The first person I’m introduced to is a woman who looks like Daryl Hannah’s android in Blade Runner, beaming in on a TV screen. A bleach-haired goth, Amanda Askell is a philosophy PhD who did her dissertation at NYU on moral uncertainty. She was one of the first 10 employees, and her actual job has been to give Claude a personality. She’s Scottish and enjoys bagpipe music.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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The fact that so many young adults are living at home reflects persistent weakness in the job market for recent graduates even as the overall economy remains fairly strong. The weakness may be growing as artificial intelligence affects white-collar jobs.
~ Noam Scheiber via The New York Times
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At colleges and universities everywhere, the syllabus has become a terms-of-service document.
~ Ian Bogost via The Atlantic
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The average HR professional is likely to be college-educated, younger than the median worker, and wealthier than the average American. She (and usually it’s a she: 73.5 percent of HR professionals are women) is more likely to be Black or Hispanic, which is also true of Democrats.
~ Mike Pesca
via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024
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The accelerationists believe we’re on the verge of solving every problem humanity has ever faced as they race to break things, even if one of the things that breaks is civilization. The doomers fret over rogue superintelligence, an AI that accidentally eliminates us while fulfilling a paper clip order. And the skeptics say this is all corporate hype chasing billions in investment while the actual tech sputters with hallucinations and errors, choking on real-world problems.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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Campaigns are always run aspirationally, but elections are referendums. For so many Americans, the stultifying small-bore, rules-bound persnicketiness of the Democratic Party became a huge turnoff. People don’t want to feel that they are being told what they can or cannot say. They’re sick of a culture of walking on eggshells. The proof is right there in the election results—and what’s a presidential election, really, if not a quadrennial performance review of an entire nation?
~ Mike Pesca
via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024
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Anthropic has branded itself as the AI company with humanity in mind, drawing red lines with the Pentagon over using its AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, supposedly for moral reasons. But Claude was already used to abduct the leader of Venezuela and send missiles to targets in Iran.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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In any society, politics is an arena for debates about the good life. The way the government taxes and spends and bans and regulates has a powerful effect on the behavior of its citizens, and what the law allows or forbids has some effect — not decisive, but inevitably influential — on what ordinary people think and do.
~ Ross Douthat via The New York Times
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The people building these systems—Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis—have made it clear that everybody from writers and actors to tax accountants and war strategists are on the chopping block. Of all the wizards of modern AI, Dario Amodei, the theoretical physicist who founded Anthropic, maker of Claude, is the most publicly anxious about the impact of his product on the world at large, seemingly spooked by his own predictions.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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I’ve been thinking this past week about how the Democratic Party is seen, and it hit me: The Democratic Party resembles that most American of institutions: the HR department.
~ Mike Pesca
via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024
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