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Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?

kabbes said:
True, but we did need to understand that baby cows come from mummy and daddy cows. We didn’t think that if we just got enough beef together, a cow would spontaneously form.
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OK, but I do think we're at, if not past, the neurological equivalent of basic information like understanding that male and female bovines produce offspring. Is it not the case that the human brain must do some kind of language modelling itself in order to function? Surely there is some kind of process like that going on in there. It's not the whole picture by any means, a language model is just that, a language model, but at the same time I think dismissing LLMs as just sophisticated chatbots is a potentially dangerous oversimplification.
 
NoXion said:
OK, but I do think we're at, if not past, the neurological equivalent of basic information like understanding that male and female bovines produce offspring. Is it not the case that the human brain must do some kind of language modelling itself in order to function? Surely there is some kind of process like that going on in there. It's not the whole picture by any means, a language model is just that, a language model, but at the same time I think dismissing LLMs as just sophisticated chatbots is a potentially dangerous oversimplification.
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The language model in the brain is dispersed over the whole brain. It’s modular, and many of the modules actually piggy-back off other functions, like the motor function. Language is fully embodied, in other words, and experiential, not something that exists as an abstract sideshow. When you think the word “kick”, the same part of your brain is activated as when you actually kick.

Language is also deeply cultural, experienced first in the interaction before being internalised as a dialogue with the other, always intentional, always for a purpose. Human thinking is a self-alter-object triangle, and language is one of the symbols used to mediate those relations.

Basically, whatever language is in humans, it ain’t what we’re seeing in LLMs.
 
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Surely the real problem will lie in our inability to distinguish between language uttered by humans (which generally has thought or some intention somewhere behind it) and the utterances of LLMs which merely mimic.
 
It’s the outcome of set of statistical models. The results can sometimes be useful and often be fun, but it’s not what we call “intelligence” (even on those rare occasions where we can agree what the word means).

It’s really interesting that in some cases it can code to the degree where a programmer can say it has solved (or got close to solving), some simple tasks, but I think it will come for the jobs of the middle managers before it grants those middle-managers their wish of being able to sack off the software engineers.
 
NoXion said:
Does he also offer any explanation for why people fall for this kind of rat-race bullshit in the first place? It's just something I have trouble personally understanding. Like, it's just so much easier to not be bothered about trying to match up to some cartoonishly hypermasculine ideal of what a man's body should be, and the same goes for the kind of go-getting bullshit that encourages wage workers to go the extra unpaid mile to "advance your career". It all just sounds so fucking exhausting. I'd rather do the bare minimum to get a somewhat decently paying job - with persistence and some luck it is possible in my experience - so that I have more time and mental energy to do the shit I actually find fun.

One can't win everything, so turning all of life into a competition makes losers of everyone.
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kabbes said:
It’s neoliberal subjectivity. If you’re interested, I can post up some papers. The ultra-short version is: primacy of choice, freedom from coercion and freedom to attain produces four interrelated dimensions of subjectivity.

First, a radical abstraction from context, by which the individual understands themself as essentially independent.

Second, an entrepreneurial self-model, whereby the aim is to overcome the demands that stand in the way of authentic actualisation, rather than adapt the environment (independent self) of adapt to the environment (interdependent self).

Third is permanent growth, which comes out of the other two dimensions — one has to permanently outcompete.

Fourth is affect management, the most complex dimension. Because the motivation is “freedom to”, there is an emphasis on this freedom being directed towards achieving “happiness”. Positivity thus becomes both a goal and a method. It becomes both the motivator behind a choice and the way that the choice was known to be correct. A negativity towards negativity is cultivated to manage this process.

Some work indicates that scoring high on a neoliberal subjectivity scale is predictive of all kinds of other traits, like perfectionism, responsibilization, depression, you name it
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Yes. Positivity is such a key and fundemental principle - it keeps us jumping through rings, keeps us on our toes. The terror of negativity then follows. A total duality. How to become miserable - fill your own pscyhe with dualities. It's such a hideous nonsense though, because you cannot have positivity without negativity - if all would be entirely positive all the time, positivity would become nothing - a nonesense, a normal. Embracing negativity to its absoloute fullness. It's like Heidegger and his insistance that everyone should be contemplating and accepting their own death, daily, in contemplation - bringing it into awareness. To really get with it and to bring it into focus now, don't put it off and it push it away. It's the one outcome no one escapes. What does that then mean about life? On this side of nothingness.

so yes teh neoliberal subject currently - The person then becomes a project - Foucault's penoptican then has lesser of an external means of control (the threat of state violence, the oppressive systems of the religion, the shunning of community, etc), so the penoptican becomes internal - the slave/master dialogue enters the psyche itself. The ontological foundation of of the subjects life becomes a gruelling need to escape from the here and now, with constant thoughts of improvement, of betterment, of warding off strange feelings of worthlessness and dispair (allow them! let them into being!). Human desire can never be fully silenced or turned off - we all want better things, but we also have values - it's just a case of seeing where we are benig taken for a ride. This is a praxis - i mean the buddhist's have been engaged with this line of thinking for millenia. I do it now with my daily swim - i used to feel i had to go for an hour no less. The whole experience became miserable. As soon as I jumped in the fucking thing I wanted to get out. The 'master' was harrasing the slave. Internally -in the very psyche. But where has the content of those thoughts come from - from my learned history, from my subjectification by way of the apparatus. Compare and contrast with other cultures, other points in history - its not there. therefore It's almost all entirely a construct (and can be seen through). Now I just go swimming until I am bored. I don't set targets. fuck the targets for one brief minute lol.
 
another good question is - when is conciousness itself not beign monitised - when with friends? walking through the park? sat quietly on a bus? okay you might buy a coffee with a mate, and you have the bus fair. reading a book? some money goes to the publisher, but that's a one off payment. In what way these days can a person be free, even just relatively or largely, from monitisation? In what way is a child's attention being monitised, and for how long, and what is that attention-capture replacing? Movement - capital claimed that by dictating our lives, and past times, and providing opportunities or not. The body itself is largely under the control of capital. How about the mind? what's left of that that someone is not making a buck off?
 
My standard for AI is a Culture Mind. Weakly godlike.

'They are designed (by other AIs, for virtually all of the Culture's history) within very broad parameters, but those parameters do exist; Culture AIs are designed to want to live, to want to experience, to desire to understand, and to find existence and their own thought-processes in some way rewarding, even enjoyable.

The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence only and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the Contact section to let them feel vicariously useful. For the Culture's AIs, that need to feel useful is largely replaced by the desire to experience, but as a drive it is no less strong. The universe - or at least in this era, the galaxy - is waiting there, largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway), its physical principles and laws quite comprehensively understood but the results of fifteen billion years of the chaotically formative application and interaction of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated'

Call me when the frequently wrong answerbot is up to scratch
 
When the internet began there were lofty ideas that it would be full of information and learning and the best thing humans had created

But...most of it now is just full of crap. Social media shite. People bullying others. Basically a place where egos get massaged or torn asunder.
What's to say that AI will always stick with the loftiness of higher intelligence. Could it lean towards the lowest common denominator? Could it become a soap opera version of intelligence?
 
two sheds said:
Mozilla are investing in AI - that's something I wouldn't mind getting involved with. I wouldn't want to contribute to improving ChatGPT for example.

blog.mozilla.org

Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI | The Mozilla Blog

We’re committing $30M to build Mozilla.ai: A startup — and a community — building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem. We’re o
blog.mozilla.org blog.mozilla.org
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My company are very enthusiastic about "getting into AI" in order to automate some of the day to day problem-solving tasks that are currently my remit.
Whenever I ask management exactly what it is they want to implement they have no idea. They seem a little embarassed to say they just want to stop paying me for whatever it is I do.
 
kabbes said:
The language model in the brain is dispersed over the whole brain. It’s modular, and many of the modules actually piggy-back off other functions, like the motor function. Language is fully embodied, in other words, and experiential, not something that exists as an abstract sideshow. When you think the word “kick”, the same part of your brain is activated as when you actually kick.

Language is also deeply cultural, experienced first in the interaction before being internalised as a dialogue with the other, always intentional, always for a purpose. Human thinking is a self-alter-other triangle, and language is one of the symbols used to mediate those relations.

Basically, whatever language is in humans, it ain’t what we’re seeing in LLMs.
Click to expand...
As the philosopher said, language is the house of being.
 
No that post is dated 31/3. Presumably the Secret Service are telling the whomever in the WH made that decision that itsakin to not bothering to pay for antivirus.

Given that the Secret Service all work for the Treasury, and, under previous Administrations fact tweets supposedly from the White House have had massive short term ramifications on Wall Street
 
The great blue tick cull hasn't happened. There are stories that is because there is no easy way to do it automatically. 😁
 
Puddy_Tat said:
tweeter seems to have a woofer instead today

View attachment 369238


it may be connected with this

www.reuters.com

Elon Musk seeks to end $258 billion Dogecoin lawsuit

Elon Musk asked a U.S. judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

:confused:
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Musk is many things, but that particular claim does look pretty vexatious. To pump a pyramid scheme surely requires more than tweets saying things like “Go, Doge!”

OTOH, I don’t have the details. Maybe the plaintiffs have more to their case than that.
 
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