The amount of lies in news is relative. Major players could take things out of context and distort the nature of the story, manipulate statistics, report what happened in a very selective fashion, rely on dubious sources etc but they're not likely to just straight up make stuff up from thin air, at least not too often. The only alternative to that is getting your news from Facebook or some other social media and there all bets are completely off.

To start with this is a rather ridiculous strawman. 'You don't like people complaining about comedians, you want to bring the minstrel shows next?'. No, those are different things. But even with minstrel shows, I know today's wokes see them as some kind of equivalent of murder and cannibalism on live TV, but they were simply light entertainment that expressed views that, at the time, a large part of the US population held. Times changed of course, a few decades later most people would find those views extremely stupid (not to mention they'd find the humour really cringy), so no network would air such a show.

Any expression of an opinion potentially perpetuates the views that the person expressing the opinion holds. If you say that perpetuating those views leads to some unspecified "harm" and thus should be censored, then potentially any opinion can be censored. The only difference is, which group has sufficient power to enforce censorship against those who disagree with them.

This isn't new at all. For most of world's history you would be subject to some kind of punishment (up to and including execution) for insulting the dignity of the king or some powerful nobleman, saying things that are contrary to common public morality, blasphemy, stating that Earth revolves around the Sun etc etc. Even today in many countries you have such laws. Then, as the principles of liberalism became popular, we've moved to a different model, where if you wanted others to believe that what you're saying is true you'd have to justify it and persuade others that you're right, rather than silencing those who disagreed with you. Hopefully I don't have to explain how liberalism benefitted us.

So I find it very alarming that now it seems those principles are being undermined from all directions. People are trying to tear down what we've been building up for centuries. Most countries with a history of liberalism still have their constitutions and many of the laws on the books based on those principles, but socially liberalism seems to be mostly dead - very few people seem to believe in or even understand its most basic principles. There's only right-wing and left-wing authoritarians now.

It seems like the approach they used in training this AI could be ported to other games, possibly even to real-world problems. This I believe is one of the situations where AI technology could actually be useful, a specialised domain with a limited number of parameters. Not an AI trained to put words together with zero understanding of what any of them mean.

This doesn't contradict the OP's point in any way. The fact that AI came up with something that doesn't correspont to reality is not the point, it is well known that AI does that. That's not the concerning thing here. The fact that the US military was prepared to take a hostile military action because it believed an AI hallucination is the concerning thing here. When you're making decisions that can literally cost a lot of people their lives, you cannot include a so-called 'intelligence' that doesn't understand anything it's saying in the decision making process. And maybe there was no chance of an actual war but boarding other nation's ships for absolutely no reason can damage diplomatic relations, not just with China but with any other nation that has ships in the region that could potentially be boarded on such an unreasonable basis. Assuming this is something the current administration wants to avoid.

Given that it was certainly an excuse for rather than a reason for that war, no, it wouldn't, but that has nothing to do with AI.

That's one (and the most charitable) interpretation of what happened. It may have all been a part of the process, or someone may have intervened at the last minute to stop this.

As in, we're not sure if this building really has terrorists/enemy combatants in it, but let's bomb it a bit anyway and then later we'll figure out if the intelligence was good? That would explain some past incidents. Even in this case, what if they started the interception/boarding before getting the confirmation? What if they weren't even waiting for confirmation and were preparing to board before the abort order came through? And you might say, they're the US military, they wouldn't fuck up like that. Given that they're using ChatGPT in making military decisions, the kind of thing that gets lawyers held in contempt of court, I'm not so sure. If you're making decisions based on something as untrustworthy as AI, which you know may well have made the whole thing up, then one, you absolutely shouldn't do that, but two, you should at the very least always double-check before taking any action.

It's extremely naive to think Anthropic wants the slowdown of AI research out of some sort of social conscience. To begin with, AI companies have shown time and again that they don't have any. This is a desperate attempt to do two things. First, to try and freeze the AI landscape while their models still have some advantage over the competitors, mainly to stop the Chinese from doing the Chinese thing of reverse-engineering Western technology and then trying to improve on it or at least selling cheaper versions. Second, and maybe more important, is to sell the idea that AI continues to significantly improve and will continue to improve at the same high rate, to the point where it eventually becomes dangerous. In reality any actual recent technological improvements have been very small and incremental and most AI improvements came either from people figuring out how to use the existing technology better or from the same technology being deployed at greater scale.

If the goal is to stop AI from doing evil stuff, then theoretically you would need more AI research into how to put better guardrails into AI. Except by now it's become extremely obvious that people will always find ways round any guardrails. Also if the supposed goal is to stop AI from hacking websites, then stopping or slowing down research would be shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted. We know quite well that most website code on the internet is chock full of vulnerabilities and does not require any sort of superhuman intelligence to hack. AI with its current capabilities is already more than enough for the task. Also, I understand that AI agents doing similar things to what's described in this story are increasingly being used as white hat hackers, in order to find vulnerabilities and fix them.

Yes, they know that in the minds of the people they're trying to sell it to, i.e. upper management all the warnings about the AI being dangerous will translate to 'it's powerful and can make us a lot of money'. At the same time it may make them sound caring and responsible to the larger populace, assuming anyone believes them, but particularly gullible people still might. Also, they can say that the progress of their AI stalled because they're trying to avoid it's dangers and totally not because they don't know how to improve it any more.

I'm not sure how much trust in the tech industry there was to begin with. After continued enshittification, numerous user data mishandling scandals, outright psychological manipulation of people in order to increase engagement, pushing ads into everything etc etc it was already pretty obvious that the main goal of a lot of tech industry is not to make better tech. Plus they've already tried to create similar hype based bubbles with cryptocurrency and NFTs (which are also technologies that have some uses in very limited number of situations but which they claimed were going to change everything). But certainly what trust still remained has been damaged.

Any additional jobs gained in construction of datacenters have to be temporary. Once you're done constructing the datacenter, your job is finished. Unless you assume that the AI bubble keeps growing indefinitely and new datacenters will continuously keep getting built, but even in that case at some point you'll run out of land.

Reading some of what that guy supposedly said, I wouldn't say he's a liberal necessarily, he may be a right-winger and a bit of an edgelord. Although people nowadays love taking quotes out of context, so you can never be too sure. But that's not in itself such an apocalyptic thing. There was a time when people would have just shrugged and gone 'ok the guy may be a bit of an idiot but he's made a really good Linux distro' (I'm not familiar with this distro but apparently it's popular). People used to understand that other people have opinions and they are sometimes different from their own.

Nowadays however you have this army of sad people on social media who find any quote that goes against the allowed set of opinions and act like the author of the quote personally genocided a whole country. Of course the real message is 'you can totally see how much I hate these opinions, because I have all the correct opinions, I'm a good boy, please tell me I'm a good boy'.

If you believe somebody is saying something wrong and/or stupid you can try to explain to them why they're wrong, or at least explain to others why they're wrong. What's bad is acting like expressing a wrong opinion is a capital offense. That's far far more dangerous than one person talking anti-immigrant or anti-vax nonsense or whatever. Because once you've established that just having 'wrong' opinions deserves you being fired from your job or even imprisoned, it's extremely easy to change what's defined as 'wrong opinions', depending on which government is in power at a given time. And then you suddenly find that criticising the government in any way will land you in prison. US may currently be the only place with real freedom of speech but if people keep trying to undermine it, it may not have freedom of speech for much longer.

There's a theory that if our civilization regresses to a pre-industrial state, or if indeed humanity dies out completely and some other species becomes sapient in the future and starts building its own civilization, this future civilization will never be able to achieve any kind of advanced technological level again.

The reasoning goes something like this. A civilization can't come up with new technology just by some smart guy sitting in a cave thinking things up. You need a certain level of social stability and organization, advanced enough agriculture, and most importantly ubiquitous technology that's just a bit less advanced than technology you're trying to inevent. Which in the end all comes down to resources. In the pre-industrial age it'll mainly be metals, for early industrial civilization coal, then gas, uranium, etc etc. Not sure if gold and silver are necessary for civilization.

However resource extraction also needs a certain level of technology. So you have a chicken and egg problem here, you can't have technology without resources, but you can't extract resources without technology. Our civilization was able to overcome that because there were widespread resource deposits that required only very primitive technology to exploit. Surface deposits, open-pit mines and so on. Those were depleted early on, but by that time we developed better technology and were able to use harder to get to resource deposits.

However for a hypothetical future civilization that bootstrap process won't be available. All the easy to get to resource deposits have already been depleted (by us) and all other deposits require technology which they don't have. So they'll be forever stuck at a pre-industrial level.

I don't know if I totally believe that theory, it'll depend on whether they could find a way to use the mines that were left over from our failed civilization, or if they could repurpose many artifacts left over from us. Or perhaps that hypothetical future civilization could base its technology on different resources than we did. It seems at least reasonably plausible though.

But this isn't about a missile attack. A power plant in US should be just as easy to hack as a power plant in UK. I bet some idiot pressed a wrong button or something or they deployed cool new software which hasn't been tested very much, and then they decided to blame this on the Iran boogeyman instead.

Especially since it's not clear what's in it for Iran. They're not at war with UK, but they are at war with US, so wouldn't a US power plant make a lot more sense as a target? Afaik during the course of this war so far Iran has only attacked targets belonging to either US and Israel or to the neighbouring Gulf nations. OTOH this government has been known to use foreign policy as a distraction to domestic problems, as have a lot of governments. Add to this that The Telegraph is known to, let's just say, not be the most reliable source of information, and has a very right-wing bias and indeed this seems very fishy.

My guess would be, mostly internal propaganda, sort of like a military parade on steroids. Moon is a lifeless rock, any mining operation there would be absolute light years away from being economical, never mind that it may well be logistically impossible to get the necessary mining equipment there or maintain enough people there to run any sort of mining operation. Any 'permanent settlement' there would as far as I see it be their own version of ISS, with hookers and blackjack, just based on a big asteroid rather than floating in space. I can't see such a 'settlement' having a population of more than a few astronauts. So very little practical benefit to be gained.

China's economy may be doing better than Europe's or US's in some ways, but they have their own problems, the growth is slowing down and there is a fair amount of domestic discontent. So they're probably looking for an impressive piece of propaganda to distract the population. Taiwan invasion could be one but they're probably realising the heap of problems it would bring. They're learning from US and Russia's mistakes I guess. So a moon base (just like in scifi!) would have pretty impressive propaganda value.

My guess would be they may decide it's not worth it. Supplying such a base would be massively expensive. Also, my knowledge of this is limited, but wouldn't there be additional logistic challenges in resupplying a ground-based base as opposed to a space station, due to the Moon's rotation? If the goal is propaganda, then any catastrophic equipment failure resulting in (probably quite unpleasant) death of the population of the base would be a significant loss of face. So I guess the plans to have a permanent base by 2040 or whatever will remain just plans. Although who knows, CCP has access to significant wealth which they can spend absolutely however they want and pretty impressive know-how, so depends on how much value they place on this I guess.

No, they want to paint the Moon pink and draw a Lenin face on it

OK the whole hormone thing is just a complete red herring. We're talking about the way to determine the sex of the individual. For which the only thing you need to know is, do they have XX chromosomes, in which case they're female, or XY, in which case they're male. That's all you need. If for whatever reason a male foetus has been exposed to very little testosterone during its development, it will probably have a lot of problems, but it will grow up to be a male with extremely undeveloped sexual characteristics. But still a male, not any non-binary nonsense. And what 'brain shape' has to do with anything, I'm still completely mystified.

Besides, as far as I can see gender dysphoria has very little to do with the amount of oestrogen/testosterone a person has. I remember recently taking a bus where the bus driver was wearing female clothes, and this was a huge, very male looking dude.

By definition, gender dysmorphia means you're one gender, but you feel like you're a different one. But if gender that you are can be determined unambiguously, and I've heard absolutely nothing that has persuaded me otherwise, that means what they're feeling is objectively different from reality, so by definition it's a delusion. A schizophrenic man sincerely and genuinely believes that the mole people from outer space are plotting to steal his memories or something. And I have absolutely no doubt that it really sucks to be this way. But you do not encourage the schizophenic's delusions.

This is starting to feel like one of those online discussions that goes around in circles and doesn't accomplish very much at all.