#EACC

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real AI fight

Tonight (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.

Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.

Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."

Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come?

This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation

White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI."

After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot.

There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/

What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another.

The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people:

https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/

Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines.

The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too:

https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/

Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ

The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term.

As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things":

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383

Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299

All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417

There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium.

The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me."

Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today.

It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords.

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/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

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

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

[badarchitecturesucks]

SNECKDOWN at EACC, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain (installation view)

Sam Cottington, Caspar Heinemann, Phung Tien Phan, Deborah-Joyce Holman, David Moser, Alex Dolores Salerno, Francis Whorral, Campell, Quay Quinn Wolf, Leto Ybarra

[radiohalisi]

EACC Summons MP Osoro

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has issued a summon to National Assembly Majority Whip Silvanus Osoro, the South Mugirango MP, in response to recent statements he made during a public event in Bomet County. During this event, he appeared to acknowledge receiving bribes from fellow MPs to facilitate their overseas trips. EACC has instructed Mr. Osoro to appear at their…

[taarifaleo]

Multiple Former and Sitting Governors Face Graft Charges, 21 Others Investigated for Billions in Public Funds Theft

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has revealed that several former and sitting Governors are currently entangled in active graft cases within the court system. These cases has raise serious concerns about corruption within Kenya’s political landscape. Among the notable individuals facing these allegations are Daniel Waithaka Mwangi, who served as Nyandarua Governor from 2013 to…

[yooniesim]

when I have $81 to my name and $400+ of bills left to pay

[aflightlessraven]

I’M SO HAPPY I’M SO HAPPY I’M SO HAPPY

[jobskenyaplace]

TENDER FOR SUPPLY, INSTALLATION, TESTING COMMISSIONING AND MAINTENANCE OF HUMAN RESOURCE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

ETHICS AND ANTI-CORRUPTION COMMISSION TENDERS OCTOBER 2024  INVITATION TO TENDER (ITT) SUPPLY, INSTALLATION AND COMMISSIONING OF HUMAN RESOURCE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM TENDER NO. EACC/T/15/2024-2025  1. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission invites sealed tenders for the Supply, Installation and Commissioning of Human Resource Information Management System 2. Tendering will be conducted…

[yooniesim]

So much for Rava saying they’re going to release this for free huh 😐

Stop paywalling holiday cc for fuck’s sake

[dumb-doll-lips]

Do you have a toy in each hole or are you double stuffed in one hole?

It’s one in eacc hole. The lush is in my pussy and the hush is in my ass

[sommerregenjuniluft]

barty (who in my head is a beater... no clue if that's canon) constantly targeting james with the bludgers to the point where he gets fouled quite often and james is sooo smug about it, constantly verbally berating barty whenever he flies by. of course this all comes to a head after the game when barty pics a fight about it and it all ends up with them fucking (of course)

BARTY. IS. A. BEATER🗣️🗣️🗣️ louder for the ppl in the back cass!!!!!!

yesyes absolutely and it’s ridiculous really because barty is basically Training james that way like he’s gotten rly good at dodging them too and then Barty just has to get better, more percise and basically they make eacc other better like AGCKH and also there is really no need for james to fly past the slytherin bench where barty sits in timeout after being exchanged for Misbehaving That Much esp after a goal like Mr Potter pls go get cheered at by the gryffindor section (mcg voice through the speaker) and yes they indeed fuck sloppy nasty hot and steamy in the locker rooms after<3

[cosmicanger]

Michele Gabriele, July 2nd, 2023, Silicone, resin, acrylic colors, fabric, plastic, plaster, graphite, found objects, 145 x 60 x 50 cm; from: ‘I see you repeating this, I warn you in the sweetest way’ at EACC, Castellon de la Plana, Spain; Courtesy of the Artist, Ashes/Ashes, NY and EACC

[thestarlense]

Kenya Maritime Authority HRM Boss Arrested Over Ksh 40 Million Tender Fraud

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has arrested Henry Mwasaru, the Human Resource and Administration Head at the Kenya Maritime Authority (KMA), over allegations of corruption in a Ksh 40,539,760 medical insurance tender deal. According to an official statement, EACC officers also targeted two insurance brokers suspected of collaborating in the fraudulent scheme. “On Tuesday, EACC…

[thecountydiary]

Governor Malombe Opens Leadership and Integrity Workshop in Kitui South

Kitui Governor Dr. Julius Malombe today inaugurated a leadership and integrity workshop at Mutomo, Kitui South, aimed at enhancing ethical practices among county staff. The workshop was facilitated by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC). In his opening remarks, Governor Malombe emphasized the importance of ethical training in promoting good governance and accountability. He noted…

[taarifaleo]

Anti-Corruption Court Said Ferdinand Waititu and Wife to Answer for Kes.588 Million Tender Fraud

Spotlight, the Nairobi Anti-Corruption Court has ruled that former Kiambu Governor Ferdinand Waititu aka Baba Yao and his wife Susan Wangari Ndung’u must answer to charges related to a fraudulent tender worth Kes.588 million. The court’s decision extends to the Director of Testimony Enterprises Limited, Charles Chege, and his wife Beth Wangeci, who are involved in the same scandal. Chief…

[yachtlily]

Definitely the last

Sunday, 27th October 2024

Wind W, N, NW, SW  6mph                    Full sun                                              Temp 16°C

Total distance sailed  5.49 miles

Nick, our boatbuilder, agreed to come and look at the ‘gaffyitis’ we have experienced all season. On starboard tack the sail sets well but on port tack the gaff seems to twist and the gaff jaws stick, preventing the gaff from swinging around the mast.

Took the boat around to Thurne Dyke to offload our gas cylinder, leisure battery and one or two other bits. Nick joined us at 1030 and we motored off down the dyke, hoisting as we turned up the Thurne, the westerly wind having now turned to the the north. We tacked around as he tried to see what the root of our problem was. Dropped sail and came alongside the EACC moorings where Nick made a number of adjustments to the sail where it is attached to the top of the gaff. Left the mooring and raised sail again. There seemed to be a slight improvement. Nosed into the reeds, dropped sail and Nick tried to realign our gaff span. Raised sail again. Again a slight improvement but there is still a significant problem. Nick made a number of suggestions for alterations we could make this winter. We dropped him back at the dyke.

Left the dyke and raised sail again, the 4th time this morning, and headed down the Thurne and then continued on down the Bure. The wind had been boxing the compass all morning and was now a mere zephyr but we had the tide with us and we had a lovely, gentle sail on an empty river. We went as far as Oby Drainage Mill before turning, dropping sail and motoring back to our mooring. Lunch on the mooring and then we stripped the mainsail off. Our sailing season is over.

[yooniesim]

Now I want yall to explain this situation to me. So, I'm catching up on the finds blog by going through my likes, and I see a newish creator I reblogged from before has new cc. Great! I go to their patreon so I can double check what I already reblogged before I reblog all their posts I've missed, and what do I see? Some goddamn 3.50 early access on some really low quality looking hair edits. Which, ok, annoying but I'm used to it at this point, people go from free to EAcc all the time once they get the smallest traction, whatever. So then I go back to delete the old posts I reblogged from them, and what do I see?

nani the fuck. and those posts STILL say always free next to them, while the newer posts are just changed to "free" lmfao. like yall think ur slick but I'm this close not to promoting people I never heard of before cos ur wack for real. using always free, tagging my finds blog and/or using the hashtag and then quietly going paid after a couple posts is bonkers. and on top of that the cc is warped, twisted, and ugly! why