Reading Wednesday

[frandroid]

Currently reading:

12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson. 12 essays on the current and future impact of AI/AGI (artificial general intelligence, i.e. full AI) in our lives. I like the prose, and how she integrates bigger historical context (all the way to ancient Greece, actually too much) into computing history. Her essay on Ada Lovelace was awesome. But I don't really see her getting anywhere I can tag along with. There's a bunch of interesting speculation about where we're going (Buddhist AGI!) but capitalism is so intertwined with technology, it's frustrating that the word doesn't appear once in the text, even though it's not totally divorced from it. I don't see how an autonomous AGI as independent personhood would be allowed to exist in capitalist society, and from that lack of explaining that, I think that we're missing a step to where we could connect to her projections in an otherwise very grounded series of essays. I still have to read the third section, on sexuality.

Comments

[ioplokon]

sounds cool. though i kinda hope if ai emerges, it's really weird and then maybe it will do its own thing and be too strange to immediately be subsumed into capitalism? i know that's overly optimistic.

[frandroid]

That's kind of Winterson's idea too, but computing cycles need hardware and power. Unless someone gives an AI a hedge fun and it's good at turning a profit, I'm not seeing how independent AGI happens. Maybe I'm too anchored in the now?

[ioplokon]

true. and most improvements to ai at this point are just throwing more compute at the problem, which makes it even more a money game... (i actually have long term been doing a thing on like... climate impacts of big data & training ais is a big thing. also there is such huge bias in favor of early items in the training data, which makes it seem like we're even farther than most people think from emergence...)