[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

Sun May 28 12:55:53 EDT 2023

Eric -

Thanks for passing this link around here.   I suspect most here have the 
background to appreciate/parse this < insert Steve Martin's "hear me now 
and believe me later" SNL skit> but maybe not an "affordance to know" 
the more acute implications of it.

One of the things I find (most) interesting in the RGND rhetoric is 
their (appropriate) invocation of Complex Systems ideas as well as the 
convergence of human consciousness (mostly from a neuroscience 
perspective) and the complex systems which are the 
techno-social-economic systems that are our energo-materio culture which 
is the engine that is spinning the earth-systems out of the orbits they 
were in pre-anthropocene (150 or 15000 years?)

I may be reading them wrong, but this feels like "yet another" elitist 
trope, this time on (nanotech?) steroids:

    /In short, we think it’s probable that MTI civilization will
    collapse catastrophically but that pockets of people with a rising
    level of consciousness and awareness of our eco-predicament will
    survive and act as the seeders of a new world.///

I particularly appreciated your pithy observation:

    /But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the
    GNDers.  The concentration in the rate and provision of services,
    and of the ownership of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out
    to be, leaves the rest of us free to die off in peace, and not carry
    on the guilt of being ecological criminals.  It’s a win-win./

/
/

Thanks to Sabine (as Cassandra) and Eric and Marcus for raising this to 
my attention...  queing it up to provide background for my read lead me 
to her Collective Stupidity episode 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng>.

I am left wondering if/how LLMs reflect/relate to Wisdom/Stupidity of 
Crowds?   Seems like LLMs are literally the encapsulation of collective 
knowledge.

Sabine's invocation of "Information Cascades" was interesting in 
contrast with entrainment and canalization.   Will LLMs in some way help 
us avoid these short-circuits/shunts?  Or aggravate them?

- Steve

On 5/28/23 2:46 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> This comment leads to an interesting angle that I haven’t heard.
> Bill Rees, whom you can find here:
> d8f080_78c1ab7b00b045ff9bbc01a273b00173~mv2.jpg
> Home | The REAL Green New Deal Project <https://www.realgnd.org/>
> realgnd.org <https://www.realgnd.org/>
>
> <https://www.realgnd.org/>
> writes numerous papers about how 90% of us need to die, or that this 
> is just what will happen whether we articulate such a need or not.  I 
> won’t go so far as to say that Rees “wants” 90% of us to die (see the 
> smiling grandfatherly bearded ecologist photo in the pages), but after 
> a long life of writing Jeremiads and not seeing the world change its 
> ways, he seems so defeated by frustration that I read in him a deep 
> and now constitutive misanthropy.
>
> (btw: the Real GND website is best read while listening to Sabine 
> Hossenfelder’s song My Name is Cassandra, Prophet of the Dark.  Thanks 
> Marcus for making me aware of her oeuvre, I had never noticed it.)
>
> Usually, the problem with the bait-and-switch of new technologies is 
> “look, it will save so much labor we will all have leisure to be 
> creative while still having comfortable levels of consumption”, when 
> what actually happens is classic Marx: the few who can enclose the new 
> services, either because they are exclusive or just through 
> market-gravitational effects, now own an even larger sector of all 
> income, and the expanding remnant is made increasingly desperate.
>
> But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the GNDers. 
>  The concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of the 
> ownership of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves 
> the rest of us free to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of 
> being ecological criminals.  It’s a win-win.
>
> I worry that that story is probably incomplete, and maybe thereby 
> wrong.  The concentrating advantage of advanced autocomplete services 
> might only be a transient while our current stock of primary knowledge 
> is “enough” and “not fully mined”.  Maybe all the inefficient activity 
> of ordinary people is somehow a diffuse source that actually expands 
> the primary base.  Certainly my impression of ecological organizations 
> is that, below any small population of charismatic megafauna, there is 
> a whole pyramid that goes down to an astonishing number of 
> nitrogen-fixer bacteria.
>
> But I don’t know, what organizations are necessary by physical, 
> mathematical, and biological laws, and which might be possible that we 
> just haven’t ever seen before.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>> On May 28, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>>
>> Looking at the recent rapid release of open source LLM systems like 
>> Falcon and Mosaic ML, Llama, etc. there is more going-on than titans 
>> like Microsoft, and Google battling it out with giant closed systems. 
>>  These are human know-how crystalized into open-source deliverables. 
>>  Why not share knowledge representations in this way?   Consider the 
>> cost and time that goes into medical or legal training.   Sure the 
>> energy requirements of digital systems are high, but so are the 
>> energy expenditures of a planet full of humans.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Steve Smith 
>> <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>> *Sent:*Friday, May 26, 2023 2:06 PM
>> *To:*friam at redfish.com<friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] crackpots and privilege
>>
>>> My grandsons' girlfriends (twenty-somethings) say that they think 
>>> babies are disgusting.  I hope they change their minds.  In any 
>>> case, what does a shortage of babies have to do with AI?
>> Babies *are* (can be) disgusting, but same for puppies, kitties, and 
>> garden-soil from the right (wrong) perspective!
>> Maybe the point is "nobody left for the AI overlords to lord over" ?
>> I think the key is "existential threat"...    I didn't look for 
>> Schmidt's statement anywhere, so I'm just speculating that maybe he's 
>> doing a mild echo of Musk's idea that a collapsing (first) world 
>> population is somehow a *bigger* existential threat?
>> With my techhead hat on I am inclined to imagine that AI will help me 
>> (well, not ME anymore, but people vaguely like who I once thought I 
>> was or wanted to be) solve micro-techonomic problems like the ones 
>> that lead to Teflon(tm) and Velcro(tm) and higher 
>> density/faster-charge EV batteries, and higher density/dynamic range 
>> pixel-displays, and neural lace to wire (grow?) into my 
>> brain/ganglia, and microbes that can convert moon/mars-dust to 
>> Soylent/Huel/Water/??? etc.
>> My PsychoHistory hatted self (Asimov - Foundation 
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>and 
>> thenon-fictional variant 
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#:~:text=Psychohistory%20is%20an%20amalgam%20of,stated%20intention%20and%20actual%20behavior.>) 
>> is inclined to imagine that AI *can* help with the "big problems", 
>> the ones nominally too large, too interdisciplinarian, too obtuse, 
>> too "wycked" (In Complexity Science jargon), possibly too 
>> counter-intuitive for most (any?) human or group of humans to grasp.
>> My Ned Ludd (very tight by definition?) hat has me thinking more down 
>> the rabbit holes of worst-case scenarios where all the arrogant, 
>> narcissistic @$$h0ii3z of the world (starting at the top with those 
>> whose names start with Pu Tr Be Zu Mu(r/s) Ne De ... and staggering 
>> down the hierarchy of potency and scope to most of us here most of 
>> the time) think they "know what is best" and put their resources to 
>> using the AI lever to "make it so"...
>> Even (especially) me, I constantly imagine that "if they made ME 
>> King" (or to the point, if *I* was the/wormtongue/in the AI 
>> Overlord's ear) that I would "make the world safe and happy for 
>> everyone, ever after with no unintended consequences or unpleasant 
>> side effects".
>> One *might* guess that the smartest thinkers in the most grounded, 
>> thoughtful, gentle think-tanks (e.g.  in a Tibetan Lamasary or the 
>> "Club of Rome" or SIPRI or CESR or the Justice League of America or 
>> the people who task "jewish space lasers" or ??? ) would be 
>> practicing their AI-whispering skills right now. Maybe tasking 
>> Marcus' Quantum Computer with "the hard problem of universal 
>> consciousness"?
>>
>>  An up-to-date version of Asimov's9 Billion Names of God 
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>?
>>>
>>> ---
>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>>
>>> 505 670-9918
>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org 
>>> <mailto:rec at elf.org>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today. 
>>>     It's headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what
>>>     will save it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt
>>>     says".  The headline is accompanied by a very serious head shot
>>>     of Eric.  Nice try, Google, but you're not sucking me down that
>>>     rabbit hole.
>>>
>>>     Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality
>>>     of disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years
>>>     ago in Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de
>>>     Palol is available in English translation and as an ebook
>>>     onoverdrive.com
>>>     <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2foverdrive.com&c=E,1,qiLuQHPdYM-73PUnxLjrSTzI76V8rfL6yb0_zHcdufFpFa1_kCTZkOyfYIh_N_0ysaWtjxXmwlL7kj8mmwGK2wfSP_01M-8QKT_yUEwBhHUL1Wuk-x_ACQBsspQ,&typo=1>at
>>>     your local library.  The narrator crosses refugee swamped
>>>     Barcelona to check on his mom and gets sent off by her to a
>>>     McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in the Pyrenees where the
>>>     elite are amusing themselves with stories while awaiting the
>>>     resolution of the first war of entertainment.  Lots of stories
>>>     about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
>>>
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