OGWiseman Rounds Up!
What a time to be alive.
The single best thing I’ve read this month is this essay by Will Manidis.
It feels so good to read something like this and think “there’s absolutely no way an A.I. wrote this”. Maybe that won’t always be true, but it is now. Just the entire perspective of that graf is so human. And this:
You could almost pick any paragraph from this whole piece and make it a pull quote, but just one more:
Go read the whole thing. It’s long but worth your time.
*
I was going to write an ode to Dan Simmons, the polymathic author of the Hyperion Cantos, one of the great pillars of the 20th century sci fi canon. But then Eric Hoel wrote a better one than I possibly could have. This guy is worth subscribing to if you like weird philosophical stuff that makes you smarter. Here he is on Simmons:
I had this exact same experience with Hyperion! I remember discovering him in the Salem Public Library, reading the entire first book of the series in 24 hours, and the electric joy of reading on the book’s back page that there were more books in the series. I started reading poetry because of these books, I gave Shakespeare another try because of these books, and I got my mind opened up to just how wild and ornamented stories can be.
Simmons’ politics were regrettable from my point of view, but I think writers are often extreme people, and the most prolific and distinctive ones can have unbearably sharp edges. But the work lives on, and it evinces a complexity that no simple political labels can capture. RIP Dan Simmons, thank you for setting my mind aflame.
*
A fly has been uploaded. Like, the entire fly. Every neuron in its brain. And, the neuronal map could be use to predict the fly’s behavior. We share like 60% of our DNA with these things, and our brains are also just made of neurons. I had always read Kafka’s classic story as a metaphor for communism, but perhaps he was just very early and prescient to the sci fi realm.
*
This is an important statement from Anthropic about their ongoing abuse at the hands of the Department of War. I think the underlying question of “who should control the military uses of A.I.?” is a very hard one to answer, and it’s not clear to me that the answer is “a handful of CEO’s who run the companies that invented it”, but that’s not what actually happened here.
What happened here, as best I can tell, is that the DoW signed contracts with Anthropic that contained certain language about how they can use Claude and how they can’t. Then, then DoW came back and demanded unilateral changes to those contracts. Anthropic refused. The DoW labeled them a “supply chain risk”, a designation they use for (for example) Huawei and other Chinese companies known to engage in industrial espionage. It is a blatant attempt to punish and even destroy Anthropic as punishment for refusing to abrogate the contractual language they specifically fought for.
I would oppose that move by any administration of either party. If you literally want to nationalize these companies and this technology, there are processes to do that. It’s possible such a thing could become necessary. There are a lot of extreme scenarios possible here. But jawboning about destroying a company as part of a negotiation process and then as retribution for insolence is ridiculous and self-destructive.
Some of this A.I. video is getting pretty incredible.
On the other hand, quite a bit of it is still terrible.
*
Why does hell exist? This is short and intuitive and I found it fascinating.
END
Thanks as always for spending part of your Sunday with me! I hope you found something useful and informative. I hope everyone has a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with something fun!
I think I remember that 24 hours you were reading Hyperion for the first time. Seriously!
thanks! Interesting ideas