Notices by James Tindall (atomless@mastodon.social)

If you've not yet read @danmcquillan 's take down of Labour's AI "plan," and how it is a "gift to the far right," it is well worth your time.

https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Labours-AI-Action-Plan-a-gift-to-the-far-right

OpenAI: “this is a race America can and must win.”

AI always was capitalism’s new War Basilisk.

By that I mean not only does it operate according to the logics of war, but as a Thought Basilisk that invokes the future threat of being dominated by an imaginary ASI equipped hostile state unless we pour every resource at our disposal into supporting the few companies building next-token prediction machines.

https://openai.com/global-affairs/openais-economic-blueprint/

@mike805 @pluralistic I really like the detail of this story that it was Marx’s wife, Jenny von Westphalen, who pawned Marx’s trousers —apparently to buy food. Was there also perhaps an element of punishment to this choice? Were there really no other things to choose to pawn? Or was she actually helping him focus on finishing Kapital by removing the option of leaving the house?

How much we all benefit from @pluralistic ’s compulsion to write. So very grateful. Chapeau! https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/

@kityates interestingly "Herrenvolk democracy" translates to "Gentlemen People Democracy". Maybe what we have now is more "Rich People Democracy" which in German would be "Reichevolk Democracy" ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenvolk_democracy

Ah, confusing.

@pluralistic Oh, I thought there may have been something that pre-dated Davies’s book? Especially as Chiang was already circling this early 2023 in his “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey” piece in the NewYorker?

@pluralistic for citation purposes, which of your posts is best to link to for “accountability sink”?

@pluralistic @a_cubed @Axomamma @MattMerk

Case in point, in fact hard to imagine a more perfect example of a bubble of delusion arising through extreme concentration of capital that whilst in denial of its internal failures then operates to present a mirage of success.

@pluralistic @a_cubed @Axomamma @MattMerk

Enshitification, the Reverse Centaur, Accountability Sinks (or perhaps Impunity Ware), these concepts are extremely helpful. Feels like a quite coherent picture of 21st-century capital and its machinations is coming into view.

Just noticed the #treasure-what-you-measure anchor in the url which lead me to this old post I'd not seen before which is also excellent 😙🤌 : https://boingboing.net/2019/06/26/breaking-goodharts-law.html

@pluralistic @a_cubed @Axomamma @MattMerk
Thinking some more about the bubbles of delusion that envelope concentrations of capital and the attraction force they exert upon those without (capital). A significant factor here, especially in an attention economy and society of control whose labidinal flows are directed by the Advertising Industrial Complex, is concentrations of capital also have the power to distort the infosphere by overwhelming sense (of their failures) with a mirage of success.

@ariane @pluralistic
The infinite regress of management process, systems of labour control within a panoptic society of control, chimes rather well @baldur 's take on code frameworks and Generative AI being fundamentally about reduction of workers to the units of labour they perform, to maximise the power of arbitrage, while laying the way for full automation. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

This post from @pluralistic
is honestly up there with his concept of enshitification in the degree to which it explains so much of the shitshow.

It implies a compelling argument against great inequity. Namely that great wealth creates a bubble of affordance that insulates the rich from discerning the immediate consequences of incorrect or damaging notions or actions so delaying recognition of errors and the need to alter course.

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/113548449727704405

@danmcquillan @anildash I have misgivings with this critique.

To me LLM's unreasonableness comes not from any irreproducibility but from their reproducibility. The way they will repeat ad infinitum the statistically prevalent attitudes and biases locked into them via the spread of opinion within their pre-training corpus. Biases that, as I understand it, can never be fully overcome or patched with later training or guardrails, no matter how painstaking.

@danmcquillan @anildash
I suppose the "heat" parameter that determines "creativity, " --the randomness of which word/token is chosen from the ranked list of the next most likely-- could be set such that it's always the one at the top selected? That would still be Bullshit as a Service, I think we all agree? But is it anymore reasonable, just because it's the same old bullshit?

@danmcquillan @anildash That's a fair point. I suppose my worry is, if the perceived bar to reasonableness is set as low as reproducible output, then all of the harms would still remain.

@danmcquillan @anildash What I do wonder about the critique of reproducibility is whether, with the heat or creativity turned right down so that an LLM's output was entirely stable, how much of the illusion of intelligence evaporates along with the irreproducibility? Is the randomness not just required for the dance of variety but somehow essential to triggering the apparition of a ghost in the machine?

This piece by @emilygorcenski is incredibly good.

“Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near is paternalistic and at times downright lecherous; paradise for me would mean being almost anywhere he’s not. The metaverse has two problems with its sales pitch: the first is that it’s useless; the second is that absolutely nobody wants Facebook to represent their version of forever. “
https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/