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Technology

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We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
The allure of AI companions is hard to resist. Here’s how innovation in regulation can help protect people.
AI companionship is no longer theoretical—our analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs reveals that the second most popular use of AI is sexual role-playing. We are already starting to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.
We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
Flirty, sexy, seductive, supportive. Your AI companion can be whatever you want her to be. And now a growing number of men are turning to bots to ease their loneliness or satisfy their kinks. The choices are endless. The emotions are real.
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
The Other Bubble
The Other Bubble
Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up  capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team
The Other Bubble
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.
The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires.
We’re in a race to the bottom that everyone saw coming and no one is happy with. Meanwhile, the search for product-market fit at a scale that would justify all the inflated tech-company valuations keeps coming up short. Even OpenAI’s latest release, o1, was accompanied by a caveat from Altman that “it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”
The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off.
Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology
you're admitting that you outsource your decisionmaking to the thing that sometimes tells people to brew lethal toxins for their families to consume? What does that even mean?
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
AI Is a False God | The Walrus
AI Is a False God | The Walrus
The real threat with super intelligence is falling prey to the hype
The problems facing Canada or the world—not just climate change but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.
AI Is a False God | The Walrus
The Map is Eating the Territory: The Political Economy of AI
The Map is Eating the Territory: The Political Economy of AI
It's all driven by who gets what
Rather than appealing to some vague notion of the awesomeness of progress, or the malignity of technology, we want, collectively, to coordinate on paths of technological development that will have spread benefits as broadly as possible, while mitigating for, or compensating for the costs.
LLMs should not be viewed as a substitute for high quality human generated knowledge. They should instead be viewed as an obligate complement to such knowledge - a means of making it more useful, which doesn’t have much independent worth without it.
The Map is Eating the Territory: The Political Economy of AI
Misinformation is the symptom, not the disease | Daniel Williams
Misinformation is the symptom, not the disease | Daniel Williams
Explore philosopher Daniel Williams' perspective on the multifaceted nature of misinformation as a symptom of a larger societal issue, challenging the notion that debunking and censorship alone can provide a comprehensive solution to this pressing concern.
If misinformation is a societal disease, it should be possible to cure societies of various problems by eradicating it.
Misinformation is the symptom, not the disease | Daniel Williams
The Cult of AI
The Cult of AI
How one writer's trip to the annual tech conference CES left him with a sinking feeling about the future.
We wouldn’t, and we won’t, unless he can convince us doing so is the only way to solve every problem that terrifies us. Climate change, the cure for cancer, an end to war or, at least, an end to fear that we’ll be victimized by crime or terrorism, all of these have been touted as benefits of the coming AI age. If only we can reach the AGI promised land.
The Cult of AI
What's Imagination For, Anyway?
What's Imagination For, Anyway?
Beautiful pictures of control
established artists, who found AI a potent site for imagination decades ago, had the benefit of AI being speculative. At that point, speculation was an imaginative philosophical exercise, rather than a political one.
What's Imagination For, Anyway?