I get the sense that in most major publications you have the AI skeptics, the doomers, the true believers, the centrists, right? The New Yorker also featured There Is No AI by Jaron Lanier, What Kind of Mind Does AI Have? by Cal Newport, The Age of Chat by Anna Wiener. All of which are really thoughtful articles that break down the anthropomorphic spell that AI casts over us.
But yeah, rankles that the NYT lists Eliezer Yudkowsky (a Harry Potter fanfiction writer hailed as a genius by his followers, a laughingstock by others) as a major influence and not, say, Timnit Gebru or Emily Bender or ANY women?
The commenter Angie Wang is being incredibly modest, because she herself created one of the most thoughtful "essays" you'll read about AI, in the form of a gorgeous comic published in (wait for it) The New Yorker. I cannot recommend it more highly.
I think, in referring to the fawning AI coverage at the New Yorker, John probably mostly means the recent AI issue. I don’t think all of it was fawning, but there is a certain amount of credulity that went into most of that issue. Even if you’re a doomer, you’re still being very credulous about what the tech is and what it can do. Anyone who has been asked to use this tech to do any part of their jobs knows, though, that it is... really not that great. For me, Ted Chiang’s piece hit so hard because he understands how these technologies work. Most reporters don’t seem to. So even if they disagree with the owners of the tech as far as optimism/pessimism or how the tech should be used, they’re still letting the tech owners tell the story, just through a different filter.
Thank you for explaining so well the SOCIAL aspects of what we call "AI" -- that it's less about what the systems can do and more about how we regard them and respond to them, what status and significance we lend them in our networks.
On the theme of action movies, I'd like to point out that some of us on substack are publishing a chain of appreciation pieces on Demolition Man -- Amran Gowani's contribution on Field Research is titled "How to make a cult classic" (https://agowani.substack.com/p/how-to-make-a-cult-classic) and my recent contribution is "The hero is the one who changes" on Human in the Post-Human World (https://amyletter.substack.com/p/the-hero-is-the-one-who-changes); I invite you, Max, to add a link to this illustrious chain, for Demolition Man is of course The Greatest Action Movie of All Time.
"The guy you want to check out is the director Jesse V. Johnson and his muse, Scott Adkins, who make nicely paced, not-too-cheap-looking, bone-crunching shooters and martial-arts movies--in particular Avengement, the Debt Collectors series, and the WWII thriller Hell Hath No Fury."
Seconding this so much. Johnson and Adkins are making DTV martial arts into an artform.
Dizzy Zaba's question prompted me to wonder if AGI might first be exposed to the most socially isolated, desperate, lonely, and fringe elements first – those who, for various reasons, have less hesitation in befriending a robot. I could imagine that having wide-ranging implications, even along class lines, where friendship and human connection are a privilege.
I get the sense that in most major publications you have the AI skeptics, the doomers, the true believers, the centrists, right? The New Yorker also featured There Is No AI by Jaron Lanier, What Kind of Mind Does AI Have? by Cal Newport, The Age of Chat by Anna Wiener. All of which are really thoughtful articles that break down the anthropomorphic spell that AI casts over us.
But yeah, rankles that the NYT lists Eliezer Yudkowsky (a Harry Potter fanfiction writer hailed as a genius by his followers, a laughingstock by others) as a major influence and not, say, Timnit Gebru or Emily Bender or ANY women?
The commenter Angie Wang is being incredibly modest, because she herself created one of the most thoughtful "essays" you'll read about AI, in the form of a gorgeous comic published in (wait for it) The New Yorker. I cannot recommend it more highly.
Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot? https://www.newyorker.com/humor/sketchbook/is-my-toddler-a-stochastic-parrot
I think, in referring to the fawning AI coverage at the New Yorker, John probably mostly means the recent AI issue. I don’t think all of it was fawning, but there is a certain amount of credulity that went into most of that issue. Even if you’re a doomer, you’re still being very credulous about what the tech is and what it can do. Anyone who has been asked to use this tech to do any part of their jobs knows, though, that it is... really not that great. For me, Ted Chiang’s piece hit so hard because he understands how these technologies work. Most reporters don’t seem to. So even if they disagree with the owners of the tech as far as optimism/pessimism or how the tech should be used, they’re still letting the tech owners tell the story, just through a different filter.
Thank you for explaining so well the SOCIAL aspects of what we call "AI" -- that it's less about what the systems can do and more about how we regard them and respond to them, what status and significance we lend them in our networks.
On the theme of action movies, I'd like to point out that some of us on substack are publishing a chain of appreciation pieces on Demolition Man -- Amran Gowani's contribution on Field Research is titled "How to make a cult classic" (https://agowani.substack.com/p/how-to-make-a-cult-classic) and my recent contribution is "The hero is the one who changes" on Human in the Post-Human World (https://amyletter.substack.com/p/the-hero-is-the-one-who-changes); I invite you, Max, to add a link to this illustrious chain, for Demolition Man is of course The Greatest Action Movie of All Time.
"The guy you want to check out is the director Jesse V. Johnson and his muse, Scott Adkins, who make nicely paced, not-too-cheap-looking, bone-crunching shooters and martial-arts movies--in particular Avengement, the Debt Collectors series, and the WWII thriller Hell Hath No Fury."
Seconding this so much. Johnson and Adkins are making DTV martial arts into an artform.
Dizzy Zaba's question prompted me to wonder if AGI might first be exposed to the most socially isolated, desperate, lonely, and fringe elements first – those who, for various reasons, have less hesitation in befriending a robot. I could imagine that having wide-ranging implications, even along class lines, where friendship and human connection are a privilege.