On the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast: While robots and self-driving cars get all the attention, four mundane technologies have the potential to change the future: Artificial wombs, smart toilets, new forms of public transportation and new cleaning machines.
… the Court felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the Court. I thought that the dignity of the Court was degraded by executing a mentally-ill person.
— This American Life. Poultry Slam
The real AI fight
Last week’s spectacular OpenAI fight was reportedly a donnybrook between “Effective Altruism” and “Effective Accelarationism”—two schools of philosophy founded on the nonsensical faith, absent any evidence, that godlike artificial intelligence (AI) beings are imminent, and arguing over the best way to prepare for that day.
Cory Doctorow:
This “AI debate” is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we’ll get a locomotive….
But for people who don’t take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they’ve split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse….
Pluralistic: The real AI fight
Left out of this argument are the real abuses of artificial intelligence and automation today, which (Cory says, quoting Molly White) “is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI.”
AI and automation can be used for a great deal of good and a great deal of evil—and it already is being used for both, Cory says. We need to focus the discussion on that.
Like Cory, I think it’s entirely possible that we may achieve human-level AI one day, and that AI might become superintelligent. That might happen today, it might happen in a thousand years, it might never happen at all. The human race has other things to worry about now.
The Pneumatic Tube Mail System in New York City
… the first cylinder tube to travel through the New York City system contained “a Bible, a flag and a copy of the Constitution. The second contained an imitation peach in honor of Senator Chauncy Depew (He was fondly known as “The Peach”). A third carrier had a black cat in it, for reasons unknown.”
Residents of North Sentinel Island off India are one of the few surviving tribes that resist contact with the outside world. When a missionary successfully contacted them in 2018, in violation of international law, they killed him brutally.
Turns out they (or their neighbors) were in contact with the outside world previously—a Victorian English adventurer—and it went badly for them, tragically and unsurprisingly.
Placebos are effective treatments for many conditions, such as chronic pain. They work even when the patient is aware they are receiving a placebo, according to a leading researcher in placebo studies.
In other news, “placebo studies” is a thing.
An ode to ‘Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast’. “… if you want to understand the man behind the squinty eyes, listen to the 600-plus episodes of ‘Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,’ one of the great love letters to twentieth century Hollywood.”
Microcelebrity in 2007
Writing in 2007, Clive Thompson describes the phenomenon of “microcelebrity”–how blogging, Facebook and Flickr makes people famous to a few fans. “Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and ‘message’ almost like a self-contained public relations department.” Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone’s a Little Brad Pitt | WIRED
Microcelebrities were still uncommon back then, but now everybody who’s active on social media is a microcelebrity, even if it’s just posting family photos to instagram.
Thompson was writing then about blogging and Flickr. Facebook and Twitter were not yet mainstream (arguably, Twitter never was). Now it’s Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. More widespread but still the same phenomenon.
Moving furniture on the blog
I’m moving furniture around on the blog again (metaphorically speaking). The main visible change: No more ephemera posts here—they’re additional fuss for me and I don’t think many people are reading them.
You can find the memes and other found media on my tumblr, Mastodon, Facebook, Bluesky, Threads and my newsletter.