Timnit Gebru

Look, I know I repost a lot of stuff but you should actually read this.

👀👀👀
Omfg
WTF is this time I'm living in?

Y'all wanna warn your friends before you get on the "AI companion" bandwagon and warn your friends, help them get informed.

gen ai as a project exists to ingest the other and reconfigure it as white supremacist fantasy

Is It Too Late? No. But We Must Better Understand the Nature of the Battle

open.substack.com/pub/sherrily...

"The recent release of some of the Epstein emails and files has confirmed the explicit nature of some of these connections."

We warned, and as she writes "were treated as extremists and conspiracy theorists."

"Today the white supremacist views of many of the wealthiest and politically ambitious tech billionaires is on display almost daily..."

Yes! It's great to see @timnitgebru.bsky.social and @xriskology.bsky.social's TESCREAL work contextualized here. We can't effectively organize without a clear-eyed shared reality of what these people are trying to achieve and how they wield power.
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Cc @ajlunited.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social

How it started (quote post)
How it's going (linked article)

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Have fun :)

When someone told me back then that they were at an EA conference and the keynote speaker was Thiel, I was like I better stay away from these people.

Koren — who said she speaks nine languages — was working for Google Translate. She said that while there, she noted the service was being used by federal government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in high-stakes, even life-threatening situations."

Some of our interpreters are doing this work from their barely standing residences in Gaza, supporting those fleeing in Sudan, for example. You see how important this work is when you hear the stories of people in RCT's network.

"At about the same time her sister was going through this experience,

RCT also provides interpreters and translators to help people navigate daily life, she said."

The organization is more like a mutual aid organization where those who were in the same terrible situation that their fellow immigrants were in, help each other, around the world.

"Over the years, the organization has built a network of some 3,000 interpreters & translators around the world who represent 200 languages, she said. Although about half of RCT’s work involves helping immigrants or asylum seekers such as Felipe navigate government proceedings and fight deportation,

@alexhanna.bsky.social and I are on the board of RCT. It is at the frontlines of protecting immigrants that are being hunted down around the country. Please support RCT if you have the money or tell others in your network about RCT.

SF nonprofit translates for tasks big and small Translation group finds interpreters for those in need.

Friends, take some time to read this wonderful article about Ariel Koren & Respond Crisis Translation. Ariel was pushed out of Google for uncovering & organizing against Project Nimbus, Google's collaboration with the Israeli military on cloud services & "AI." 🧵

www.sfexaminer.com/news/technol...

Its incredible how shallow Thiel is and how profound he thinks he is.

I am dying that ~38 minutes in, he uses Andy Meltzoff's newborn facial imitation study to claim we are all naturally memetic, and therefore have no good original ideas.

Thread

I thought the whole "effective altruism" thing was quantifying everything lol.

But early on I knew all they did was pull numbers out of their asses to justify their decisions and talk about being "rational."

even though this whole AGI thing is THE MOST important thing to work on potentially.

One of the funniest things he said was that if you ask him when this whole AGI thing will happen, he'll say he doesn't know. BUT

"if you insist on measurement" you'll end up with these problems that you won't work on because you can't measure then,

"It's time to start reaccelerating" technology is his last message.

Friends the MOST important thing is the "hostile AI vs friendly AI."

"The biggest 0 to 1 thing is generalized AI".

It will change the world in ways that are "more radical than we can imagine."

"Potentially the most important zero to one problem that is."

Friendly AI vs the apocalyptic one is important too. Remember, this is a conference about seeing all the things in the world & describing what the most important things are that will make it better. We arrived at "figure out how to make me live forever" & stop the fictional AI devil from killing me.

All the arguments against longevity are bad and wrong guys, according to him. Thank god that he will not live forever.

"It is grotesquely underfunded."

Now quoting Muskrat. Of course, talking about why engineers are close to magicians." These people say more about us than us, I've never described myself as a magician but I did meet an actual magician who was also an engineer when I worked at Apple.

He's talking about "a really safe way to get out of giving money to people" followed by a laugh from the crowd in an "effective altruism" summit lol.