"The effective altruism movement, if we want to be gracious in calling it a “movement”, is a rabbit hole of reciprocal wealth. A lot of billionaires unload money into its related NPOs, and oddly enough, that money often goes into buying NVIDIA GPUs for an altruistic AI project,..."
🔇🔇🔇 On Friday April 17th (9am PDT/5pm CET/7pm EAT), we'll have a virtual event introducing our Refugees, Migrants & AI research which centers their lived experiences.
We introduce a limited podcast series highlighting Sudanese refugees, discuss tools like Surveillance Watch, and show how immigrant communities are supporting each other through Respond Crisis Translation.
We end with a creative workshop to remind us that the future is ours to shape.
Answered some of my questions about what people think the future will be if everyone codes like this. It seems to be: instead of thinking about constraints of any kind or "what is the most efficient way to do Y or the most readable way to do Z?" answer the question, "what is the most brute force way to perform X if I pretend that there are no resource constraints and nothing needs to make sense as long as I see some sort of test passing? Just ship it with spaghetti code.
This "careful" "AI Safety" company that just accidentally leaked its entire source code to the world is the one that African governments are entering into agreements with to include in infrastructures from health care to god knows what.
These are the products people have to use to make sure that they don't get dinged in their performance reviews for "not using AI."
These are the products teachers have to use in schools so that "students aren't left behind."
I'm not even talking about the data stealing, exploitation, environmental pillaging, pollution, environmental racism etc.
I'm talking about the way people use the tools. Like what do advocates of using these tools say will happen to software engineering in the future? That it just won't need to exist because everyone will be able to create software using these tools?
In this interview with The Maybe, she cited the Stochastic Parrots and TESCREAL papers as key sources for the creation of her film, Ghost in the Machine ❤️
"Galton and his fellow eugenicist / protegee Karl Pearson were not directly involved in the development of early computational machines. But Galton’s foundational work with multidimensional modeling — a technique he used while measuring the attractiveness of African and European women — shaped Pearson’s thinking as he developed statistical tools like logistic regression, which is one of the fundamental components of modern machine learning."
I don't remember who said this, but it's like telling you to buy Camels instead of Marlboros while claiming to fight tobacco companies. If any politician parrots talking points of a CEO on a funding round, even on the harms of AI systems, you should be worried.
Remember when Altman schmoozed them and newspapers had headlines of him "begging" to be regulated and hailing him as an Oppenheimer figure who is so worried about his own creation 🙄?
You don't believe Altman is such a figure but you think Amodei, who insisted that OpenAI use all 10,000 GPUs and train the biggest model possible, when he was there, is such a figure?
In his video, Bernie is literally creating a Claude ad, showing the system as an all knowing being that answers all of his questions. An ad for Anthropic, a company claiming that they can't even confidently say that "Claude isn't conscious".
A company amassing billions saying they'll at once save us from evil super intelligent machines and build the benevolent super intelligent machine that will solve all of our problems. They're so worried about people not getting "reskilled" because workers are going to be replaced by their machine god that will do our jobs so much better than us. Investors want to hear about machine gods displacing workers because, well, that's how they make money.
Bernie has been repeating, almost verbatim, Dario Amodei's talking points, for a while now, even quote tweeting him. Amodei positions Anthropic as the ethical alternative to OpenAI just like OpenAI positioned itself as the ethical alternative to Google in 2015 and everyone ate it up. This was an article from then, the headline says that Muskrat, Thiel, Altman + friends founded an "altruistic AI venture" 🙄 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35082344
Bernie Sanders just created a video to make a point about issues of privacy in AI (a real problem). His supporters on Muskrat's platform came for me when I quote tweeted his post saying, "at this point, Bernie’s job seems to be lobbying for Anthropic."
So I'm going to elaborate on the corporate psyop that has been happening since the beginning of time and how no one seems to learn their lesson.
As someone who came to the US as a refugee with political asylum I can't overstate how cruel this is. I was already terrified and had nightmares every day. And here they're telling you that you didn't get to safety after all that, that they will reverse your status on a whim, if they deem it safe for you to return. As Warsan Shire wrote, no one leaves home unless home becomes the mouth of a shark.
"Emily [...] says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. “then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car,” [...] the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver's side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask [...] addressed Emily by name [...] ‘Emily, Emily, we're going to take you home!’ Then she looked at her phone and she recited my home address,”
Personal Account. Fired from Google for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace and writing about the dangers of large language models: https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened/.Founded The Distributed AI Research Institute (https://www.dair-institute.org/) to work on community-rooted AI research.Author: The View from Somewhere, a memoir & manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities (to be published by One Signal / Atria