#neuralism

[snaillamb]

Triptych "Neuro-transforfimng"

[aiweirdness]

Nobody should be using GPT detectors for anything important.

This is from a recent study that found that GPT detectors were misclassifying writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated 48-76% of the time (!!!), compared to 0%-12% for native speakers.

It is irresponsible to use AI-generated text detectors as evidence of academic misconduct, and that's putting it mildly.

[puffycinnabunny]

Is it the finals week or my final week, stay tuned to find out fellas!

[disease]

Frank Rosenblatt, often cited as the Father of Machine Learning, photographed in 1960 alongside his most-notable invention: the Mark I Perceptron machine — a hardware implementation for the perceptron algorithm, the earliest example of an artificial neural network, est. 1943.

[isolophilian]

the minute "Seaweed Brain" and "Wise Girl" are uttered, I will become the most annoying person you know

[hoe4hotchner]

helloo i saw your fluff request. Can you write something about jack having a nightmare so hotch comforts him. and hotch sees reader smiling at them so he invites her in to a hug or smt.

I have a love-hate relationship with Jack. But goddamn if he isn't the cutest kid in the world 😍 and hotch is so sweet with him. I can't

Nightmares | [A.H]

WC: 0,4k

Requests are open

           The soft sounds of the night had filled the house, and everything was still. Jack sleeping peacefully in his room and Hotch was cooped up with the last bit of paperwork in his office. You had just settled into bed, the warmth of the covers wrapping you in a cozy cocoon, when a faint noise caught your attention. It was quiet at first - a soft whimper - then it grew louder, accompanied by the sound of tiny feet padding down the hallway.

           You sat up slightly, listening as Hotch’s office door creaked open, followed by Jack’s soft, shaky voice. "Dad?" he called, his voice trembling with the telltale signs of a nightmare.

           Without hesitation, you heard Hotch get up, his footsteps steady and reassuring. “I’m right here, buddy,” he murmured gently. You too got up to see what the commotion was about.

           You watched from the door as he scooped Jack up in his arms, cradling him like he was still that little boy who used to cling to his dad any chance he got.

           “Did you have a bad dream?” Hotch asked, his voice soft and soothing.

           Jack nodded, burying his face in Hotch’s shoulder. “It was scary…”

           “I know, but it’s okay now. I’m here,” Hotch whispered, rubbing Jack’s back in slow circles. The sight warmed your heart, seeing the way Hotch held his son so protectively, so full of love.

           You leaned against the doorway, a soft smile tugging at your lips. There was something so tender about this moment, about the way Hotch comforted Jack with such care and patience. It reminded you of all the reasons you had fallen for him - his quiet strength, his kindness, and the way he always made sure the people he loved felt safe.

           Hotch glanced up and caught you watching, your smile still warm and fond. His lips curled into a soft, tired smile in return. “Come here,” he mouthed quietly, extending an arm toward you.

           Without a second thought, you walked over, slipping into his embrace, his arm wrapping around you as Jack remained tucked against his chest. It was a tight, cozy hug, one that made you feel like you had found your place in the world right there with them.

           “You okay, Jack?” you asked softly, brushing a hand through his hair. He gave a small nod, still nestled comfortably between you and Hotch.

           “We’re all okay now,” Jack whispered, his voice starting to fill with sleep. The three of you stayed there, wrapped up together, a quiet sense of peace settling over the room.

           Eventually, Jack’s breathing slowed, his body relaxing as sleep began to take over again. Hotch smiled down at him, then back at you, his eyes soft and filled with gratitude. You leaned into him, resting your head on his shoulder, feeling completely content.

           In that moment, everything was perfect.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

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

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[feliformiaboy]

their ship name is pathways. in my heart.

[gaugedgauntlet]

two very similar guys who have a lot in common!! never let them meet or interact with each other in any way

[one-time-i-dreamt]

For some reason, everyone in the world got the neuralink chips. As if that wasn't bad enough, 2 years after it became wide spread, Elon Musk decided to implement mandatory jump scares to "make the world more fun" so overnight, everyone in the world just started experiencing random terrifying visions every few hours.

[kyuyua]

Nerds nerding

[ari-kari]

do you guys ever just think about Catra all the time constantly

[aiweirdness]

Original

It had generated a complete reference with title, author, and everything. Completely fabricated.

It’s not a search engine, it’s a crappy imitation of one.

[puffycinnabunny]

Yeah man ofc u can borrow my notes (if u can read them)

[thresholdbb]

what's the threshold theory

There was a post about how Tom is the only crew member who isn't really affected by the Borg, and there's a theory that he has so much luck because he saw the past and the future when he crossed the transwarp threshold. He saw the past and the future, all of time and space. There's some subconscious part of him that remembers that experience. In fact, Tom refused to play a part in Chakotay indulging Annorax's temporal incursions, probably because a part of him knew nothing good could come of it.

If we extend that same theory to Janeway, some of her wild luck with time travel and other crack plans starts to make sense. She doesn't verbally hate time travel until after the events of Threshold, since it happens in Time and Again without complaint. Janeway has an uncanny knack for time travel, as evidenced every time she deals with it. She hates time travel, but it might be because part of her knows exactly how to manipulate the timeline. She manages to avoid the "inevitable" temporal explosion in Future's End, saving both Voyager and Braxton. She resets the entire timeline in Year of Hell, and no one else followed her reasoning. She pulled it off flawlessly. In Relativity, she senses the incidents are all related, despite it being just one reading that connects them. By the time she's involved, she has a temporal incursion factor of .0036 and a time travel protocol named after her, even if that may just be Braxton's personal grudge. Then there's Endgame, where she intentionally changes the timeline. Up until this point, she has been dragged into time travel, but for the first time, she jumps in on purpose. How does Admiral Janeway know how to get them home sooner in a way that completely avoids the Temporal Integrity Commission? It's because she has seen all of time, and part of her knows exactly what needs to happen so she can get Voyager home and do it in a way that becomes baked into the prime timeline. Maybe she doesn't consciously remember what happened during her transformation, but the experience lives in her mind somewhere, guiding her decisions.

[tenspontaneite]

fancy pibble having a big think