Tag: AI

  • bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems

    bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems

    Oh god, OK—yes, I’m sorry, more “#AI” discourse, and believe me, no one finds my repeated returns to the topic more wearing and ironic than I do, but we are living in A Moment, and I have been wrestling with that moment on the personal and artistic front, but I have also been looking at…

  • rocket from the crypto / two dead letters

    Chairman Bruce appears to be repubbing longreads from the now defunct Beyond The Beyond blog. This is a weird experience for me—distinctly atemporal, to use the man’s own term—because I recall reading this stuff at the time. And so it’s familiar and just-like-yesterday, but also so alienated and impossibly historical… I mean, I can’t recall…

  • a cranky aspiration

    Chairman Bruce on AI ethics at LARB: In the hermetic world of AI ethics, it’s a given that self-driven cars will kill fewer people than we humans do. Why believe that? There’s no evidence for it. It’s merely a cranky aspiration. Life is cheap on traffic-choked American roads — that social bargain is already a…

  • a metrics of labour other than time

    Very interesting long paper by Matteo Pasquinelli; going back through Marx’s notion of the general intellect, he shows that none other than yer man Babbage theorised computing systems not only as a concretisation of labour but a crystallisation of preexisting biases in the workforce. Everything old becomes new again. … the distinction between manual and…

  • Staring down Roko’s basilisk

    Pete Wolfendale: We have consistently overestimated what computation is capable of throughout history, whether computation was seen as an algorithmic method executed by humans, or a process of automated deduction realised by a machine. The fictional record is crystal clear on this point. Instead of imagining machines that can do a task better than we can, we imagine machines…