This Schmidt Shit is going to go down in history as emblematic of…however our present era is viewed in hindsight, and it won’t be kind.
“We can’t stop the planet from dying, so society should dump all its money into my Ouija board business!”
It’s crap on the level of “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” Nero fiddling as Rome burns, “We must join with Sauron.” Just willful self-immolation.
From @breadandcircuses: https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/113277705558752831
Agree with @dave_andersen, it really is — and I think my Ouija board comparison is not off the mark: the SV billionaires locked in a small room sniffing each others’ farts are strongly reminiscent of the way the wealthy of the 19th century got sucked into the rise of “spiritualism” (seances, etc).
I’m not the first person to notice the connection between spiritualism and AI mania. I remember seeing a thoughtfully worked out blog post on how LLMs exploit some of the same cognitive traps as magic tricks, but I’m now struggling to find it. I did find this interesting-looking book, though:
https://academic.oup.com/book/35192
Especially relevant:
https://academic.oup.com/book/35192/chapter-abstract/299570171
Aha! This is the one I was thinking of:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
Note that one section is titled “Many psychics fool themselves.”
Once you see the connection between LLMs and psychics / seances / spiritualism, it’s hard to unsee. At the center: people •want• to believe, and that is powerful. Thinking of modern-day SV, listen to some of the stories of how con artists used spiritualism…
…as a business: https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters
…as wartime subterfuge: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-234-the-seances-9-8-2023
…as almost a kind of therapy: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-79-secrets-and-seances-11-17-2017
Is there a “there” there with LLMs and other contemporary forms of AI? Consider this story of a photographer who prepared hoax photographs of ghosts in the early days of photography, and suckered even Mary Todd Lincoln:
https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-159-spiritual-developments-2-26-2021
Is there a “there” there with using double exposures in photography? Sure! But step zero is completely giving up on the idea that you’re photographing ghosts — or in the case of AI, creating “intelligence.”
The trouble is that giving up on the promise of photographing ghosts won’t let you extract •nearly• as much money from investors.
A great point here:
https://mastodon.social/@tantramar/113278385211586464
One of my favorite picture books is “Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like.” This book is frequently mis-summarized — including by the publisher’s own blurb! — and the mis-summarizing perfectly illustrates @tantramar’s point:
The blurb:
❝Because of the road sweeper's belief in him, a dragon saves the city of Wu from the Wild Horsemen of the north.❞
That is flatly wrong.
What the road sweeper actually says to the old man who claims to be a dragon (but nobody believes him) is:
❝I don’t know whether you are a dragon or not, but if you are hungry and thirsty, please do me the honor of coming into my humble home.❞
The dragon saves the city not because of the road sweeper’s •belief•, but because of his •kindness•.
The story couldn’t be clearer on this point. Isn’t it fascinating that our culture consistently sets people up to misread it so?
@inthehands also that we live in a society that demands children *believe* — so many children’s stories centre belief as crucial — and that we never openly criticize people who deeply believe the most bizarre things.
@inthehands@hachyderm.io @tantramar@mastodon.social
At least it ain't Atlanta Nights.
@inthehands
#PostOfTheMonth:
One Sunday afternoon, a man named William Mumler decided to take a self portrait. He said he was alone in the photography studio, but as the photograph developed he saw something very strange—the image of someone else, sitting beside him.
Mumler’s “spirit photograph” was championed by advocates of Spiritualism, who saw it as evidence that the living could communicate with the dead
@inthehands The thing I have noticed myself also is... these people are primed, by a mixture of (in hindsight, pseudo-scepticism) of anthropocentric forms of human intelligence (without really having the depth of empathy to reflect this further) and (sci-fi) priming that (alien) intelligences can and will be built and were hard to recognize, that the ELIZA effect hits them really, really hard. They're expecting sceptics that hit a confirmation signal and plunged down the confirmation bias hole.