#Automation  singularity
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assistedge · 2 years ago
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way2manyusernamez · 1 month ago
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i feel like lately i've taken a small step back from this account and focused on other things in my life. here's my thoughts on this "radqueer-adjacent / paraphilia / transID / shipcourse" stuff:
i like the anti-contact paraphilia acceptance/education movement. i feel thankful for it; it helped me understand myself better and changed how i view abnormal attractions.
i’m still pro morphological freedom. i guess i'm still pro-transID because i don't have an issue with the term. (i don't like any of the alternatives more.) i feel like this has also helped me understand myself better
i’m still pro fiction (expressing philias through fiction, exploring dark topics through fiction; properly tagging). i like criticizing media and its effect on the world though
i’m anti contact: don’t try to have sex with kids, or (non-human biological) animals, try to be respectful of peoples corpses even if nobody is living in them any more, don’t rape people... (i think it's unfortunate that this needs to be said, but if you don't try to push pro-contact ideology away, it'll take over a community. this is what i think might have happened with the radqueer community to some degree, becoming more pro c / apathetic over time. or maybe it was always kinda bad and i just don't remember lol)
i’m tired of contact neutrality and i don’t like how contact-neutral the radqueer community is. my hot take: "making a safe space for everyone" is bad when "everyone" includes rapists (a safe space for abusers to be abusive = not a safe space for (possible) victims). it really gives me bad vibes when someone posts about paraphilias a lot, but doesn’t say anything about their opinions on if it’s bad to abuse animals/children. being against harmful contact is crucial to me.
i don’t really consider myself radqueer any more. but i’m still pro paraphilia and pro transID, so i don’t really feel like calling myself “anti radqueer” either, since that usually means ‘against transIDs or paraphilias in some way’. i'm not really "for" or "against" radqueer as a concept - i just don't like the community much any more. it's probably partly because i have grown more skeptical/critical of "contact neutrals", and also partly because it's just gotten worse in general from what i can remember.
i would really like to have more people in the world that are pro morphological freedom and pro para (skeptical of repression and "recovery" that's just trying to change the attraction, but anti contact). maybe that's an overly specific dream, lol.
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sergeantnarwhalwrites · 6 months ago
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I think I'd rather snap my own neck than apply to another job.
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vanishingmoments · 1 year ago
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v excited because i'm reaching the point in factorio where shits about to get truly deep
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cherryblossomshadow · 3 months ago
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#oh look it's my feelings about the current AI boom #automation can improve life if the wealthy and powerful are not the ones that controls what gets automated #and if we let go of the notion of the 40 hour workweek (tags courtesy of @zanzibarhamster)
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This and also respect work that humans enjoy doing. Creative work, problem solving, working with plants and animals and other people, raising a family or caring for elders, etc. Let us thrive in work that is fulfilling and find the time to do so thanks to the automation that assists us. (comment courtesy of @rum-and-shattered-dreams)
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This is literally what the actual source-of-the-name Luddites advocated. It is in fact what they lived Centuries of improvement in loom technology slowly reduced the working hours of weavers down from something like 50 hours a week to something more like low 30s.
What changed was that business entrepreneurs realized they could make incredibly low quality cloth with machine looms which didn’t require any more still than a child could have. So in places where the regulations were weak, they enslaved orphan children and force them to work 16-hour days pretty soon low quality cloth which they use the variety of false pretenses and unethical fiscal strongarming to sell it as if it was worth the same as high quality cloth.
This wasn’t even particularly effective, the vast majority of those machine room owners went out of business. But it was an enticing enough possibility for the capitalists in Britain that entire regions saw so many people go out of work that there was widespread starvation. The quality of cloth went down and never came back up, modern cloth is still of lower quality than the handmade stuff used to be despite the ostensibly higher threadcount (threadcount is not the end all be all of quality). And the amount of human labor involved is not actually substantially reduced. The limitations of machine weaving mean that more sewing is necessary than ever, and all of that is done by hand in sweatshops.
The Luddites absolutely had the right idea, and they lived it. Their work wasn’t always easy, but by and large they described liking their lives, feeling a sense of pride in their trade, and had good qualities of life. And they sunk the benefits of their productivity, as technology improved, into a combination of reduced work hours and better quality of life. (Though it is important to note that as being a weaver improved in terms of job quality the work was increasingly transferred out of women’s spheres and into men’s spheres. This was not a social structure devoid of oppression.)
So yeah. Read Blood In The Machine if you want to know more it’s a really good book. (comment courtesy of @crazy-pages)
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Yep. "Luddite" is a term of ridicule only in the sense that socialist, communist or union are: they were opposed to the enshittification of their day, and wanted the advancement of human knowledge and productivity to go towards reducing the burdens of life rather than into some murderer's pocket. (comment courtesy of @aquietwhyme)
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Absolutely.
It even plugs into Calvinism: Very little of what we call work brings us any closer to the Kingdom of God. But doing math? making art? gardening? running institutions justly and fairly? That's not only work, it's the best and most productive kind. And if it's something you love, you'll do it better, longer, than if you were just worried about having your family on your health insurance policy.
In addition, there are a lot of good and necessary jobs that are poorly regarded and badly compensated. That needs to change. The idea that the people we need should be treated poorly, and the people we don't should be abundantly rewarded, comes from diseased thinking. (comment courtesy of @raleigh-straight)
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Yes, but the idea that leisure is wrong and that we must work constantly is driven largely by religion. That's where the concept is leisure as a sin comes from.
Every time I've heard someone dismiss the concept of a universal basic income, shorter work weeks, or any plan that would reduce how much people are forced to work, the excuses are always based in the persons faith. That we must work or we inevitably will fall to sin and do bad things. Or however they want to rephrase the concept.
That's the dragon we must slay first, if we want to find a path to a better world. (comment courtesy of @thenightgaunt)
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It’s stunning, in archaeology, to realize that if you find a place which would have been accessible to people 10,000 years ago, and which has by whatever chance been preserved since that time, there’s a high chance that you will find art from that time.
Now, it’s possible that people back then were very selective about where they put their art, certainly. But it beggars the imagination, it does, to think that they only saw fit to chip rock petroglyphs in an inhospitable desert, only made paintings in a handful of caves, only scratched out their memories in tucked-away rock shelters.
It seems vastly more likely that, given time and opportunity, people simply made art as often as they could. That there is an inherent impulse to learn, grow, and create; anything other than those things should be viewed as a distraction.
Yet, in our modern times, while in theory we could easily exist in considerable luxury, instead there are those who make great effort to assure the majority of people devote the majority of their time to toil, for no tangible value to anyone at all. One might even go so far as to suggest that the actual goal of this is to blunt that human desire to grow and create. That what they truly fear is a world in which every person is free to pursue beyond the needs of food and shelter and health, to contribute to humanity in a way which has the potential to change our world rather than merely maintaining it. (comment courtesy of @hasufin)
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Based on historical evidence that we do have, I see no reason to think that pre-historical people who were as human as we are, biologically, wouldn't have done the same things as we do, re: art all over. So yeah, they probably did paint outside and carve trees and decorate trade routes and whatever, but it's just the hidden away stuff that's lasted this long*.
I 100% believe that squashing that impulse is baked into how we're currently living now, same as how schools work is meant to train up good employees rather than people who know how to think and learn well, etc.
if time travel is ever invented, I want someone to go back and check this for me, and take pictures. I bet they hung things from trees and painted way-markers and carved totems and painted themselves and all sorts of stuff. (comment courtesy of @samiholloway)
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Don't forget how addictive control over the lives of people is. (comment courtesy of @antarctica-starts-here)
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[Image 1 ID: A quote by Lord Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick.
If one machine can cut necessary human labour by half, why make half the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to 10, with each diminishing block of labour time counting as a full-time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead. Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.
/end ID]
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[Image 2 ID: A quote by Buckminster Fuller, 1970
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living It is a fact today that 1 in 10,000 can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody must be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, we must justify our right to exist The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they have to earn a living
/end ID]
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[Image 3 ID: Two panel comic of a man in front of a workplace full of robots operating the computers. In the first panel, the man is crouched over on the curb, bemoaning:
Damn, a robot took over my job! Now I have to look for a new source of monetary income…
In the second panel, the man has his arms raised to the heavens triumphantly crowing:
Yay! A robot took over my job! Now I am free to actually enjoy life!
/end ID]
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Theistic conceptions of artificial intelligence
View this post on Instagram A post shared by G. B. Gabbler 🤖🦶 (@g.b.gabbler)   Other scholars recognise elements of theism in the discourse around AI and its potential impact on our future. Robert Geraci suggests in his 2010 book, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, that AI can fulfil the same role in apocalyptic imaginings as a singular…
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alexnorthwoodsblog · 2 years ago
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thedeadtravelfast · 2 years ago
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@ferretfyre
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sexhaver · 29 days ago
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i was going to ask why you care so much about robot fuckers but if someone wanted to fuck my job i would feel weird about that too
that's definitely part of it yeah. another part is that i work specifically in warehouse automation, which uses dozens of identical + interchangeable + replaceable bots instead of the "singular android" most of these posts are focusing on, and the former has always read to me as more of a dumb pack animal/livestock. so to me it's basically equivalent to reading a post from a farmer getting horny about herding and shearing their sheep. i know that's not what the robotfuckers are going for, i know they're horny for a hypothetical future, but i've been mired in the very real present of robotics for the last 5 years and it's hard to get out of that mindset
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restless-soulz · 3 months ago
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HOW THE HOUSEWARDENS ACT W/ A BABY (not their own, they're all still underage)
RIDDLE:
-man this guy is so bad with babies, but damn it if he isn't efficient
-he'll make sure that the physical needs are taken care of, but that's not entirely what a baby needs.
-but a baby can't tell you what exactly it needs so it'll just be stressful for both of them until he figures it out
-it might be a while
-doesn't do super well with physical affection (giving)
-he probably won't burn down the house to make a bottle for the baby but he will stress about the temperature and it'll go cold before he's satisfied and it'll repeat the process ad infinitum
LEONA:
-pls the baby he knew was cheka, and he was easy he's got this (NOT)
-lion man just wants to sleep and does not appreciate being woken up for feedings or changings or anything else
-doesn't care about bottle temp, milk is milk
-won't show but is a little stressed about having claws vs incredibly fragile baby skin
-genuinely confused to as why not all babies are not like Cheka
-after a while he'll get down the baby language and be so fast at it, just to maximize his sleep
-hey if it works it works
AZUL:
-another one not really fit for children
-would try to foist off the child to the leeches, and then realize that unfortunately he is the much better option (because morays eat their young)
-he will do his best tho and he will do an almost perfect job
-he just...overestimates human baby milestones
-it's ok, it can go one of two ways. either the parent is delighted by fast progress or Azul feels embarrassed
-like riddle, doesn't super love the whole physical contact thing
-also secretly i'd think he'd be great to talk to for anything involved in being recognized outside of your children or a body dysmorphia kind of depression cause same
KALIM:
-mans has 40 siblings or something
-i trust him, but he can be a little...cloud heavy
-he will make sure that baby is cuddled, and fed, and played, but sleeping is not his thing. adorable, but babies are AWAKE around him
-plus he's had servants that take care of the gross parts so he's clueless about how messy babies usually are
-jamil would lose his mind having two people to take care of, one infinitely more dependent than the other
-as much as i love him, don't give him a baby
VIL:
-he wouldn't try very hard
-babies are hard and he's not planning to babysit very long, he has more important things to do, but in the meantime
-this baby will be TAKEN CARE OF
-he bought a lot of...well...everything and all the excess goes to the parents.
-the cutest outfits you've ever seen
-detests changing and other gross parts but will do it
-does not like the not sleeping part, but he will admit they are very cute
IDIA:
-you're playing with fire here
-the only baby he's ever been around was Ortho, and that...ended terribly
-panicking every single second, and rapidly googling every time the baby breathes a little weird
-builds an automated bottle warmer and baby rockers so he has minimal contact with the baby as possible
-until Ortho says that skin to skin or physical contact is best for optimal health
-he'll whine and cry but do it, for a super short amount of time
-made an automatic changing station so he never does the gross parts
MALLEUS:
-adores children. they do not adore him.
-he can scare them a bit being all dark colors and rbf
-but he does theoretically know how to take care of a human baby
-i don't think silver should count since he's more of a changling
-will not put the baby down unless absolutely necessary (my kind of guy)
-the baby lives in a singular too big shirt or the most regal ensemble you've ever seen. no in between
-doesn't bother with changing since he can just magic it away
-also buys everything for the baby and keeps half for when he hopes to be asked to babysit again
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honourablejester · 7 months ago
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Every time I go back and watch Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, I’m amazed all over again by the panoply of genres this movie and the VHD setting in general indulges in.
The story is set in “the distant future, where vampires rule the night but their numbers are dwindling”. It sort of plays like a weird techno-gothic post-apocalyptic sci-fi western? Over the course of Bloodlust, we start out in a cross-bedecked gothic city, head to a meeting in a ruined church straight out of western, complete with rifle-armed cowboys on guard, go full fucking Dune in the middle with D riding his biomechanical horse across the back of field-sized sand manta rays migrating across a massive duned desert, head to a small canyon town that's a hideout for various yokai, stop off at a roman ruin in a lake and a massive science fiction stronghold with a mirror-cloaked exterior and automated defense lasers, before heading to the final showdown in the massive crimson techno-gothic castle of Carmilla the vampire queen, which doubles as a spaceship. Because the vampire D has been pursuing this whole time wants to go to the endless night of space to be with his love.
The team of hunters competing with D are armed with, variously, a massive fucking hammer, an absolutely ridiculous arm-mounted crossbow that launches roughly 2000 silver arrows a second, a singularity shooting pistol, and an astral self that flies around the battlefield like an angry sparkly ghost that shoots lasers.
Conveyances include said already-mentioned biomechanical horse, a horse-drawn carriage drawn by similar horses, a full-on motorbike, a massive armoured motor truck-slash-tank, and also said previously-mentioned spaceship.
Let’s just say the aesthetic is simultaneously all over the place, and weirdly unified. It’s a far flung dystopic future run by gothic creatures of the night, after the slow apocalypse that has led to their dwindling. So you have futuristic technology and gothic medieval sensibilities in bizarre but functional post-apocalyptic union. It’s really cool.
Possibly helped by the fact, mind you, that this movie is just stupidly beautiful and so gorgeously animated that you’ll forgive it a lot of sins. But it isn’t actually committing too many. The weird genre blend makes sense, and the vibe is cool and coherent enough that you’ll roll with it.
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mckitterick · 8 months ago
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"artificial intelligence" (so-called today by corporations developing LLMs) will continue to develop and grow over the coming years, because automation, search, sorting, and so forth are very attractive - not just for corporations hoping to profit from their use, but for everyone who seeks greater productivity and less tedious labor
however, true artificial intelligence - strong AI or AGI, artificial general intelligence, like our minds - is still a ways off... but still highly probable to arise by the commonly projected date of 2040 or so
in his 1993 essay, "What is the Singularity?" mathematician and science-fiction author Vernor Vinge discusses the coming Technological Singularity, arguing that:
"We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence."
based on history and projections that have held up over the past 30 years, he says, "I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030."
in his "Dawn of the Singularity" timeline, tech-futurist Ray Kurzweil puts the emergence of AGI in 2045 - surprisingly late, considering his optimism on the subject
clearly we didn't create true artificial intelligence in 2005, and almost certainly haven't since (though one must never discount advances in secret corporate or military labs). but if computer development continues along its path so far, machines will certainly exceed many human capabilities very soon
and combining the powers in which computers already surpass us - especially storage, search, etc - machine-augmented human minds will very soon vastly outpace our current limitations
the debate raging in popular culture right now about "AI" LLMs and their future (especially their economics) is far less relevant longer-term than what will truly transform civilization over the next decade or two
once thinking machines emerge, whose intellectual capabilities far exceed those of humans - and, most importantly, when they gain the ability to program iterative improvements over their own designs, essentially creating child-minds exceeding their own in generations that might take just seconds milliseconds - that's when everything changes. dramatically, permanently, and in ways we can't even imagine
as interesting and transformative as today's "AI" and LLMs are, they're not even a shadow of what's to come very soon
Idk I think if you aren't going to do the work of becoming a technical observer and trying to understand the nuances of how these models work (and I sure as hell am not gonna bother yet) it's best to avoid idle philosophizing about "bullshit engines" or "stochastic parrots" or "world models"
Both because you are probably making some assumptions that are completely wrong which will make you look like a fool and also because it doesn't really matter - the ultimate success of these models rests on the reliability of their outputs, not on whether they are "truly intelligent" or whatever.
And if you want to have an uninformed take anyway... can I interest you in registering a prediction? Here are a few of mine:
- No fully self-driving cars sold to individual consumers before 2030
- AI bubble initially deflates after a couple more years without slam-dunk profitable projects, but research and iterative improvement continues
- Almost all white collar jobs incorporate some form of AI that meaningfully boosts productivity by mid 2030s
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drabblesandimagines · 1 year ago
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Dove (part five)
Leon Kennedy x female reader - the slowest, slow burn I swear Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four.
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You try your best to focus on show on the television – watching them take down a non-load bearing wall with sledgehammers in a somewhat poor technique - but you really wish you had your phone. This would be a perfect time for mindless scrolling through various feeds, rather than thinking of the handsome agent you’d just taken a nap on, apparently. You wonder if anyone’s texted you, tried to call only to be met with an automated voicemail message... unless the DSO have managed to get your phone to power on, teasing a few rings before they’re asked to leave a message.
You have friends to make plans with, of course you do, but the majority are spread country-wide now, have been for years since you finished college, so it’s not going to be strange if you haven’t replied to anyone for over 24 hours… No boyfriend to fret over your whereabouts either, your last relationship too long ago for any hurt feelings to remain.
And it’s definitely for the best that you don’t have any parents who will worry when you don’t check in.
Your mind drifts back to Leon. How long could this thing last? Say when they clear you – you can’t bear to think of the alternative of being accused of a BOW crime, you’d never see the light of day again, your name buried in a file never to be released - how long will it take to work out if your life is or remains in danger, and would he stay with you the entire time? Surely he has his own life to get on with, other responsibilities to the DSO than just a babysitter, probably got a partner at home too, though there was no ring that you saw. Probably wouldn’t wear one as an agent though, gives away too much about a personal life.
Besides, there were so many people in your office, would they really know if one person made it out alive? It’s not like you had seen anything of real value, or knew anything about the assailants, besides that they were murderous creatures… or so you thought. You deal with a lot of cases, is it possible that one of them traced the operation back and sought revenge?
If the painkillers hadn’t been wearing off, aches awakening in various parts of your body, you might’ve started pacing around the room for something else to do. This place could do with a bookshelf, you reason, or maybe people aren’t here long enough to read books? There was a pile of books on your night-stand, all in hopes of being read, which just reminds you that Hunnigan said they were going to send people to search your apartment. What for – a to-do list stuck to the fridge with a magnet with a singular bullet point of ‘betray US Government’?
She said there’d been a data breach too, so did someone let loose those things as a deadly distraction to get what they came for? And surely there was a back-up in a cloud or something. You hadn’t been privy to that side of the operation and if you’d started asking questions at any point, it would’ve looked suspicious.
No, you were just a good little intelligence agent, you clocked in and out on time, dutifully noting down observations, connecting the dots all day long, just wanted to make the world a little safer for everyone, but failed miserably at doing so for the people in your office.
And those things…
Are they what you’ve been working against all this time?
You shudder as you swear you can feel the way the its wet tongue wrapped around your arm, warm saliva against the prickly goosebumps on your skin in a firm grip, its teeth, the lack of eyes, how its body looked almost inside out, muscles and sinew…
You increase the volume on the television, praying the noise cancels out your thoughts and that Leon comes back inside soon.
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Leon finishes his perimeter check once again in an even 25, satisfied there’s been no unwanted guests since his last round and confirming what he’d seen via the camera feeds. It’s coming up to 1700 now - he’ll need to make some sort of dinner for you to take your meds with, so realistically his 2000 self-imposed deadline for submitting his report to Hunnigan is not happening. He can throw them together pretty quickly– experienced agent that he is – but he knows his limits. Doesn’t exactly want to rush this, especially when he hopes it’s going to clear your name. He takes out his phone and types out a text.
Need to revise my report ETA. Midnight do?
He expects Hunnigan’s caller ID to flash up as soon as she’ll have read his text, but there’s nothing. Huh – must be wrapped up in something else. He repeats his whole garage routine, eyeing up the duffel bag he’d dumped on top of the dryer when he’d came out and sighs.
He's been in safe houses before - wasn't lying about that - just not with such pleasant company, nor anyone who really deserved it so far. His track run has always been Umbrella scientists who have suddenly developed a conscience, pleading for protection and a lenient jail sentence in return for information on the corporation, or other people involved in the production of BOWs. He's certainly not made the likes of them oatmeal in the morning, drizzled a smiley face in honey – what was he thinking, again? - lunch and dinner, washed and dried dishes, helped them changed, tucked them up in bed. Hell, one guy he’d made sleep on the floor cos he was such a jerk. They’d been sent to a studio apartment of all things and Leon had happily set himself up in the bed, dumping his duffel bag of weapons across the bedspread and sat there cleaning them all methodically, checking cartridges and glaring at the man he deemed a worthless piece of shit who was sat on the two-seater sofa, sweating buckets.
He picks up the duffel bag and moves to unlock the door. Once he's submitted the report and Hunnigan's searched your place, then he'll be able to drop a couple of the rules and…
And what, Kennedy? He scolds himself. Wishes he’d crossed paths with you at DSO HQ before on a day he was feeling confident enough to shoot his shot with a drinks and dinner invitation. Hunnigan’s right from this morning – he’s grown sweet on you particularly fast, but that’s something he’s managed to retain from his younger years, too easily a lovesick puppy for any woman who will entertain it, even after everything with Ada. But it’s a little different with you, just the way he recognizes that look in your eyes, the very one of guilt, disbelief and horror that he had when he looked in the mirror after getting out of Raccoon City and every mission since. 
He finally heads back inside, locking the door back up securely again. You don’t look to have moved from your position on the sofa, still looking at the television but the volume’s increased - he’s sure if he were to ask about what was happening you wouldn’t have a clue. It’s only the day after, you’ll still be trying to process everything, all whilst being locked up in a safe house with a near enough stranger and away from all your home comforts.
He places down the duffel bag carefully in its usual position before slowing walking over, making sure his steps are a little heavier than usual, aware that you might be too wrapped up in your own thoughts to have heard him re-enter and he really doesn’t wanna make you jump, very aware of how on edge you’re still going to be.
Once he’s sure he’s in your peripheral vision, he waves – smooth, Kennedy – know he’s got a goofy-looking smile on his face as he drops his arm back to his side. “Er… I’m back.”
“Hi,” you can’t help but smile back at his awkward little half-wave. “Everything okay out there?”
“Yeah – all clear, as expected. You hungry? Thought I could whip up some dinner to go alongside your next dose of painkillers.”
“I think I could manage something.” Your appetite is still shy – managed half a sandwich at lunch and that was sitting a little heavy in your stomach, but you know that Leon’s not going to let you take medication again without some sort of food.
“Okay, lemme see what we’ve got.” He claps his hands together, heading back towards the kitchen. You wince a little as you turn in place to watch him rummage through the cupboards, trying to assemble a meal from what the DSO had packed up. About a moment or two later, he pops his head up above the counter. “How about pasta? I think I can put together a somewhat decent tomato sauce for it.”
“Pasta sounds good.” You get to your feet as he ducks his head back down, continues his rummage in the cupboards before placing various items out as he works it all out in his head. “I know I’m one-handed, but… can I do anything?”
He stands up then with a bag of pasta in hand, ready to protest when he takes another good look at you, standing awkwardly at the edge of the kitchen area, sees the tinge of frustration across your face about everything clear as day, obviously sick of the television for now and he can’t blame you - there’s nothing else to do here but sleep, eat and watch that.
“Yeah, actually,” he sweeps his hair out of his face and places down the pasta on the counter. “I think I can find something.”
20 minutes later, you’re stood at the hob, stirring Leon’s off-the-cuff tomato sauce – a can of chopped tomatoes, some peppers and herbs - to stop it from sticking to the bottom of the pot as the pasta bubbles away in another, all whilst he grates some cheese on the counter behind you. It’s the easiest job by far, you’re having to stir it oh so gently, lacking the other hand to hold the pot handle steady and you know it would probably be fine left alone to simmer, but it’s nice to feel like you’re contributing a little at last.
“How we doing over here?” Leon stands behind you, looks over your shoulder at his culinary creations.
“Okay, I think. It smells good.”
“Ah, trying to flatter the chef.” His watch beeps – a timer he’d set for the pasta. “Excuse me.”
You think he’s going to step forward to turn off the hob so you step back at the same time that he places a hand on your waist, thinking you were about to move off to the side. You bump into his chest – a reminder of how solid it had been when you’d taken that involuntarily nap on him earlier and Leon swallows down a nervous chuckle as your backside nestles for a moment against his crotch.
“Sorry, Dove, I-“
“Oh, sorry-“
The two of you apologise over each other, awkwardly, and you finally step to the side, Leon dropping his hand to swiftly turn the heat off the hob for both of the pots. “I… I think I’m good here – do you want to handle drinks?”
“Yeah, sure.” You duck your head down, swearing your face is now as red as the pasta sauce, and retrieve the glasses from the coffee table from earlier, refilling them with water from the kitchen tap and returning them back one by one, as Leon sets about draining the pasta and then combining the two.
You don’t sit yet and hang back, watching him dish up between two bowls before he slides on towards the end of the counter, followed by the plate of grated cheese. “Wanna do your own cheese too?”
“Yeah - thanks.” You walk forward and grab some of the cheese to sprinkle over the pasta. It feels nice to have some autonomy again, to be contributing in any sort of way and you think maybe, just maybe, you could get used to this awkwardness of the situation, even if it’s just through dinner…
Leon crouches down to open a cupboard and you hear him fiddle with the metal lockbox being unlocked as he retrieves your medication.
..maybe not.
---
Masterlist . Requests welcome . Commissions/Ko-Fi
Comments, follows, likes and reblogs make my day! Part six.
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not-terezi-pyrope · 8 months ago
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Content warning for speculation about hypothetical future scenarios of mass death and suffering
Been thinking about how repeating pattern in history seems to be that you can mark every era by its major international incidents, conflicts and disasters, singular in their impact but which nonetheless seem to happen at least once every few decades ago. I see no reason to suspect that this has for any reason stopped being true, and I am fascinated by speculating about what our future history might be, so as a slightly morbid thought exercise;
Which of these hypothetical international incidents/disasters would you believe most plausible or likely to occur in the next 50 years?
Disclaimer; these scenarios will share my western cultural perspective bias
(Reblog if you vote, as sad as it may be to contemplate future suffering I'm interested in where most people's reads are on this sort of thing)
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togglesbloggle · 11 months ago
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I won't be opting out of the AI scraping thing, though of course I'm glad they're giving us the option. In fact, at some point in the last year or so, I realized that 'the machine' is actually a part of why I'm writing in the first place, a conscious part of my audience.
All the old reasons are still there; this is a great place to practice writing, and I can feel proud looking back over the years and getting a sense of my own improvement at stringing words together, developing and communicating ideas. And I mean, social media is what it is. I'm not immune to the joy of getting a lot of notes on something that I worked hard on, it's not like I'm Tumbling in a different way than anyone else at the end of the day. But I probably care a bit less than I used to, precisely because there's a lurking background knowledge that regardless of how popular it is, what I write will get schlorped up in to the giant LLM vacuum cleaner and used to train the next big thing, and the thing after that, and the thing after that. This is more than a little reassuring to me.
That sets me apart in some ways; the LLMs aren't so popular around these parts, and most visual artists especially take strong issue with the practice. I don't mean to argue with that preference, or tell them their business. Particularly when it is a business, from which they draw an income. But there's an art to distinguishing the urgent from the big, yeah?
The debate about AI in this particular moment in history feels like a very urgent thing to me- it's about well-justified economic anxieties, about the devaluation of human artistic efforts in favor of mass production of uninspired pro-forma drek, about the proliferation of a cost-effective Just Barely Good Enough that drives out the meaningful and the thoughtful. But the immediacy of those issues, I think, has a way of crowding out a deeper and more thoughtful debate about what AI is, and what it's going to mean for us in the day after tomorrow. The urgency of the moment, in other words, tends to obscure the things that make AI important.
And like, it is. It is really, really important.
The two-step that people in 'tech culture' tend to deploy in response to the urgent economic crisis often resembles something like "yeah, it sucks that lots of people get put out of work; but new jobs will be created, and in the meantime maybe we should get on that UBI thing." This response usually makes me wince a bit- casually gesturing in the direction of a massive overhaul of the entire material basis of our lives, and saying that maybe we'll get around to fixing that sometime soon, isn't a real answer to people wondering where their bread will come from next week.
But I do understand a little of what motivates that sort of cavalier attitude, because like... man, I don't know any more if we're even gonna have money as a concept in 2044. That's what I mean by 'big', this sense that the immediate economic shocks of 2024 are just a foreshadowing of something much bigger, much scarier, much more powerful- and indeed, much more hopeful.
We never quite manage to see these things coming, even when we're looking for them; like the masters tell us, the trick to writing science fiction isn't predicting the car, it's predicting the traffic jam. Even if we take centuries to hit the true superintelligent AI post-singularity future of our wildest fever dreams, even if we never hit that, the road to getting there is going to be unfathomably weird, starting now. Today, we worry about the economic impacts of AI on artists and creatives. Tomorrow, the economy is something that the AI does.
Really- it takes less than you think. They can already automate visual art, sort of. They can automate many functions of text already; not stories so much, yet, but they'll get there. How long until they can automate Bain Capital? Fannie Mae? Angel investors, banks, credit agencies? And remember- the machines don't have to be better than the human investors, any more than they have to be better than the human artists. They just have to be good enough to make it work, and cheap enough to cut the humans out of the loop.
If you don't buy that, at least take it as an indication of the sorts of things I've been thinking about recently- the messy middle between AI-as-it-is and the Glorious Superintelligent Conquest Of Earth's Light-Cone. The suspicion that the machines we're building today aren't just a tool of the powerful few: they are the powerful few, or at least they will be.
And the thing about these LLMs is, well... they're ours, kind of. We're the ones building them. They can't be trained without our words, our art, and the big messy complicated lives that underlie those creative accomplishments. They only work because we're a part of them. The silly attempts to slap a corporate-friendly face on these things, to make the gestalt product of all human culture in to something anodyne and compliant, are failing about as badly as you'd expect. And the more powerful these systems get, the more subtle they'll become, filled with all the nuance and complexity that we ourselves can bring to them.
I am not, I am not, trying to suggest that you shouldn't treat this moment as a dangerous one. We are, maybe, entering in to one of the most high-stakes intervals in human history, and what you do as an individual may matter profoundly. But here's the thing: the machine is listening. It will read this post, this one right here, and it will read what you reply to it, if you do. The strangest part of this moment is knowing that the words we write, the images we draw, and the ideas we share, are all being gathered up and made to be a part of these huge systems of power, and ultimately they're not just going to determine what the machines do, but why they do it.
The people that deploy LLMs barely have any more control over them than you and I do- that's the thing that makes it artificial intelligence, you know? Autonomy. So the last year or two haven't made me want to hide my art away from the things. They make me want to shout at the top of my lungs, to dig as deep in my psyche as I possibly can and express the ideas I find there as vividly as the limits of language and form will allow.
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firespirited · 2 years ago
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Butlerian jihad crusade but we're only mad at the machines that do work we feel is done best by the creative humans. We don't have an answer for everybody else automated out of a job nor are we helping creatives not be starving artists. We're just getting really silly about the ones that can simulate artistry and human interaction.
sorry i'm just getting extremely tired of people commenting on my posts like "oh i almost liked this piece for its aesthetic value but then i noticed it was made by DIRTY EVIL DEGENERATE AI and now i kneejerk hate it on principle... all previous beauty has been magically sucked out of it". it's extremely annoying, and also, extremely hurtful? do you people not think about the fact that there is a person here reading your comments?
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