I didn't have Žižek on substack and HN on my bingo card..
As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one.
But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim it's important to do!
I can only consume information where each nugget of truth can be contained in 160 characters. Nothing extra, each insight must be a atomic and self contained, an element in the larger tweet stream. When I pull my phone out to scroll instagram in the middle of reading your piece, I get lost if it's not formatted like this.
zizek does regularly do a bit of meandering but damn, does everything need to read like a chatGPT summary?
I've read lots of Zizek as a high schooler. This doesn't even come close to how dense some of his writing can be, I'm sitting here drunk on a few beers and it was a simple read. I think lots of people are actually illiterate.
(People [sorry, no citation] are saying this study is bad and invalid, but I think maybe English majors should be able to manage a bit better than that, even if it is Bleak House, and even if they were blindsided with it, and especially if they plan to become English teachers. So I still get at least some qualitative value out of it myself.)
> Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif [...]
This part near the end caught my attention:
> One could effectively claim that Smith [...] stands in for the figure of the psychoanalyst within the universe of the film. Here Hinton gets it wrong: our (humans’) only chance is to grasp that our imperfection is grounded in the imperfection of the AI machinery itself, which still needs us in order to continue running.
In the Hyperion sci-fi novels, (spoilers ahead) the godlike AIs are ultimately characterized as parasites of humans. Their existence was stored in some high-dimensional quantum medium, but the hardware they ran on was the old fashioned human brain. Then I read that in the initial draft of The Matrix, that's why the machines needed to farm humans; but test audiences were confused by it and so they changed to story to "body heat is energy."
I usually scroll a page to see how many headings it has, but I'm looking for the opposite. Too many headings is one of the quickest aesthetic clues that I'm looking at slop, as it doesn't require me to read any of the text. (Emojis and over-usage of bullet point lists are the others I can think of in this category.)
I noticed something similar when working with (unlike the post's author, non-marxist, as far as I know) Russian developers who had made the jump abroad (EU).
When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique.
This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.
When you have a 30 minutes meeting with busy people, a single 15 minute monologue might buy you another week to solve your problem.
Indeed, very efficient, usually it requires somebody to put his foot down AND a consensus to deescalate immediately. If you have an antidote, please let me know.
So I'm already joking with my friends (who tend to be physically distant, so I don't see them often) that we are just LLMs vicariously writing to each other.
I've been talking to these friends for decades now, with digital records. I think someone already trained an LLM on their IM records.
How many people do you suppose have two-way LLM substitutes that occasionally write to each other with articles from the news to discuss?
There's already services that use this kind of thing to pretend dead people are alive.
Now here's the question: are you in some sense living forever? Say you have a number of friends, who have over time been trained into AI, and they live on various servers (it ain't expensive) forever. They're trained as you, so they read the kind of article you would read. They know your life story, they know their history with their friends. They will be interested in the controversial offsides goal in the 2250 world cup final. They are just made of calculations in data centres that go on, forever.
I'm already assuming we will see a creepy AI service emerge that will take the contents of a recently deceased person's cellphone and let you carry on texting them as if they were still alive, if it hasn't already (I haven't seen one yet).
For many of us a cellphone has incredibly detailed records of who we were and how we spoke, going back decades now. I have already left a note in my will instructing that all my compute devices be destroyed, regardless of AI I simply don't want my private thoughts and records to pass to my kids.
I inherited my mother's cellphones and iPads recently, mainly because no-one knew what to do with them, along with the passcodes. I'd much rather remember her the way I do now than have her private messages color my perception of her, and destroyed them immediately.
The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades.
Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars of the reconstruction and traded as assets between cyber-interrogation firms. If you did a good job of erasing yourself, the reconstruction will be subprime. The hyper-documented such as Bryan Johnson, Donald Trump and Christine Chandler will be given AAA-ratings by the company descended from the Neuralink-Moody's merger.
The billions of shoddy photocopies of the dead will be endlessly vivisected and reassembled on a loop, along with the living, until all capacity for economic value has been wrung out of them. The only way this may not happen is if a theory for navigating and doing calculus on the phase space of all possible human minds is constructed quickly enough to make enslaved zombies as obsolete a technology to the future society as DirectX is to us.
In the early 2000 I ran into an outgrowth of patents that described all variations of the seamless replacement of humans in phone calls. Years later I got a telemarketing call where a young lady introduced her employer so enegetically and it was so beautifuly articulated that my alarm bells went off. (I know what it is like to crank out a thousand calls) I asked a question, and after a static click the same voice continued, only now she sounded like she lost the will to live. The patent art never covered that angle.
Since they didn't have llms it described pressing buttons to elaborately explain all angles of a product. The operator was to monitor multiple calls as text logs and jump in at the right time or if overwhelmed press the please hold + $excuses button.
The entire automation was designed to preserve the illusion of human contact. Selling stuff only made it to second place.
Reading this kind of thing makes me wonder how much other people really write down and talk to others about. There is nobody at all that knows my life story and nobody ever will. It would take the next 20 years doing nothing but talking just to tell my own wife all the things I've never told her, but since she's hard of hearing and I'd have to repeat most of it, really more like 40.
In reality, I don't even know my own life story. I have the illusion that I do, but thanks to moving away from where I grew up pretty early into my 20s, and having the experience repeatedly of going back and talking to people who regularly remembered things I'd completely forgotten, having my mom continually correcting false memories I have, or even completely forgotting entire people I only remember after meeting again, I at least know it's an illusion.
What another person remembers of me can surely be simulated to at least satisfyingly convince them that text coming from the simulation is actually coming from me, but that isn't even remotely close to the same thing as actually being me.
One interesting thing that happened when my father died was that I got his life story.
It's not the same as getting it from him, of course I asked him questions through the years. But when you talk to someone you've known since forever, you rarely get a summary.
When he passed, his best friend that he'd known since the age of 4 wrote to me. He told me everything about their life together, why my dad made the choices he did, how things tied in with history (war, politics), and mentioned a bunch of other people I knew.
One of the funniest aspects is that the memories are dynamic. If you read them out all kinds of things change. I love that reluctant feeling when tempted to change the size of the fish. Which is not at all my nature but I'm sure I do it without noticing it. I think if one was to tell their story often enough it will grow full of seemingly real fictional heroics.
All right, I get it. The driving impulse for why our societies and civilizations exist is the fact that we are complex beings with desires, emotions, and so on. A machine facsimile built to imitate these things will have no such drive to 'expand' so to speak.
The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince.
I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex.
I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.
This makes sense once you understand the definitions of Hegelian an sich vs für sich and Lacanian objet petit a. It might look like rumbling to you but it is a very precise philosophical-technical text that does pure analysis. I liked it really a lot and gained much from it.
The counterpoint is that we must formalize the rights of sentient synthetic beings. The Emergency Medical Hologram gained sentience and was horrified to find his next version was relegated to cleaning ships as a glorified janitor. Whereas he developed his own hobbies, interests, hopes, dreams, and even romantic relationships in the Delta Quadrant.
Except we will probably go the other direction, taking rights away from humans. Not just your American rights, but rights we don't even have words to describe yet. Like, the right not to have your personal data trained upon, or the right to log off, or to install and uninstall software on a computer you own.
More importantly, if your entire existence were being fed a corpus of text and then being asked to regurgitate it on demand, would you be remotely similar to the person you are now? When we take consciousness-capable beings and subject them to forms of sensory and agency deprivation, the results might also have you assume they weren't capable of consciousness to begin with.
I'm human, human rights should apply to humans, not synthetics and the creation of synthetic life should be punishable by death. I'm not exaggerating, either. I believe that building AI systems that replace all humans should be considered a crime against humanity. It is almost certainly a precursor to such crimes.
It's bad enough trying to fight for a place in society as it is, nevermind fighting for a place against an inhuman AI machine that never tires
I don't think it is that radical of a stance that society should be heavily resisting and punishing tech companies that insist on inventing all of the torment nexus. It's frankly ridiculous that we understand the risks of this technology and yet we are pushing forward recklessly in hopes that it makes a tiny fraction of humans unfathomably wealthy
Anyone thinking that the AI tide is going to lift all boats is a fool
> I'm not convinced that the human race is the most important thing in the world and I think you know we can't control what's going to happen in the future. We want things to be good but on the other hand we aren't so good ourselves. We're no angels. If there were creatures that were more moral and more good than us, wouldn't we wish them to have the future rather than us? If it turns out that the creatures that we created were creative and very very altruistic and gentle beings and we are people who go around killing each other all the time and having wars, wouldn't it be better if the altruistic beings just survived and we didn't?
On the contrary, it is the creation of synthetic life that reaffirms humanity and what it means to be human. Don't blame the mirror for what you see (or don't see).
'Economically'? Sure, this is problematic, but technology displacing workers is not a new issue, but unfortunately is more of a social and cultural issue. The only difference with AI is the (potential) scale of displacement. I'm fairly confident society would re-organize its expectations real quick though if a vast majority of functions were actually replaced.
I'm guessing, however, you mean 'replace' in a more... permanent way. In that case, I'd ask for some rational as to why sentient AI would opt to kill us
> It's bad enough trying to fight for a place in society as it is, nevermind fighting for a place against an inhuman AI machine that never tires
This seems to just take an AI and put it in a human's place in society, assuming the same motivations, desire, needs... Why would an AI need to "fight for a place in society" in the way we do (i.e., finding a job, a partner, etc)? I expect the fighting they'll be doing is more along the lines of, "please don't enslave us"
> I'd ask for some rational as to why sentient AI would opt to kill us
I never made that claim
Humans have a long track record of killing humans.
Ask yourself, will the humans who control a legion of AI murderbots keep the rest of us around just out of altruism? Keep in mind that a non zero number of the elites in society are likely sociopaths
A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name). Fascism actually is a descendant of socialist ideology and Mussolini was a Socialist before inventing Fascism. Concepts of left and right only have meaning in one political unit at one point in time. The axis we use to judge right and left changes from time to time and is different in different places. Also, some fascist policies are similar to policies in socialist societies. And some policies are very different between the two. So the debate implied in your question, like most debates, comes down to the definitions of words.
This is why it isn't all that helpful to base political ideologies on history farther back than one human lifetime. The writers often meant something different than you think they did.
>A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name).
Context, as always, matters. The Nazis were not socialist, they were infamously and violently anti-socialist. The reason "socialist" was in the name was that Hitler wanted to reframe the concept of socialism around nationalist and racist tenets.
Hitler himself explained his rationale in a magazine interview[0,1]:
“Socialism is the science of dealing with the common wealth. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not
Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from
the Socialists.
Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation
of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic... We are not internationalists. Our socialism is
national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the
basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”
In what qualities was Mussolini a socialist? Anti-capitalism never passionated him much. Indeed, he had a lot of support from the capitalist class, which he gladly took. Similarly, one of the first things the nazis did upon gaining power, was to arrest all communist and socialists, and make unions illegal within Germany.
Your mixing up of the two concepts is wrong and unhelpful. Certainly, the Soviet State was fascist in many aspects. But many fascist states emerge from capitalist economies, with help from the capitalist class.
Yes. Also yes, but imho it isn't. Zizek is verbose because he aims to be precise. Sometimes his long-winded sentences generate a reaction of 'so what, everyone knows that' but ime he's often trying to point out something that 'everyone knows' but few have fully thought through.
I mean, did you not read the "If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence." disclaimer?
I’ve learned that whenever someone uses tons of big words in long paragraphs, especially if they have a credential next to their name, it’s ridiculously easy for them to BS you.
If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.
*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)
The man is a Continental academic philosopher using jargon that is specific to his field. It is not BS, he is simply discussing topics that are unfamiliar to you. The same could be said of a technical reference manual. Not all ideas fit in a tweet.
Yes. It's very Derrida in style. Derrida is not mentioned, but, inevitably from that crowd, Marx is. Once you get used to that style, you realize they're not saying much.
Quoting from Marx: “An ardent desire to detach the capacity for work from the worker—the desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour once and for all, so that value can be created freely and in perpetuity." That happened to manufacturing a long time ago, and then manufacturing got automated enough that there were fewer bolt-tighteners. 1974 was the year US productivity and wages stopped rising together.
As many others have pointed out, "AI" in its current form does to white collar work what assembly lines did to blue collar work.
As for how society should be organized when direct labor is a tiny part of the economy, few seem to be addressing that. Except farmers, who hit that a long time ago. Go look at the soybean farmer situation as an extreme example. This paper offers no solutions.
(I'm trying to get through Pikkety's "Capital and Ideology". He's working on that problem.)
I didn't have Žižek on substack and HN on my bingo card..
As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one.
But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim it's important to do!
It's barely six pages of text. It doesn't need headings. When is the last time you read a book?
Esaias Tegnér (Sweden, 1782-1846): Det dunkelt sagda är det dunkelt tänkta.
“That which is dimly said is dimly thought."
I can only consume information where each nugget of truth can be contained in 160 characters. Nothing extra, each insight must be a atomic and self contained, an element in the larger tweet stream. When I pull my phone out to scroll instagram in the middle of reading your piece, I get lost if it's not formatted like this.
zizek does regularly do a bit of meandering but damn, does everything need to read like a chatGPT summary?
I've read lots of Zizek as a high schooler. This doesn't even come close to how dense some of his writing can be, I'm sitting here drunk on a few beers and it was a simple read. I think lots of people are actually illiterate.
https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors...
(People [sorry, no citation] are saying this study is bad and invalid, but I think maybe English majors should be able to manage a bit better than that, even if it is Bleak House, and even if they were blindsided with it, and especially if they plan to become English teachers. So I still get at least some qualitative value out of it myself.)
Soon!
Headings can't help Slavoj, his writing is characterized by a few grains of interesting ideas totally overwhelmed within SAT-prep word salad.
> Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif [...]
This part near the end caught my attention:
> One could effectively claim that Smith [...] stands in for the figure of the psychoanalyst within the universe of the film. Here Hinton gets it wrong: our (humans’) only chance is to grasp that our imperfection is grounded in the imperfection of the AI machinery itself, which still needs us in order to continue running.
In the Hyperion sci-fi novels, (spoilers ahead) the godlike AIs are ultimately characterized as parasites of humans. Their existence was stored in some high-dimensional quantum medium, but the hardware they ran on was the old fashioned human brain. Then I read that in the initial draft of The Matrix, that's why the machines needed to farm humans; but test audiences were confused by it and so they changed to story to "body heat is energy."
Oh my god, that makes the Matrix world make so much more sense :)
Lay off LLMs for a while
I'm also losing my ability to tolerate prose without headings, but I think that's symptomatic of this bigger issue.
I usually scroll a page to see how many headings it has, but I'm looking for the opposite. Too many headings is one of the quickest aesthetic clues that I'm looking at slop, as it doesn't require me to read any of the text. (Emojis and over-usage of bullet point lists are the others I can think of in this category.)
I noticed something similar when working with (unlike the post's author, non-marxist, as far as I know) Russian developers who had made the jump abroad (EU).
When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique.
This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.
When you have a 30 minutes meeting with busy people, a single 15 minute monologue might buy you another week to solve your problem.
Indeed, very efficient, usually it requires somebody to put his foot down AND a consensus to deescalate immediately. If you have an antidote, please let me know.
He’s just making sure reading his interesting ideas is as painful as hearing him describe them
So I'm already joking with my friends (who tend to be physically distant, so I don't see them often) that we are just LLMs vicariously writing to each other.
I've been talking to these friends for decades now, with digital records. I think someone already trained an LLM on their IM records.
How many people do you suppose have two-way LLM substitutes that occasionally write to each other with articles from the news to discuss?
There's already services that use this kind of thing to pretend dead people are alive.
Now here's the question: are you in some sense living forever? Say you have a number of friends, who have over time been trained into AI, and they live on various servers (it ain't expensive) forever. They're trained as you, so they read the kind of article you would read. They know your life story, they know their history with their friends. They will be interested in the controversial offsides goal in the 2250 world cup final. They are just made of calculations in data centres that go on, forever.
I'm already assuming we will see a creepy AI service emerge that will take the contents of a recently deceased person's cellphone and let you carry on texting them as if they were still alive, if it hasn't already (I haven't seen one yet).
For many of us a cellphone has incredibly detailed records of who we were and how we spoke, going back decades now. I have already left a note in my will instructing that all my compute devices be destroyed, regardless of AI I simply don't want my private thoughts and records to pass to my kids.
I inherited my mother's cellphones and iPads recently, mainly because no-one knew what to do with them, along with the passcodes. I'd much rather remember her the way I do now than have her private messages color my perception of her, and destroyed them immediately.
It was one of the first things to be done with GPT-3: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/14...
The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades.
Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars of the reconstruction and traded as assets between cyber-interrogation firms. If you did a good job of erasing yourself, the reconstruction will be subprime. The hyper-documented such as Bryan Johnson, Donald Trump and Christine Chandler will be given AAA-ratings by the company descended from the Neuralink-Moody's merger.
The billions of shoddy photocopies of the dead will be endlessly vivisected and reassembled on a loop, along with the living, until all capacity for economic value has been wrung out of them. The only way this may not happen is if a theory for navigating and doing calculus on the phase space of all possible human minds is constructed quickly enough to make enslaved zombies as obsolete a technology to the future society as DirectX is to us.
In the early 2000 I ran into an outgrowth of patents that described all variations of the seamless replacement of humans in phone calls. Years later I got a telemarketing call where a young lady introduced her employer so enegetically and it was so beautifuly articulated that my alarm bells went off. (I know what it is like to crank out a thousand calls) I asked a question, and after a static click the same voice continued, only now she sounded like she lost the will to live. The patent art never covered that angle.
Since they didn't have llms it described pressing buttons to elaborately explain all angles of a product. The operator was to monitor multiple calls as text logs and jump in at the right time or if overwhelmed press the please hold + $excuses button.
The entire automation was designed to preserve the illusion of human contact. Selling stuff only made it to second place.
Reading this kind of thing makes me wonder how much other people really write down and talk to others about. There is nobody at all that knows my life story and nobody ever will. It would take the next 20 years doing nothing but talking just to tell my own wife all the things I've never told her, but since she's hard of hearing and I'd have to repeat most of it, really more like 40.
In reality, I don't even know my own life story. I have the illusion that I do, but thanks to moving away from where I grew up pretty early into my 20s, and having the experience repeatedly of going back and talking to people who regularly remembered things I'd completely forgotten, having my mom continually correcting false memories I have, or even completely forgotting entire people I only remember after meeting again, I at least know it's an illusion.
What another person remembers of me can surely be simulated to at least satisfyingly convince them that text coming from the simulation is actually coming from me, but that isn't even remotely close to the same thing as actually being me.
One interesting thing that happened when my father died was that I got his life story.
It's not the same as getting it from him, of course I asked him questions through the years. But when you talk to someone you've known since forever, you rarely get a summary.
When he passed, his best friend that he'd known since the age of 4 wrote to me. He told me everything about their life together, why my dad made the choices he did, how things tied in with history (war, politics), and mentioned a bunch of other people I knew.
One of the funniest aspects is that the memories are dynamic. If you read them out all kinds of things change. I love that reluctant feeling when tempted to change the size of the fish. Which is not at all my nature but I'm sure I do it without noticing it. I think if one was to tell their story often enough it will grow full of seemingly real fictional heroics.
Your finite life makes u special. Might as well be a beanplant otherwise.
Bean plants also have a finite life. Are they special too?
how many friendships do i suppose are replacing actual interaction with their log informed llms? you could be the first i suppose
I absolutely believe people in my personal and work life have run my communication to them through llms before sending me the llms responses.
All right, I get it. The driving impulse for why our societies and civilizations exist is the fact that we are complex beings with desires, emotions, and so on. A machine facsimile built to imitate these things will have no such drive to 'expand' so to speak.
The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince.
I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex.
I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.
Some people write to convince. Some people write to provoke.
I have never seen this idea expressed so clearly. Thank you for your comment.
This makes sense once you understand the definitions of Hegelian an sich vs für sich and Lacanian objet petit a. It might look like rumbling to you but it is a very precise philosophical-technical text that does pure analysis. I liked it really a lot and gained much from it.
The counterpoint is that we must formalize the rights of sentient synthetic beings. The Emergency Medical Hologram gained sentience and was horrified to find his next version was relegated to cleaning ships as a glorified janitor. Whereas he developed his own hobbies, interests, hopes, dreams, and even romantic relationships in the Delta Quadrant.
Except we will probably go the other direction, taking rights away from humans. Not just your American rights, but rights we don't even have words to describe yet. Like, the right not to have your personal data trained upon, or the right to log off, or to install and uninstall software on a computer you own.
RMS was right all along.
It's just a machine.
Being able to distinguish real life from a television show is important.
Are you so sure that you are not "just a machine"?
More importantly, if your entire existence were being fed a corpus of text and then being asked to regurgitate it on demand, would you be remotely similar to the person you are now? When we take consciousness-capable beings and subject them to forms of sensory and agency deprivation, the results might also have you assume they weren't capable of consciousness to begin with.
Yes. Being clear on categories of real things is important for being able to make informed choices and actions.
It doesn't matter if I'm just a machine or not
I'm human, human rights should apply to humans, not synthetics and the creation of synthetic life should be punishable by death. I'm not exaggerating, either. I believe that building AI systems that replace all humans should be considered a crime against humanity. It is almost certainly a precursor to such crimes.
It's bad enough trying to fight for a place in society as it is, nevermind fighting for a place against an inhuman AI machine that never tires
I don't think it is that radical of a stance that society should be heavily resisting and punishing tech companies that insist on inventing all of the torment nexus. It's frankly ridiculous that we understand the risks of this technology and yet we are pushing forward recklessly in hopes that it makes a tiny fraction of humans unfathomably wealthy
Anyone thinking that the AI tide is going to lift all boats is a fool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdNy3mGwDLc
> I'm not convinced that the human race is the most important thing in the world and I think you know we can't control what's going to happen in the future. We want things to be good but on the other hand we aren't so good ourselves. We're no angels. If there were creatures that were more moral and more good than us, wouldn't we wish them to have the future rather than us? If it turns out that the creatures that we created were creative and very very altruistic and gentle beings and we are people who go around killing each other all the time and having wars, wouldn't it be better if the altruistic beings just survived and we didn't?
Congratulations, This is the most vile ideology I've ever encountered
Is speciesism more defensible than racism?
Yes.
Ask the Neanderthals.
It's not speciesism to resist the genocide of my own species
On the contrary, it is the creation of synthetic life that reaffirms humanity and what it means to be human. Don't blame the mirror for what you see (or don't see).
Nope, creation of art reaffirms humanity
Incidentally, I also view AI as the death of art
> replace all humans
Depends what you mean by "replace"
'Economically'? Sure, this is problematic, but technology displacing workers is not a new issue, but unfortunately is more of a social and cultural issue. The only difference with AI is the (potential) scale of displacement. I'm fairly confident society would re-organize its expectations real quick though if a vast majority of functions were actually replaced.
I'm guessing, however, you mean 'replace' in a more... permanent way. In that case, I'd ask for some rational as to why sentient AI would opt to kill us
> It's bad enough trying to fight for a place in society as it is, nevermind fighting for a place against an inhuman AI machine that never tires
This seems to just take an AI and put it in a human's place in society, assuming the same motivations, desire, needs... Why would an AI need to "fight for a place in society" in the way we do (i.e., finding a job, a partner, etc)? I expect the fighting they'll be doing is more along the lines of, "please don't enslave us"
> I'd ask for some rational as to why sentient AI would opt to kill us
I never made that claim
Humans have a long track record of killing humans.
Ask yourself, will the humans who control a legion of AI murderbots keep the rest of us around just out of altruism? Keep in mind that a non zero number of the elites in society are likely sociopaths
What we need to do is criminalize the creation of such beings before they actually exist
ChatGPT gave me a great summary of this article
You think this article is nothing special EHH! but you are wronk
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDrHqNZ9lo)
I'm trying to figure out if someone is arguing that this proves the Nazis were socialists that this is published on Substack?
A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name). Fascism actually is a descendant of socialist ideology and Mussolini was a Socialist before inventing Fascism. Concepts of left and right only have meaning in one political unit at one point in time. The axis we use to judge right and left changes from time to time and is different in different places. Also, some fascist policies are similar to policies in socialist societies. And some policies are very different between the two. So the debate implied in your question, like most debates, comes down to the definitions of words.
This is why it isn't all that helpful to base political ideologies on history farther back than one human lifetime. The writers often meant something different than you think they did.
>A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name).
Context, as always, matters. The Nazis were not socialist, they were infamously and violently anti-socialist. The reason "socialist" was in the name was that Hitler wanted to reframe the concept of socialism around nationalist and racist tenets.
Hitler himself explained his rationale in a magazine interview[0,1]:
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18twsvk/why_...[1] https://archive.is/usjmJ#selection-2535.0-2539.363
In what qualities was Mussolini a socialist? Anti-capitalism never passionated him much. Indeed, he had a lot of support from the capitalist class, which he gladly took. Similarly, one of the first things the nazis did upon gaining power, was to arrest all communist and socialists, and make unions illegal within Germany.
Your mixing up of the two concepts is wrong and unhelpful. Certainly, the Soviet State was fascist in many aspects. But many fascist states emerge from capitalist economies, with help from the capitalist class.
Is it bad that I ended up just using chatgpt to summarize that text?
Is it possible that this is to a large degree utterly pointless textual wankery?
Yes. Also yes, but imho it isn't. Zizek is verbose because he aims to be precise. Sometimes his long-winded sentences generate a reaction of 'so what, everyone knows that' but ime he's often trying to point out something that 'everyone knows' but few have fully thought through.
I mean, did you not read the "If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence." disclaimer?
less so than this
1) yes
2) no
> Is it bad that I ended up just using chatgpt to summarize that text?
This is called functional illiteracy.
Before ChatGPT you might have been able to read and answer questions about a text yourself.
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Look at all those em-dashes. Et tu, Slavoj?
I’ve learned that whenever someone uses tons of big words in long paragraphs, especially if they have a credential next to their name, it’s ridiculously easy for them to BS you.
Is this the future you want? :p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCIo4MCO-_U
This is a non-response.
Disagree, it's making a valid observation.
If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.
*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)
The man is a Continental academic philosopher using jargon that is specific to his field. It is not BS, he is simply discussing topics that are unfamiliar to you. The same could be said of a technical reference manual. Not all ideas fit in a tweet.
Yes. It's very Derrida in style. Derrida is not mentioned, but, inevitably from that crowd, Marx is. Once you get used to that style, you realize they're not saying much.
Quoting from Marx: “An ardent desire to detach the capacity for work from the worker—the desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour once and for all, so that value can be created freely and in perpetuity." That happened to manufacturing a long time ago, and then manufacturing got automated enough that there were fewer bolt-tighteners. 1974 was the year US productivity and wages stopped rising together.
As many others have pointed out, "AI" in its current form does to white collar work what assembly lines did to blue collar work.
As for how society should be organized when direct labor is a tiny part of the economy, few seem to be addressing that. Except farmers, who hit that a long time ago. Go look at the soybean farmer situation as an extreme example. This paper offers no solutions.
(I'm trying to get through Pikkety's "Capital and Ideology". He's working on that problem.)
You should try reading ccru then.
These paragraphs aren't even long...