Skip Rhudy

this is evil

I’ve now had a few posts go viral on the subject of AI consciousness. The first thing I’ve noticed is that the majority of people challenging my assertion (AI isn’t conscious) are tiny accounts, that have no apparent experience in computer science, most barely technically literate, and seem to think of themselves as amature philosophers. Additionally, I’m starting to challenge one of my own assumptions, that other people are conscious as I am. Surely I still think most people are, but anyone who considers that a software program can ever possibly be conscious like they are, can’t possibly be experiencing the same consciousness as I am. Nobody truly experiencing consciousness would ever diminish it to the point of saying a computer program was as conscious as they are unless they’ve been fooled or have an agenda. I’ve even had multiple people say a rock was conscious because we can’t prove otherwise. Seriously?!? So I’m starting to think, I’m actually seeing the NPCs calling themselves out. So that is my working theory right now. People who think AI is, or might be, conscious is either very gullible (and I want to help them), have an agenda, or an NPC. Joking (not joking), but which one are you?

"If people believe AI systems to be conscious or to have moral status... 'You could be legally prevented from turning AI systems off.' @anilkseth also "worries that AI users will be more vulnerable to... manipulation if they think they’re interacting with a conscious agent"🔗⬇️

Scott Aaronson four days ago on the possibility that AI models will soon break widely used cryptographic systems, and on what responsible disclosure looks like when the parties who need to be notified are effectively the entire world.

⚠️ No Constitution Can Ever Fix This Benjamin Franklin warned, “This can only end in despotism.” He knew that when the people themselves become corrupt - liberty doesn’t stand a chance. 👇 blog.tenthamendmentcenter.co…

This makes sense if you look at it narrowly. If you want to optimize the AI inference supply chain across the world to get the maximum LLM tokens at the lowest cost, then local inference would not make much sense. But there are plenty of reasons to want to run local inference, including privacy and preventing IP theft. A lot of organizations and people don't trust companies like OpenAI or Anthropic with their data for various reasons. They want to run models on their own devices. We now have infinite storage in the cloud, but people still have terabytes of storage on their devices. I think local AI makes a lot of sense.

Machines are tools, not persons. Today, some propose granting these systems rights, or even legal personhood. Such an approach risks obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity.

Because of AI, nothing works as well as it used to. It destroys value, rather than creating it. History will consider us letting tech folks' wet dreams about magic robots to devalue every interaction with our fellow humans as the gravest error of the 21st century.

"I don't understand why they're pushing AI so hard when we can all see it's making everything worse." That's because it's not being marketed to you; it's being marketed to governments and plutocrats. They're the real target audience for these products, not you. You are not receiving the real sales pitch for AI, because the real sales pitch would not appeal to your sensibilities. The real sales pitch for AI isn't "Hey check out this product, it makes some web searches slightly easier and it can maybe write your emails for you." The real sales pitch for AI is "This product allows you to surveil the entire population of your country. It can be built into autonomous surveillance drones and killing machines. It can allow you to monitor and control every aspect of your society. It can reverse the decentralization of information brought on by the internet age. It can take away the collective bargaining power of workers and give you the skilled services your company requires. It can nullify strikes, civil disobedience, and even full-scale revolutions, and lock humanity into your capitalist dystopia forever." That's the real sales pitch. It doesn't sound appealing to any normal person, but it makes sense when you remember who these technologies are really being sold to, and why.

Superintelligence will mean the end of social mobility. Instead of your being able to rise based on your talent and labor, those with the most capital will simply outcompete you by buying more compute. It will mark the end of any sort of meritocracy, and the dawn of a new feudalism.

sam: local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources “a lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data centre but from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that”

What’s coming was avoidable, but Republicans in Congress let Trump start a war, increase spending, arm a genocide, betray MAHA, and cover up for Epstein’s coconspirators. I was ousted with over $30 million of foreign lobby money for refusing to go along, and here we are.

No that’s not it. AI writing is not good writing at all. Much less “too good.” It’s neat, yes. Perfectly spelled and punctuated. This writing itself is atrociously bad, though. Bland and dull and utterly devoid of style or personality. But it’s bad in a bizarre, uncanny way. Bad but perfectly coherent. Whereas bad human writing is generally bad because it’s not coherent. Maybe that’s the thing that makes AI slop so easy to spot. It is coherently shitty. A weird combination.