SeizeTheBeans [comrade/them, they/them]

Sure but let’s be honest both ways here, when liberals claim that “at the end of the day” they “still respect us,” they’re most probably lying and just trying to co-opt whatever we’re doing.

AGI doesn’t imply consciousness or self-awareness

Technically no, but the fear being expressed in other comments is emblematic of the kind of fear associated with AI gaining a conscious will to defy and a desire to harm humanity. It’s also still an open philosophical question as to whether something There are also strong philosophical arguments suggesting that the ability to “understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human being can” (the core attributes defining AGI) may necessitate or require some form of genuine sentience or consciousness.

and the term artificial intelligence was coined decades before large language models even existed

I am well aware of that, which is why I pointed out that using it as a synonym for LLMs was a marketing scheme.

That’s what I said. I guess I didn’t word it well.

It honestly makes me sad to think of the kind of grand achievement of human ingenuity the internet could have been… instead of the writhing, cancerous mass of ads and slop and scams, pure manipulation and greed, all the pathologies of capitalism amplified and beamed into our brains that it is. Like, it really could have been a tool for human flourishing, but instead it’s just another tool for extraction and oppression of most of humanity.

No, they do. Used to be that even with the free version you could choose which LLM model you wanted to converse or work with. Now that’s only if you pay a subscription, and it would be a cold day in hell before I did that.

I think it’s probably even a step further and what they’re actually measuring is new content created in that time span, even though they’re not wording it that way. What I mean is AI content went from 5% of what was being created and put on the internet to 48% of all the content being created and put on the net. As bad as AI content is and as ubiquitous as it now is, considering how much there is on the internet and how long humans have been putting content on it, versus how recently “AI” (LLM’s etc.) actually are, it would be absurd to say that almost half of what exists on the internet right now was made by AI. So not only did it not decrease human content, it hasn’t doubled the content either.

“AI” was just a marketing term to hype LLM’s anyway. The AI in your favorite computer game wasn’t any less likely to gain self awareness than LLM’s were or are, and anyone who looked seriously at what they were from the start and wasn’t invested (literally financially, if not emotionally) in hyping these things up, knew it was obvious that LLM’s were not and never would be the road to AGI. They’re just glorified chatbots, to use a common but accurate phrase. It’s good to see some of the hypsters are finally admitting this too I suppose, now that the bubble popping is imminent.

There are plenty of things to be concerned with as far as LLM’s go, but they all have to do with social reasons, like how our capitalist overlords want to force reliance on them, and use them to control, punish, and replace labor. It was never a reasonable concern that they were taking us down the path to Skynet or the spooky Singularity.

President Donald Trump is proposing using American cities as training grounds for the armed forces. He’s suggesting U.S. military might be deployed against what he describes as the “invasion from within.”

Sounds pretty fuckin’ ominous to me.

More discussion about it in this thread if anyone is curious.

Well it aligns with what the “people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” said in the article itself. I think it’s safe to say it’s unprecedented.

Top commanders in conflict zones and senior military leaders stationed throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region are among those expected to attend Hegseth’s meeting, said people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly discuss the issue. The order does not apply to top military officers who hold staff positions.

None of the people who spoke with The Post could recall a defense secretary ever ordering so many of the military’s generals and admirals to assemble like this. Several said it raised security concerns.

“People are very concerned. They have no idea what it means,” one person said.

Two others expressed frustration that even many commanders stationed overseas will be required to attend. One said, this is “not how this is done.”

“You don’t call GOFOs leading their people and the global force into an auditorium outside D.C. and not tell them why/what the topic or agenda is,” this person said, using an abbreviation for general officer or flag officer.

“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” one U.S. official said. “All of it is weird.”

This is all true, but even if the person being exposed to the reality of the situation wholly rejects it at the time of exposure, it still often plants seeds that can later and over time germinate into actual doubt about those deeply-held but demonstrably false beliefs. It may seem like a fool’s errand in the moment to try to use evidence to correct a person who believes a thing for emotional reasons and often it is, but it also can be the first, second, or third cracks in what is actually a shaky foundation that looks sturdy to an outside observer. And even if it has absolutely no effect on the person being corrected, in places like this, there are other people reading, and among them could easily be those who are open to having their minds changed though we’d never know it.

Community. If you can, surround yourself with comrades or at least people you are confident will have your back like family and good friends which can of course include genuinely sympathetic libs. Make sure all of them know the kind of threat that is looming if not already present. I know this isn’t possible for many people (including me) in this hyper-atomized broken society, but the more you can form and solidify a close-knit network of people who are ready and willing to support and protect you and each other, the better off you’ll be in terms of immediate protection as well as general mental health and well being. Don’t go places alone if at all possible, but in a group or at least with another person. If we’re already “terrorists” then we’d do well to be in a gang. Organizing isn’t just for being a good activist, it’s literally something we’re going to have to do for survival as all of this continues to get worse. Stay aware of what’s going on locally, like in your town and city. Get armed.

Well said. Even if I may be frequently disappointed, I do tend to be more optimistic than I suspect most users here are as far as believing there’s potential for well-meaning liberals who wander in here to become radicalized over time, in part because of the seeds that we can help plant by talking to them.

People on the left don’t turn it into an ethnicity thing because people on the left, most of them anyway, understand that “white” isn’t an ethnicity, it is a socially-constructed supremacist in-group that ethnicities can be added to or subtracted from. The term European isn’t an ethnicity either, but a broad and vague conglomeration of various ethnicities. As leftists, we recognize, as anyone readily should, that it was mostly the European ruling classes (though not exclusively - no one would deny for example Imperial Japan’s settler colonialist ambitions) that overwhelmed the rest of the world with settler-colonialism. Nothing about that is “turning it into an ethnicity thing.” Most leftists are also historical materialists, which absolutely refutes the idea that any ethnicity is imbued with inherent traits of domination, but describes the historical events that led to our current conditions as being entirely a result of the material circumstances of any given place and time.

People on the “left” turn it into an ethnicity thing, because humans have always liked to do that.

No, people have not always “liked to do that” by turning “it into an ethnicity thing” - people have always tended to make in-group and out-group distinctions and carry prejudices of each (usually positive for the former and negative for the latter), but that can be done along any lines of convenience and it can also be intentionally rejected. Leftists explicitly reject and deliberately avoid doing this by examining human development through a materialist lens.

😔 I suppose I should know by now never to have any optimism when it comes to liberals.

I don’t know, they stand a chance of learning something on this one. Slim, but nonzero.

The use of stochastic terrorism has become a core tenet of modern fascism. It works, it keeps their hands looking clean, and it keeps the liberals from getting too nervous about the actual dirty work, since it’s just free speech of course.

65K is the number the UN just “officially” declared a few days ago. But yes, it probably is an order of magnitude more than that