Links 17
Kevin Kelly: “When photography first appeared, it seemed as if all the photographer had to do was push the button. Likewise, it seems that all a person has to do for a glorious AI image is push the button. In both cases, you get an image. But to get a great one—a truly artistic one—well, that’s another matter.”
Scott Aaronson: “Today GPT-3 and DALL-E2 and LaMDA and AlphaTensor exist, as they didn’t two years ago, and one has to try to project forward to what their vastly-larger successors will be doing a decade from now. Though some of my colleagues are still in denial about it, I regard the fact that such systems will have transformative effects on civilization, comparable to or greater than those of the Internet itself, as ‘already baked in’—as just the mainstream position, not even a question anymore. That doesn’t mean that future AIs are going to convert the earth into paperclips, or give us eternal life in a simulated utopia. But their story will be a central part of the story of this century.”
Rory Stewart: “I feel that there is a deep lack of seriousness in British politics … I felt as soon as I saw us debate Afghanistan that we were not a serious country. The people debating it were not asking serious questions. There is a lot of pantomime, on every side. Not only the Conservatives, it’s Labour too. When I was the Africa minister, I was at the despatch box and people would pop up. ‘What is the minister going to do to stop the terrible civil war in Burundi?’ Sit down. ‘What is the minister going to do to deal with the human rights abuses in western Cameroon?’ Sit down. ‘What is the minister going to do to deal with the situation in Togo?’ Right? And somebody needs to say to them: ‘We do not have an embassy in Burundi. We do not have an embassy in Togo. We’re not going to do anything, about any of these issues, and what fantasy world do you live in to think that we’re going to do anything?’” (Youtube video, March 2019, 55 minutes)
