Links 31
Noah Opinion: “Centralized social media, as Jack Dorsey wrote, was a grand experiment in collective global human consciousness. It was a modern-day Tower of Babel, the Human Instrumentality project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Yes it was a way to make some people rich, but it was also an experiment in uniting the human race. Perhaps if we could all just get in one room and talk to each other, if we could just get rid of our echo chambers and our filter bubbles, we would eventually reach agreement, and the old world of war and hate and misunderstanding would melt into memory. That experiment failed.”
“If you are going to run out of words, the best time for it to happen is December, as this time of year backward-glancing and retrospection are all anyone is really expecting anyway.”
Dan Shipper: “The future of programming might be abstracted away from writing code. Instead, you ask GPT-4 in natural language to perform any operation (e.g., convert this file, perform a function that does the following). In one version of the future, GPT-4 generates the code and you run it yourself (which is currently possible with ChatGPT.) In another version, you don’t even need the code—you just rely on GPT-4 to produce the right answer for you.”
Melissa Heikkilä: “AI is already fooling us. Researchers at Cornell University found that people found fake news articles generated by GPT-2 credible about 66% of the time. Another study found that untrained humans were able to correctly spot text generated by GPT-3 only at a level consistent with random chance.”
