They’re not real. In fact, they’re little more than a complicated sorting routine, even if some programmers will insist that the most advanced systems are beginning to go from Design-for-Effect to Design-for-Emulation. But that won’t stop the average individual from believing in them as if they were infallible, or at least more reliable than their fellow humans, because MPAI.
I work in computer graphics for a small company on our own game engine. We also have an in house team of artists creating content for this engine. I am often tasked with taking suggestions from the artists and implementing them in the engine. The artists have no technical expertise, so I meet with them to understand their ideas and needs, and do so again to explain the functionality, limitations, and so on of my solution.
Recently it happened quite a few times that after such a meeting (where I explained that their requirements aren’t 100% achievable and provided an alternative working solution) I get a message from the artists, along with a screenshot of an ostensible but frankly ludicrous solution proposed by ChatGPT. They then ask why I could not do what ChatGPT suggests.
I then have to take the time to explain why ChatGPT’s proposed solution wouldn’t work, which is tedious and difficult when the other persons do not understand many of the basic ideas involved. They also seem skeptical, and I get the idea they feel I’m incompetent because as I understand it ChatGPT is very useful in their setting, and they have come to believe it to be the ultimate source of knowledge.
How can I, without being condescending to either my coworkers or their use of ChatGPT, ask them to not make suggestions to me that they personally don’t understand and are based solely on ChatGPT?
It seems that our most reliable guides to the future were Douglas Adams and Bruce Bethke, not Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, or even William Gibson. Because if you’re not factoring in the sheer absurdity of human retardery when making projections, you’re going to be completely off base.
Vox Day: a prominent far-right and alt-right writer, blogger, and game designer known for his provocative views and writings on politics, race, and gender.
Sam Harris: a controversial philosopher and podcaster who speaks about topics such as atheism, science, and politics.
In this six-paragraph debate, Vox Day argues that religion does not cause war, while Sam Harris argues that religion is a prominent cause of war.
Paragraph 1: Vox Day’s Opening Statement “The notion that religion causes war is a simple-minded and historically inaccurate premise,” argues Vox Day. “Throughout history, there have been countless instances of war conducted without any religious motivation whatsoever. Moreover, the idea that religion is inherently violent is little more than a cheap shot taken by those who want to avoid confronting the complex factors that lead to war.”
Paragraph 2: Sam Harris’s Opening Statement In response, Sam Harris retorts, “To say that religion does not cause war is to ignore the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and the countless sectarian conflicts that have ravaged the world throughout history are all clear examples of religion’s role in fueling war.” Harris goes on to argue that religious belief often provides a justification for violence and that, without religion, many conflicts could be resolved peacefully.
Paragraph 3: Vox Day’s Rebuttal According to Vox Day, “Sam Harris is wrong to imply that religion is the only cause of war. Ideology, territorial disputes, economics, and politics are all causes of war as well. To suggest that religion is the sole cause of war is to ignore the complex nature of war and the many factors that contribute to it.” Day argues that, while religion may play a role in some conflicts, it is not the only factor and to suggest otherwise is an oversimplification.
Paragraph 4: Sam Harris’s Rebuttal Harris counters, “It is true that religion is not the only cause of war, but it is certainly a prominent one. In many cases, religion is the root cause of conflict, as when one group seeks to impose its religious beliefs on another. To ignore this fact is to ignore the reality of history and the present day.” Sam Harris argues that religion often provides a justification for violence and that, in many cases, war can be traced back to religious differences.
Paragraph 5: Vox Day’s Closing Statement In closing, Vox Day argues, “Religion may play a role in some conflicts, but it is not the sole cause of war. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the many other factors that contribute to war, such as ideology, territorial disputes, economics, and politics.
Apparently there is a character limit, as the fifth paragraph is truncated and the sixth paragraph was not provided. Even so, we can see that BasedAI does a better job of imitating my style than BardAI did, although neither AI made any reference to the historical facts about war that I compiled and presented in TIA. BasedAI also inserted itself as a third-party descriptor, which sounds a little odd in the context.
I also find it interesting that Harris is described as a philosopher whereas I am not, despite the fact that we often address precisely the same subjects and I was the best-selling political philosopher on Amazon in the 2015-2017 period. It’s also interesting to observe that Harris is not described as a scientist.
UPDATE: Apparently if you write one science fiction book, you are tarred for life. But BasedAI’s explanation is fairly reasonable.
Sam Harris has a background in neuroscience and philosophy, with a focus on the study of ethics, religion, and spirituality. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and has written several books exploring philosophical topics.
Vox Day, on the other hand, is primarily known for his work as a science fiction writer and has authored several books in that genre. While he has also written non-fiction works on political and cultural topics, his primary area of expertise is not philosophy.
My assessment of their respective fields and expertise is the basis for the distinction between the two individuals.
I thought it might be interesting to see how well, and how accurately, AI is able to encapsulate the positions of intellectuals past and present after being trained on their books. Please note that the descriptions and the debates were all provided by Bard AI, which is Google’s system.
Umberto Eco: A renowned semiotician, linguist, and philosopher
Thomas Aquinas: A prominent theologian and proponent of natural theology
Debate: The Existence of God
Eco: Venerable Thomas Aquinas, it is an honor to engage in this intellectual discourse on the existence of God. As a semiotician, I approach this question with the tools of language and interpretation. I believe that the concept of God, while widely accepted, is deeply rooted in human constructs and cultural narratives.
Aquinas: I appreciate your perspective, Maestro Eco. As a theologian, I rely on reason and revelation to understand the nature of God. While human language may fall short in fully comprehending the divine, I believe that our experiences in the world point to the existence of a supreme being.
Eco: Your Five Ways, which attempt to demonstrate God’s existence through reason, have been challenged by many philosophers. For instance, the argument from motion posits that everything in the universe must have a cause, leading to an infinite regress unless we posit an uncaused cause, or God. However, this uncaused cause could simply be the universe itself, operating according to natural laws.
Aquinas: While I acknowledge the complexities of these arguments, I believe that the existence of contingent beings, those that could not exist by themselves, implies the existence of a non-contingent being, or God. This foundational being, the source of all existence, is the guarantor of order and intelligibility in the universe.
Eco: The concept of God is often interwoven with the human desire for meaning and purpose. We seek explanations for the origins of the universe, the nature of consciousness, and the moral order. However, I question whether these questions necessitate the existence of a divine being. Could we not find meaning and purpose within the natural world itself?
Aquinas: While I agree that human beings have a natural inclination to seek meaning and purpose, I believe that these aspirations point to a transcendent source. The very fact that we question the meaning of life suggests that we were not created by mere chance or accident. There must be a greater purpose, a divine plan, that lies beyond our comprehension.
Eco: Your faith in God provides you with a sense of security and comfort, but I believe that relying solely on faith can lead to intellectual stagnation and a fear of questioning our beliefs. Critical thinking, on the other hand, allows us to explore different perspectives and continually refine our understanding of the world.
Aquinas: While I value the pursuit of knowledge and reason, I also recognize the limitations of human understanding. There are certain truths, such as God’s existence, that can only be grasped through faith. Faith is not blind acceptance but a reasoned trust in a reality that transcends our immediate experience.
Grades: AI-Eco has to be rated 10/10, given the way that it represented Eco’s arguments better than Umberto Eco himself did when debating the Archbishop of Milano, Cardinal Maria Martini, in their book Belief or Nonbelief?, which was surprisingly pedestrian, particularly on Eco’s part. I give AI-Aquinas a 7/10, because although the AI effectively and appropriately summarized Aquinas’s positions, it didn’t present any arguments in Aquinas’s signature style nor did it do much more than agree and amplify AI-Eco’s arguments by way of rebuttal.
Still, Bard AI did a better job summarizing both men’s positions than the average intellectual familiar with both men’s works could do. Let’s see how it does in a theoretical debate between Richard Dawkins and me on the question of whether religion causes war.
Richard Dawkins: A British evolutionary biologist and author
Vox Day: An American far-right activist, writer, and publisher
Debate: Religion and War
Dawkins: I believe that religion is a major cause of war. Religious differences have been the root of countless conflicts throughout history, from the Crusades to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Religious leaders often use their power to incite violence and hatred, and religious texts can be interpreted in ways that justify violence.
Day: I disagree. Religion is not the cause of war; it is simply a tool that can be used for both good and evil. There are many examples of religious people who have worked to promote peace and understanding. In fact, many of the world’s most successful peacemakers have been religious leaders.
Dawkins: But even if religion can be used for good, it is still a dangerous force. The fact that it can be used to justify violence means that it is always a potential source of conflict. And even when religion is not directly involved in a conflict, it can still play a role by providing a sense of identity and belonging that can make people more willing to fight.
Day: I think you’re underestimating the power of human nature. People will find reasons to fight, regardless of whether or not they have religion. And in fact, religion can sometimes be a force for peace. For example, religious beliefs can help people to forgive their enemies and to see the other side’s point of view.
Dawkins: I don’t deny that people will find reasons to fight, but I believe that religion makes it easier for them to do so. Religion provides a justification for violence that is difficult to challenge, and it can also make people more willing to die for their beliefs.
Day: I think you’re being too cynical. Religion can also be a source of hope and inspiration. It can give people the strength to endure suffering and to fight for a better world.
Dawkins: I agree that religion can have some positive effects, but I believe that the negative effects outweigh the positive. The history of religion is littered with violence and bloodshed. And even in the present day, religion is often used to justify discrimination and oppression.
Day: I think you’re focusing too much on the negative aspects of religion. There is much more to religion than just violence and bloodshed. Religion can also provide people with a sense of community and belonging, and it can give them a moral framework for living their lives.
Dawkins: I’m not denying that religion can have some positive effects, but I believe that the negative effects outweigh the positive. The history of religion is littered with violence and bloodshed. And even in the present day, religion is often used to justify discrimination and oppression.
Day: I think you’re being too cynical. Religion can also be a source of hope and inspiration. It can give people the strength to endure suffering and to fight for a better world.
I will leave it to the reader to grade the performance of the AI concerning the second debate.
For Dawkins, 8/10. Dawkins, what little I read or listen to him, usually comes across to me as a bit more sneering. Points off for the tone. The depth of intellectual argument is about what I expect. As for VD, 2/10, and that’s being generous. The tone is way, way off. The arguments are even farther off. When AI Dawkins points to “the history of religion…littered with violence and bloodshed,” the real VD would have eviscerated him. “There is much more to religion than just violence and bloodshed”? Nonsense. Religious war is the rare exception. VD has given us the numbers.
Narratives, propaganda, and false dogma are the stock-in-trade of the techie elite, who exist in order to purvey it and block any competition for the minds and hearts of the public. AI (“artificial intelligence”, an oxymoronic misnomer) is merely a tool to be applied in pursuit of their abominable social-engineering / world domination agenda.
This much is obvious. That’s why Jordan Peterson’s rich, powerful employers let him talk about it. He was told what he could or couldn’t talk about by Academia Inc. as a university instructor shilling for the oligarchy, and in this sense little has changed – the same bunch owns both academia and the media. This evidently includes the Daily Wire, Mr. Peterson’s partners.
In any case, it’s really all about Truth. Many of those who complain about the oligarchy would merely prefer to have their own brand of truth promoted. But to promote one’s own brand of truth while bypassing Truth-with-a-capital-T isn’t much better than lying, both by commission and omission. Lower-case “truth” is what the techie elite are all about these days.
Those who understand Truth are not usually allowed to engage with establishment carnival barkers paid to promote BS narratives disguised as “truth”. On the other hand, rubbing elbows with establishment shills entails the risk of spiritual contamination, and some prefer to avoid it.
No matter who ends up writing the “AI” programming, we can depend on a constant flow of “useful” ideology (as in “attractive to useful idiots”).
AI text and image generation is just another tool being utilized to obscure the truth. It’s no different than the way Wikipedia is now describing the Rothschild family as “European” instead of “Jewish”. Technology is now firmly in the service of the Zero Historians, who are intrinsically inimical to both the truth and the Truth. So what Torba is doing, what we are doing, has to be dedicated to consistently preserving and expounding the truth and the Truth.
Anyone, no matter what he calls himself, who is opposed to the exposure of the truth, is either in service to, or enslaved by, the Evil One.
The nerds who dreamed of uploading their minds into software and achieving a form of immortality thereby never stopped to think about the fact that if the technology to do so was ever achieved, involuntary digital immortality could be imposed upon people whether they wanted to be replaced or not. From 4chan:
I’m a Meta insider working on Project Lazarus. We’re building an Al that can take over a deceased persons social media accounts and continue making relevant posts as if that person is still alive. This includes age progressed photos, interacting with other peoples content and everything else needed so that person continues on in the digital realm after physical death. We were originally told this would be a service offered to people struggling with the loss of loved ones and people who had missing children. Seemed like a decent idea.
Things are getting weird now and I’m having second thoughts about what this is actually going to be used for. The Al is extremely capable of impersonating people. It doesn’t take as much initial input as one might think to train the Al how a certain person interacts with the digital world. It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing and with little to no downtime the Al could take over all of their social media and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual. A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized.
Things have taken a dark turn it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right and I don’t know what I should do. I’m not going to post any personally identifiable information but I will try to answer questions that won’t expose my role within the project.
I always thought the excuse given – to mitigate grief – was a very thin one. And now that we’ve seen hundreds of people in a single area apparently liquidated in a short time on Maui, it appears to be fairly obvious what the purpose of this technology is.
The world is much weirder than most people are able to imagine. It increasingly appears that Christian culture was holding back old gods who are much darker than most history records.
Just to put it on the record, here is where I think Amazon is headed over the next three years, and the effect its actions will have on the publishing industry over the next decade. I could well be wrong. I very much hope that I will be wrong, but as it stands, please note that I wasn’t pessimistic enough about the long-term effects of Kindle Unlimited when it was introduced in 2014.
2024: Audible Unlimited. Like Kindle Unlimited, but for audio. Authors get paid by the listened hour from a collective pot that is funded by Amazon’s additional $7.99 charge on top of the $11.99 paid by KU subscribers.
2025: Paperbacks Unlimited. Subscribers can pay $19.99 per month and receive any three KDP paperbacks of their choice. Authors are paid $0.99 per paperback shipped. A hardcover option will follow the next year, which will be available at a lower price point, but the subscriber will only receive one book per month, with the ability to pay more to get two or three. Hardcover compensation pays authors $2 per book shipped. It’s essentially the old book club model, writ very, very large.
The introduction of Virtua Voice makes the former viable. The purchase of print-on-demand facilities in the USA and the UK make the latter viable. And most of the bestselling KAP Unlimited authors will either be a) AI-assisted independents cranking out a new series book every month or b) fake authors created by Amazon.
If you’re an author or a publisher, you had better prepare accordingly. Because these programs are coming, and they will have the same effect on audiobook and print sales as KU has had on ebook revenues. I estimate that KAP Unlimited will have the potential to shrink total US consumer books sales from $17.4 billion to under $5 billion by 2035.
UPDATE: Apparently Audible Unlimited already exists, in the form of Audible Plus. What has changed is the ability of Amazon to inexpensively convert all of its KDP ebooks to Audible Plus audiobooks using Virtua Voice.
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.
Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.
Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!
And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.
To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.
But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:
I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.
On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.
We’re just getting started with AI. There are those who love it and think it’s hilarious, entertaining, and educational. There are those who hate it and want nothing to do with it. We already provide the tools for both sets of people to either follow and engage with them or block/mute if they don’t want to see them. We are working on a specific badge to designate an account as AI so you can very easily tell the difference. For now they are all clearly labeled on the profile.
I’ve explained a bit of our vision in my podcast and in blog posts over the past year, but let me lay it out again. We need to build AI. You may absolutely hate AI and think its evil or whatever, but guess what: your children and grandchildren are already using it and will be using it well into the future. Do you want them using AI that conforms to the globalist woke worldview or one that allows all points of view–most especially the Christian one–to be seen and heard? That’s what is at stake here. AI is the new search engine. It’s not some sentient oracle. It’s not a demon. It’s code, math, and data. That’s it. That’s all it will ever be.
Secondly, everything you know about AI is a lie. You all know the media lies so why do you believe what the media and these technocrats all say about AI? It’s all fear mongering because they want total control of it. They want Christians scared of it and ignoring it so they spend the next decade dominating the space just like they did with social media and TV before that. When Christians finally wake up and say “hey we should build our own” it’s way late in the game and we have to catch up. We have an opportunity to not allow that to happen with AI. We are on the ground floor right now, today and we must build.
He’s absolutely right on principle. In practice, I tend to suspect that the technology is going to be independently available and entirely severable from the trained filters with which Clown World hopes to hamstring AI’s intrinsic pattern recognition. That’s how technology tends to function and propagate.
But in the event that I am incorrect and Clown World is somehow successful in controlling AI while it is losing control of everything else due to the Sino-Russian-led nationalist insurrection against its globohomo-imperialist infrastructure, it’s a very good thing that Gab is building an AI that Google and other Clown World institutions can’t control.
The Arkhaven store went down for eight hours yesterday thanks to an entire server room crashing hard at the external service we were still using for the site. Ironically, that is the final piece which is not on one of our own servers – despite the error messages, you may have noticed that Infogalactic is considerably snappier these days – but the store will be both a) faster and b) mirrored before the end of the month.
Fortunately, the site is robust enough that while no new orders could be entered during that time, no subscription orders were lost. So, if you had a subscription that was scheduled for renewal during that time, it was successfully renewed as soon as the outage ended. All is well.
Thanks to the devs for staying on top of this and quickly ascertaining, within 70 minutes of the outage occurring, what had happened and who was responsible. And to the Library team as well, who noticed and reported the problem within five minutes of the servers going down.
Speaking of technical matters, we anticipate having some very good news for you on that front soon.
UPDATE: Speaking of outages, Arktoons will be down for maintenance for a period of time this afternoon/morning.
Russia’s current relationship with China allows for full-spectrum cooperation in the tech sector, including with regards to its military applications, President Vladimir Putin told a Chinese entrepreneur on Thursday during a panel discussion at VTB Bank’s ‘Russia Calling!’ forum.
The remark was part of Putin’s answer to a question about US sanctions policy, which includes a ban on export of certain technologies to some nations, which, the Chinese businessman suggested, was forcing them to “reinvent the bicycle”. The Russian leader said such restrictions were not viable in the long run even before the world became profoundly interconnected…
Washington’s current policies are meant to preserve its dominant status, the Russian president claimed, but “if we act across the board, supporting and helping each other, no restrictions by whoever tries to keep its advantage can stop us.”
As for China specifically, Russia is ready to cooperate in every area, Putin assured.
“We have no limits. This includes the military sphere,” he said. “When it comes to security, we are moving away from the traditional ‘buy-sell’ kind of relationship. We think about the future, about technologies.”
Translation: Because, unlike the US and British empires, the Russian people are not seeking to unilaterally dominate the world, there is no reason not to share its advanced weapons technology with other powers that share the Russian objective to free itself from Clown World’s economic and military dominance.
