41–50 of 117 posts
Is this the sci-fi writer? if so, why is it important about AI?
Neal Stephenson is not any sci-fi writer. He's written (and reflected) at length about crypto, VR and the metaverse, ransomware, generative writing, privacy and in general early tech dystopia. Since he has already thought a lot about these topics before they became mainstream, his opinion might be interesting, if only for the head start he has.
> Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways. look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al). b…
> look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al) Hey, has anyone done an "AI" tool that will take the graphics that I inexpertedly pasted together for printing on a tshirt and make the background transparent nicely ? Magic wands always leave something on that they shouldn't and I don't have the skill or patience…
edit to add: honestly, if you take the old school approach of treating it like you're just cutting it out of a magazine or something, you can use the polygonal lasso tool and zoom in to get pretty decent results that most people will never judge too harshly. i do a lot of "pseudo collage" type stuff that's approximating the look of physical cut-and-paste and this is what i usually do now. you can play around with stroke layer FX with different blending modes to clean up the borders, too.
> It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this understatement are pretty important: - "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and species/biodiversity loss - whatever "shari…
Imperfect, but definitely better than most!
> It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this understatement are pretty important: - "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and species/biodiversity loss - whatever "shari…
Because humans like eating beef, and they like having emotional support from dogs
That seems to be true:
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/environment/weight-respons...
Wild land mammals weigh less than 10 percent of the combined weight of humans
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120
I mean it is pretty obvious when you think that 10,000 years ago, the Americas had all sorts of large animals, as Africa still does to some extent
And then when say the Europeans got here, those animals were mostly gone ... their "biomass" just collapsed
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Same thing with plants. There were zillions of kinds of plants all over the planet, but corn / wheat / potatoes are now an overwhelming biomass, because humans like to eat them.
Michael Pollan also had a good description of this as our food supply changing from being photosynthesis-based to fossil-fuel-based
Due to the Haber-Bosch process, invented in the early 1900's, to create nitrogen fertilizer
Fertilizer is what feeds industrial corn and wheat ... So yeah the entire "metabolism" of the planet has been changed by humans
And those plants live off of a different energy source now
> It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this understatement are pretty important: - "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and species/biodiversity loss - whatever "shari…
Yeah totally, I have read that the total biomass of cows and dogs dwarfs that of say lions or elephants Because humans like eating beef, and they like having emotional support from dogs That seems to be true: https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4% https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/environment/weigh…
> It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this understatement are pretty important: - "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and species/biodiversity loss - whatever "shari…
NZ is pretty unique, there is quite a lot of farmable land which is protected wilderness. There's a specific trust setup to help landowners convert property, https://qeiinationaltrust.org.nz/ Imperfect, but definitely better than most!
This is not really true. ~80% of NZ's farmable agricultural land is in the south island. But ~60% of milk production is done in the north island.
> Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways. look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al). b…
> look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al) Hey, has anyone done an "AI" tool that will take the graphics that I inexpertedly pasted together for printing on a tshirt and make the background transparent nicely ? Magic wands always leave something on that they shouldn't and I don't have the skill or patience…
It's an anthropocentric miss to worry about AI as another being. It's not really the issue in today's marketplace or drone battlefield. It's the scalability.
It's a hit to see augmentation as amputation, but a miss to not consider the range of systemic knock-on effects.
It's a miss to talk about nuclear weapons without talking about how they structured the UN and the world today, where nuclear-armed countries invade others without consequence.
And none of the prior examples - nuclear weapons, (writing?) etc. - had the potential to form a monopoly over a critical technology, if indeed someone gains enduring superiority as all their investors hope.
I think I'm less scared by the prospect of secret malevolent elites (hobnobbing by Chatham house rules) than by the chilling prospect of oblivious ones.
But most of all I'm grateful for the residue of openness that prompts him to share and us to discuss, notwithstanding slings and arrows like mine. The many worlds where that's not possible today are already more de-humanized than our future with AI.
Hogwash. The philosophy+AI crossover is the worst AI crossover.
> Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren’t human is to consider the fact that we’ve been doing exactly that for long as we’ve existed, because we live among animals. Another analogy that I like is about large institutions / corporations. They are, right now, kind of like AIs. Like Harari says in one of his books, Peugeot co. is an entity tha…
Did we survive these entities? By current projections, between 13.9% and 27.6% of all species would be likely to be extinct by 2070 [0]. The USA suffers an estimated 200,000 annual deaths associated with lacking health insurance [1]. Thanks to intense lobbying by private prisons, the US incarceration rate is 6 times that of Canada, despite similar economic development [2]. Sure, the human species is not yet on the br…
People choose to have fewer kids as they get richer, it's not about living conditions like so many people like to claim, otherwise poor people wouldn't be having so many children. Even controlling for high living conditions, like in Scandinavia, people still choose to have fewer kids.