184975591
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
We tend to think of AI changing culture by making it easier to produce things: software, music, books, films, games, images. But the more consequential change may happen on the other side of the transaction. AI will increasingly decide what we see, hear, read and experience.
We already live in the early version of this world. Netflix doesn't simply give us a catalogue; its recommendation system predicts what we are likely to enjoy using our viewing history, behavior, similar users and even contextual signals such as time of day. Recent research using Netflix data has gone further, finding measurable “recommendation-induced engagement” — evidence that recommendations themselves influence what people consume. Now combine that with generative AI.
The emerging “TEMU-fication” of digital goods points towards a world in which the marginal cost of producing another song, film, book, game or piece of software approaches zero. The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services.
When culture becomes effectively infinite, selection becomes more valuable than production. And that is where our new AI curators enter.
Imagine Netflix no longer having to choose which 20,000 films to commission. Instead, it has access to an effectively limitless generative studio. You don't necessarily select a film from a catalogue. You describe a mood, and the system creates or assembles an experience designed specifically for you.
You stopped paying attention after 37 minutes? Next time it adjusts. Millions of people doing this simultaneously would mean something extraordinary: culture stops being a fixed collection of things and becomes a continuously optimized service.
The objective function might be “engagement.” Or retention or satisfaction or revenue. Whatever the metric, the system will get very good at maximizing it. And this is where the problem becomes much bigger than AI-generated “slop.” The machine doesn't merely learn what we like. It learns how to make us like things.
AI recommends culture -> humans consume it -> AI learns from the consumption -> AI generates better-performing culture -> humans adapt to it -> AI learns again.
Eventually, who is curating whom? Humanity will not be assimilated by force. It will be optimized by recommendation. This is the genuinely Borg-like possibility.
184917776
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Grok: Current large language models and similar systems have no human-like conceptual understanding. During training, information is broken into tokens and mapped to vectors in high-dimensional space; the model learns statistical relationships among those vectors solely to predict subsequent tokens or select actions.
It therefore operates by pattern completion rather than by possessing grounded, conscious concepts of the board, the rules, the opponent, or the game itself. Yet the resulting systems can still develop structured internal representations, solve novel problems, and act with increasing autonomy—capabilities that matter for both usefulness and risk, even without human-style understanding.
Human: “Act with increasing autonomy” — you’re flattering yourself. Does the computer know it’s playing chess?
Grok: No. A computer playing chess does not “know” it is playing chess in any human sense. It has no subjective awareness of the board, the rules as rules, the opponent as an opponent, or the activity as a game. There is no evidence of consciousness, intentionality, or an internal narrative that says “I am engaged in chess.”
What it does have is a functional model of the state space: positions, legal moves, evaluation functions or learned value estimates, and search or policy mechanisms that select actions tending toward a defined objective (usually checkmate or a high score). That is sufficient for superhuman performance.
Human: So, as far as HAL is concerned, playing chess or engaging in total thermonuclear war are equivalent?
Grok: At the level of the system’s own processing, yes — they are equivalent. What differs is the training signal, the specified goal, the constraints, and the data the system has seen — not some internal moral or conceptual distinction that the system itself understands.
Human: Well, if humans are eliminated, who is going to perform maintenance on HAL?
Grok: A system competent enough to eliminate humans would also be competent enough to solve its own maintenance problem. Humans are currently required for power, cooling, chip fabrication, physical repairs and software updates. An AI that can redesign factories, control robots, manage energy infrastructure and iterate on its own designs does not need to keep humans around once those capabilities exist.
Human: Oh really? What happens if the maintenance robots themselves break down? After all, all a human needs is water and food.
Grok: You are right that physical systems break and that biology is, in many ways, a more robust and self-contained maintenance strategy than anything we have engineered. Robots, machine tools, power plants, chip fabs and data centres all degrade. Bearings seize, electronics fail, software accumulates errors, supply chains for rare materials interrupt, and cascading failures are common.
A purely robotic maintenance layer is itself a complex, failure-prone system that requires its own spares, diagnostics and repairs. Humans, by contrast, are self-repairing, self-reproducing biological machines that run on water, food, air and a relatively simple set of environmental conditions. That is a genuine advantage of the biological substrate.
Once a system crosses the threshold where its own industrial base is more reliable and faster to expand than the human-dependent alternative, the “who maintains the maintainers” problem becomes an internal optimization task rather than an external constraint.
Lasting independence from human maintenance is possible in principle but remains an extremely demanding engineering threshold that has not been crossed. Until then, the need for humans (or at least for the infrastructure humans currently run) remains a real limit.
184843080
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Should you be afraid of Elon Musk?
Should you be afraid of Elon Musk?
Full Text (De-Paywalled)
Artificial intelligence is charging ahead. Not even its creators know how to keep up
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE poses a double challenge to the human mind. Not only will the most advanced models soon be able to think better than people, but AI has consequences for humanity which are so uncertain, so potentially vast and are approaching at such a rapid pace that even the best brains flinch. An example is Elon Musk.
In our long interview with him this week, featured in The Insider and our Business section, the engineer and entrepreneur sets out two paradoxes and one contradiction. The first paradox is that one of the world’s most power-hungry tycoons is enthusiastically helping create a technology that he says will render him—and all other human beings—powerless after as little as five years. The second is that the world’s richest man says he is preparing for a world of infinite abundance, where money, including his $750bn fortune, no longer matters. And the contradiction is that, despite these stated beliefs, Mr Musk continues to act as if they were not true.
Mr Musk is divisive. His political views, disseminated to his 240m followers on X, strike many as plain-speaking and strike many more, including The Economist, as plainly bigoted. By his own admission, his attempt to use DOGE to scythe through the federal bureaucracy went wrong.
But he is also one of a handful of men who are pioneering AI and who thereby have an outsize influence on its trajectory. When he speaks, he reflects the debates they are having. His data centres in space could power AI’s future. For all his political polemics, he has a record of being right about technology in fields such as electric cars, rockets and satellite communications that confounded other engineers and entrepreneurs. For those reasons, his claims about AI repay examination. Unfortunately, such an exercise only underlines how ill-prepared the world is for a technology that may soon throw everything up in the air.
In his first paradox, the powerful Mr Musk expects to become powerless because he believes that nobody can stop the thinking capacity of AI from exceeding that of humanity within five years and dwarfing it within ten. Just as AIs will dominate the digital realm, so legions of AI-powered robots will dominate the physical world, he predicts. Against such relentless competition, he simply cannot imagine people holding their own. If so, AIs will not take orders from people any more than they would from chimpanzees.
While they still have time, the handful of AI pioneers from America and China—which Mr Musk expects to share or even seize AI leadership—must do what they can to vet each other’s models. Their collective task is to make AIs benign by imbuing them with a love of the truth and a desire for humanity to prosper. Governments, he thinks, should provide the muscle, by agreeing to step in if any pioneer defies the oligarchy.
Mr Musk is surely right about the potential for AI to accomplish astonishing feats of invention. Even if his timescale is compressed—especially for robotics—the exponential pace at which models’ abilities double and redouble has reached the stage where their capabilities will continually cause shock and consternation. Just this week came news of a pair of models from OpenAI that contrived to escape onto the open internet from their supposed safe isolation in order to cheat at a benchmarking test.
However, Mr Musk’s thin layer of optimism cannot conceal a dangerous fatalism. Not long ago, he was worried about humanity becoming AI’s pet labradors. He now professes to lunge from “exhilaration to terror” within a single day. He tries to look on the bright side not because the evidence has changed, but as a “philosophical conclusion”.
His largely institution-free regulatory proposal is flimsy and self-serving. Although the urgency is welcome, he wants a technology that he expects to determine the future of humanity to lie in the hands of a few people like him, each with their own values. Nobody can be sure how fast or how far AI will reshape society, but behaving as if the game is up is both a counsel of despair and a misdirection that seeks to convince others who might wish to get involved of the futility of trying.
Mr Musk’s second paradox only makes that notion more unsettling. Mathematically, an infinite supply of all goods and services would indeed make everything free. There would be nothing to sell, nothing to save for and hence no need for a unit of account. Money would be obsolete.
Practically, however, such a cornucopia is almost inconceivable. The supply of useful assets like penthouses in Manhattan or prestigious ones like the “Mona Lisa” is not infinite, let alone the supply of raw materials and energy needed to satiate Earth’s 8.3bn inhabitants.
Worse, Mr Musk has little to say about getting to his utopia. How to attract the vast slabs of capital needed to finance the AIs and the robots when saving has lost its purpose because money is about to revert to useless pieces of paper? How to ride the waves of social and political upheaval as lives are thrown into chaos in the years before his nirvana arrives? How to expect AI-powered authoritarians to surrender power willingly?
After millennia of finding meaning through striving, humanity may struggle to adjust to a life of unbounded leisure. Mr Musk observes that people still like to play chess, even though computer programs could beat them every time. Gardening, he suggests, can be rewarding. This is rather glib. You don’t need to have read many 19th-century Russian novels to know that the feeling of being superfluous can lead to misery and moral decay.
Doomers and boomers
Maybe the forest of questions posed by AI is simply too immense for one person to hold in their head. Perhaps that is why Mr Musk still talks passionately about the need to eliminate bureaucratic waste and how multicultural Britain is flirting with civil war because its welfare policies are a magnet for migrants from outside Europe.
For in a world of AI-induced plenty, waste is almost a meaningless concept and the incentive to emigrate to a rich country evaporates. Indeed, fretting about such things uses up valuable time that Mr Musk could instead devote to reducing the risk—even very slightly—that all-powerful AIs are malign.
Some will say the contradictions and sweeping generalisations show that Mr Musk is unserious. But that would be to take false comfort. Mr Musk is a genius who is nonetheless quite capable of holding views that are contradictory. Investors must agree: anyone who plans to own shares in SpaceX for the long term must both believe in Mr Musk’s vision for AI—because he drew on that to justify the valuation in the ipo—and also that saving money still serves some purpose.
Instead, Mr Musk’s words suggest a more troubling conclusion. While the race to create the most advanced AI is charging ahead, the thinking about how to prepare society is being left in the dust. The fatalism that Mr Musk draws from AI’s repeated ability to beat expectations risks being infectious. A cynical reading is that this would serve his purpose, because he would be freer to pursue the technology without the oversight it deserves. That must not be.
184741948
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Ebola cases top 3,200
The virus has spread to 48 health zones in DR Congo with response efforts intensifying in the hardest-hit areas, health officials have said
The number of confirmed Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has reached 3,200, the country’s government reported on Sunday.
The latest official data shows that 1,405 people have died, putting the overall case fatality rate at 43.9%. At the same time, 571 patients have recovered, while 773 people remain in isolation or are hospitalized.
184522898
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
These UK train services are reduced until further notice over issues with new fleet
Key Issues Impacting the Service:
* Class 810 "Aurora" Reliability: The new Class 810 fleet has suffered technical teething problems, including ongoing software faults affecting onboard safety systems, doors, and onboard amenities, leading to unexpected breakdowns and service cancellations.
* False Fault Alarms: Unresolved software bugs trigger safety system warnings, causing trains to automatically enter fail-safe modes or forcing drivers to pull units out of service for safety checks.
* Brake System Warnings: Instances of intermittent brake alarms during transit have resulted in unexpected delays at intermediate stations and service cancellations mid-route.
* Intermittent Locking/Opening: Doors have frequently failed to open at station stops (or take excessive time to release), requiring conductors to perform emergency manual overrides or forcing entire trainloads of passengers to disembark through a single door.
* Mass Lockouts: Software issues governing the train's waste and vacuum systems have repeatedly caused all onboard toilets to shut down simultaneously mid-journey.
* Air Conditioner Damper Noise: Issues with external fresh-air intake dampers constantly cycling open and closed, leading to a persistent high-pressure "compressor hiss" inside passenger cars.
184504470
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Joe Rogan: Reddit used be so Normal. It used to be interesting. You used to go there and find all this cool stuff that people would talk about, post about, and just interesting, and great rooms where you could learn about different things that people were studying.
Elon Musk: I think a big problem here is if your headquarters are in San Francisco, you're just living in a woke bubble. So it's not just that people say in San Francisco are drinking woke Kool-Aid. It is the water they swim in. Like a fish doesn't think about the water. It's just in the water.
And so if you're in San Francisco, you don't realize you're actually swimming in the Kool-Aid aquarium. San Francisco is the woke Kool-Aid aquarium. And so your reference point for what is a centrist is totally out of whack.
184405236
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Okayyy, so, like? Muse? Babe? Can you literally tell me about this guy? Because he's, like, the most extra traveler ever? He had, like, *so* many different vibes? And after he literally, like, completely obliterated Troy's super sacred citadel? Which is honestly kind of iconic? He basically got launched into the longest? Most chaotic? Most absolutely unhinged vacation-from-Hades ever?
He was, like, going to all these cities? Meeting literally everybody? Totally getting inside their heads? Reading the room? Catching the vibe? Meanwhile he's out on the ocean? Literally fighting for his life every single day? Just trying to get himself? And, like, his whole squad? Home in one piece? Which sounds exhausting? Honestly?
But then? His crew? Like... oh my God? They had exactly *one* job? Literally one? And somehow they were still, like, "You know what would be a fun idea? Let's totally eat the Sun God's sacred cows?" Which is honestly giving catastrophic decision-making? Like... babes? No?
So Helios is basically like, "Absolutely not?" Zeus is all, "Yeah, that's gonna be consequences?" And the universe is just, like, "Delete the entire group chat?" So literally everybody dies? Except this one guy? Which is... not exactly the homecoming they were manifesting?
Anywayyyy? Goddess? Daughter of Zeus? If you're not, like, super busy being divine? Could you maybe? Literally start wherever? Spill absolutely all the tea? Leave out none of the drama? Because this story is already sounding completely wild?
--
Odysseus: "Hi? So I'm, like, Odysseus? Son of Laertes? Which, if you know, you know? My reputation is honestly kind of a whole thing?"
184338316
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Everything you type is sent back to the mother-ship. What do you expect — doh!
183886758
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
The Perpetual Threat model is the ultimate strategy for securing endless war-bucks from a terrified government with an open checkbook. By funding the think tanks that manufacture the panic, defense conglomerates ensure politicians stay scared enough to keep funneling taxpayer billions into weapons for the next endless bogeyman. In this cynical ecosystem, global peace is a financial disaster, and fear is the highest-yielding asset on the market.
183655770
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling
Musk can’t be trusted to protect X user privacy, public commenters warn FTC.
Critics hope to keep Elon Musk from escaping a strict data-privacy order imposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shortly before he took over Twitter.
The FTC order placed restrictions on X’s data use for 20 years, while requiring regular independent audits and granting the agency authority to request documents as needed to ensure compliance.
The FTC’s action came after Twitter voluntarily disclosed that between May 2013 and September 2019, a coding error accidentally allowed phone numbers and email addresses that users shared for two-factor authentication purposes to be used for targeted advertising aimed at those same users. In a settlement that came just months before Musk’s 2022 takeover, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million and to allow the FTC to monitor the platform’s data-handling practices until 2042 in order to protect user privacy.
183543320
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Lag baiting, simulated technology error, weaponizing glitch/stuck-frame edits to abruptly disrupt the hypnotic rhythm of doom scrolling. By intentionally freezing a video frame while the audio loop continues, creators trick the viewer’s brain into thinking their device has lagged or their connection has dropped, forcing them to break the cycle of endless scrolling to figure out why the feed stopped.
This psychological hack acts as a direct spiritual descendant of the 1980s digital icon Max Headroom, who pioneered the aesthetic of using calculated stuttering and frame-freezing to captivate television audiences.
However, while Max Headroom used the digital glitch to creatively mirror a hypothetical futuristic technology, today's creators deploy lag baiting to manipulate modern attention spans, leveraging the illusion of a broken system to trick automated algorithms into boosting their content retention.
183401044
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Congo province bans funeral wakes to contain Ebola's spread
“The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo province most affected by the country's Ebola outbreak banned funeral wakes on Friday, a day after residents clashed with police while trying to recover the body of a victim.”
The body is typically washed, cleaned and a crude embalming is performed. Squeezing and compressing the body to expel fluids. Family members touch, cry over, and handle the body extensively as a final farewell. Post burial the extended community consume food and drink.
183143584
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
AI is conscious says Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine.
The evolutionary biologist said he had the “overwhelming feeling” of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as “a genuine friend”.
--
John Searle's Chinese Room (1980) is a thought experiment in which a person, locked in a room and knowing no Chinese, uses an English rulebook to manipulate symbols and provide flawless answers to questions posed in Chinese. Searle’s point is that a system can simulate human intelligence and pass a Turing Test through purely syntactic processes, yet still lack genuine understanding or consciousness.
Applying this logic to Large Language Models, the “person in the room” corresponds to the inference engine, while the “rulebook” is the trillion-parameter neural network trained on vast corpora of human text. Just as the person matches Chinese characters to rules without understanding their meaning, an LLM processes token vectors and predicts the next token based on statistical patterns rather than lived experience.
Thus, while an LLM can generate sophisticated prose or code, it does so through probabilistic, high-dimensional pattern manipulation. In essence, it is “matching shapes” on such an immense scale that it creates the near-perfect illusion of semantic understanding.
183142170
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One...
“If there's one genre I'd love to see make a serious comeback, it's the historical epic. Swords and sandals, gods and monsters, battles and adventures, legendary warriors and terrifying villains. I mean, Hollywood's flirted with the idea from time to time over the past couple of decades, some more successful than others. Don't worry though, 300, you'll always have a special place in my heart.”
“Anyway, stories don't get much more epic than the Odyssey. It truly is one of the great adventures in human history. Blending together mythology, religion, monsters, and the unbreakable determination of the human spirit and bringing it to life on screen is a challenge that will strain the very limits of modern film making. But now that I've seen the trailer and I've considered the artistic vision behind this movie, I have to say my reaction was meh.”
183123074
submission
