Links 44
Emily Bell: “It seems incredible to some of us in the ‘ethics crowd’ that we have learned nothing from the past 20 years of rapidly deployed and poorly stewarded social media technologies that have exacerbated societal and democratic problems rather than improved them. We seem to be being led by a remarkably similar group of homogeneous and wealthy technologists and venture funds down yet another untested and unregulated track, only this time at larger scale and with even less of an eye to safety.”
Russell Jacoby: “Censorship by fear can take two forms: top-down or bottom-up. From the top, a publisher or editor can stop publication over concern about a potential reaction. However, the text or cartoon still exists, and might appear elsewhere. But bottom-up censorship—self-censorship—is more nefarious, more widespread, and more difficult to track. Writers shelve projects before they see the light of day. The cartoon is undrawn, the novel or the scene unwritten. ‘The fight against censorship is open and dangerous and thus heroic,’ the Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš observed in 1985, ‘while the battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed.’”
Scott Alexander: “The big thing all the alignment people were trying to avoid in the early 2010s was an AI race. DeepMind was the first big AI company, so we should just let them to their thing, go slowly, get everything right, and avoid hype. Then Elon Musk founded OpenAI in 2015, murdered that plan, mutilated the corpse, and danced on its grave. Even after Musk left, the remaining team did everything to challenge everyone else to a race short of shooting a gun and waving a checkered flag.”
“Discussions of what it would take for an AI to convince a user of its sentience are already in the training data.” How then can we tell if an AI is conscious?
Alisha Rai: “Many, many years ago, when I first started writing, someone said to me: ‘Oh, this is the first book where the heroine had brown nipples, like on the page,’ and I was like: ‘What? That’s crazy!’ She was a long-time romance reader. I thought about it. I’m pretty sure nipples come in all shades, but they’re always, like, pink on the page, or berries, or some kind of pink fruit. What happens is, it goes into one book, it goes into 10 books, people read those books and write their own books, and suddenly, everybody’s got pink nipples. And they forget about the fact that that’s not reality.”
