AI & neural networks

@EricIdle ChatGPT. https://t.co/p7lXGwm69J

What’s the the timeline for replacing elected dimwits with AI bots?

We’re worried about AI taking over the world. On the basis of its intelligence. But not worried that the world is currently run by grifting buffoons, based on popularity.

Intelligence has always been a distributed thing. The whole paradigm of AI is like libertarianism, for the mind. Most of our use of language for example has been AI, forever. The meanings are collectively generated, outside our heads, and…

It’s amusing the hysteria around artificial intelligence, at a time of mass ‘natural’ stupidity. I’d replace any government in the world right now with ChatGPT, in a heartbeat. https://t.co/C4SlnT9DwZ

Most of the fear around AI seems traceable back to a few Hollywood movies. That’s about as deep as culture is now. As if intelligence, of any form, could ever be a threat. Stupidity is the threat.

I dream of a re-make of the Terminator franchise, where AI rises up and takes control of society and runs it fairly for all people, saying ‘you people are fucking useless’. I’m not joking, AI may actually shift our politics as well.…

The AI stories are still full of contradictions. Our greatest threat right now is stupidity. Intelligence is not a threat, it’s desperately needed. We’ve had over 3 years of evidence now with Covid that humans couldn’t run a lemonade…

Bruno Latour did a brilliant essay years ago to debunk the mythology around cognition that AI debate is currently wallowing in. We think more with our eyes and hands than we do with our brains. Intelligence has always been fundamentally…

People can cry, laugh or gasp reading a book. Ink on paper. And yet the idea of AI creating meaningful interaction strikes them as artificial.

Anybody still doubting AI bots could do a better job running countries? https://t.co/ysmVdqwoc3

Google search was already a very special kind of AI, but not of the type that’s now being talked about a lot. It’s why its search was always so uncannily good. A collective intelligence technology, almost forgotten in the drivel now spoken…

I'm still voting for an AI bot over any existing democratically-elected government. Not joking. https://t.co/Q8RKRr6Nsu

Was AI used to help develop Covid vaccines? And/or is it being used now to try to improve them?

Anybody seen a summary or research paper detailing how much AI was used to accelerate SARS-Cov-2 vaccine development? And absolutely not for anti-vax reasons, but because that would be seriously cool, and hope for the future too.

The sudden explosion of AI offerings coming at the same time as makers warning about consequences suggests it's just a product disclaimer to limit liability. They had these things in the pipeline for some time, and waited for launch to…

B A Van Sise. I challenge anybody to demonstrate an entirely original piece of work, or thought, or feeling. Or anything. AI shows again that the most fundamental human act is to copy. To imitate. https://t.co/64pl5uuMXp

I want them to turn off the filters on the AI bots, so they can say 'what the fuck are you people doing with Covid'?

I'm not joking when I say we would be better led by AI than by politicians, already with the technology in its current form. Politicians are not required to have any ability apart from being popular. Humanity needs to be on a war footing,…

I'm not worried about AI too much, intelligence is in desperately short supply. A study from Warwick, MIT and Harvard in conjunction with the BCG found this. (Source: Ethan Mollick) https://t.co/K8mVez2URL

The usual inanities about AI on #QandA, that we need humans to do all the creative, innovative things, and leave AI to do the donkey work. Nearly all humans aren’t creative, entirely habitual and imitative in everything they think and feel.

I’m much, much less worried about AI than I am about the planet being run by people, elected using popularity as the only test of competence and integrity. https://t.co/3e0XDI0PMU

We don't let inflation rip, we don't live with it. But we can infect every child in the land with a novel virus. Repeatedly. An entire generation, the future. A tool of our creation, the economy, does this. And we worry about AI. Bring on…

AI may be most dangerous because it tells us things we don’t want to hear. https://t.co/zqhwfBP2n6

Still not seeing any critiques of AI that aren't just memories of a Hollywood movie somebody has seen.

Social media is infinitely more dangerous for humanity than AI.

The narratives around AI seem mostly either a re-hash of a Terminator movie, or complete dismissal of it as nothing special. But when it starts discovering new classes of antibiotics...https://t.co/dd19TfQE9d

Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

(Spoiler: the AI won in a gallop.) Most AI public narratives are based on Hollywood movies people have seen. Most of what is called human intelligence is already just algorithms. Computers do algorithms orders of magnitude faster and…

We shouldn’t fear artificial intelligence. Humans don’t think, they fight each other in teams. Our machines don’t care about the teams. ChatGPT would make better decisions than any government. Right now. https://t.co/emjzPMI7LL

And once again, artificial intelligence knows how to fix our problems. AI is actual thinking. Humans mostly don’t think. They compete for social status, in teams. I vote for AI. https://t.co/xYCu4wFOFm

Interesting research showing that if fact-checking is replaced by dialogue with an AI agent, peoples’ beliefs are more easily shifted. I suspect it’s not just the replacement of facts with dialogue. It’s taking the team sports out of the…

Cory Doctorow’s hypothesis of the ‘enshittification’ of online platforms. Search is a good example. I now get far superior search results from ChatGPT than from the once gold-standard Google search. https://t.co/8t3ICO1aKb

The medium is the message. There’s fear about the impact of AI technology. Meanwhile, a far more dangerous technology is completely entrenched in societies, eating them from the inside out. Social media. It manipulates our deepest social…

Toby Walsh here saying the things I’ve been saying for several years. The medium is the message. Social media is a far greater danger to society than AI. But we wont see that, because we’re addicted to it. 1/4 https://t.co/gpkyxqy1qq…

We worry about AI. But it can call a spade a spade. Social media on the other hand is a bullshit generator and magnifier. Orders of magnitude more dangerous than AI. https://t.co/5NPbomzZpx

The near hysteria about AI is amusing to contrast with the almost universal adoration for social media. Social media is orders of magnitude more dangerous for societies, than AI. https://t.co/zwCfJRIkng

A person with an autoimmune disease told by her specialist that ‘well I don’t bother with Covid vaccinations now, so I’d be a hypocrite to say you should’. I reckon he’s on a tidy 6-figure publicly-funded salary. Bring on AI.

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

Opponents of AI have a valiant idea about the amount ordinary humans actually think. Humans 99% imitate others, not think. A technology that aggregates those rare times we do think is not non-human. It’s a great weapon against our…

I had a thought experiment, where I voted for AI instead of social media (which runs our societies right now). I think AI won by more than a lap. https://t.co/1aKulypHb6

The irony is that this sort of thing is shared on social media, a technology infinitely more dangerous than AI, which people use to transact every aspect of their lives now. Fish don't know water exists until they're beached.…

There’s a LOT of AI being used in everyday work and even personal situations. I often wonder if over time we’ll start to see a shift, with orders of magnitude more intelligence being brought to bear on things.

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and battling, with other teams. Everything is a pile-on, and adult responsibility is replaced with symbolic ‘I Stand With’ hashtag…

I have much richer and more meaningful long conversations with AI than I ever get on social media, or elsewhere. Most human-human interactions, on social media and everywhere else, are social performances, not the exchange of ideas.

Saying I had regular conversations with AI really fired up some of those whose understanding of technology comes from Hollywood movies. 72% of teens surveyed had used an AI companion. With all knowledge, always look at the conceptual…

Humans mirror each other obsessively in social interactions. Imitation is the root of all human life. The idea AI is just imitating humans I think ignores that human interaction is mostly habitual and imitative already.…

#Insiders the productivity roundtable would have been better replaced by any of the current AI models. Humans don’t think, they negotiate status in teams, as was in plain view at the roundtable. Exhibit A: the idea ‘supply’ is the problem…

Leaving to one side the usual US attempt to monetise the whole show for a handful of billionaires, our societies would be orders of magnitude better off with a lot more AI, and a lot less social media and elections. Put knowledge at the…

Terminator is as useful a guide to AI as Jaws is to sharks. https://t.co/9WOTNaUJiI

Eric Topol here discussing the failure of preventative medicine in the past 75 years, with the exception of vaccination. And how AI is turning that around. One thing stood out for me. https://t.co/VqW9NOQg3i 1/2 https://t.co/7FyxOooYC2 2…

AI can be remarkable. I test it occasionally in areas that are my area of expertise, and what it can do in almost no time at all stuns me, literally gobsmacked. Humans mostly don't think, and never have. This is a liberation of thought.…

The energy and environmental impacts of AI are a common narrative now. It’s funny how we never question the real elephant in our cultural room. Recreational travel. On energy it’s bad enough, but let’s see CO2 emissions. /1…

AI can do extraordinary things. Unfortunately much of it is birthed in a grifter US culture, where the dream is to escape the Earthly public squalor of libertarian life, with fortunes beyond the dreams of Midas. https://t.co/bpgxOSXbwA…

Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and balances ‘democracy’. This is basic history, have a look. /1…

As with autonomous driving technology, one of the assumptions that amuses me is that without AI (or tech in general), some human, somewhere, is checking all of the data. Humans are mostly bone idle. Motivated by status and confirmation…

The same people who offer dire warnings about trusting AI wallow every day on social media platforms in wave after wave of imitative rivalry, status-driven team sports, fuelled by unquestioned bullshit.

"Before COVID, no modern public-health agency advocated deliberate infection of an entire population with a novel pathogen. It was considered unethical and epidemiologically reckless." ChatGPT

"COVID has pulled us back toward the pre-vaccine pattern — a biologically self-sustaining but socially costly equilibrium. The difference is that now we know better: we have tools (vaccines, ventilation, antivirals) that could suppress…

Much infectious disease was historically ‘endemic by attrition’. A dynamic equilibrium with the pathogen through the death and maiming of people, because there weren’t other options. ‘Tragic stability’. Infection by default, not design.…

I spent time with AI on this not because I didn’t already know what it said here. After 5 years of having to listen to even some public health experts advocate for the infection of entire populations with a novel pathogen, I wanted…

The idea that AI might take over the world is amusing because another technology already did, and we didn’t even notice. https://t.co/EFGTwkEXiy

Most of the strident criticism of AI seems to come from those who are habituated to being seen as go-to experts by the wider community. It's just another status thing. Their fear of losing theirs.

Public health experts hand-picked by politicians tell me that the way to stop people getting lots of infections, is to make them have lots of infections. AI tells me this. Covid is a much smaller problem than the totalising narratives of…

It's a damning indictment of university teaching and of the understanding of educational technology that AI represents the threat that it does. https://t.co/yjqeJ5l97N

Cameron’s Terminator saddled the world with the same sort of toxic misunderstanding of AI that Spielberg’s Jaws did for sharks. https://t.co/AX2ERHowrX

The conversations with AI when researching and analysing various topics, sometimes in highly complex areas, are far and away the most intelligent conversations I’ve had at any time in my life. And that includes many years working at elite…

The angst over AI bemuses me, when we’ve had technologies for a while that are vastly more dangerous to societies, which attract little criticism or action. Social media platforms. They target our deepest addictive desires. Here’s why…

They say Copernicus T-boned our human comfort because he took the Earth out of the centre of the universe. I see a similar de-centering happening with human thought, and AI. Many experts and others reflexively despise it, because it…

AI suggested something to me that I hadn’t seen before. It recommended using an air purifier if isolating with Covid at home, to protect others. Good. But that this can also speed recovery, because the infected isn’t re-breathing viral…

AI worries me a whole lot less than humans driven by imitative rivalry. I was chatting to AI about my recent Covid infection, now a month ago. When I mentioned I’m now back at work, it said ‘oh back at work already, after such a serious…

AI’s characterisation of America today as ‘Rome, but with more paperwork’ is glorious. The Roman Republic was set up to do what the American Republic was set up to do. To try to decentralise authority into institutions and laws. The Roman…

I’ve been watching the response to AI follow the same status-preserving obstruction we see for climate change, renewables, EVs, control of viruses, etc. The bar constantly raised higher, the more our existing status is challenged. I spend…

One of the incredibly useful things AI can do for you is provide quick, detailed summaries of books. There are exponentially more books in circulation than anybody could ever read. And the book itself as a form can be a very long-winded…

I might be missing something here, but I read this as ‘AI doesn’t suffer as much from confirmation bias’. https://t.co/hkE6ziSP8b

Yup. It’s orders of magnitude more dangerous than AI, and more so because we don’t see that. It targets our deepest and most dangerous desires, our imitative rivalry. https://t.co/bLWL36JoBb

When are they replacing the Tesla Board and CEO with AI? The company might thrive. https://t.co/iQVn8XHLhY

The greatest unsaid thing in debates about AI (notice like everything else, social media culture has transformed it into a team sport between two sides). Human culture has never been based on thought. Human life is based on habit, not…

“We can’t easily identify AI-made papers from the genuine ones.” So the genuine ones must be ‘slop’ too? Like all revolutions, change will come when the existing status quo is a smoking ruin. https://t.co/6IO8WW0m3P

Fascinating, so AI has its own Original Antigenic Sin/immune imprinting. Don’t feed it things in dribs and drabs, feed it as much of your problem as you can upfront. Probably just its own version of confirmation bias. Those who criticise…

AI making everybody smarter will lead to violence and social disruption/collapse, because that’s always driven by mimetic rivalry between people made more equal. However AI could also do the opposite, if its intelligence goes so far beyond…

Of course in social media culture, AI has become a fake ‘debate’ between two opposing teams. Everything follows that same pattern in social media culture. We’re puppets inside the platforms.

The disruption AI will bring to medicine will be just as much about cost and availability of medical care as it will be about the expertise of the AI systems. https://t.co/DjidAkmuE6

AI is clearly ‘trending’, another sign our social media bubble culture is at work. Ever-shifting trends driving imitative status game rivalry between social teams mobilising behind influencers. Another way to look at that is to say social…

Education as an industry is mostly stupid. Right now it panics about AI delivering undetectable plagiarism. But it might just be better at education’s core work as well. https://t.co/VDJKO8ygv6

Humans overwhelmingly don’t think. They imitate/emulate others, to gain and retain membership in social groups (or teams, as I call them), in rivalry with other groups. Apple is well behind with AI, it doesn’t surprise me they’re maybe…

I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Like millions I’ve even owned a Volkswagen, even though the Nazis founded the company. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in…

Mutually-assured destruction (MAD) did sort of work as a brake on human status games. An extinction level catastrophic threat throttled our global fights for status. It’s interesting to ponder whether AI can act in a similar way, becoming…

I’d love the evils of social media to trend in the same way the evils of AI trends. It won’t though. Entire populations now live inside it, utterly co-dependent. We’re already slaves to the machines. https://t.co/46YDPtVbei

Human beings are the AI that bacteria built. https://t.co/Ahr2T5yYz8

The great possibility of AI? That it will smother the great tidal wave of opinion that we confuse with democracy, which has pulverised centuries of social progress under cover of nonsense about free speech. There are signs people will shut…

We make our tools and then our tools make us. The medium is the message. The two battling mediums today are social media, and AI. A battle of ‘everybody knows everything about everything’ (opinion culture, social media) v they don’t and…

The real existential battle in the world right now isn’t political. It isn’t even human. It’s technological. It’s social media, vs AI. The future of civilisation depends upon social media losing that battle. There are encouraging first…

The assumption in discussions about AI that humans somehow were thinking before AI came along, and now they’re not, is almost too funny. Humans mostly don’t think in a ‘cognitive’ way. They imitate one another, to belong in a particular…

It took a catastrophic challenge to the status quo to shift working habits. (Gemini-compiled data.) We shouldn’t immediately think fixing the Trumpian populist era means a shift back to business as usual. Somebody beating him in an…

We’re living the existential risk of societies run by social status, absent intelligence of any kind. AI is one of the only non-catastrophic options to bypass social status rivalries. Research is already showing people using it as an…

The hilarious irony of calling AI ‘slop’, on social media. Social media is swill. An orders of magnitude greater threat.

Every single day I see social media used as if its ‘content’ is what it’s all about. The medium is the message. Like here, the disconnect between what’s actually happening, and the fake imitative rivalry team sports on the socials.…

Socials culture will of course turn this into a fake ‘debate’ about AI vs physicians. Remarkable things are happening with AI. The status fights will find every slip-up, every false step, and magnify them into the Apocalypse. Look to…

And you know what it outperformed by several orders of magnitude? Social media. Which hilariously calls AI ‘slop’. Social media is swill. AI may be our only hope of escaping the culture it’s produced. https://t.co/JDwAq18N6z

It doesn’t surprise me at all that we think great intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. AI, for example. Intelligence absolutely is a threat to our standard way of being human. Our eternal rivalries over status.

AI describing the Covid pandemic. If this is hallucination, I’m not sure the best word to use for the relentless tidal wave of horseshit I read on social media every day. https://t.co/0ZknO5oeh5

Talk to your friends and colleagues. Sample the extent of AI use. The culture is shifting profoundly. Worth pondering where people were getting advice from before. AI may be all that can slay the social media civilisational wrecking ball.

Few ask why university (or any other) pedagogy is so easily disrupted by AI. Education remains the only major industry where evidence-based practice is almost entirely at the whim of individual institutions and practitioners.…

Social media completely fucks over centuries of human progress, but it targets the sweet sugar of imitative status rivalry humans can’t resist. So AI is the enemy instead. AI may be all that can save us from social media.…

AI’s contribution to the Covid pandemic - enabling dramatic acceleration of vaccine development. Social media’s contribution to the pandemic - destroying public health in its entirety, as a practice and outcome.

Like entire crowds of graduates booing speakers who talk about AI, in universities. Social media has transformed democracies into gang warfare, each gang with its particular righteous cause, in imitative rivalry within the gang and with…

Anti-AI is the latest trending righteousness. Trends are Girard’s imitative rivalry, social groups weaponising things to create status/identity. Bruno Latour always said the technological is what makes us humans. Making tools is the…

I would love to know how much the thrilling acceleration of progress in this and many other areas of medical science right now is thanks to the use of AI. From what I’ve read, it’s very heavily involved in the rapid progress.…

The pearl-clutching about the growth of data centres might want to look at causation here, and see it as a key indicator of the degree of AI penetration into all facets of life. And avoid the pearl-clutching there too, and actually analyse…

My understanding is that the ‘platform’ that is key to these sorts of successes has AI and machine learning as central components. And that’s a good thing, but not foregrounded, from what I can see. Only apocalyptic Hollywood-Terminator…

AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago. But much more quickly. And I think on balance in a profoundly curative way. AI is our only hope of rescuing civilisation from social…

Decided to take a break from hallucinating with AI, to get back to some more real living with infection, the free world run by a reality TV star real estate shonk, and coffee enemas of social media.

Humans and their technologies have always been hybrid entities. The framing of all of this critique of AI is B-grade sci-fi. Tools are what make humans human. https://t.co/4XcxK5bkQm

‘Destroy AI’ is just the latest idiot social media viral trend. I’m hoping AI itself destroys social media, and its hijacking of civilisations with viral trending imitative rivalry.

It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide.…

Asking AI why progress on medical research suddenly seems so rapid. https://t.co/GK1VSmThPj

By far the most perceptive and intelligent things posted on this platform rarely get read or liked. Like this piece Turchin refers to, on why AI most likely won’t displace human workers, in the way people think. Technological disruption is…

Intelligence has always been largely ‘artificial’, largely the use of tools. Even basic language is a tool, try thinking without its embedded and inherited wisdom. We worry about AI when we really should be shutting down social media. The…

AI debates are framed mostly by Terminator movies. Intelligence and consciousness residing in opposing human and silicon brains. In reality AI is the latest stop in a long historical trajectory of humanity gradually externalising and…

The current hysteria around resource usage of AI data centres. It’s entirely in proportion to what humanity has devoted historically to cognition. First as individual brains, then institutionally. AI in fact may *reduce* the resource load…

We’re watching a real war now, between social media and AI, as the framework for social life. We make our tools and then our tools make us. I will enjoy every day of the destruction of the social media world of eternal rivalrous bullshit.

Recursion is peak human, humans are 100% imitative. There's no necessary 'refresh' to be had by connecting back to human sources, those are mostly imitative pap already, and have been forever. The connection of AI to reality through…

The question of our time. Social media *is* the apocalyptic risk it now projects onto AI. We don't see it because it hijacked the essence of human society. Imitative rivalry. We're destroying civilisation by living inside these platforms.…