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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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.
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@dpfyhrie
“What is intelligence?” and “How do we know that any entity, including ourselves, is ‘intelligent?’” are both fascinating philosophical question, and both don’t have a clear answer. “Intelligence” doesn’t even have a widely accepted definition.I’m displeased that people are certain they’ve created an artificial version of something when we can’t even agree on what the original, natural version is.
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@inthehands I kinda wonder how much the “lsd microdose for productivity/innovation” trend feeds into this. My notes from trying 90 micrograms (which is probably higher than “micro” but still firmly below significant visual effect levels) were that the experience included
* feeling excessively clever
* being extremely suggestible
* feeling vaguely worshipful in a nonspecific but religious-feeling wayEntheogens gonna entheogen?
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@inthehands @breadandcircuses Also: If he has his way, this *won't* go down in history - because there won't be any history.
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@Catfish_Man
It may in fact be that Schmidt is literally high on drugs. I would not be surprised. Ketamine seems a likely one if I’m guessing.Regardless, there’s definitely •something• here in the realm of neuroscience, Plato’s cave, human fallibility, false belief in the mind as rational, and brain hacking with poor understanding of consequences.
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@datarama
I don’t think that’s on the table; •someone• is going to survive. But in a way, total extinction is far easier to picture than the kind of gross collapse of human well-being that •is• on the table. -
@inthehands Well, cockroaches don't read or write history books.
Hyperbole aside: I guess this is a special case of the more general "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
I still hold out an ever-dimming hope for a future where effigies of Schmidt, Musk and Zuckerberg are burned in annual "what the fuck were our ancestors thinking" festivals.
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@inthehands @breadandcircuses
Back in college, one of my friends, who was an adept sleight-of-hand magician, passed his science requirement by programming an Apple ][ to help him carry out a simple misdirection, convincing a physics professor that the computer was reading their mind.The only difference here is that Schmidt is performing the trick on himself.
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@inthehands
I repeat to people the story of a lecturer that put googley eyes on a pencil and gave it a name and then during the lecture broke it in half.
Some people gasped.
The lectured pointed out humans anthropomorphize anything including an incredibly complex auto-complete machine.
