This Schmidt Shit is going to go down in history as emblematic of…however our present era is viewed in hindsight, and it won’t be kind.
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Aha! This is the one I was thinking of:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/Note that one section is titled “Many psychics fool themselves.”
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@inthehands @breadandcircuses
For me it's just a rationalist version of 'let go & let God', where 'God' is whatever vague thing Schmidt things he means when he says "AI". -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by [email protected]
Once you see the connection between LLMs and psychics / seances / spiritualism, it’s hard to unsee. At the center: people •want• to believe, and that is powerful. Thinking of modern-day SV, listen to some of the stories of how con artists used spiritualism…
…as a business: https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters
…as wartime subterfuge: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-234-the-seances-9-8-2023
…as almost a kind of therapy: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-79-secrets-and-seances-11-17-2017
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@inthehands Eric Schmidt is straight up professing a religious faith. He believes super intelligent AI will solve everything with no rational support for this belief. It doesn’t matter that his god would be tangible if it existed. If it existed there’s no reason to believe it would do what he thinks it would, nor is there any reason to believe that it could or will exist. He’s operating on 100% religious faith.
And it’s the worst kind of religion, the kind that supports him being a bad person.
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@cheddarcrisp
That right. And the worst kind for a second reason: it’s a con. -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by [email protected]
Is there a “there” there with LLMs and other contemporary forms of AI? Consider this story of a photographer who prepared hoax photographs of ghosts in the early days of photography, and suckered even Mary Todd Lincoln:
Episode 159: Spiritual Developments (2.26.2021)
One Sunday afternoon, a man named William Mumler decided to take a self portrait. He said he was alone in the photography studio, but as the photograph developed, he saw something very strange—the image of someone else, sitting beside him.
(thisiscriminal.com)
Is there a “there” there with using double exposures in photography? Sure! But step zero is completely giving up on the idea that you’re photographing ghosts — or in the case of AI, creating “intelligence.”
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The trouble is that giving up on the promise of photographing ghosts won’t let you extract •nearly• as much money from investors.
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@inthehands I think you are thinking of https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ by @baldur ?
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A great point here:
https://mastodon.social/@tantramar/113278385211586464One of my favorite picture books is “Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like.” This book is frequently mis-summarized — including by the publisher’s own blurb! — and the mis-summarizing perfectly illustrates @tantramar’s point:
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@inthehands I saw a minute later, but I thought I knew precisely what you were talking about when I saw the tweet, and dove down my highlights archive to get it.
Sorry for the redundant post. -
The blurb:
❝Because of the road sweeper's belief in him, a dragon saves the city of Wu from the Wild Horsemen of the north.❞
That is flatly wrong.
What the road sweeper actually says to the old man who claims to be a dragon (but nobody believes him) is:
❝I don’t know whether you are a dragon or not, but if you are hungry and thirsty, please do me the honor of coming into my humble home.❞
The dragon saves the city not because of the road sweeper’s •belief•, but because of his •kindness•.
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@Sevoris
Eh, good to know others have my back! -
@inthehands @breadandcircuses It's not really primarily "self"-immolation when he's also proposing immolating everyone else.
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The story couldn’t be clearer on this point. Isn’t it fascinating that our culture consistently sets people up to misread it so?
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Rob Cinos :verified:replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands The story could be further reduced to the fact that the farmer took action above wishful thinking.
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Rob Cinos :verified: last edited by
@robcinos
“Action rooted in compassion.” Could any lesson be simpler, or more important? -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by [email protected]
@robcinos (It is perhaps also useful to note that in the story, the road sweeper gives his •one• daily bowl of rice to the old man, after all the wealthy and powerful people in the town mocked him and turned the old man away. The road sweeper, who by the way is just a kid, would rather go hungry for a day than let a stranger suffer. Not just action, but an extraordinary act of generosity.)
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@cheddarcrisp @inthehands It continues to be striking, although I have long since stopped being surprised, to witness a group of mostly self-identified atheists re-invent very specific varieties of Christianity but with "AI" in place of a god.
(Eric Schmidt is Jewish; but the lines he is using in that interview are right out of the LessWrong apocalyptic AI cult, which is a group of people who say they are atheists imitating messianic end-times Christianity.)
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AI being perceived as intelligent implies we could be doing the same with certain people. Maybe they're just rules based response engines--like the most annoying internet trolls appear to be.
