via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
Facing a technology that already has such immense capabilities – built on, modeled after, and in many ways now exceeding human powers – the Institute’s fundamental challenge and most important goal must be to nurture and protect our shared humanity, and to value the MIT community, its members, and their flourishing above all.
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If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.
~ Bill Gates via Gates Notes
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For years, the strategy among U.S. allies was to wait President Trump out. Now many are preparing for a world in which the United States is no longer indispensable—not simply during Trump’s presidency but afterward as well, regardless of who occupies the White House.
~ Vivian Salama via The Atlantic
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Like the people of Albert Camus’s Oran, we are understandably reluctant to recognize just how much the world has changed. The problems are thorny, complex and tedious, and it’s easier to look away. So we holiday on beaches while wildfires rage; we ask A.I. how to train a new puppy, how to write that letter — to do our thinking for us. We hope that the wars will end, that the guardrails, institutions and alliances will be rebuilt, and that the world as we understand it will recover and endure.
~ Margaret MacMillan via The New York Times
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No Artificial Intelligence executive is publishing long manifestoes on how to resolve the backlash against the data center buildout. This is a problem Silicon Valley does not know how to solve. The backlash would not matter if progress in machine intelligence rested solely on a steady diet of capital. But it also requires land — land for the supercomputers powering the industry’s A.I. agents and land for the electric plants powering these computers.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
Society tends to peg the “birth” of a new technology as the point when it becomes readily usable. By that measure, generative artificial intelligence was “born” with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Public engagement with generative AI is therefore less than four years old. In that time, it has amassed more than a billion users, and the companies selling AI technology have come to dominate the headlines, the stock market, and public consciousness.
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An account that searches through someone’s following list for Jewish names is not conducting any meaningful analysis. This mentality is one reason American online public life has become so polarized. People no longer examine arguments; they investigate affiliations.
~ Yiyang Zhuge via Wired Magazine.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve wished innovation could happen faster. With AI, my feelings are more complicated. I wish the world could get the benefits rapidly and delay the problems it will cause as long as possible, but the benefits and problems are arriving at the same time. I believe we need time to prepare for the period of social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter.
~ Bill Gates via Gates Notes
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A world war is not inevitable, but the threat of a catastrophic conflict between big and well-armed powers is closer than it has been for decades.
~ Margaret MacMillan via The New York Times
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It’s a great record, hardscrabble and honest and charming; Dolly Parton was just coming into her own as a writer and solo performer. All the tropes we now associate with country music—the idea that the genre boils down to “three chords and the truth,” as the songwriter Harlan Howard once put it—were beginning to crystallize. Parton was such a crucial engineer. Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker
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