Month: May 2023

2023-05-16 05:30

Posted on by Oluf Nissen

“I’ll tell you the problem with the […] power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it!”

Originally posted on 2023-05-16 at 05:30 via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7064109897893744640

2023-05-13 00:42

Posted on by Oluf Nissen

Isn’t it interesting that in English the words for the two most common genders both anchor on “male” in some way? In other languages there is much more separation from a linguistic perspective. Compare “woman/man” and “female/male” with:

German: “Frau/Mann”
Danish: “Kvinde/Mand”

I wonder if there is significance to this that goes beyond mere words. Maybe there isn’t, but I find it interesting.

Originally posted on 2023-05-13 at 00:42 via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7062950256748998656

2023-05-12 05:25

Posted on by Oluf Nissen

Here is a thought on AI that you may not have come across yet.

What AI does is drive further separation in society, meaning that it benefits only those already in positions to take advantage of it. Like being born into a rich family makes you more powerful. Like being poor makes it almost impossible to escape poverty.

The other thing is that we can’t “know” AI anymore than we can “know” another human being’s brain. The difference is that all humans have been socialized by other human beings. And that gives us at least some assurance that when we encounter another human, they are somewhat like us.

What we’re doing with AI is like giving a toddler access to a tool cabinet full of brushes, paints, seeds, shovels, knives, axes, chainsaws, dynamite and atomic bombs, and the toddler doesn’t know the difference between them. And because it wasn’t socialized, it doesn’t know other AI’s, nor humans. It doesn’t know what it takes to sustain itself. What it means to be able to be injured, tired, elated, exhausted, or deathly afraid.

We humans are wonderful at creating new technologies, but we are very, very bad at doing so thoughtfully, with the lens of being “good ancestors”. Michael Crichton warned about this in Jurassic Park when he had Ian Malcolm say “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”

We are facing a global Ian Malcolm moment.

Originally posted on 2023-05-12 at 05:25 via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7062659068485636096

2023-05-02 02:42

Posted on by Oluf Nissen

The “banking crisis” may be over, according to JP Morgan’s CEO. You know what’s not over? The fact that human civilization is unsustainable with its current, prevailing model of “economics”. We are consuming the resources of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 planets Earth. We can’t keep doing that.

Originally posted on 2023-05-02 at 02:42 via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7058994176570363904