You can practically taste the frustration in the “prompt engineering” here. Just one more edge case bro, one more edge case and then the prompt will be perfect!

Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

Data and stats can tell you whatever story you want to promote

Seen this so many times at my work. There’s some bone-headed decision and the people in charge are like “look guys we ran the numbers”. But the methodology is messed up somehow, or they just ignored / misinterpreted the numbers while pretending they were following the data, or it doesn’t bear out in the real world; etc.

When data and common sense disagree you’d better be damn sure in the data.

When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don’t worry!) I’ll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.

My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice “You might want to check your blood pressure!” and “you still haven’t completed today’s tasks for Health+ points! But don’t worry, there’s still time!”

Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.

Couldn’t make it through the video, but this level of argument has been hashed and rehashed over literally the past thousand years. It’s in the training data out the wazoo. And yet the youtube commenters act like it’s the most insightful thing they’ve ever heard, and not copy-pasted from a mediocre philosophy 101 textbook.

each perspective is given its best possible representation.

This was a quite nuanced debate, better than what most humans are capable of.

I feel like we are nearing to the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves… – Hayao Miyazaki

Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.

Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(

Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”

Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.

The utter contempt doesn’t cost extra? Sweet!

But wait, there’s more!

AI Steve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vtKT9RrrI

Virtual Integrated Citizen: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/tech/openai-shuts-down-ai-mayor/index.html

Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)

AI party (apparently now defunct, if it was ever halfway serious in the first place): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/

Me: Mom I want AI mayor!

Mom: Shush now Saturn, we have AI mayor at home.

AI mayor at home:

https://www.ai-mayor.com/

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党

This is just weird. But I guess that’s to be expected from elections anywhere in the world, disgruntled groups use them to get their message out.

I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never let the left-turn signal turn green. Harrowing.

What’s your P(moon)?

Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding, there’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.’ That’s a gray area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you’re bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

Robots are becoming extremely capable – able to respond to very abstract commands like “move forward”, “get up”, “kick ball”, “reach for object”, etc.

Computers now have the cutting edge ability to-- *checks notes*– parse Zork text adventure style user input.

If you’ve done any reading on the history of AI you may recognize these sorts of commands as “blocks world”, which goes back to the '60s. Sure there’s been a ton of advancements since then, but just the basic act of a computer understanding “kick ball” is not exactly groundbreaking.

After Bard warned me against the perils of dropping an egg off a tower, twice, it decided to answer with the solution to the dynamic programming interview question instead of what I asked… but in Chinese lol.

Is this intelligence??

It’s not so much that self-driving is easier than automatic trains, but that it’s easier than passenger rail in the US at all. Everyone hates rail here it’s wild, and the safety expectations in the US are (weirdly) much lower for cars than anything else.

I tried to look up this Mr. Gerard’s lurid wikipedia past expecting at least a torture dungeon or wiki-cult or something; but all I found were a bunch of people grumpy that they couldn’t turn wikipedia articles into cryptocurrency ads.

Booring.

align[s] broadly with informed experts that the distribution of genetic traits associated with intelligence is non-zero

Now I’m not the smartest cookie in the bakery but I know a dog-whistle when I see it!

what the heck EA forum doesn’t have a block feature? That’s just… ew.

Also how long have all these people been obsessed with “woke” and “the left”? Because it’s been really obvious and over the top lately.