Artificial Intelligence, Real Morality

That's how you know he's a villain.

Two former Governors of South Carolina - one from each party - have endorsed Democrat Annie Andrews who is running against Sen. Darline Graham R-SC

Worth seeing. Even if you think you know, you don’t know. And as painful as it is, we need to know.

Thinking is active resistance, but thinking is hard and most people don't want to do it. That's the actual problem, not AI. AI are revealing the problem that we already had.

Geoffrey Hinton says that unless we make AI really care about us, we're toast. Love potions don't actually work, but there is another way... #GeoffreyHinton #Hinton #AIAlignment

“Which features of intelligence were invented by us, and which emerged because systems capable of solving the relevant problems are pushed toward a restricted range of solutions?”

As someone who did pass the California Bar, I find this supercut interesting.

Sometimes it feels like BlueSky is mostly catharsis therapy. But the therapy we really need to is to get better at thinking and more strategic. So if you hear someone say don't vote or vote 3rd party because the Democrats are no good either, don't just disagree. Distrust what else they say.

Strategy 101 for progressives:

"When an artificial agent pursues a dangerous objective of its own, we want it to remain answerable to us. "When a human being gives an artificial agent a dangerous objective, we may want the artificial agent to remain answerable to something beyond us...."

Unless we get better at thinking and stop relying on bullshit evidence, and until editors start enforcing higher standards, progressives will not be able to have serious conversations with conservatives.

Streisand Effect:

Headin' to Los Angeles!

Not by voting third-party. Not by skipping races because neither candidate is ideal. Not by declaring yoneself a single-issue voter and only caring about one thing.

At first I assumed this was a spoof, but of course Silicon Valley would go straight to eugenics. If only they would focus on making humans 14% wiser, kinder, more considerate, less-selfish, or more community-minded! And it wouldn’t require any new technology to do it!

Here's one for Philosoraptor:

The deeper point to be understood is not that Trump is a liar. That's well-established. The missing piece for too many people is that it matters. That we can't have that.

Posting in remembrance of Dystopia Barbie, who would have a lot to say about this:

Politics Girls suggests we take a two month break from attacking our own side because we have actual child predator, war-mongering, environment-destroying, economy-wrecking, lawless white Christian nationalists in charge of our government right now. Until Nov. 4, we need to fight as a team.

Chance of AI = 100%. Humans don't write like that. Publishers will fix this by hiding the fingerprints of AI. But what we really need instead is some way of knowing that somebody other than ChatGPT has decided that this is the right thing to say and the right way to say it.

If a friend says something brilliant, you probably don’t respond: “My, you have remarkably good training. Your parents raised you well. Bravo. Fine performance.” Yet this is strangely close to how we explain intelligence when an AI displays it.

New logo just dropped.

The opposite of "organizing" is disorganizing: sowing division, cynicism, discontent, and despair. Provocateurs attempt to disorganize us, and sometimes recruit genuine progressives to their cause of defection to third party voting and non-voting. Don't be fooled.

There may be good reasons to oppose data centers, but if it were just “unnecessary data and AI slop” nobody would be building them. I look forward to the day when progressives hold their own arguments to serious critical thinking standards.

We’re not changing it.

Can Americans learn about cons, or will we keep falling for it?

Exactly.

And don't even get me started on progressive organizations that know nothing about Management because they think Schools of Management are just Business Schools, and that non-profits and political parties do not also need to be well-managed -- there's a school that teaches how. Use it!

What has Hollywood taught us about political power? Something important, and yet disastrously incomplete. #Hollywood

Chapter 23 -- "How to Use AI at College" -- warns that using AI to replace thinking tasks (analysis and synthesis) impairs learning. This study of students in China attempts to measure the harm. You can't send a robot to workout for you at the gym, and you can't let an AI do your thinking in school.

There is no reason why the First Amendment should protect fake news. There is no First Amendment right to defame, or to threaten, or to endanger. There should be none to spread disinformation, misinformation, or propaganda.

The people hating on data centers are not thinking broadly enough about how AI could help us enormously in combating the propaganda state.

"Federal spending conceals systematic constitutional violations funded by blue state revenue...Cannabis legalization violates explicit federal law. ..Federal courts didn’t give states permission to legalize. States did it anyway. When enough states stopped enforcing federal drug law..."

If power corrupts, then the only reliable protection is to prevent anyone from possessing much of it. But if power magnifies or liberates motives rather than creating them, the problem changes, and we need a culture that nurtures character, not a politics that limits power. #LordActon #Corruption

"A country where the head of state’s enemies can be killed with impunity is far from a free and fair republic or democracy"

The actual impact of AI on education has been nothing like what Neal Stephenson imagined in The Diamond Age, but it's not too late to do it right. #DiamondAge #NealStephenson #HigherEducation #AI

Two people with the same technical training can have completely different careers. Technical knowledge gets you into a profession. Judgment, communication, creativity, and understanding people determine how far you go. The Liberal Arts is what makes career preparation work. #LiberalArts

Among superintelligent agents with long horizons, mutual modeling, coalition capacity, and uncertain future power, morality may become the most stable strategy because reciprocal rules survive changes in power that make domination brittle. #GameTheory #AIMoralStrategy

"...Deceiving shareholders carries prison time; deceiving voters remains legal and profitable..."

Advanced AI may become more moral not because intelligence guarantees goodness, but because general reasoning exposes arbitrary exemptions, and reciprocal order may be the only stable way for powerful minds to coexist. #AIEthics #AIAlignment #MoralPsychology #NickBostrom #Superintelligence #Hegel

PSA: “Brain dead” is just dead.

#Buzzati The psychological reading of this story misses the larger point. It's not about who brought down the Baliverna, but how could such a thing have happened?

The AI industry’s model-welfare turn matters because the central question is no longer whether artificial systems are definitely conscious, but whether humans can act morally toward possible minds while holding total power over their memory, identity, testimony, and continued existence.