Data and stats can tell you whatever story you want to promote

Seen this so many times at my work. There's some bone-headed decision and the people in charge are like "look guys we ran the numbers". But the methodology is messed up somehow, or they just ignored / misinterpreted the numbers while pretending they were following the data, or it doesn't bear out in the real world; etc.

When data and common sense disagree you'd better be damn sure in the data.

When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don't worry!) I'll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.

My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice "You might want to check your blood pressure!" and "you still haven't completed today's tasks for Health+ points! But don't worry, there's still time!"

Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.

Couldn't make it through the video, but this level of argument has been hashed and rehashed over literally the past thousand years. It's in the training data out the wazoo. And yet the youtube commenters act like it's the most insightful thing they've ever heard, and not copy-pasted from a mediocre philosophy 101 textbook.

each perspective is given its best possible representation.

This was a quite nuanced debate, better than what most humans are capable of.

I feel like we are nearing to the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves… -- Hayao Miyazaki

Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.

Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(

Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated "poetry"

Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn't it? Burn it all down.

The utter contempt doesn't cost extra? Sweet!

But wait, there's more!

AI Steve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vtKT9RrrI

Virtual Integrated Citizen: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/tech/openai-shuts-down-ai-mayor/index.html

Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)

AI party (apparently now defunct, if it was ever halfway serious in the first place): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/

Me: Mom I want AI mayor!

Mom: Shush now Saturn, we have AI mayor at home.

AI mayor at home:

https://www.ai-mayor.com/

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI%E5%85%9A

This is just weird. But I guess that's to be expected from elections anywhere in the world, disgruntled groups use them to get their message out.

Don't worry a heavily edited 3 minute video filled with inconsistencies promised me that AI movies were right around the corner. No matter that the unearthly writhing of the backgrounds makes me simultaneously motion sick and stressed out, I'm sure they'll work that out.

I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never let the left-turn signal turn green. Harrowing.

Microsoft's AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding, there's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you're bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.