And who do we have here conducting the interview: Stuart Ritchie, anti-trans activist & one of the more ‘deniable’ eugenics types of the late 2010s. What an incredibly tight ecosystem our good friends inhabit indeed lol.

Of course The Economist (inherently derogatory) would criti-hype AI.

A magazine whose editorial line is confident cluelessness.

Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.

Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.

Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.

Have been using Tutanota for years. They took an anti-AI stance pretty early on as well.

Seems like he’s very heavily professionally invested in the symbolic paradigm and given machine learning completely dominates AI at the moment he’s taking the piss at them whenever he can. Given the fundamental limitations of ML he’s probably right that any sincere attempt to improve on them requires a more symbolic approach, but talking specifically about AGI is getting into woo territory.

Was he promoting LLMs earlier on?

It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle

It should be said here again that these people don’t even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.

Mario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh… Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/

Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.

That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.

More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing.

The luddites smashed looms not because they were inherently anti-technology, but as a means of industrial action in a time when labour held no formal power at all. As you say yourself, the issue with AI is that it doesn’t even work as advertised; industrial looms worked fine. «AI»'s biggest problems are the enormous waste, ecological damage, enshittification and labour discipline that it incurs. If Silicon Valley was actually building Data, the debate would be different, but this dimension seems mostly theoretical for now.

Oh, I’ve seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.

Novara published a gushing profile of MacAskill a while ago, so no surprises there.

Yeah, the party-line was far from realistic and reflected the West’s own imperial hubris, but there’s a spectrum there. When the fullscale invasion finally happened, the Jake Sullivans weren’t going around for weeks about how Ukraine is doomed. And again, there was at least some room in the mainstream for eastern europeans or even just people who had traveled in Ukraine and understood the country & the people. In that regard Samo shares much more with the vatniks (sorry, the “realists”) like John Mearsheimer and The Economist, who kept (and still keep) telling people Russia would win any day now.

He runs an analytics company and was specifically touting how his models showed a quick Russian victory, even weeks into the invasion, which was more than just the usual Besserwisserism among western europeans towards eastern Europe. If the whole shtick is that the mainstream is lame but my patented crystal ball actually tells the future from first principles and you then tank even harder than the mainstream, you not only embarrass yourself but reveal your own preferences as well.

And the mainstream predictions in the West of Ukrainian resistance weren’t as negative as what he advanced, which is precisely why many refused to believe the Kremlin would actually step on this rake of a war. That he wholeheartedly defended a quick Russian victory made him seem steeped more in the Kremlin’s narratives than the West’s, even as all imperial powers tend to be hubristic.

I remember him tweeting in February 2022 where immediately after the invasion he confidently predicted that Russia would gobble up all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Unlike all those legacy academics with their degrees he really see into the future of governance, you see.

Pentagon says US military to be an ‘AI-first’ fighting force

Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!

Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesn’t belong here please remove.

The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is it’s mainly junior positions which aren’t tightly “bundled” with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?

The whole political convention feels like a sporting or entertainment event. The endless personalistic glazing, rock music… is this really how every party does politics in North America? Trump really comes off as much less of a deviation in this context.

I’m not quite sure in matters of morality competition should serve as its basis. It’s too easy to game such things, e.g. the aforementioned optimized “hyper-ethics” of EA or buying indulgences etc. It’s too easy to see oneself as blameless based on some particular slice of life, to become a monster whilst thinking oneself morally as above all others (dictators care deeply about being seen as righteous, why do they all spend so much time on propaganda). Better to admit that everyone, including oneself, sins, and also that everyone is worthy of redemption, and to follow from that.

The motivating factor for doing right should never be that it bases oneself above someone else in any way; a better way, imo, is that moral behavior is more in accord with a sincere, unillusioned engagement with life that is aware of the interdependence of all things, the fluid boundaries of what constitutes the self and hence self-interest.

It’s the autopilot mode/nihilism that gets at one, but having a self-image as morally superior isn’t entirely honest either I think. No one can be perfect, even typing these words runs on energy partially generated by burning fossils that will lead to early deaths somewhere. These webs of interdependent existence & suffering are inescapable save for maybe a buddha. But at least have the awareness to acknowledge your own role and work to minimize your harm. Not even caring or coming up with fairytales about billions of future digital beings in sublime bliss are both just ways of turning away from looking at the tragedy of life. Maybe I’m getting overly existential, but it’s late here.

Good read, thanks.