Whenever I read about our new capitalist overlords gutting each other over who gets to profit from the rabbit-out-of-a-hat tricks of large language models, I have to laugh. Here are a handful of quotes that will give you some idea why:
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I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.
—@kat@weatherishappening.network, from a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT
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Und so wie gesellschaftliche und technische Entwicklungen zuvor die Unantastbarkeit Gottes in Zweifel zogen, so stellen sie nun die„Sakralisierung” des Menschen zur Disposition.
And just as social and technical developments once cast doubt on the sanctity of God, so they now subject the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.
—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)
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Der tiefere Sinn der Singularity-These ist die technische Überwindung kultureller Pluralität.
The deeper meaning of the singularity-thesis is the triumph of technology over cultural plurality.
—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)
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Die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.
The Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity.
—Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung
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Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:
—Basil Bunting, Villon
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Say what you will, it’s clear to me that the Pax Americana, and more generally humanism itself, with all its honorable striving, are both well and truly done. Contemplating what passes for virtue and wisdom among those so obviously eager to feast on the leftovers would make even the gods laugh.
I grimace and grit my teeth repeating as a mantra….
>>>>>pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will<<<<<>>>>>even if I have no free will I shall act as thought I do<<<<<<
Not. Ready. To. Give. Up. …. yet.
And, I'm *still* ruminating over "flexible egos".
Flexible egos? Maybe, but it takes a lot of experience, not to mention self-knowledge, to distinguish between pragmatism and cowardice. The thing about the tech bros is that they think their wealth equates to immortality, or if not immortality, at least to infallibility. It’s not surprising that they don’t picture themselves lining up to lick the Zeitgeist’s boots, but in my view, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes, while I’m doomscrolling, I see this as gallows humor, sometimes as commedia dell’arte. When I was working on this post I was obviously in a commedia dell’arte mood. As the saying goes, you either laugh or you cry. What you absolutely don’t do is surrender.,
Consistent with your thesis… I don’t recommend more than the first 5 – 6 minutes of this, but those minutes gave me a much better idea of what you were driving at…. I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpOkrxxpTcE
I dunno, William. There are days I think I might be too old for this world. I don’t generally delve too deeply into the comments of people I don’t “know” on these social media platforms, so I’m not sure I’d ever pick this up. But, I’m beginning to understand the desire of many to return to the days of blogs and just leave these platforms behind altogether.
The days of blogs as the jewels of social interaction online are over, and to misappropriate a phrase that was far nobler in its original incarnation, “we are not going back.” What’s unavoidable about the current state of bots is that we’re already “subjecting the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.” Turns out that nobody actually wants to bother with a Turing test or a Voight-Kampf test. Turns out that we don’t actually care very much whether we’re talking to another human or to a machine that’s mastered the everyday forms of speech—grammar and syntax—that we’re used to. If ChatGPT gets us and our neighbors to a first approximation, we’ll happily talk to it all day long. After a few days we might even accept a proposal of marriage from the damned thing. I mean, really, think about the fact that ChatGPT has already trained on far more data than the average Republican. No wonder an idiot savant like Sam Altman thinks he can do AGI on current hardware. If we don’t care about the human use of human beings, why the hell should he?