You have a problem with that? That’s how it’s designed — to make profits for AI developers and their customers. In part by telling you what you want to hear. Hank Green has a new, long video in which he summarizes all the things that scare him about AI: Dangerous and disruptive AI slop and…
I gave up on corporate-owned “social media” a few years ago, and have never regretted the decision for a moment. It was easier for me, though, because I’m a blogger. I have my blog on a self-hosted WordPress site. WordPress is an open-source nonprofit organization. While it has a management team, it is owned by…
Readers often ask me what the point is of writing about the accelerating collapse of our global civilization if I believe it’s inevitable and unstoppable. As a non-believer in free will, my answer is that this seems to be what I’ve been conditioned and am compelled to do these days. My role, it seems, is…
This is a work of fiction. image by ‘as above astro’ via Jae Mather It’s like… I’m watching a castle made of sand, slowly eroding from below as the unforgiving ocean tide laps around its base — The people at the bottom of the castle are dying and desperate, while those above carry on with…
This is #51 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community. dog in play pose; by Thomas Zimmermann on wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0 DE Last week my neighbourhood ramble took me by a local off-leash ‘dog…
Another internal conversation with my self, spinning around in the infinite loop of ‘me’. I’m sitting in the corner of the café, looking at the wan reflection of this body in the window. I think I know what’s going on, inside this body and outside it. But it’s pretty obvious that I don’t. This brain…
photo by Crannofonix News of anti-regime, pro-Pahlavi rally in Sweden last month, from wikipedia CC BY 4.0 Iran has been dealing with sanctions, embargoes and blockades from the US, Israel and the rest of White Empire for decades. Each new administration selects ways to further squeeze and punish America’s favourite whipping boy. The result is…
Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein (image released by the House oversight committee). Via Scheerpost. Each time I read new revelations from the heavily-censored Epstein files, I am at once shocked and not at all surprised. It’s a cliché that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The oft-resurrected causal debate that arises when someone says…
words on a T-shirt I saw recently; pretty much sums up what the pols and their media are trying to do to our minds, I think Things can change. So Cory Doctorow reassures us: [In] Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capital in the 21st Century, [he introduced] the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a…
ChatGPT knows me pretty well. I’ve asked it hundreds of questions by now, and told it my reactions. It’s saved me hundreds of hours of time, and given me information, quite quickly and precisely, that no search engine could ever have managed. The tool is trained with one purpose in mind: To make you want…
Last summer, I wrote what I think is one of my most important posts about our species’ nature and how it has led to our civilization’s accelerating collapse. My thesis was that what differentiates us from all other species on the planet, including h. neanderthanesis, is our profound distrust, fear, discomfort, and intolerance of creatures…
