#1 calgary

[ratatatastic]

"Battle of Alberta, right? It was my first game: Calgary, Edmonton. We would play them in the preseason, and you know—trying to make the team I'd always be asking him to fight in preseason, always. I'd be runnin' my mouth—like, tryna fight the biggest, baddest guys, tryna make an impression.

And he would never fight me. He'd always tell me, like If you make the team, I'll fight ya. You don't have to worry about that, but I'm not fightin' ya preseason. And I totally respect it, I'm not gonna chase him down. It is what it is. He's established—I'm looking for my chance.

So I get called up, we're playing Edmonton in Edmonton: Battle of Alberta. [He's] over there on the other side, and it's like the coolest thing ever... you know, the buildup was crazy 'cuz I knew if the opportunity presented itself—if the game went the way I hoped it would, I would get an opportunity to fight him.

I remembered in warmups tryna skate by the redline initially just kind-of gettin' a feel for it—to see if I have to say something or whatever... He's got no bucket on, his big, bald head is glarin' around, he skates by the redline with the biggest smile on his face, and just gives me the biggest wink...

At that moment I knew Okay, he remembers. It's gonna happen at some point.

We were up 1, I think it was 2-1 going into intermission or whatever—Oh, no, I think it was 1-1 and we had just scored so the position I'm like Yeah, I don't know if I can fight him now because we have the momentum and we're winning the game. I don't want to lose a fight, then we lose a game and now I'm, like, never getting a chance again.

You kind-of gotta play the game within the game like [...] there's an opportunity to fight, and there's an opportunities where you shouldn't fight. Things weren't looking good, then they score and now we need a spark. I'm like Fucking perfect.

I just skate by their bench and I'm like It's time, big boy! He jumps out, we line up, and he goes We squarin' up or we goin' right away?

I'm like I'm not fuckin' squarin' up with you right now! We're goin' right away!

Drop em, we go right away, grab each other. I know he's a lefty so he's gonna let go—let's go of my right arm before he throws one. I threw one. Big boy went down, he jumped back up pretty quick. I don't know, I tell people all the time, I'm like I would've been in the league fuckin' 2 years earlier if there was good footage of this fuckin' fight!

For some reason—For some reason, the cameras cut out. I don't know if [he] had his cousins working the cameras or something that night, or if they're in the video room or what happened.

That was my first NHL game.

It's funny 'cuz Chucky was there—Chucky's there and he knows, he saw, he always laugh when I say that I would've been in the league earlier 'cuz he knows how things like that go. You get a little bit of energy and buzz around ya, and then kind-of momentum takes you a little bit further but unfortunate[ly], I missed that opportunity but I don't regret a thing.

[...]

The opportunity was there, I just—unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Hockey Gods said not yet." (Ryan Lomberg reminiscing over his first NHL game/fight) (x)(x) (please go watch the second link to see lombos giant smile as he tells this story jfc)

and other genuinely bonkers things to say about a hockey player in your first fight... like why did this need to be said like that...what

[theworldofwars]

Men from the CEF at Sarcee Camp, Calgary, Canada. c.1916. "Home Was Never Like This"

[oldshowbiz]

[purecommemasolitude]

So I’ve been out all night without a chance to see how the oilers have been doing and now that I am home and have had time to check it. I wish I hadn’t

[rabbitcruiser]

Alberta joined the Canadian confederation on September 1, 1905.

[sun-ni-day]

“We were gay”

RDA and Michael Shanks when asked about Jack and Daniel’s relationship

[tkachunk]

the case for mark kastelic

that's my arizona-born hockey player

1. dressed up as jesus for halloween and pulled this face

2. is, as far as anyone knows, the only player to ever have recorded his first nhl fight and first nhl goal at the exact same time

3. now. I have no proof of this but I'm pretty sure he grew his hair out so his fights would look more dramatic

3.5. (this one maybe should've been #3 tbh) likes to get into a good fight!!

4. is but ~670ish game away from being the person in his family who has played in the most nhl games. the agony of never living up to your family's legacy etc etc

[love-fireflysong]

Well just got a call this morning letting me know that my application was approved, so you're girl is officially moving (again 😒) into her new apartment in three weeks!

Now to do all the other moving shit. Like hiring movers and buying boxes so I can pack all my shit up. Again.

God I hate moving so much 😭

[calpicowater]

Week 46.9/52: November 14th - November 20th 2022 | Downtown Calgary

A trip isn’t complete without walking around downtown at least once. This was my once. I only had time for once. Always grateful to be here regardless. 

[trukademy-canada]

Class 1 Driver Training Calgary

Trukademy offers specialized Class 1 driver training in Calgary, providing a unique blend of hands-on experience and in-depth instruction. Our program is designed to fully equip you with the skills and knowledge required for a successful trucking career. With experienced instructors and advanced training techniques, we focus on real-world scenarios, road safety, and comprehensive vehicle operation. Whether you're starting fresh or upgrading your skills, Trukademy ensures you're well-prepared to excel in the Class 1 licensing exam and beyond.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"On April 26, in a meeting room at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC, Chief Justice Thomas Mathers of the Manitoba Supreme Court opened the inaugural meeting of the Royal Commission on Industrial Relations. Justice Mathers told his audience:

The upheaval taking place throughout the world, and the state of men’s minds during this critical period, make this the time for drastic changes of the industrial and social systems of Canada

Before hearing any evidence at all, Mathers was serving notice that his Commission wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

The Commission was the public face of the Unionist government’s response to the wave of unrest sweeping the country. At the same time as White was secretly asking for naval support, and the military and police forces were dispatching their undercover agents to spy on and harass the Reds, the Borden cabinet wanted to show that it was at least considering the demands for progressive reform coming from many quarters of society. It also wanted to assess how much of the present discontent was based on legitimate grievances and how much on the infamous “outside agitators” that employers loved to blame. As a result, not many days after the Western Labor Conference in Calgary, Ottawa announced the creation of the Mathers Commission, consisting of the Chief Justice and six other commissioners: three business representatives and three from the world of labour, including Tom Moore, president of the national Trades and Labor Congress.

Many activists dismissed the commission as a ploy to camouflage the government’s actual disinterest in reform. After it was all over, John Bruce, one of the labour representatives on the Commission, said it was “one of the bitterest lessons that ever I learned about political chicanery.” But this was probably unfair. Government ministers certainly wanted to defuse the powder keg, but they hoped that the Commission might actually do some good, first of all by identifying the extent of the discontent and second by providing some ideas that would help map out a moderate middle ground between left and right. Or, in the words of Chairman Mathers, the commission wanted to find ways “for establishing permanent improvements in the relations between employers and employees.” Obviously the government hoped that organized labour would buy into the moderate option, but this is not the same thing as calling the Commission a cynical ploy designed to drown significant reform in an ocean of talk.

As they set about their business, commissioners could be in no doubt as to the state of mind of Canadian workers. On the second day of hearings in Victoria, E.S. Woodward, a member of the Victoria Trades and Labor Council, served notice that

no government has ever impressed the workers, as a class, with more distrust than the present Government that is sitting at Ottawa.

This defiant tone of opposition was typical of what commissioners would hear over the subsequent seven weeks of testimony as they made their way by train across the country. "I advocate government ownership of everything,” declared machinist Frederick Eldridge in Sudbury, to loud applause from his audience. “I am a Bolshevist,” labour organizer Clifford Dane announced at the Halifax hearing, “and I will warn these two governments that trouble is coming and the men will have what belongs to them.”

In all, commissioners heard from 486 witnesses in twenty-eight cities from Vancouver Island to Cape Breton. Of course, not every witness was a socialist firebrand. Some were business owners who indulged in the customary Red scaremongering. In Vancouver, for example, N.G. Neill, manager of the British Columbia Employers’ Association, warned that the Bolsheviks in the city were being allowed to “undermine our whole system” and warned the commission that “we have to take some steps to stop this intrigue.” Neill was supported by J.J. Coughlan, a shipyard manager, who blamed socialist labour leaders for all the unrest.

Labour representatives often agreed that a crisis was impending. “Yes, my opinion is that we are on the top of a volcano that is not in any way latent,” warned Thomas Barnard of the New Westminster Trades and Labour Council. But they rejected the notion that a conspiracy of extremists led the unrest. Instead they blamed worker discontent on more prosaic causes: low wages, long working hours, the high cost of living, and lack of security. Vancouver shipwright J.W. Wilkinson put it passionately:

They [the workers] just feel that they are like a piece of merchandise, and that their chances of life are a gamble consisting in the possibility of someone coming along tomorrow to buy them for a day or hire their labour just for a little while, having no personal interest in them whatever more than if they were a piece of wood or a piece of brick.

In Calgary, the commissioners heard from William Irvine, a thirty-four-year-old Unitarian minister whose church had removed him from the pulpit for his anti-war opinions. He told them:

I think what the working men generally want today is truly democratic control of industry. Some people talk of evolution and some of revolution. In Calgary evolution means doing nothing and revolution means doing something.

He reassured the panel that he was not proposing violence but rather “a complete fundamental change in the way we live and do business.”

(Another of the witnesses appearing in Calgary was the RNWMP secret agent Frank Zaneth, using his undercover identity of Harry Blask. Zaneth/Blask attended in his capacity as secretary to union leader George Sangster. The commissioners would have had no idea they were playing host to a police spy.)

Commissioners seemed keen on the idea of industrial councils, known in Great Britain as Whitley Councils after the politician who had conceived of them. These were committees that brought together workers and employers in formal sessions to discuss working conditions and other issues. Some witnesses agreed the idea was worth exploring, but most thought councils were a non-issue. "I do not recognize your authority to interfere with the management of the plant at all, declared a defiant Blythe Rogers, president of BC Sugar Refineries. While at the other end of the spectrum, “Why should labour confer with capital?” asked Socialist Party of Canada member Charles Lester.

It is an insult for it to do so. […] We are not going to compromise with the master class at all; not at all; we are going to fight this thing out to a finish; we are going to use our political power to get hold of the reins of government and introduce what measures we think fit, and we shall not show the master class the slightest consideration whatever.

Lester’s language was extreme, but his rejection of councils was typical of the majority of labour representatives meeting with the Commission. In Regina, Saskatchewan, J. Sanbrook, a bricklayer, opposed the idea of councils because they gave an advisory, not a controlling, role to labour. The Commission was operating on the assumption that cooperation was a good thing, he said. Not so. There was a class war going on and cooperation was simply a way

to make a more patient and contented work animal out of a live human being so that the war fattened profiteers may continue their period of prosperity and profit-making.

The Commission reached Winnipeg on May 10. Most of the city’s prominent labour leaders refused to come to City Hall where commissioners were hearing witnesses. One exception was William Ivens, editor of the Western Labor News and founder of the Labor Church (an organization that business leader A.J. Andrews later called “a camouflage for the preaching of sedition and for fanning the flames of unrest”). Like William Irvine in Calgary, Ivens was a former Methodist preacher who had been fired by his own church because he refused to tone down his anti-war rhetoric. Three months before the Royal Commission arrived in the city, he had warned employers in an editorial in the Labor News:

Your system will fall down about your ears with a suddenness and thoroughness that will surprise you. Such was the process in Russia […] and no man or set of men can stem the tide.

Ivens only attended the Commission’s hearing so that he could explain why his comrades were not there. Simply put, the inquiry had been appointed by a federal government “which we feel is entirely hostile to labour,” he said. As such, labour expected absolutely nothing from its deliberations. One of the great orators of the labour movement, Ivens finished his presentation by mocking the call from management for increased productivity and greater thrift:

Now, if I understand greater thrift, it means that the workers shall wear their overalls just a little bit longer, that they carry just a little bit less in their dinner pails, that their homes which today are not kept warm enough shall be kept one or two degrees colder.

(Meanwhile, as Ivens spoke, a boisterous crowd of veterans and their supporters were meeting around the corner from City Hall in Market Square to call on the provincial government either to deport aliens or resign from office.)

It is indicative of the speed with which events were unfolding in the country that the Winnipeg General Strike began just three days after the commissioners left the city. On the one hand, the strike threatened to make their proceedings redundant. The time for talk was over, thought the more alarmist observers; the revolution had already begun. On the other hand, the troubles in Winnipeg added urgency to the commissioners’ desire to hear for themselves what was disturbing labour peace across the country and to propose some solutions.

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 85-88.

[andtheflameswenthigher]

The Flames traded Markstrom….

I would just like to talk to whoever though this was a good idea

[punkrockmixtapes]

Listen/purchase: Last House on the Left by The Browns

the bonus part of this track (starts at 7:00) has lived rent free in my head since this came out. Fuck I’d love to see this band live one more time.

[rabbitcruiser]

Downtown Calgary (No. 5)

The heritage value of Calgary Fire Hall No. 1 lies chiefly in its historical and architectural significance for its association with the history of firefighting in Alberta, its connection to James "Cappy" Smart, and its excellent representation of an early twentieth-century, urban fire station.

Built in 1911 to replace Calgary's first Fire Headquarters, which had been erected in 1887, Calgary Fire Hall No. 1 represented advances in fire-fighting characteristic of the pre-war boom in Alberta. Emerging urban areas throughout the west had marked their transition from early settlement communities to more densely populated towns and cities by shifting from buildings constructed predominantly of wood to much more fire retardant structures erected of brick and stone. In the cities, fire departments were making the change from primarily volunteer bucket brigades to professionally trained, paid, and mechanized forces. Important figures such as James "Cappy" Smart, Calgary's first full-time fire chief, spanned the whole era of this historical development. As such, Smart personally participated in the planning of Fire Hall No. 1, and led Calgary's fire fighters from their headquarters there until his retirement in 1933. The station was in continuous use as a fire hall until 1973.

Architecturally, Calgary's Fire Hall No. 1 embodies several elements desirable in state-of-the-art urban fire halls of the period, and stands as one of the premier examples of this building type in Alberta. Designed by architects Lang and Major, the building was designed with a growing city in mind in terms of size and required facilities. Significantly, the building is oriented diagonally towards the street corner, enabling efficient access and ease of departure. Fire Hall No. 1 includes five wide bay doors, and the necessary hose tower required to hang and dry the canvas hoses in use throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. The large central garage area accommodated Calgary's first fire trucks. Additional spaces such as offices, bedrooms, and lounges provided room to accommodate fire fighters in a state of readiness for their tasks. With its highly identifiable facade, the building has become a well known city landmark.

Source

[radicalgraff]

"Shrimply United Against the 1%"

Poster spotted in Calgary, Alberta

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en