"Surprisingly, vampires have played a significant role in Buddhism, in Asia, for centuries. They are not a Western invention.

And, contemporary vampire fiction—“preternatural romance”—provides tools for presenting aspects of Buddhism that are otherwise difficult to communicate."

#DavidChapman

https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/

"We’ve seen that current AI practice leads to technologies that are expensive, difficult to apply in real-world situations, and inherently unsafe. Neglected scientific and engineering investigations can bring better understanding of the risks of current AI technology, and can lead to safer technologies."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/science-engineering-vs-AI

"People, societies, and cultures produce intelligence, not brains. Brains are involved, as are (for example) stories. A brain would not be sufficient to produce intelligence, if one could somehow be disentangled from the person, society, and culture."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/backpropaganda#fn_people_not_brains

"Two dangerous falsehoods afflict decisions about artificial intelligence:

* First, that neural networks are impossible to understand. Therefore, there is no point in trying.

* Second, that neural networks are the only and inevitable method for achieving advanced AI. Therefore, there is no reason to develop better alternatives."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/backpropaganda

One of the biggest problems with the phrase "artificial intelligence" is that decades of criti-hyping sci-fi has endowed it with the meaning "simulated mind". But human technology is no closer to creating that than we were in the 1950s. As AI experts like #DavidChapman tirelessly point out, humans haven't even developed a philosophy of mind accurate enough to tell us what a simulated mind would be simulating.

(1/2)

"So-called “neural networks” are extremely expensive, poorly understood, unfixably unreliable, deceptive, data hungry, and inherently limited in capabilities.

In short: they are bad."

#DavidChapman, Gradient Dissent

"AI is about power and control. The technical details are interesting for some of us, but they’re a sideshow.

Superintelligence is a fantasy of power, not intelligence. Intelligence is just a technical detail."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/one-bit-future

I've already posted quotes from this book that make this point, but I think it's worth reiterating. Plus I just really like this quote.

"'What sort of society and culture do we want, and how do we get that' is the topic of the AI-driven culture war. The culture war prevents us from thinking clearly about the future.

Mooglebook recommender AI does not hate you, but you are made out of emotionally-charged memes it can use for something else."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/AI-destroyed-the-future

"Cargo cult science means conforming to misaligned incentives. For academics, it optimizes the proxy objective “publish journal articles,” which has increasingly diverged from the actual objective, understanding natural phenomena."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/stop-obstructing-science

What's responsible for this? The managerialism that now grips most universities and other #research institutions. In which job security and promotion depends - at least in part - on the quantity of journal articles published.

"There’s a popular image of scientific geniuses figuring things out by thinking about math in an armchair. Newton and Einstein did that, but the kind of science they did is extremely atypical, and they are misleading as prototypes."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/limits-to-AI-simulation

"The most powerful people, and notably the most monstrous, are not conspicuously intelligent, at least not in the sense measured by IQ...

Success in gaining power seems to depend instead on extreme Dark Tetrad traits (psychopathy, narcissism, machiavellianism, and sadism). That’s moral idiocy, not any sort of intelligence. Maybe we should be more concerned with AI developing superhuman dark tetrad traits than superintelligence."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/what-intelligent-people-do

"Anyway, superintelligent general AI would probably be bad, so let’s not go there, not if we can avoid it. Probably a 'narrow AI,' meaning one that just did science stuff—or, more likely, many narrow AIs with different specializations—would suffice. That seems safer. Narrow science AIs need not be similar to human scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. Mind-likeness seems unnecessary (and scary)."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/what-AI-for-progress

"The seeming ability of text generators to perform multi-step commonsense reasoning is currently the only plausible stepping stone toward Scary AI. I do find it somewhat worrying. So far, there have been no published investigations of either the mechanism for this ability or its ultimate limits. To the extent that apparent reasoning seems worrying, that project seems urgent."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/fight-unsafe-AI

"The seeming ability of text generators to perform multi-step commonsense reasoning is currently the only plausible stepping stone toward Scary AI. I do find it somewhat worrying. So far, there have been no published investigations of either the mechanism for this ability or its ultimate limits. To the extent that apparent reasoning seems worrying, that project seems urgent."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/fight-unsafe-AI

"Raji et al.’s 'The Fallacy of AI Functionality' points out that whether an AI system works reliably is ethically prior to the desirability of its intended purpose. They give dozens of examples of AI systems causing frequent, serious harms to specific people by acting in ways contrary to their designers’ goals."

#DavidChapman

https://betterwithout.ai/mistrust-machine-learning