Join 📚 J'S Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
When one engages with AI models, the meaning of the process is systematically precluded. If, as Bernstein puts it, “freedom is the capacity to act anew, and art is that human practice in which human beings routinely produce new, unique items,” then generative models are the opposite, a foreclosure of the possibility to create new meanings, new unique items — things that can’t be virtually anticipated by an algorithmic process.
Epic Forgetting
Rob Horning
Yes, exactly. There are a couple of ways to think about this. One is that superintelligence could be really important because it could facilitate the realization of the TESCREAL vision of the future. TESCREALists tend to think of everything as an engineering problem. So the reasoning is that if we have a superintelligence, then we have a super-engineer. If we have a super-engineer, then we can engineer paradise, which is a term that they literally use.
Tech Capitalists Don’t Care About Humans. Literally.
jacobin.com
Amazon got a *ton* of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of *critical* press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.
Pluralistic: Three AI Insights for Hard-Charging, Future-Oriented Smartypantses
Cory Doctorow
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise