Chelsea's Chatterbox

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

Dedicated to my cat, who is very vocal about my bed time.

Kaladin raises so many good points about the lighteyes/darkeyes stuff and then the books just dont. Acknowledge it? Even after the reveal that its all misremembered history, theres still this "both sides are at fault" thing. Which sits weird with me

Shout out Jasnah, only royal to even begin to question all that bull. And she didnt even do much about it

Oh yeah. I don't know that it's as egregious as the human/singer dichotomy for windrunner oaths, in that idk if it would be considered morally correct for them to kill darkeyes in order to protect lighteyes, but you are correct that the lighteyes/darkeyes thing is handled badly. The way in which this was addressed was by saying that darkeyes have to turn the other cheek in the face of racism forever, but if they work hard and don't make a fuss and protect the Kholins, then some day they'll get to become lighteyes too, by bonding an honorspren. Which is. Uh. Bad. It's not a realistic portrayal of the harsh realities of racism, because in harsh reality you don't get to magically join the privileged caste if you're nice enough, and it's also not a wish fulfillment fantasy about how racism can be overcome, at the end of the day the windrunners (which seem to be the only predominantly darkeyed order) are still subservient to the Kholins. In the end it's kind of just a story wherein Kaladin needs to learn to be more accepting of racism, because aside from how the lighteyes view him as less human than themselves, they're really quite nice people.

Have I mentioned before how frustrating Kaladin is to me? You're right, he does make plenty of great points about this sort of thing. His anger in the face of these systems is really understandable and sympathetic. Except we're not actually meant to agree with all that stuff. It's all meant as a mindset that he needed to ourgrow. In way of kings, he talks about how there are no good lighteyes, so that in the end he can be proven wrong by seeing how honorable Dalinar is. In words of radiance he yearns for justice for the crimes that lighteyes commit and will never be held accountable for, but in the end he overcomes that as well and commits to protecting Elhokar despite his crimes. I'm not saying that he was wrong in these situations, that is a different discussion, but I think it's important to keep in mind when reading Kaladin's character. A lot of what you consider to be good points he's making are actually intended as flawed outlooks to be set aside.

And yeah, there's definitely a whole thing for me as well, about how they're not really an order devoted to protecting everyone, they're a group who works for the Kholins, and protects the Kholins, and helps to achieve the Kholins' agendas. It's not wrong to defend them, I wouldn't say that, but I don't see why the Kholins should be more deserving of allegiance and protection than everyone else.

happy pride to them

painted a sweater with bleach!! not 100% done, I want to patch up harrow's skull a bit but i wanted to wear it out today anyway

originally planned on adding the ninth skull with gideon's glasses to the back but idk how i feel about it now so we'll see

Harrow the Ninth: