitating messianic end-times Christianity.)
Paul Cantrell
@Catfish_Man
It may in fact be that Schmidt is literally high on drugs. I would not be surprised. Ketamine seems a likely one if I’m guessing.
Regardless, there’s definitely •something• here in the realm of neuroscience, Plato’s cave, human fallibility, false belief in the mind as rational, and brain hacking with poor understanding of consequences.
David Smith
@inthehands I kinda wonder how much the “lsd microdose for productivity/innovation” trend feeds into this. My notes from trying 90 micrograms (which is probably higher than “micro” but still firmly below significant visual effect levels) were that the experience included
* feeling excessively clever
* being extremely suggestible
* feeling vaguely worshipful in a nonspecific but religious-feeling way
Entheogens gonna entheogen?
Paul Cantrell
@datarama
I don’t think that’s on the table; •someone• is going to survive. But in a way, total extinction is far easier to picture than the kind of gross collapse of human well-being that •is• on the table.
RealGene ☣️
@inthehands @breadandcircuses
Back in college, one of my friends, who was an adept sleight-of-hand magician, passed his science requirement by programming an Apple ][ to help him carry out a simple misdirection, convincing a physics professor that the computer was reading their mind.
The only difference here is that Schmidt is performing the trick on himself.
Matt Boehm
@inthehands
I repeat to people the story of a lecturer that put googley eyes on a pencil and gave it a name and then during the lecture broke it in half.
Some people gasped.
The lectured pointed out humans anthropomorphize anything including an incredibly complex auto-complete machine.
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