Showing posts with label artificial intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artificial intelligence. Show all posts

03 October 2023

The Proto-Singularity

Something akin to the "Singularity" (the moment of mass AI consciousness) already exists:
An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (LLMS) that power services such OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes, described in “At the Mountains of Madness”, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novel of 1931. When a pre-release version of Bing told Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, that it purportedly wanted to be “free” and “alive”, one of his industry friends congratulated him on “glimpsing the shoggoth”. …

Lovecraft’s shoggoths were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators. The shoggoth meme went viral because an influential community of Silicon Valley rationalists fears that humanity is on the cusp of a “Singularity”, creating an inhuman “artificial general intelligence” that will displace or even destroy us.

But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, "Behold the AI Shoggoth", The Economist (June 21, 2023) ("The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies").

08 March 2023

ChatGPT Channels Donald Trump Explaining The Universe

I was playing around with chat gpt asking for a paragraph on the nature of the universe in the styles of various people, Alan Watts, Erwin Schrödinger, Aristotle, and tried this: "Write a paragraph on the nature of the universe in the style of Donald Trump" 
The universe, let me tell you, it's tremendous, it's huge. Nobody knows more about the universe than me, believe me. It's got planets, stars, galaxies, all the best things, really the best things. But you know what, there are some bad things too. There are black holes, and let me tell you, those are scary things, very scary. But we're going to figure it out, we're going to make the universe great again, that's what we're going to do. We're going to build a wall around our planet and make sure that no aliens, no illegal aliens, can come in and cause trouble. We're going to be number one in the universe, the most powerful, the most prosperous, just like we're doing with America. So let me tell you, the universe is going to be fantastic, believe me.

As attempted by John Starrett and reported by him on Facebook today.