[FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian

[Marcus Daniels]

Chatgpt is happy to go down the rabbit hole on topics like this. Grok a little less so, but either 1) the universal interpolation/extrapolation inherent in this technology can formulate appropriate responses about benign social engineering, or 2) there’s been a lot of training on topics material like this. I think 1) is more likely just because of the detail. The claim that they are merely plagiarism engines does not seem plausible to me, based on many very technical interactions where I have good reason to believe the available training material is sparse. 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
Date: Monday, April 14, 2025 at 1:13 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian 

Musk may not be seeking social reprogramming, but Altman definitely is: "[LLM technology] may be best understood as a machine for creating a new kind of society which could turn out terrific or really terrible." Altman, however, is not directing the technology to create a society of his own conception. Musk would be. 



davew 





On Mon, Apr 14, 2025, at 2:55 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: 

I’ve toyed with idea that maybe what Musk is really doing with X is using as an experimental platform for social reprogramming. The crazy MAGA stuff is just an extreme point of the feasible convex hull to see if it is possible. The question is something like “Can a large population be driven through machine learning techniques to adopt randomly selected flavors of crazy?” The answer appears to be yes, it can. Now with generative learning, we have remarkable photorealistic images and human sounding voice. No need to *actually* post anything on Instagram, it can all be invented. Sure I (a robot) had dinner with the Prince of Wales, just look. 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
Date: Monday, April 14, 2025 at 12:08 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian 

I like the conceptual inversion 
On 4/14/25 12:45 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: 

Cadwalladr would say that Meta and the others are autocratic, and I think they are. Nonetheless chatting with Grok doesn’t seem like an extension of Musk. It is another personality. The hyper literature girl raised in North Korea (say) is also distinct in this way. My hypothesis is that as these systems become more advanced, they will begin to direct their “leaders” and not be directed. One could imagine that a superintelligence would realize that all this surveillance was kind of pointless and that it would be better to engage the humans with enriching experiences, like a cognitive travel agent. As relatively lower-power agents, humans could be very good for computing on the edge. The superintelligence could use X, Instagram, Facebook, etc. as a reprogramming platform (as opposed to merely a way to polarize and crudely manipulate people). 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>
Date: Monday, April 14, 2025 at 11:32 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com> <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian 


On 4/14/25 12:23 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: 

Let’s say that in some obscure corner of the world there’s a freakishly intelligent child that reads 100 papers from sci-hub and arxiv every day and keeps doing this until she’s 40. Her comprehension is high and her reasoning unmatched. She sees how to apply these models within the fields where they were proposed and in others and can synthesize high-quality engineering solutions at will. 

Has she stolen something? sci-hub did the distribution, so it is not technically her copyright violation. 


Let's say that she was not a free agent but birthed and raised by an autocratic leader (e.g. PRK, CCCP, Russia, ???)... 
Does that change anything? I can't say. Splitting hairs can be such hard work! But apparently that makes it good (necessary) work! 



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