Even people who have “nothing to hide” aren’t safe.

I’ve lost track of the number of articles about people who were wrongly accused by “AI” camera systems or flagged for arrest because their (relatively common-seeming) name matches or is close to an entirely different person who is a legitimate suspect. Some of those people have been jailed for weeks and have lost their jobs over what amounts to a clerical error.

It does get better.

It’s not my favorite show, but I don’t regret the time I spent watching it.

Season 3, episode 12 (“One Day, One Room”) is probably the closest to that.

It isn’t all House in the clinic, all the time, but I think he only works clinic cases in that episode.

If they grow up without humans they will be the apex predators that will do everything possible to show you that they would rather die than give you control.

(Emphasis mine)

… And now I’m going to hear, “Bow down before the one you serve; you’re going to get what you deserve,” in the context of a cat who feels that she deserves our worship. That song will never be the same again.

Yeah, my little group met up in Arlington and traveled together so we wouldn’t get lost.

It was nice to be with such a huge group of people who all had a good sense of humor. We don’t get a lot of that these days.

Trying to rigorously answer fundamental questions is kind of the whole point of philosophy, and Mr. Long and Jeff Sebo, an N.Y.U. philosopher who specializes in animal welfare, soon collaborated to write “Taking A.I. Welfare Seriously,” a paper arguing that it was important to avoid harming A.I. systems if they “matter morally,” and also important not to care for systems if they don’t. Later, with funding from three foundations aligned with the Effective Altruism movement, Mr. Long and a colleague set up a nonprofit, Eleos AI Research.

The people who founded Eleos started out by trying to figure out our moral obligations toward AI, or whether we should have them at all.

For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

All good questions, but in my opinion we’re missing key questions about the environmental ethics here.

The middle third of the article is about a group of researchers at Eleos who are testing different models for sentience.

Then there’s this:

Mr. Long and his team also feel an urgency of the soul. If A.I. were to be conscious and capable of suffering, the world would be at risk of committing a moral atrocity, witting or not, on an unprecedented scale by essentially confining an A.I. in a tiny pen, thwarting its desires, shutting it down against its wishes and forcing it to act against its values…

Mr. Long himself thinks it’s dangerous to impute more capability to models than they have. The Eleos bookshelf contains works by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith and the neuroscientist Anil Seth arguing that consciousness derives from evolution and biology and is unlikely to emerge on silicon. But Mr. Long doesn’t see why anyone should have a problem with a handful of philosophers, in an exponentially growing industry, focusing on questions of A.I. welfare. Even skeptics of A.I. consciousness have made the pragmatic case that if we’re worried about a potentially malign A.I., it’s in our interest to care how it feels, or even just “feels.”

Yes, it’s a fairly long piece for the Times, and it mentions the one (!) woman who seems to be responsible for Claude’s moral compass. But the bulk of this article is about Robert Long and his team at Eleos, and their focus appears to be the well-being of the machine.

(I recognize that the journalist has an angle here, so the article may only be representing one facet of their work.)

No, you didn’t. The “reporting” here is very poor and largely just reiterates the owner’s view without clarifying the actual reasons the state gave for revoking the license.

I’m completely unsurprised that the corporate philosophers are talking about how humans can treat LLMs ethically (as if they have consciousness) while seemingly completely ignoring whether their employers are acting ethically within the world.

The fact that data centers raise ambient temperatures during a time of unprecedented environmental disasters due to global warming? Apparently not a concern.

Water and power resources being diverted from local residents to feed the machines while raising prices across the board? Not mentioned.

An entire generation of students disengaging from their education to outsource their thinking to a really fancy word-prediction machine? Not on the radar.

A whole new mental illness called “AI psychosis” that affects people of many different walks of life? Never heard of it.

An economic bubble so large that it could take down world markets when it collapses? Nah, we’re not here for that.

But let us tell you how you can be more respectful in your communications with our machines, just in case they can actually understand you.

The tagline on the poster was, “Cannibalistic. Humanoid. Underground. Dwellers.”

Agreed.

That was a great day. Thanks for prompting a trip down memory lane.

The harassment was allegedly spurred in part by an April 2019 article titled, “eBay CEO Devin Wenig Earns 152 Times That of Employees.” An FBI affidavit included messages exchanged between Wenig and Wymer about that article and other coverage of eBay by EcommerceBytes. Wenig, identified in the affidavit as “Executive 1,” told Wymer to “take her down,” in reference to Ina Steiner.

Is … Is that it? They reported information from eBay’s public filing with the SEC, therefore eBay needed to take them down? What petty trash.

… yet.

And this is the contemporary teacher’s dilemma. Which is it? Did they do the work themselves, or did they simply proofread the machine’s work? Those skills are not the same.

One is evidence that they understood and synthesized the information. The other is evidence that they could identify literal nonsense and remove it from their answer.

I thought it read like a clickbait article that just quoted verbatim from the social media posts. But I didn’t watch the videos, so I don’t know how much the article writer left out or added to the story.

Some professions, like ER doctor, require a high level of memorization. But that’s also part of medical training.

Others don’t need that level of memorization, even other kinds of doctors. I’ve seen medical specialists in private practice leave the exam room to look up symptoms to help make a diagnosis. And I think that’s a good idea, since only TV doctors can “know” everything about incredibly rare diseases.

Almost a decade ago, I took a physics course online through my local community college. They made me take the final on-site in a secure testing facility, using their computer with a locked-down browser and a human to verify my identity.

If that was standard operating procedure for a community college a decade ago, I’m surprised that it’s not more universal at this point.

And people not paying attention in philosophy class is why most of the world is ignoring the far-reaching ethical implications of the LLM boom until their own electricity and water disappear.

I feel like one of the things he said was that he blacklisted people who “regularly post things normal people don’t want to see” (or something along those lines). I assumed that was a blanket statement to cover Violet and anyone else whose posts have made him feel uncomfortable.

I would bet that he’s got his father’s voice in his head, telling him what a loser he is a dozen times a day.

A lot of us have family trauma. Most of us don’t try to burn down the entire world because of it.

How different do you think things would be if someone had gotten this man into therapy in the '80s or '90s?

That makes me sad for those people. Life is too short to spend it in the company of miserable assholes.

I wasn’t born into a family I enjoy spending time with. It took me a while to find “my people,” but I’m so glad I did.