suhr

"Few scientists, engineers, union spokesmen, technicians, industrialists, professors, or experts agree on '___', even among themselves."

"and as the symbol of ominous technological progress. One can see that it has been deliberately distorted in a few cases, loosely used often, and honestly but differently defined many times... Small wonder that the public is bewildered.

(Quoted by the book) "Few words of recent years have been so twisted to suit a multitude of purposes and phobias as this new word, '___'. It has been used as a technological rallying cry, a manufacturing goal, an engineering challenge, an advertising slogan, a labor campaign banner,

Reading a random used book from 1966 I picked up on automation and "cybernation" ("The Automation Hysteria") is like scrolling through social media right now except "AGI" is replaced with "automation"

They were using the same words as us, down to "abundance". Nothing is new :)

"intelligence" is also a narrative device

begging everyone to please read this wonderful piece by Edsgar Dijkstra www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd09xx...

"intelligence" is also a narrative device

begging everyone to please read this wonderful piece by Edsgar Dijkstra www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd09xx...

(what if "AI" was "proven to be conscious"? what shall we do then? my point is this is a pointless and frankly dangerous exercise that can only lead to more dehumanization of actual living human beings)

(to be clear, I do not mean to imply that "AI" should (or could) ever be on the same "level" as humans. my point is that this is up to us. I think focusing on the question of whether "AI" is "conscious" is leading us down the wrong path of inquiry.)

Consciousness is a narrative device

yes!!! exactly the perspective I was looking for on this as well, thank you for sharing!!!

Where things stand with the Department of War A statement from Dario Amodei

I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”

www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...

oh, yeah, on my bookshelf but I need to read this. (btw, @adambecker.bsky.social I've been meaning to reach out, will email you soon!)

The Religion of Technology by David F. Noble: 9780140279160 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books Are religion and science really at war with one another? Not according to David F. Noble, who argues that the flourishing of both religion and technology today is nothing new but rather the continuat...

(some refs just shared by a colleague: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/331339..., opiniojuris.org/2025/01/30/c...)

ya thx!! do you happen to know of the/some particular people/work to look into here?

Agenthood under this view isn’t a fundamental property of the object. It’s a model that abstracts complexity in terms of what a thing is trying to do and what actions are available. A pendulum could just as well be modelled as agent that chooses its swing length to minimize variation in period.

@timnitgebru.bsky.social you wrote about this before -- do you know or have any work that explicates this analogy, especially from a religious studies angle?

has anyone written about how so much of AI discourse is basically rapture discourse?

A quick note on that new "AI declaration", which is mostly just a bit clueless but which also assembled some of the most vile people on the planet for a bunch of scientists and activists to put there name next to.

https://tante.cc/2026/03/05/nothing-to-declare/

YouTube video by Posy Small Crowd Cheering.wav

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGYR...

Hi, as a gal who has had AI porn of herself thrown at her by nightmare people

This shit ain't funny, this isn't a Ha Ha Oh These Chuds. This is disgusting on so many levels. "Jessica" is made up of real women who are now unwillingly part of this digital homonculus. Fuck everyone involved.

thinking about my final posts on twitter for no particular reason

I think therefore I can't be bothered.

Back on the first point, I think perhaps it's a good thing that PIs who have been treating their grad students as postdocs as work horses could have their AI now. Perhaps they should stop working w research assistants for the net benefits of everyone involved and the good of the research culture.

i find the LLM "capabilities" debate to be almost uniquely poisoned. people who claim that LLMs cannot do things that they verifiably can arguing with people claiming that LLMs can do things that they verifiably cannot.

These repeated attempts to "communicate" with AI left me feeling adrift from my own language. I thought of the opposite of poetry. Poetry sets you adrift from language in service of connection to meaning and other people; this is how it recreates language. This set me adrift in service of nothing.

(context: scrolling through Twitter and seeing lots of curious, empathetic, and thoughtful people who aren't certain of their values lauding a corporation for taking the "good" side in this week's "good versus evil" contest, this time where it's Actually About Killing Real People)

Y'all really ought to read what y'all are writing. What do you want? Why are you doing what you are doing? What don't you know? Why? Please take Mrinank seriously

we are the agents!!! by god some of you are so eager to give yourselves up to the Computer. luckily 99% of the world is not, and also has enough lived experience to know that apocalypse stories are allegories for things that really happen to real people

why are we giving "AIs" entityhood? what is the principal of speech generated from an LLM? who is chatgpt???

Was everyone so eager to be relevant intellectually and financially that they failed to even imagine the possibility of being responsible in matters of human rights?