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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.

Apparently not. Much like generals, PR consultants have a bad habit of always fighting the last war. The corporate PR paradigm of parroting the woke shibboleths of the day is woefully inadequate for the coming wave of, “my daughter spends all day in her room with her chatbot instead of talking to boys,” and, “I had a cushy office job, now I have to do degrading manual labor for a living”.

“my daughter spends all day in her room with her chatbot instead of talking to boys”

WTF I love LLMs and chatbots?!

Sounds like a feature rather than a bug.

Would you rather your daughter grow up into a slut or an old maid? What if she is your only child?

Would you rather your daughter grow up into a slut or an old maid?

False dichotomy… a slut daughter could very well end up being an old, barren maid.

What if she is your only child?

That’s the neat part about having multiple children. If a daughter ends up being a hoe, at least you have other children (hopefully sons) to diversify your portfolio and take the sting out of having a hoe daughter.

Agreed here. I think that most major institutions will be massively blindsided, at least from the public perspective. With a technology this volatile that's so hard to predict, I think the risk assessment will make these hide bound juggernauts try to avoid taking a public stance until the chips fall decisively to one side or another. Which is precisely when their statements will cease to really matter.

This is, of course, by design.

This is, of course, by design.

Whose?

I’m at least partially convinced of Venkatesh Rao’s idea that sociopaths create bureaucracy within organizations in large part to be able to shift blame or reap praise as the winds shift. Essentially large bureaucracies exist to make things move slowly and give people scapegoats at different steps.

This setup leads to slow-moving public statements generally, and combine that with a culture that follows the precautionary principle, you get large institutions that generally don’t say anything controversial.

http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

You'll have to explain that one as if to a ten-year old.

The protagonist of history isn't humans but the intelligent force some people with Marxist inclinations call "capitalism" that has been terraforming the world and modifying humans for its purposes since the age of sail.

This story is about that force not needing humans anymore and ridding itself of them.

That's interesting. There's a new book called Inhuman Capital that pretty much makes this point, from indeed a Marxist pov. The endgame is no humans at all.

Finally catching on to accelerationism I guess.

The problem is that complaining about deterritorialisation is ultimately reactionary. if full communism requires there be no humans, do Marxists side with humanity or with the principle of the thing?

This is why I'm not interested in the doom saying people have about AI and the current crop of LLMs, we already have a "general" artificial intelligence that's at best indifferent and at worst malicious, they are called corporations and they are globally distributed.

Oh, sure, that makes sense. I can absolutely get on board with that. And it's such a nice theory, too - you can call that force capitalism, or intelligence, or life! Whatever it is, it stands to reason that humans are only an intermediate phase of its development.

I get a lot of pleasure watching the AI Ethics folks pointedly refuse to even acknowledge that LLMs are getting more capable. Some of them have noted publicly that they're bleeding credibility because of it, but can't talk about it because of chilling effects.

It's also remarkable how the agreed-upon leading lights of the AI Ethics movement are all female (with the possible exception of Moritz Hardt, who keeps his head down). The field is playing out like you'd imagine it would in an uncharitable right-wing polemic.

The field is playing out like you'd imagine it would in an uncharitable right-wing polemic.

Is Harry Potter considered right-wing now? I get serious Professor Umbridge vibes from Emily M Bender. Imagine Harry Potter Sam Altman demonstrating the magic of artificial intelligence to congress in person, and then having Professor Bender show up and start lecturing about how it is impossible in-principle for LLMs to provide useful information, then start ranting incoherently about “techbros” and “AI hype”.

Harry Potter is a children’s book for children. Much as I love it.

One can pattern-match Umbridges and Dumbledores and Hermiones in the real world because JKR wrote plausible characters, not because of a political allegory.

Is Harry Potter considered right-wing now?

The novel series about kids starting a secret gun club because all government institutions are thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by a cabal of perverted elites that want to live forever?

Always has been.

It's also a whole bunch of other things because despite being a stylistically poor writer, Rowling is actually an artist and capable of tapping into the archetypes of the English collective unconscious to extract the nature of masculine evil and feminine evil, all different that they are.

If Voldie only wanted to live forever he wouldn't be the villain. No one would know who he is.

He’d be a side note on a chocolate frog card, remaining completely offscreen even as the protagonists destroy his life’s work.

Of course I playfully skip over the main thing that makes HP left wing coded in some people's minds, the EVIL NAZIS who want to ethnically cleanse the wizarding world.

But do understand my point is that it's not really left wing or right wing. It is both and neither because it's trying to actually relate to the human experience of being a British schoolboy with a destiny. And what's more British than fighting the Nazis, really?

And what's more British than fighting the Nazis, really?

Building empire over which the sun never sets, while dressed in terribly hot khaki uniform and drinking tea.

Now that's soldiering.

And what's more British than fighting the Nazis, really?

You don't mean to imply that the House of Saxe-Coburg and GothaWindsor isn't British do you?

Are you impying that the patriarch of the House of Windsor didn't make his bones killing fascists for the Royal Navy?

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Haha, exactly. I don't know if you've seen on Twitter, but a lot of FAccT people are still stuck on browbeating people for talking about general intelligence at all, since they claim that the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully compared is racist + eugenicist.

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