newyorker

I thought the Ronan Farrow/Andrew Marantz New Yorker article on OpenAI and Sam Altman in particular reveals many important details and helps settle several speculations (e.g. about what happened when Altman was briefly fired from OpenAI). The overall portrayal of Altman as frankly a compulsive liar is much needed.

However, like many Farrow and Marantz seem to take the so-called "existential risk" framing of AI seriously. I really wish people would stop doing that. In this case it makes the article feel incoherent in places.

This technology by itself does not pose a unique risk. It's the people, organizations, and governments around it, and their behavior with respect to it, that generate risk. Treating the technology alone as uniquely existentially risky provides cover for a wide variety of bad actors to both continue doing their work as well as to shrug and say "oops" if something goes catastrophically wrong or if smaller harms accumulate into intolerably large ones. The very framing provides an accountability shield, which by my read contradicts what Farrow himself suggests is needed, namely more accountability. I take this from this article, his previous work, and comments he makes in interviews (e.g., this one with Decoder.

We need to stop catastrophizing. It's thought and action terminating.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #SamAltman #RonanFarrow #AndrewMarantz #NewYorker #xrisk #ExistentialRisk #AISafety

#introduction time!

Hi, I'm Bea. I seem to be leading a highly squiggly life that's led me through a wild range of experiences, has, at this point been going on for Some Time, and fortunately shows no signs of stopping yet.

Currently, amongst other things, I'm a #coder, a #boater, a #music obsessive, and a #cat mama, plus I #parent a non-zero irrational number of other humans of various ages in this, my sandwich era.

I've also been a #soundEngineer, a #teacher, a professional #psychic, a #theatre technician, and so on. I'm a #Londoner, a lapsed #Glaswegian and a recovering #NewYorker.

I'd list more specifics, but honestly they change all the time; two of the rare constants in my life are #singing and #bass, though I'm increasingly surrounded by a constellation of strange instruments; physical and digital, musical and nautical.

I'm also a #vegan (for the animals) #trans shapeshifter practising #nonMonogamy, and am gay for girls of most genders and apparently now the occasional boy. If this feels like rubbing it in your face, feel free to move your face.

I have an overdeveloped sense of justice, but only compared to your average late capitalist human, and the kind of highly spicy brain you'd expect from, uh, well, all of the above.

I'm afraid things are likely only going to get weirder from here.

No TERFs, no SWERFs, no cops, no Tories (or any other forms of fascism).

Warning! contains multitudes!