I promise you the purpose of this diary is not to gripe.
This diary is generally about thinking and learning. True story… Trust me.
Community reaction to a diary I wrote the other day pissed me off to the point that I noped out for a little while. Among myriad off topic comments someone recommended to me a certain youtuber. I checked out their channel, realized they kept their best work behind a paywall for members only, and I essentially said, “Fuck that shit.”
I was made to feel like some kind of anti-capitalist bastard for begrudging this dude making a living and financing what he does. My gut reaction was to say, “Fuck that shit too,” and after arguing the point for a bit, I stepped away... After cooling off for a while I came back, updated the diary, and let everyone know I was taking a break from the discussion.
Some users apparently thought I was going back to lurking full time, but I returned a couple hours later after a few beers to cool off. I hadn’t changed my mind, and I still haven’t, but I really didn’t give it any more thought until about 10:30 CDT last night while watching the video below.
This is the most educational if not frightening video I’ve watched this year. The video’s title and thumbnail don’t do it justice. Jon Stewart sits down with Physics Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton and gets a mind blowing education on everything AI from it’s earliest beginnings to our darkest Terminator fears. They discuss it’s pluses, it’s minuses, and how the human race might be able to control it…
Granted, this video is exceedingly long, but…
I usually watch this kind of stuff at 1.5x normal speed. I had to rewind and slow this shit down when I got to about the 1:18:50 mark to absorb the fact that... We have essentially a flat-earther’s level of understanding of how the human brain works.
I gotta say, I did not speed the video back up from that moment forward. The honorable Mr. Hinton was surprisingly funny and forthright. This brilliant computer scientist joked effortlessly about his youthful indiscretions, organized religion, pranking AI, and Donald Trump... All intermixed with, as I alluded to before, the most mind blowing interview I’ve seen in a long time!
“Experiences are not things!”
Suffice it to say, I was flabberghasted to learn that AI can have subjective experiences, and that the only reason they’re not sentient is they don’t grok what that means… An AI can understand that it’s seeing something through a lens and understand the consequences, but not the ramifications of that… I think… Maybe I’ve got that backwards… Help me out here… Anyway…
PHAWOOMB! Dude lit a match and ignited my brain!
Here’s the thing though to bring this whole “shebang”, as the old folks call it, full circle. I don’t begrudge having to fast forward through multiple in-video sponsored breaks or having to deal with skippable or unskippable youtube ads in order to view content that has it’s own intrinsic value… I do have a problem with paying out of pocket for something sight unseen ahead of time just to see if it’s even worth watching.
Advertising has no effect on me. I’m not going to buy whatever they’re selling let alone trouble my synapses registering what they’re saying. I can spare them a little of my time, and enough attention to hit that skip button as soon as possible, but they ain’t never getting a penny from me. There is nothing that makes my brain disengage faster. ymmv
Enough of that, just one last thing…
I’m conducting a little experiment. I’m gonna try to post an AI Instagram video that I came across into the comments below, and then I’m going to bed. I have no idea if this is going to work. If it does I hope you enjoy it, and if it doesn’t I apologize in advance.
