Ran Prieur

September 9.

2022-09-09T21:30:01Z

September 9. Continuing on AI, James sends this article from 2018, Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn't Work Yet. "Reinforcement learning assumes the existence of a reward function.... Importantly, for RL to do the right thing, your reward function must capture exactly what you want. And I mean exactly." This is a lot easier to do with games than with anything real. One problem is that machines tend to get stuck in local optima, behaviors that make sense in the narrow view but not the wide view -- just like humans.

And a new article, Why Does This Horrifying Woman Keep Appearing in AI-Generated Images? "Is Loab some kind of presence within the system, whispers from the AI's datasets given human form? Or is she just AI smoke and mirrors, born of our human desire to see patterns in the noise?"

September 7.

2022-09-07T19:10:41Z

September 7. Last week there was a cool post on the Psychonaut subreddit. The images on the right were generated by an AI, from this Terence McKenna quote:

This AI that is coming into existence is, to my mind, not artificial at all, not alien at all. What it really is, is: it's a new conformational geometry of the collective Self of humanity.

Now, I don't know what "conformational geometry" means. It sounds like a fancy way of saying form or shape. But I think he's right. The best way to think about AI, is to think of it as human. AI will never go rogue, or "become sentient". It will always do exactly what humans tell it to do -- which will never be quite what we want it to do, and increasingly, not what we expect. But it remains fundamentally an extension of our own story.

Meanwhile, here's a comment thread on the Seattle subreddit about something that's actually non-human, the intelligence of crows.

They see humans give other humans things and get food in return, but don't quite equate that only specific things count. I've seen them try to feed leaves and bits of paper to a vending machine before in hopes of persuading it to give up snacks.

September 5.

2022-09-05T17:50:10Z

September 5. For Labor Day, I'm thinking about the word "work". One definition is very broad. Work doesn't have to be productive, because Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill, that always rolls back down, is doing work. It doesn't have to be physical, because chess players thinking about their next move are doing work (and burning a lot of calories). Even meditation could be called work, when the literal intructions are to do nothing.

Another definition is narrow: in the context of a society where tokens are exchanged for goods and services, you're doing a service in exchange for some of these tokens. If you're reading an article about "work", this is usually what they mean, and if you practice reading "work" as "work for money", you'll see the subject more clearly.

Humans like to do stuff. But as a means for arranging the stuff we do, wage labor has only been common for a few hundred years. It is now in decline for multiple reasons, but the main one is that it's failing to satisfy our need for meaning, for our actions to be part of something larger that we believe in. We no longer believe that doing wage labor with more intensity (working hard) will make us rich. Employers are openly calling workers "resources" in their quest for higher stock prices.

In response, the phrase "work-life balance" is framing wage labor in opposition to life. Back in 2004, when I wrote "How To Drop Out", people would say, what would happen if everyone dropped out? That's basically happening now. When I go to the drug store, and half the shelves are empty, I can't complain, because filling those shelves requires a long string of shitty jobs.

It's anyone's guess how it will all shake out. I like to think we're still in the early stages of figuring out how to run an ethical society. For the last few hundred years, the organizing principle of people doing things has been how much money can be made by people doing things, where money is the power to make people do things they would not do except for the money. In a better society, the organizing principle of people doing things is what people enjoy doing.

September 3.

2022-09-03T15:30:02Z

September 3. Three fun links for the weekend. Random Street View is exactly what it sounds like.

How to Estimate Distance Using Just Your Thumb, by using the parallax of your eyes.

And just released, a nice ambient piece, Tree Music.

September 1.

2022-09-01T13:10:54Z

September 1. Three stray links, starting with a fascinating history article, Pre-Modern Battlefields Were Absolutely Terrifying. Specifically, humans hate deadly hand-to-hand combat. "When you realize just how terrifying it is, much of what we find in the ancient and medieval source starts to make a lot more sense."

The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved. I've changed my position on nuclear power. I still think that accidents are inevitable, and there's no good place to put the waste. But it turns out that both of those things, accidents and waste storage, create large areas where humans can't live, and wildlife thrives.

Cool page, AI-Generated Bible Art. I recently noticed that my favorite Bible verse is basically the same as my favorite song verse. From Ecclesiastes 9:7, "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works." And from Big Blood's Go See Boats, "You've got some fun, speak your own. Creation without us untying to your bone. Promise in this day time, do your things."