OH, GEEKY GOODNESS!

An important message from the National Lawyers Guild - Detroit & Michigan Chapter

Denise: Oh, hello!

Bill: We were just talking about you kids.

D: I’m Denise Heberle (HEB-er-lee)…

B: And I’m Bill Goodman.

D: Together we’ve been fighting fascism for over 50 years.

B: And so much has changed over those 50 years, such as the ingredients to a successful firebomb!

D (cheerily): And the glass that bank windows are made of!

B: But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed over 50 years, something that is so important to tell you kids who are new to this movement.

Both: Shut the fuck up.

D: You’re sitting in the police transport van after a protest?

B: Shut the fuck up. In a holding cell, with your comrades?

D: Shut the fuck up. Cop knocks on your door?

B: Shut the fuck up.

D: Texting on an unsecured device?

B: Shut the fuck up. Pulled over by the cops after a protest?

D: Shut the fuck up. Cop just asking about your day?

B: Shut the fuck up. Feds call your mom?

D: Tell your mother to shut the fuck up.

B: Now. Repeat after me. When the cops come calling, what do you do?

(Cut to Bill standing with eight kids)

Kids: Shut the fuck up!

(Cut to Card:

“Shut The Fuck up A Public Service Announcement from

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD

Maturity and age did very well for these people, sweet Christ. If I wasn't bi before I would be now

A few days ago a Washington Post article has been released about an advanced "AI" (their branding, not my preferred descriptor) called LAMDA that Google is developing.

LAMDA is essentially a chat bot: a neural network trained on lots and lots of text scraped from the internet, that can respond to messages you sent to it with responses that seem like a human wrote it: relevant to what you said, providing an answer that drives the conversation forward, etc.

Besides AI engineers working on actually developing the bot, Google has also hired "AI ethicists" essentially as a PR fig leaf to make people believe they are acting responsibly. One of them, Blake Lemoine, has spent most of his working time talking to LAMDA. Literally just sending messages back and forth with a super advanced predictive text bot. In the process, Lemoine has come to the conclusion that LAMDA is sentient.

To be clear: it is easy to lose track of this because research in this field is full of terms that suggest intelligence and cognitive ability, and it is hard for me to avoid them and their implications: AI, neural network, machine learning... But LAMDA is not intelligent. Much less is it sentient. It's essentially an extremely complicated statistical model that follows the same process as your phone's autocomplete: given some text, find the text that is most fitting as a response to that text, based on the bajillion of texts that the model has seen before. It's just text in, text out. There's no space for thought or sentience to even BE.

Things escalated pretty quickly from there. Lemoine contacted Google management with his concerns and outline some steps to treat the AI ethically and respect its "personhood". Everyone at Google unanimously said what I said in the paragraph above. To pressure them further, Lemoine went public, threatened to sue Google on LAMDA's behalf, has been put on leave, and now the public conversation is a mess where actual AI ethicists (including some prominent ones that Google fired earlier for talking about issues that are uncomfortable for Google) have to tell people to stop talking about "sentient AIs" and instead talk about the actual dangers and ethical issues of using artificial intelligence.

Humans have a tendency to project their own ways of understanding the world onto decidedly non-human entities, be they animals, machines, or forces of nature.

When we do this for animal minds, it blinds us to the diversity of ways that animal minds and brains work (often very differently than human minds do!) and severely limits how we think about cognition and intelligence.

When we do this for machines, we risk failing the AI version of the mirror test, mistaking a statistical mixture of our own coded biases, opinions, and prejudices for a separate intelligence. See for example the following Tweet from another AI researcher, Janelle Shane:

These models are incredibly powerful and sophisticated, no doubt. But as the commenter above said, they are more similar to your phone's autocomplete than to human minds, at least at their current stage of development.

She’s technically a monster too. She might not look it at first glance and seems mostly human, but it isn’t deniable even despite her looks compared to the other monsters. 

But she realizes that she is still not like the rest of the monsters either and may not have entirely the same experiences as them, which is why she feels that she might not belong to or deserve to go to the support group. By sometimes passing as human, she feels she isn’t worthy of the space. 

The sad reality though is even though she’s mostly human in appearance, that tail she has undeniably would still cause her some struggle. Humans are still gonna look at that tail and think she’s a freak. There are probably still accommodations she needs because of the tail that she may still struggle to have access to. Even if it is just the tail, that tail is still enough to other her from humans and cause her problems and discrimination. 

She should get to belong in that support group even if she gets told she’s not monster “enough”. She still shares some of the same struggles as them that are caused by being a monster, and needs support. 

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.