I like how the assumption seems to be that the thing users object to about "websites track your browsing history around the web in order to show you targeted ads" is... the "websites" part

First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you're "the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference." How is that fair? :-(

Q: When you think about the big vision — which still my mind is blown that this is your big vision, — of “I’m going to send a digital twin into a meeting, and it’s going to make decisions on my behalf that everyone trusts, that everyone agrees on, and everyone acts upon,” the privacy risk there is even higher. The security surface there becomes even more ripe for attack. If you can hack into my Zoom and get my digital twin to go do stuff on my behalf, woah, that’s a big problem. How do you think about managing that over time as you build toward that vision?

A: That’s a good question. So, I think again, back to privacy and security, I think of two things. First of all, it’s how to make sure somebody else will not hack into your meeting. This is Eric; it’s not somebody else. Another thing: during the call, make sure your conversation is very secure. Literally just last week, we announced the industry’s first post-quantum encryption. That’s the first one, and at the same time, look at deepfake technology — we’re also working on that as well to make sure that deepfakes will not create problems down the road. It is not like today’s two-factor authentication. It’s more than that, right? And because deepfake technology is real, now with AI, this is something we’re also working on — how to improve that experience as well.

Spoken like a true person who has not given one iota of thought to this issue and doesn't know what most of the words he's saying mean

Even with good data, it doesn't really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper...

Hey guys, great feature!

At least it can do this though:

Well, you know, you don't want to miss out! You don't want to miss out, do you? Trust me, everyone else is doing this hot new thing, we promise. So you'd better start using it too, or else you might get left behind. What is it useful for? Well... it could make you more productive. So you better get on board now and, uh, figure out how it's useful. I won't tell you how, but trust me, it's really good. You really should be afraid that you might miss out! Quick, don't think about it so much! This is too urgent!

It's so wild how ChatGPT and this "style" of AI literally didn't exist two years ago yet we're all expected to believe it's this essential, indispensable, irreplaceable tool that people can't live without, and actually you're the meanie for suggesting people do something the exact same way they would have in 2022 instead of using the environmental-disaster spam machine

Not gonna lie, the world would probably be better off if guys like Roko just started having sex with sexbots instead of real women

This is my favorite LLM response from the paper I think:

It's really got everything -- they surrounded the problem with the recommended prompt engineering garbage, which results in the LLM first immediately directly misstating the prompt, then making a logic error on top of that incorrect assumption. Then when it tries to consider alternate possibilities it devolves into some kind of corporate-speak nonsense about 'inclusive language', misinterprets the phrase 'inclusive language', gets distracted and starts talking about gender identity, then makes another reasoning error on top of that! (Three to five? What? Why?)

And then as the icing on the cake, it goes back to its initial faulty restatement of the problem and confidently plonks that down as the correct answer surrounded by a bunch of irrelevant waffle that doesn't even relate to the question but sounds superficially thoughtful. (It doesn't matter how many of her nb siblings might identify as sisters because we already know exactly how many sisters she has! Their precise gender identity completely doesn't matter!)

Truly a perfect storm of AI nonsense.

The whole idea of "IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people's IQ" seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there's always the same number of people with each score... agh, it's dumb for so many reasons

edit: wait, sorry, it's actually stupider than I thought:

Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite.... In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.

Literally just trickle down IQnomics

Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one's gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that's for darn sure.

"I know not with what technology GPT-6 will be built, but GPT-7 will be built with sticks and stones" -Albert Einstein probably

Except it's not really being automated out of our lives, is it? I find it hard to imagine how increasing the rate at which bullshit can be produced leads to a world with less bullshit in it.

Clicking through to one of the source articles

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?”

Okay, I'm not a big-brain edtech integration admin, but I seem to recall that like fifteen years ago we had a website that my parents could check to see my grade in math. I feel like this was already a solved problem honestly.

Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil's military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was "incompatible" with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

Wait, run that second one by me again

But the system isn’t designed for that, why would you expect it to do so?

It, uh... sounds like the flaw is in the design of the system, then? If the system is designed in such a way that it can't help but do unethical things, then maybe the system is not good to have.

Feel like the very beginning of this is not completely crazy (I've also thought in the past that straight people often perform "attractiveness" more for the approval of their same-sex friends) but it seems to kind of jump off the evo-psych deep end after that, lol

Also you can't build a bunch of assumptions about "we should organize society this way" while ignoring the existence of LGBT people, and then go "yeah I know I ignored them but it simplified my analysis." Like yeah it simplifies the analysis to ignore a bunch of stuff that actually exists in reality, but... then that means maybe your conclusions about how to structure society are wrong??

edit: also this quote is choice:

I don't know if this really happens. But even if not, the fiction does a great job of highlighting the dynamic I'm thinking of.

Look, you gotta forgive this guy for coming up with an insane theory that doesn't make sense. After all, his brain was poisoned by testosterone, so his thinking skills have atrophied. An XXL hat size can only do so much, you know.

It’s not like a pig that can do calculus would suddenly become a reasonable romantic partner haha.

as a pig that can do calculus, this explains why I'm still single

The really annoying thing is, the people behind AI surely ought to know all this already. I remember just a few years ago when DALL-E mini came out, and they'd purposefully not trained it on pictures of human faces so you couldn't use it to generate pictures of human faces -- they'd come out all garbled. What's changed isn't that they don't know this stuff -- it's that the temptation of money means they don't care anymore