Anthropic vision of good AI

Amodei presents his vision of how the next generation of powerful AI can help 

COVID

Repeat infections

It’s not like the flu.

even a “mild” case of COVID can throw your immune system into a tizzy as it works to quickly shore up your defenses. And each reinfection is a fresh opportunity for the virus to win the battle.

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any encounter with COVID can also cause your immune system to “go awry or develop some form of dysfunction,” Dr. Al-Aly tells SELF. Specifically, “immune imprinting” can happen, where, upon a second (or third or fourth) exposure to the virus, your immune cells launch the same response as they did for the initial infection, in turn blocking or limiting the development of new antibodies necessary to fight off the current variant that’s stirring up trouble. So, “when you get hit an [additional] time, your immune system may not behave classically,” Dr. Al-Aly says, and could struggle with mounting a good defense.

Marx

A review of Capital

capitalism’s unprecedented mode of producing for human needs and generating wealth shapes present and future conditions of earthly existence more pervasively and profoundly than anything else humans have made. It affects the entirety of the planet’s surface and crafts both possibilities and challenges for all life upon it. It arrays 8 billion homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation. It contours all social relations and subjectivities, from practices of work and leisure to arrangements of kinship, intimacy, and loneliness. In addition to class, it constructs and mobilizes race and gender in continuously changing yet persistently exploitable ways. It powers technological revolutions and scatters the discarded remains of past ones everywhere on earth and in orbits circling it. It birthed the Anthropocene—the epoch in which human and “natural” histories are now permanently and dynamically entwined—and within it, the Great Acceleration: the short half-century in which fossil fuel use intensified so radically as to inaugurate what scientists term the Sixth Mass Extinction. And it incited the development of finance, artificial intelligence, and other practices animated by digital technologies that bode ever more intense and paradoxical ways to both serve and dominate the species that invented them.

Neofeudalism and the panopticon

Neo feudal review

Ukrainian recent history

Wetern destruction of the Ukraine 🇺🇦

Glenn Diesen walks us through the past 20 years 

In political propaganda, it is common to frame a war through a concept that everyone agrees with, such as the need to “help” Ukraine. We all want to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty, territory and the lives of its citizens. However, instead of discussing what would help Ukraine, such concepts are given a fixed meaning to shut down debates. Any argument can then be framed as either being pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian. However, what is bad for Russia is not automatically good for Ukraine. Yet, people who can be taught to speak in clichés can be taught to think in clichés. Commentary on NATO policies toward Russia is similarly framed as being pro-Western or pro-Russian, which circumvents an actual discussion about whether these policies are in the West’s interests or not.

Epistemological analysis of the internet

Free speech…

Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet.

COVID and the brain

Bloomberg surveys the literature

In 2021, UK researchers reported early results from a study comparing brain scans taken before and after the pandemic began. They discovered signs of damage and accelerated aging in the brain, particularly in the region responsible for smell, even in patients who had experienced mostly mild cases of Covid months earlier.

How Does Covid-19 Impact the Brain?

Research has since shown that Covid-related cognitive deficits can persist for years, especially in older adults and those who suffered more severe cases. 

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Even mild cases of Covid led to cognitive decline, equivalent to an average 3-point drop in IQ. For those with unresolved symptoms such as persistent shortness of breath or fatigue, the decline amounted to a 6-point decrease in IQ.

Some evidence suggests the infection may increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease. This link is supported by the rise in cases of parkinsonism — a collection of symptoms such as tremors, slow movement, stiffness and balance issues — following Covid.

Ted Gioia predicts AI issues

11 intermediate term forecasts

The world has gone mad. But nothing is as crazy as the AI news.

The results are sometimes hard to believe. But all this is true:
The movie trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s new film got pulled from theaters because “the studio had been duped by an AI bot.”
Just one person in North Carolina was able to steal $10 million in royalties from human musicians with AI-generated songs. They got billions of streams. 
The promoters of National Novel Writing Month angrily declared that opposition to AI books is classist and ableist.
Children are now routinely using AI to make nude photos of other youngsters. 
Nearly half of the safety team at OpenAI left their jobs—and almost nobody seems to care or notice. 
AI tech titan Nvidia lost a half trillion in market capitalization over the course of just a few days—including the largest daily decline in the history of capitalism. 
By pure coincidence, Nvidia’s CEO sold $633 million worth of stock in the weeks leading up to the current decline. 
We truly live in interesting times—which is one of the three apocryphal Chinese curses.

But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived—the unleashing of AI agents.

• And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for. 

  Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore. 

  That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission. 

  It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path.

  But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.

Why Dick Cheney should not be rehabilitated

A rundown

In response to his endorsement of Kamala over trump 

Public goods

Should be owned publicly

A standard retort against government-run industries is that they will be less efficient than privately owned industries, provide worse service, produce a miserable experience for you, the consumer. Bullshit. For one thing, private companies do an excellent job of providing a miserable experience for the highest possible price already. 

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common assumption that public systems are naturally shittier than private ones. That is an observation of current reality masquerading as a principle. Yeah, the public systems in America are often shittier, because we allow all the rich people to opt out of them and use private systems and then the public systems are left exclusively for the poor. Make everyone use the public system, and the public system will get better. Duh.

Related, Cory Doctorow on “enshittification”

pluralistic

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

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Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

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Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

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you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

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sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime

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Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

Cory Doctorow on “enshittification”Cory Doctorow on “enshittification”

COVID preparedness

Some current recommendations

DIY encrypted communication

LoRa and Reticulum