Facial recognition to pick up on lying. Could be useful at the poker table.

Quite keen on where some of these go.

This is a fascinating podcast about Bing. I was looking for this thread but search incorrectly. Dude gets Bing (Sidney) to declare its love for him.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t ... 0600155879

After listening it's clear we are very far away from artificial "intelligence."

Crap. I don’t care about chat bots, but other aspects of AI are enabling worker attention monitoring and other extra-horrible capitalist shit.

Crap. It's dystopian and will likely be the end game of our capitalist oligarch overlords.

Makes me want to kill myself.


The family friendly documentary Alphago was very good, though!

A friend who works in tech introduced me to OpenAI a few weeks ago and (helpfully) talked me through the context / industry shop talk around its development and where it's going w/ the Bing vs Bard war.

After playing around with ChatGBT for a few hours I felt like I did when I first had access to the Internet - that this technology was a radical game changer, like a sliver of the near-future had accidentally ended up on my friend's phone.

The shock and awe has worn down a bit since I've played around with it and it's been interesting to see that it's still confident even when I know it's factually wrong (I went round in circles about Geordie Walker's ES-295, which it didn't know about) and that it does have moral lines it won't cross (asking for help is always a positive sign of strength, no ifs, no buts). But I can see that once you link an upgraded version to the Internet w/ real time updates, then it'll be cooking straight away.

I'm quietly convinced that very quickly AI will do to the white collar, office-based knowledge economy and the corporate creatives what the industrial revolution did to the agrarian economy. And OpenAI are very clear that a low participation, max efficiency economy is a likely consequence of their vision, with most of the plebs like us left dependent on UBI.

IMO the key issue limiting the scope of this societal upheaval (at least in the short term) is how we manifest this supra-human knowledge into action and that's where human competence and confidence has a key role for the foreseeable. (E.G.: we now all have a tool that talks us through how to fix a plumbing problem in real time but we might not have the tools / strength / contextual knowledge / etc... to actually fix the problem ourselves.)

I'm more convinced by Thoreau / Kaczynski / Ellul than say, Lovelock's Novecene, but I'm so desperate for anything to disrupt our apathy and stagnation that I'll take what I can get.

I tried using the chat one the other day to come up with a list of names for a specific thing and was pretty underwhelmed. As a thing that can parrot human-ish phrases back at us, it's kinda crap.

ChatGPT is (currently) about as useful as oblique strategies: maybe a good way to stir up thought but then you spend almost equal time scrutinizing, expanding, and editing ideas. Sure, high school kids will probably get away with using it to write long papers, but maybe quota-based 'learning' methods like assigning X-number paged papers is the thing that needs to be reevaluated.

AI overall is a massive thing to sum up: some amazing potential and some disastrous. I too worry about the monitoring and policing potential of it.

penningtron wrote: ChatGPT is (currently) about as useful as oblique strategies: maybe a good way to stir up thought but then you spend almost equal time scrutinizing, expanding, and editing ideas.

I don't know. I have no experience with it and probably lack the chops or inclination to use it, but my super-brain college-age nephew, who is into coding on the side, seemed to think it could spit out very individualised answers to coding questions, like "how would I go about coding this or that specfic thing". If an intelligent search engine was a hugely useful tool, then surely something that combines that with highly specialised, nearly complete seeds from which to start more complex tasks, almost serving like individualised tutorials (if not fully realised solutions), must be more than "what would your grandmother change on this tune? do that!" or whatever. I am now old and don't move in that space and am unable to evaluate the relevancy or (real, even positive) power of these things moving forward based on personal experience. I would honestly imagine most of us are. It's easy for me to focus on the considerable negatives as a result, and the meta/political side of it, where I feel more informed or wise based on past observation. I would like to hear more from people using it in concrete ways that go beyond spitting out expository text.