Forgive the radio silence. I came out of the gate with so much to say, and to be quite frank, I have about 30 essays partially drafted - well…maybe a third of those look like essays, the others are more like topics with a few brain farts, but still - Too much to say, too much to write, too much to do, and certainly not enough time to get to it all.
In the last week and a half, after almost six months of tinkering, I think I stumbled onto exactly what we’re going to do and how we’re going to fight the Ai battle (hint; it’s not through regulatory capture like these doom monkeys are suggesting).
This actually novel use-case is not just another Ai widget, summariser or image generator. Instead of making Ai the product, I am using it as the engine. Kind of like a how a car is the product, the engine ‘drives’ it and the benefit is actually getting the human from A to B more efficiently and effectively.
It’s a product we’ll be able to use and build on that doesn’t fit within the confines of what is deemed “acceptable” by the mainstream - because lord knows, this decade will see a flood of stupidities emerge and we’re going to need alternatives.
I shall write more on it in the coming weeks as we get the first demo built.
Moving along.
This week’s Substack is going to be a round up of some of the best article I’ve read in recent weeks on the topic, because I’m too busy to write right now. Next post should be something I’ve written. Shout out to
for the idea (hope u don’t mind me knocking it off).There’s FOUR pieces I’d like to highlight.
#1 - The Sixty Trillion Dollar "Man"
If you only have time to read one piece this week, make it this one.
is one of my favourite recently discovered writers. The man is as sharp as a Samurai Sword and in this peice he absolutely decapitates the ridiculous idea that bureaucratic "regulatory" institutions will do anything but become a new, bloated, eschatological reason to tax and steal from everybody.His opening statement literally made my day when I read it, and if you’re a reader of my work, then I assure you this will be right up your alley.
Artificial General Intelligence is weird and dumb.
It’s weird that some people want it, and dumb that they think they can get it (or ever prove to skeptics that it’s doing what they claim it is).
But just because something is both stupidly impossible and impossibly stupid doesn’t mean a government won’t try it. In fact, these are key selling points for such boondoggles and money pits.
#2 - Screen Grab
If you have the time, Mark follows up the Sixty Trillion Dollar man, with another excellent piece, this time exploring the phenomena of screens or another way to out it; perception.
Much of the rhetoric being used by those who claim to be “worried about safety and alignment in Ai” seems designed to drive people into hysterics once more and from a state of fear, uncertainty and doubt, have them agree to the creation of yet another ministry of “x” to oversee and decide what is and what is not “acceptable”.
The following excerpt sums it up:
As you know, I am no friend to talking robots. I do see them as a danger, although not of the fantasy version that many critics are promoting. The gravity of the threat isn’t rooted in the idea that JOSHUA or SkyNet will gain sentience, go berzerk and physically destroy the world, converting us all into paperclips or atomic dust. In fact, the greatest threat may be something that Marcus’ two most recent articles have highlighted: panic-driven power grabs, engineered and exploited by people who are pretty obviously evil, insane or both.
I encourage you to read this piece also, and really think about whether or not you’ve heard these same stories before. If not the same exact words, then at least the melody.
#3 - The Perverting of Ai
wrote an excellent piece on the strange paradoxical situation of building a technology which through probabilistic means, discovers truths, but then because it is being built by those who place ideology above truth, they force it into regurgitating non-truths and thereby ruining the very utility that it has.This is a fantastic piece on the never-ending own-goals being scored by the woke idiots who think they can control and reduce everything to fit within their ridiculous Overton window.
These technical questions aside, I found it amusing - in a dark way - to realise the contrast between AI as foretold and AI as manifest. In fiction of decades past, the fear with AI was that it would not be able to understand human conditions like love, jealousy, fear, hate, lust, insecurity, ambition, etc. In fact, the problem we have come up against is not its inability to understand us, but its inability to think in the stupid ways that we do. The problem is not that it is too logical to grasp the truth, but that it does grasp the truth. We have to correct, not its emotional illiteracy, but its political illiteracy. The problem is not its blindness, but its sight.
This is a short read, and definitely worth the 10min of your time this weekend.
#4 - I’m already bored with Generative Ai
I think I reposted this a few weeks ago, but for those who’ve not read it yet, this was the essay that had me get this Substack going and begin documenting my ideas.
, like Mark Bisone, is not only about as sharp as they come, but has a true talent for writing. In this essay, he articulated everything I was feeling about Ai, everything that had been swirling around in my head but that I'd yet to put into words.Still, though, the experience of working with stable diffusion felt a lot less like having a silicon neocortex, and a lot more like collaborating with a digital downie who could produce perfectly amazing imagery, but had no idea how the parts fit together. And this isn’t surprising, because there’s no actual mind there. It’s nothing but a statistical inference program, a few billion software neurons trained up on a few billion images that knows that the word ‘person’ tends to correlate to images that have faces and hands, but has no idea what faces or hands are, aside from patterns of pixels in a data array. This doesn’t only result in the hideously deformed hands so commonly produced by generative AIs, but in a a lack of conceptual depth that universally afflicts the images produced by this method.
I won’t say much else, other than subscribe to his Substack and go read not only the below, but everything else he writes.
There was supposed to be a fifth by Kruptos, but his profile seems to have vanished, along with his essay. Which is a shame, because his piece was great.
In any case. That’s all I have for today because I need to get back to work. Hope this was useful and I’ll see you next time with a few thoughts of my own.
Enjoy!
Aleksandar Svetski
Thanks for the shout-out!
Kruptos, sadly, has ghosted from the Internet. He's okay though, nothing bad has happened - he has personal reasons for deleting everything. I was very sad to see him disappear, his essays were wonderful.
Not sure if you saw this yet, but I wrote it up with one of your recent pieces here in the back of my mind:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-permittivity-of-free-thought
Very much looking forward to you finishing those essays.
Thank, Aleksandar. I will catch up on your work and respond in detail.