"Neither a robot nor a human but actually an entirely new entity"
What is Claude? Anthropic doesn’t know either
Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker goes in depth with researchers at Anthropic attempting to understand how Claude works and finds AI is even more weird and confusing than we think:
The most candid A.I. researchers will own up to the fact that we are doing this because we can. As [Brown computer scientist Ellie Pavlick] wrote, the field originated with the aspiration “to understand intelligence by building it, and to build intelligence by understanding it.” She continued, “What has long made the AI project so special is that it is born out of curiosity and fascination, not technological necessity or practicality. It is, in that way, as much an artistic pursuit as it is a scientific one.” The systems we have created—with the significant proviso that they may regard us with terminal indifference—should inspire not only enthusiasm or despair but also simple awe.
In the eighteenth century, James Watt perfected the steam engine: a special box of fire that turned archaic fern sludge into factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. The Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics. This scientific advance led to such debatably beneficial things as the smartphone. But it also helped us explain why time flows forward, galaxies exist, and our universal fate is heat death.
Now we have a special box of electricity that turns Reddit comments and old toaster manuals into cogent conversations about Shakespeare and molecular biology. The sheer competence of language models has already revamped the human quest for self-knowledge.
Askell describes AI is “neither robot nor human but actually something new.” Based on my use of AI and learning about it, that’s a good way to describe it.
Has AI achieved intelligence? Define “intelligence.” In the 2019 book “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intellience,” James Bridle argues that our definition of intelligence — which limits the phenomenon to humans and maybe some higher animals — is too narrow. Software is intelligent, as are analog computers, as are bonobos, jackdaws, bees and trees. Bridle is not arguing here that plants have “hidden lives,” like 1970s pseudoscientists argued, but that these machines, birds, animals and plants should be considered intelligent just on the basis of their observed behavior.
I’m skeptical that AI has achieved anything resembling human intelligence. It is not alive. But I’m even more skeptical of people who dismiss AI as just a fancy autocomplete.
Pair the New Yorker article with this essay by Matt Shumer, an AI entrepreneur and investor: Something big is happening.. Shumer says that within a year or two, AI will be better than humans at any job that’s now done at a screen. He compares the present moment to February 2020, the weeks before the pandemic hit, when nearly everyone went about their normal lives but a few people knew that the world was about to profoundly change.
Rubio brings Naziism to Munich
Marco Rubio went Nazi on America’s European (former) partners — at the Munich security conference last week, espousing a vision of Western civilization united by whiteness and Christianity.
… officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.
How can people like Rubio (son of Cuban immigrants), Stephen Miller (Jewish) and Peter Thiel (gay) can embrace an ideology that considers them to be second-class citizens at best and vermin at worst?
Post by @spocko@mastodon.online
@gardengeek here is Obama’s Follow up
I’m old enough to remember when we had an intelligent President who wasn’t an embarrassment every time he opened his mouth.
David Boreanaz will star in a Rockford Files reboot. I am looking forward to this. David Boreanaz is perfect for the role.
But nobody uses answering machines anymore. Text messages wouldn’t be the same.
Changing how I handle blogging and social media (again)
I vibe-coded a thing! I coaxed Google Gemini to modify the template for mitchwagner.com to hide a specific category of posts from the home page. I’ve been wanting to do that for a couple of years but lacked the skills — I was able to do it in less than two hours with Gemini (including a lunch break lol).
The category is Mitchellaneous — it’s where I post memes and other Internet curiosities. I had been running that on a separate blog for a few weeks; now it’s all here. And folks who were signed up for my newsletters will now just receive one newsletter with everything (which is how I did the newsletters until a couple of weeks ago when I made the switch to two blogs and two newsletters).
Over the years, I’ve had a few ideas for how I want to handle blogging and social media, but haven’t had the coding chops to implement those ideas. With the help of AI, maybe I can finally do it.
Next up: Can I change my newsletter template so all the Mitchellaneous posts go at the end? Hold my beer….
ICE is preparing to spend $38 billion this year on a network of concentration camps to incarcerate 100,000 people. This is obscene. They are the American Gestapo. Fuck ICE.
An 88-year-old grandmother flew for the first time, on a plane piloted by her grandson. She also took Dramamine for the first time.
I love the idea of a single app that reads RSS, Bluesky and Mastodon timelines, all in one place. I have tried Tapestry, Reeder and the Micro.blog timeline and none of them seem right for me. Am I missing an app that does what I am looking for?
People don't give Gene L. Coon and D.C. Fontana enough credit for Star Trek
When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it’s important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.
“Superficial” in this sense doesn’t mean “minor” or “unimportant”; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a been pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).
By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing “the final frontier” and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power.
Also:
People don’t give Gene L. Coon enough credit for interrogating the Federation. I know it’s gotten better in recent years and fandom seem to be more willing, on the whole, to credit him and the equally fantastic D. C. Fontana with - quite frankly - doing much more than Roddenberry ever did during TOS’ original run, but it’s still not enough.
Interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Read more: larasramblings.tumblr.com
We need a new amendment: The right to bear phones
The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.
Watched: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms S1E1, The Hedge Knight A pleasant surprise! I thought I had enough of Game of Thrones, but this tale of Ser Dunk, a threadbare, sad-sack knight, is good-looking, light and enjoyable. We will keep watching.
Minnie in a raincoat is giving a vibe like Ralph wearing the bunny suit in “A Christmas Story.”
Minnie has a raincoat now.
As far as I can see, the only thing the national Democratic Party is good for is sending text messages asking me for donations. You want my fucking money? Do something!
The Horse Girl Fandom Is Melting Down Over Armpits: “Armpits are an advancing contender in the crowded field of “non-censored and ironic ways to be a pervert online….. " — Ryan Broderick (third item at the link)
The Problem With Measuring Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime (And Everything Else)
Ryan Broderick (second item):
… even something like the Super Bowl, arguably the last television broadcast everyone in America sits down to watch together (in theory) is not immune from the larger shift towards non-linear short-form internet content. And, as we’ve seen almost every month since we started compiling metrics for platforms like YouTube and Twitch, the most viral language west of China’s Great Firewall is not English, but Spanish.