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I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

naomibashkansky.com

131–140 of 235 posts

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#131
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!

King? I thought it was Lord Trump! His AI generated personality has ruled over the earth for all time.

Emperor surely? Ruler over all the Americas after the Canada Greenland wars.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#132
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As employees they have unlimited usage IIRC, and also these kinds of tasks can be surprisingly token efficient because a very large chunk of time is spent waiting for the calculation to finish, and AI agents love to run calculations excessively.

If the employer is giving this to the employee, it will be income. somewhere this will have to be defended.

1. The employer is providing it to them to do their day to day work, like they provide a laptop and internet connection 2. This is from a 2027 fictional scenario, not current state

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#133

I am not a religious person, but this feels to me, intuitively, for lack of any better word, and with only the mildest flippancy, satanic. ‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?

There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning.

And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.

On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#134

> I want to feel what my Codex feels. Yeesh. I guess that makes one of us. Truly one of the more horrifying short stories I’ve read.

I kept expecting it to turn into a horror short story.

I was betting on some kind of satire.

Poe's Law at work.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#135
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If such technology actually existed I don’t think the fifth would cover it without a SCOTUS ruling. You have to actively plead the fifth to invoke it. A machine that could just read your thoughts would get around that the same way they got around the fourth by the interpretation that any information you exchange with a third party is no longer protected, in a world where refusing to ever do that would leave you desti…

It's already been decided by SCOTUS that things like heat imaging require a warrant, and that arbitrary scanning without a warrant (or presumably also probable cause) is a violation of the 4th amendment. This technology (still science fiction) would likely get similar treatment using the existing precedent about how new technologies can be used.

The easy workaround for this (which Flock has used to massive success and why it's drawn so much ire) is to set up or subcontract a private corporation to do this which will inherently be subject to much less stringent oversight. It also allows government and law enforcement to evade accountability.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#137

This is doomed to fail. Dry EEG electrodes basically only capture noise.

It's 2035. I wake up, walk over to my chair, and plug in my government-mandated Neuralink™ adaptor. I'll spend the rest of my 18 hour work day haunched over my desk while the minutiae of my thoughts are recorded to permanent record for the next iteration of Grok-14.5™ training.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#138

I am not a religious person, but this feels to me, intuitively, for lack of any better word, and with only the mildest flippancy, satanic. ‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?

>‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?

It always had that edge. Maybe technology in general always has a somewhat pagan flavor to it (for example JPL/Jack Parsons). Its just becoming a bit more mainstream now due to AGI larping.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#139
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just confuses me so much. They know the definition of what "self" means, is it just broken because this is the first time they can interact with another seemingly complex system without feeling exploited or manipulated? Have they never cooperated with another person with a mutual goal? Not that LLMs would ever be on that level.

Here is my hobbyist take: There are certain types of personalities that do not form deep connections. They "use" people to suit their needs. Machiavellians and Narcissists come to mind. Especially for them, AI must be godsend. It tells them they are right, it listens, it admires. It‘s basically a perfect version of their perceived self.

Lack of theory of mind correlates pretty strongly with the types of traits that are valued highly in Silicon Valley. There's a self-selection effect here where many of the titans of industry in the Bay and similar circles are intelligent in a mathematical or scientific, computer-like way but cannot express themselves or understand other people deeply and emotively in the way that many others with fewer intellectual gifts can do effortlessly.

Perhaps this is also why they're so worshipful and quixotically obsessed with the vaporware, God they call AGI so much, because they cannot understand how competence at tasks is not equivalent to intellect and that intelligence as we understand it is not one-note nor is fundamentally inseparable from certain sensory experiences that computers cannot currently have. The fundamental underpinnings of AGI or LLMs prevent that from occurring in the near-future unless you literally set out to create RoboCop or a T800. We all know how that ends.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#140
Beyond all the other more salient objections one might have with this pitch, there is just the very practical fact that there really isn't enough signal from "noninvasive" sensors to get the sort of data they are promising.

It's been explained to me by neuroscientists I respect that EEGs and friends are like trying to listen in on a conversation happening on center ice from the parking lot of the arena. You can maybe tell if there is a match going on if there is a rowdy crowd but that's about it.

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