timelets

“powerful narratives, don’t tell us what to think but cause us to think. Narrative as such, to borrow a line from I. A. Richards, is a “machine to think with.”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is burning through $1 billion a month as the cost of building its advanced AI models

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xai-burning-through-1-billion-a-month-as-costs-pile-up

Watch on YouTube

The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

“Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/pope-leo-ai-tech-771cca48

This is quite unexpected, although it seems quite logical in the context of Harari's Nexus

I find it really productive to think about different types of AI/ML using one of Whitehead's approaches. For example, he describes three elements of any event: physical prehension (objective data), cognitive prehension (eternal possibilities), decision. Implicitly, when we talk about an agent, the fourth element is realization, i.e. action on the decision. (upd. he also has _subjective aim_, which is the target of the decision).

Each of these elements carries modes of interaction that are fundamentally different for humans and ML. First of all, physical prehension, i.e. awareness of the world, involves radically different sensory methods. Furthermore, while human awareness relies on analog biological, evolutionary fixed senses, ML can access digital non-biological signals. Further, its awareness can be retrained on new data gathering methods. Moreover, various types of ML can be trained and retrained on new senses just like we train dogs for tracking. The possibilities for creating new types of world awareness are mind boggling.

Etc, etc, etc.

Also, Whitehead's theology is highly applicable to this subject, but I'd need more time to study and think about it.

upd: transparency of prehension would be a good topic on which to "compare and contrast"

К сожалению, жабогадюкинг между Т и М оказался очень коротким — М позорно слился. Еще раз убеждаемся, что каким бы гениальным ни был ученый, предприниматель или энтрепренер, против власти идти очень непросто, даже с огромными деньгами. И до Сахарова Маску, как до Юпитера.

Most discussions about AI, especially AGI, suffer from what Whitehead would call the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. That is, people assume that Intelligence is something concrete existing in Nature that can be easily pointed to and described. Instead, we have a broad range of definitions covering various bundles of human and/or computer capabilities.
By contrast, discussions about industrial robots, including drones and autonomous cars, are usually much more productive because their roles are well specified in terms of tasks and accomplishments.

Watch on YouTube

Thanks to the book I'm reading now, I've discovered the true identity of Elon Musk. He's an AI bot that, like Tay, was trained on Twitter. Tay was shut down by Microsoft when it became clear that it developed psychopathic, dictatorial tendencies. By contrast, Elon bought Twitter, so that nobody could shut him down:

“stories of Tay,2 the Twitter bot that Microsoft created and swiftly shut down after it turned into a Hitler-loving, non-consensual-sex-promoting bot. Tay was modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’. The bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, forcing Microsoft to shut down the service only sixteen hours after its launch. According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls – people who deliberately start quarrels or upset others on the internet – who ‘attacked’ the service as the bot was making its replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter.”

Excerpt From: Mo Gawdat. “Scary Smart.”

p.s. this is not a joke

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( Read more... )
However, this would require shifting incentives away from maximizing engagement and toward epistemic responsibility, which is difficult given current business models.

====
It would be an interesting challenge to come with up a technology and a business model that solves the problem.

Also related https://youtu.be/qlPHGnChhI4?si=03mDoaAYAFJnEfCE&t=4004

truth conditions (theoretical intentionality) vs satisfaction conditions (practical intentionality)

Разговаривал с приятелем из Нью Йорка. Говорит, старики на Брайтоне, которые массово голосовали за Трампа, свято верят, что заморозка федеральных денег к ним отношения не имеет. Люди в принципе не понимают, что федеральные деньги идут на оплату их медицины, жилья, субсидий на коммунальные услуги, уходу и т.д. Все эти программы не подпадают под перечень исключений в трамповском указе. И что срок возобновления выделения денег в указе не установлен. По-английски они плохо понимают, да и понимать не хотят. Потому что, говорят, Трамп не мог такую козу устроить своим любимым затрамповцам. Это все происки геев-демократов! Нас-то за что?

Такие дела.

Upd. Гранты технологическим стартапам тоже остановлены, когда их дадут теперь неизвестно. По закону, работников надо увольнять за три месяца до того, как в компании закончатся деньги. Стартапы в биотехе, медицинских приборах, диагностике рака, лекарствах сильно влетели.

"In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard.

Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was polyphonous; the stories created were all different and the same at one and the same time—again the fairy tale as tune, riffed by singers or instrumentalists. Every listener is potentially a new storyteller. Early literature was not composed of fixed texts, but of play scripts and prompt books, storytellers’ scrolls, pattern books. ”

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

How do we measure fitness of a technology startup as a function of time/stage? Rapid positive changes in fitness would be considered value inflection points.

Also, rapid changes in fitness due to new entrants can be easily detected. For example, in the Three Little Pigs story, the appearance of the wolf impacts fitness distribution and as a result changes ROI of house-construction tech.

“Fairy tales are one-dimensional, depthless, abstract, and sparse; their characteristic manner is matter-of-fact—describing a wolf devouring a young girl, ordering a palace chef to cook a young woman, or chopping up a child to make blood pudding arouses no cry of protest or horror from the teller. “This is as it is, as it happened; the tale is as it is, no more no less.”

...

“The poet W. H. Auden, discussing these imaginary zones, adopted the term ‘Secondary World’, which had been used by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and declared, ‘Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but also cannot stop himself creating … Stories about the Primary world may be called Feigned Histories; stories about a Secondary world myths or fairy tales.’ ”
...
“but whatever their atmosphere, they’re also laboratories for experiments with thought, allegories of alternatives to the world we know.”

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

===

Company X invented a cancer diagnostics method that predicts with 100% accuracy cases where treatment is not necessary. It's a 50% improvement over previous methods. Clearly, company X created a lot of value because it enabled patients/insurance to save lots of money as well as hustle (pain and suffering). Nevertheless, capturing a portion of this value is a challenge because people don't want to pay for treatments they don't need.

Assignment: come up with at least three ways to monetize the new diagnostics method, based on the savings.

There is an insistent presupposition continually sterilizing philosophic thought. It is the belief, the very natural belief, that mankind has consciously entertained all the fundamental ideas which are applicable to its experience. Further it is held that human language, in single words or in phrases, explicitly expresses these ideas. I will term this presupposition, The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary.

--- Whitehead.
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1938/1938_09.html

We might be committing this fallacy wrt ML.~~, although most people live with the fallacy b/c their world is quite stable.~~ The world is full of inexpressible moments.

FDA approved Airpods2 as hearing aids for people with mild to medium hearing loss. https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apple-airpods-pro-hearing-aid-features-af0f2714

As soon as it rolls out the software update this fall, Apple will instantly make the AirPods Pro 2 into a medical device, essentially turning every pair of the company’s top-selling headphones into over-the-counter hearing aids.
...
75% of people with hearing loss let it go untreated, according to the Apple Hearing Study, a project run with the University of Michigan. In case you don’t trust medical statistics from a trillion-dollar company trying to sell you something, the audiologists I consulted told me that number sounded right.

He claimed to be a ratcatcher, and he promised that for a certain sum he would rid the city of all mice and rats. The citizens struck a deal, promising him a certain price.

Now that the citizens had been freed of their plague, they regretted having promised so much money, and, using all kinds of excuses, they refused to pay him.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/hameln.html

We need a private space station ASAP.

Today was a strange day. One startup founder said that they made "one of the biggest discoveries in oncology." Another startup founder didn't say anything, which told us that they were going under in a couple of months or so. I guess I should be happy for the humanity at large.

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