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#singularity

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In the middle of a small project I was doing with GPT a few weeks ago (failing to convert sheet music to MIDI), I had a good chat with it about ethics, the singularity, the stealing of the libraries and works of humanity, and right-wing bias training of AI models.

It was quite a good chat, so I decided to post it.

At the moment, I am quite optimistic about AI's future with humanity, but I am sure some billionaire owned corporation will come along and fuck that up somehow.

superhighwayman.com/2025/a-cha

#AI#GPT#Ethics

I wrote 4 short time travel stories deliberately breaking every author 'rule' I could think of yet still producing a readable experience. Years later I read about Ray Kurzweil's #singularity and realised my 'timebots' were remarkably similar to his concept. You can get this short book for $0.99 via books2read.com/tat

books2read.comAvailable now at your favorite digital store!It Was a Dark and Stormy Night - Time After Time: Four short time-travel stories by John Chapman

"Consciousness is the only reason life has value. It’s the only reason anything matters. Otherwise life would just be physical materials getting whipped about by natural forces without anyone feeling, sensing or experiencing any part of it. Suffering wouldn’t matter because it’s not being felt or experienced. Joy wouldn’t matter because it’s not being felt or experienced. There’d be no good reason not to torture someone, because there wouldn’t be any conscious experience of pain. There’d be no good reason to love anyone, because there wouldn’t be any conscious experience of love. Consciousness is the only reason life is worth living.

There is no basis on which to believe AI will ever be conscious. Consciousness isn’t some minor detail that science will easily work out once it gets around to it; it’s an all-encompassing phenomenon which has always been a complete mystery to all scientific fields. Science has no idea what consciousness is or why it happens, much less how to replicate it. It’s the single most important and fundamental aspect of every second of our waking experience of life, yet it remains a complete unknown to all of science. And this somehow gets left out of so much of the conversation about the future of artificial “intelligence”."

x.com/caitoz/status/1910886574

X (formerly Twitter)Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) on XOn AI And Consciousness

Yuval Harari on the rising trend of techno-fascism driven by populism and artificial intelligence has been visible since the US presidential election in November

Nexus, which was published just a few months earlier, is a timely explainer of the potential consequences of AI on #democracy and totalitarianism. In the book, Harari does not just sound the alarm on #singularity—the hypothetical future point at which technology, particularly AI, moves beyond human control and advances irreversibly on its own—but also on #AI’s foreignness.

#YuvalHarari #technofascism #musk #peterthiel #billionaires #siliconvalley
apple.news/AQawLDx_UShubipLXNj

apple.newsYuval Noah Harari: ‘How Do We Share the Planet With This New Superintelligence?’ — WIREDThe academic and author discusses what to expect from the singularity, the need for AI self-correcting mechanisms, and what hope there is for superintelligence safeguarding democracy.

How the early 20th century US Technocratic Movement (with its company Technocracy Inc.) prefigured much of today's Silicon Valley ideas of technological singularity and tech oligarchies, including the US annexation of Canada: my co-worker Eva Visser, tutor at Hogeschool Rotterdam, has been working on her PhD thesis on this topic for many years. It is now more relevant than ever. In this blog post she gives a preview of her historical research:

michaelrasche.eu/technate/?trk

michaelrasche.euAmerican Expansionism & the Technate of AmericaIn her doctoral thesis at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, historian and philosopher Eva Visser is researching the ‘technocrats’, a controversial and banned North American movement from the 1930s. Much of what this group wanted to achieve is now appearing as goals of the US government. An exciting historical view: to understand the present, you have to look into the past.