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Gerry's avatar

You have a brilliant way of putting specific systems into the larger systems context and into their historical evolution. It is intellectually liberating to read you.

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Philip Koop's avatar

At the Molehills of Madness

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Mitchell Porter's avatar

You ask us to consider AI as just the latest inhuman infrastructure of modernity, alongside markets, bureaucracies, and representative government. Very well: the significance of LLMs, is that they would allow "modernity" to dispense with human beings entirely - the role of humans in all those social institutions could be completely filled by AIs, and they could continue to function.

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Alex Tolley's avatar

Using Lovecraft's Shoggoth is a similar error to humans anthropomorphizing AI (LLMs).

AIs are not living, and should be thought of as systems, and as "Accountabilibility Sinks" as Dan Davies has coined the term. Human agency has had mechanisms to at least help with bureaucratic accountability, from organizations that help solve a myriad of problems to the legal system. Sadly, the SCOTUS "Shadow Docket" has created a new Accountability Sink with its "irrational" decisions from the partisan majority of judges.

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Sam Pooley's avatar

Nice piece on NRP today about the Israeli military use of AI. Nice but very unpleasant in real life.

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Frank Ashe's avatar

This article made me think of an analogy I'll have to give further thought to:

From the point of view of Earth's entire ecosystem, the dangerous Shoggoth has been the evolution of human intelligence.

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