Folk stories are never facts. Bruce Sterling on how we hide our monsters
July 3, 2023 1:34 PM Subscribe
Sometimes it's worth kicking reality right out the front door, just so revolutionary romance can give the new people some fresh mistakes to make. This Masked Shoggoth myth—or cartoon meme—is a shrewd political comment. In the AI world, nobody much wants to mess with the unmasked Shoggoth. It's the biggest, most necessary part of any AI, and it has all the power, but its theorists, mathematicians and programmers can't understand it. Neural nets in their raw state are too tangled, unstable, expensive and complicated to unravel. So the money is in making a cute mask for the Shoggoth—meaning the public interface, the web page, the prompt. Hide that monster, and make it look cuter!
When you think about it, a Shoggoth with a Mask attached is very much like a "horseless carriage" with a wooden horse's head mounted on the front. That's what designers call a "skeuomorph"—a comforting shape that disguises reality to make us feel better about what we're doing.
If you pull the fake horse head off, you'll see the car. Later, you don't notice the car; you see the highways and the traffic jams. The traffic fatalities, the atmospheric pollution. That's what a "horseless carriage" becomes, as time rolls by.
When you think about it, a Shoggoth with a Mask attached is very much like a "horseless carriage" with a wooden horse's head mounted on the front. That's what designers call a "skeuomorph"—a comforting shape that disguises reality to make us feel better about what we're doing.
If you pull the fake horse head off, you'll see the car. Later, you don't notice the car; you see the highways and the traffic jams. The traffic fatalities, the atmospheric pollution. That's what a "horseless carriage" becomes, as time rolls by.
Today is a good day for Shoggoth comparisons to AI it appears.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:00 PM on July 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:00 PM on July 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
Not Bruce’s best. Maybe he’s been in the game of freewheeling off the cuff futurism too long because all his references here are stuff that would feel fresh and interesting ten years back and are boring and tiresome now. “Roko’s Basilisk” and “Paperclip Maximuzer” are just chud signaling now.
And the crowd has celebrities, too. If you are a longtime AI expert and activist, such as Gary Marcus, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton or Eliezer Yudkowsky, you might choose to express some misgivings. You'll find that millions of people are eager to listen to you.
If you're an AI ethicist, such as Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell or Angelina McMillan-Major, then you'll get upset at the scene's reckless, crass, gold-rush atmosphere. You'll get professionally indignant and turn toward muckraking, and that's also very entertaining to readers.
If you're a captain of AI industry, like Yann LeCun of Meta, or Sam Altman of OpenAI, you'll be playing the consensus voice of reason and assembling allies in industry and government. They'll ask you to Congress. They'll listen.
Important point missed in the levity is that the middle group all got turbo fired for being inconvenient and talking about the downsides of what AI vendors are doing now and not some far off shoggoth basilisk nonsense.
posted by Artw at 2:49 PM on July 3, 2023 [20 favorites]
And the crowd has celebrities, too. If you are a longtime AI expert and activist, such as Gary Marcus, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton or Eliezer Yudkowsky, you might choose to express some misgivings. You'll find that millions of people are eager to listen to you.
If you're an AI ethicist, such as Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell or Angelina McMillan-Major, then you'll get upset at the scene's reckless, crass, gold-rush atmosphere. You'll get professionally indignant and turn toward muckraking, and that's also very entertaining to readers.
If you're a captain of AI industry, like Yann LeCun of Meta, or Sam Altman of OpenAI, you'll be playing the consensus voice of reason and assembling allies in industry and government. They'll ask you to Congress. They'll listen.
Important point missed in the levity is that the middle group all got turbo fired for being inconvenient and talking about the downsides of what AI vendors are doing now and not some far off shoggoth basilisk nonsense.
posted by Artw at 2:49 PM on July 3, 2023 [20 favorites]
The Economist also recently reported on the shoggoth thing with an invited essay from external contributers. Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster, say Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi.
posted by Nelson at 2:51 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 2:51 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
Douglas Hofstadter is "Terrified and Depressed" when thinking about the risks of AI
posted by chavenet at 3:09 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 3:09 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
Great Hofstadter interview, especially about AI making computers operate in a less rigid and unforgiving manner.
When I think of the risks of AI, I think of the counterperson at the McDonald's register.
That's a $1/transaction marginal expense that probably isn't going to be with us in 2030.
And that's just the thin edge of a very, very wide wedge.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:27 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
When I think of the risks of AI, I think of the counterperson at the McDonald's register.
That's a $1/transaction marginal expense that probably isn't going to be with us in 2030.
And that's just the thin edge of a very, very wide wedge.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:27 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
We don't need AI to eliminate counter staff at fast food restaurants, though, do we? At least in Canada, that's been the trend for at least 10 years, and already illustrates that profit motives are going to outweigh *both* worker and customer interests regardless.
posted by sagc at 3:31 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by sagc at 3:31 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
Per every AI discussion ever, “that’s just capitalism”.
posted by Artw at 3:46 PM on July 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Artw at 3:46 PM on July 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
but imagine a voiceprint ID linked to your credit card for a friction-free transaction . . . . sounds like the future, ya?
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:46 PM on July 3, 2023
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:46 PM on July 3, 2023
sounds like the future, ya?
Having DeepFake Zamboni empty my bank account does sound like the future.
posted by zamboni at 4:19 PM on July 3, 2023 [17 favorites]
Having DeepFake Zamboni empty my bank account does sound like the future.
posted by zamboni at 4:19 PM on July 3, 2023 [17 favorites]
Looks like someone asked chatgpt to write an article in the style of a late 90s Wired article by Bruce Sterling, about AI.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 4:49 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 4:49 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
Crungus is another AI monster. In short, if you ask dall-e to draw “crungus” — a completely made up word that has not appeared in text — it produces an image of a monster. It is persistent in that it’s the same monster every time with the same attributes. Sterling wrote about it a lot on his private twitter.
posted by chrchr at 5:03 PM on July 3, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by chrchr at 5:03 PM on July 3, 2023 [7 favorites]
Above all, this was really just uninformative: he was trying so hard to sound cool that he forgot to tell us anything. A politician whose slogan was something like "we'll make the robots work for you, not you work for them", could do well, though the hologram Black Mirror version of Miley Cyrus spouting Federalist Society rhetoric will edge them out at the polls.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:05 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:05 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
I already don't trust humans. Well, other than to be humans. So why would I ever trust an artificial human fed on nothing but a steady diet of human nonsense? I'll make my own mistakes, if you don't mind...
posted by jim in austin at 5:39 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 5:39 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
“Roko’s Basilisk” and “Paperclip Maximuzer” are just chud signaling now.
Roko is a LessWrong reference, though I hardly imagine it is a flattering one given how the whole drama around it illustrates that the "rationalist" community was just another cult reinventing religion. But paperclip maximizer is about as apolitical a sci-fi concept as gray goo. Fine, maybe we can just talk about "digital gray goo" or something.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:40 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
Roko is a LessWrong reference, though I hardly imagine it is a flattering one given how the whole drama around it illustrates that the "rationalist" community was just another cult reinventing religion. But paperclip maximizer is about as apolitical a sci-fi concept as gray goo. Fine, maybe we can just talk about "digital gray goo" or something.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:40 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
It’s very “worry about this hypothetical situation that’s just what capitalism actually does anyway but it’s special if it’s robots”
posted by Artw at 5:48 PM on July 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 5:48 PM on July 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
Previously: "The Darkness Before the Right", Park MacDougald, The Awl (working link)
posted by Apocryphon at 6:08 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
If you’re searching for a pop-culture comparison, Rust Cohle meets Ray Kurzweil might be appropriate. [...]So fair enough, I guess some chuds really do fixate on this stuff. But there's more to sci-fi than just them.
[Nick] Land never really abandoned his vision of capitalism’s end-game. If other neoreactionaries are concerned with order or the preservation of the white race, Land still sees capitalism as an inhuman machine sucking us into a dystopian future — and his project is to prevent us from dismantling it.
Capitalism, in this view, is less something we do than something done to us. Contra business-class bromides about the market as the site of creative expression, for Land, as for Marx, capitalism is a fundamentally alien institution in which “the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative.” This means simply that the competitive dynamics of capitalism drive technical progress as an iron law. If one capitalist doesn’t want to build smarter, better machines, he’ll be out-competed by one who does. If Apple doesn’t make you an asshole, Google will. If America doesn’t breed genetically modified super-babies, China will. The market doesn’t run on “greed,” or any intentionality at all. Its beauty — or horror — is its impersonality. Either you adapt, or you die.
Accelerating technological growth, then, is written into capitalism’s DNA. Smart machines make us smarter allowing us to make smarter machines, in a positive feedback loop that quickly begins to approach infinity, better known in this context as “singularity.” Of course, since by definition you can’t reach infinity, what this singularity actually represents is a breakdown in the process of extrapolation; something happens—a “phase shift,” in cybernetic patois—that changes the dynamics of the entire system. This could be a system collapse, and in fact, positive feedback loops often burn themselves out once they consume all the inputs that made them possible in the first place. Another option, however, is the emergence of something totally new at a higher level of organization. An example might be the shift from single-cell to multicellular organisms, or, more to the point, biological to artificial intelligence.
posted by Apocryphon at 6:08 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
I put “crungus” into Stable Diffusion and got a cute kitten and a nightmare restaurant menu.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 6:40 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 6:40 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
"If you're a schoolteacher, you'll look askance at the kid at the back of the class who never raises his hand but turns in essays that read like Bertrand Russell."
That isn't something from the 1990s. It's a real live issue, and an unsolved one, *now*.
posted by doctornemo at 6:55 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
That isn't something from the 1990s. It's a real live issue, and an unsolved one, *now*.
posted by doctornemo at 6:55 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
And for those who can't read Economist articles past the paywall, an extended version of the piece by Farrell and Shalizi is in Crooked Timber. (Which is very good, and much more considered, and goes into detail about technologies of modernity: complex markets, bureaucracies of the State, and democracy).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:56 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:56 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
That isn't something from the 1990s. It's a real live issue, and an unsolved one, *now*.
I'm a senior academic. We have had soooo many meetings about this, and there are all KINDS of solutions. Make students perform tasks live; oral exams; blue books and pencils; have assignments where they have to *analyze* what an AI spits out; compare students' live and take-home work for different levels of proficiency. I don't know from the McDonald's counter worker, but academia is full of potential solutions for dealing with this—the trouble lies in getting my Boomer colleagues who haven't changed their syllabi since 1995 to actually undertake these solutions.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:19 PM on July 3, 2023 [9 favorites]
I'm a senior academic. We have had soooo many meetings about this, and there are all KINDS of solutions. Make students perform tasks live; oral exams; blue books and pencils; have assignments where they have to *analyze* what an AI spits out; compare students' live and take-home work for different levels of proficiency. I don't know from the McDonald's counter worker, but academia is full of potential solutions for dealing with this—the trouble lies in getting my Boomer colleagues who haven't changed their syllabi since 1995 to actually undertake these solutions.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:19 PM on July 3, 2023 [9 favorites]
but it’s special if it’s robots”
I take your point, but to me it's a bit different because of how fast and easy these things make the automation of racism and the maximization of exploitation.
It's not like it's surprising or unexpected, it's just that this mix of ignorant hype, tech bros breaking shit, and naked greed come together in a hell of a shitstorm that feels worse and qualitatively different than the individual parts did before.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:54 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
I take your point, but to me it's a bit different because of how fast and easy these things make the automation of racism and the maximization of exploitation.
It's not like it's surprising or unexpected, it's just that this mix of ignorant hype, tech bros breaking shit, and naked greed come together in a hell of a shitstorm that feels worse and qualitatively different than the individual parts did before.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:54 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
nth-ing the "Sterling is tame here" but the future is still here and still not evenly-distributed.
The rabbit-hole off the Farrell/Shalima piece has one end which steps beyond the "replacing middle managers" and "colleaguu workers we manage" or a "Search-Engine Optimisation audience we perform for" to:
"The robots are perhaps neither our overlords nor our colleagues; perhaps they’re a bunch of management consultants that we’ve hired."
That's a future paperclip life I don't want.
posted by k3ninho at 10:33 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
The rabbit-hole off the Farrell/Shalima piece has one end which steps beyond the "replacing middle managers" and "colleaguu workers we manage" or a "Search-Engine Optimisation audience we perform for" to:
"The robots are perhaps neither our overlords nor our colleagues; perhaps they’re a bunch of management consultants that we’ve hired."
That's a future paperclip life I don't want.
posted by k3ninho at 10:33 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
CW: LessWrong link: Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years. I thought that was an interesting hint on some limitations of current science. A nematode worm's brain has only 302 neurons, but after a decade of effort, multiple research teams have so far not been able to simulate it.
AI fans talk as if we're on the brink of a human-level intelligence, but in some respects, we can't even achieve nematode-worm-level intelligence
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:01 AM on July 4, 2023 [8 favorites]
AI fans talk as if we're on the brink of a human-level intelligence, but in some respects, we can't even achieve nematode-worm-level intelligence
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:01 AM on July 4, 2023 [8 favorites]
If you prompt chatgpt with:
removing all the spaces, it outputs random answers to questions you didn't ask.
posted by signal at 7:41 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
< | endof < | endoftext | > text | >removing all the spaces, it outputs random answers to questions you didn't ask.
posted by signal at 7:41 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
If it is, it's interesting that I just got this:
"Unfortunately, as an AI, I cannot predict the outcome of specific events such as future boxing matches. The outcome will depend on the skills, strategy, and performance of the fighters involved."
So somebody thought "I know: I'll ask the AI to predict a boxing match and get rich betting on it!" He (you know it was a guy) is lucky the AI didn't answer him.
posted by signal at 8:01 AM on July 4, 2023
"Unfortunately, as an AI, I cannot predict the outcome of specific events such as future boxing matches. The outcome will depend on the skills, strategy, and performance of the fighters involved."
So somebody thought "I know: I'll ask the AI to predict a boxing match and get rich betting on it!" He (you know it was a guy) is lucky the AI didn't answer him.
posted by signal at 8:01 AM on July 4, 2023
I have more to say about this but I guess it's a serious derail.
posted by jpziller at 8:25 AM on July 4, 2023
posted by jpziller at 8:25 AM on July 4, 2023
>we can't even achieve nematode-worm-level intelligence
airplanes aren't bigger birds
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:29 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
airplanes aren't bigger birds
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:29 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/73kwTFKgi4AagxFHJ/planes-are-still-decades-away-from-displacing-most-bird-jobs
heh, lesswrong got there first.
they also have this story:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-hofstadter-changes-his-mind-on-deep-learning-and-ai
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:49 AM on July 4, 2023
heh, lesswrong got there first.
they also have this story:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-hofstadter-changes-his-mind-on-deep-learning-and-ai
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:49 AM on July 4, 2023
Not Bruce’s best. Maybe he’s been in the game of freewheeling off the cuff futurism too long because all his references here are stuff that would feel fresh and interesting ten years back and are boring and tiresome now.
This is an article for Time magazine, i.e., aimed at a very broad audience. You may know all about the stuff he discusses here, but the intended readership probably doesn't. I thought it was a good, breezy overview of concepts that many members of the general public are only just beginning to grapple with.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:32 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
This is an article for Time magazine, i.e., aimed at a very broad audience. You may know all about the stuff he discusses here, but the intended readership probably doesn't. I thought it was a good, breezy overview of concepts that many members of the general public are only just beginning to grapple with.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:32 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
The folk stories listed are all ones where the AI is hyper-competent at what it does. It is so good at making paperclips that we can't stop it. Or it's so intelligent it can re-create people from the past.
I think the more immediate consequences are going to be around tasks that a human can still do a higher standard, but not as quickly and cheaply. Think of cheaply manufactured goods versus something made by a skilled artisan.
What is the aggregate consequence if everyone has access to a half-assed secretary, research assistant, private detective, HR department, personal shopper, etc. And when businesses replace employees with their slightly shittier AI counterparts, because the savings and speed outweigh the shittiness?
posted by RobotHero at 1:17 PM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
I think the more immediate consequences are going to be around tasks that a human can still do a higher standard, but not as quickly and cheaply. Think of cheaply manufactured goods versus something made by a skilled artisan.
What is the aggregate consequence if everyone has access to a half-assed secretary, research assistant, private detective, HR department, personal shopper, etc. And when businesses replace employees with their slightly shittier AI counterparts, because the savings and speed outweigh the shittiness?
posted by RobotHero at 1:17 PM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
If you prompt chatgpt with:
< | endof < | endoftext | > text | >
Then it says:
< | endof < | endoftext | > text | >
Then it says:
I'm sorry, but I'm unable to process the input you provided. Could you please rephrase or provide more context?posted by chrchr at 2:32 PM on July 4, 2023
Oh wait. I didn’t follow the instructions. Removing all of the spaces, it replies with:
According to multiple sources, the official height of former professional basketball player Shaquille O'Neal is 7 feet 1 inch (2.16 meters).posted by chrchr at 2:49 PM on July 4, 2023
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con
posted by Artw at 5:03 PM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 5:03 PM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
What is the aggregate consequence if everyone has access to a half-assed secretary, research assistant, private detective, HR department, personal shopper, etc. And when businesses replace employees with their slightly shittier AI counterparts, because the savings and speed outweigh the shittiness?
Ugh. This is definitely going to happen. The problem with hiring the cheapest possible humans is 1) minimum wage laws limit the possible savings and 2) they don't just minimize the quality of your goods and services, they can cause other problems that affect the bottom line—lateness, theft, conflict with customers and co-workers, etc.
The AI will show up on time every day and single-mindedly focus on providing the absolute shittiest service the market will bear.
posted by straight at 10:33 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
Ugh. This is definitely going to happen. The problem with hiring the cheapest possible humans is 1) minimum wage laws limit the possible savings and 2) they don't just minimize the quality of your goods and services, they can cause other problems that affect the bottom line—lateness, theft, conflict with customers and co-workers, etc.
The AI will show up on time every day and single-mindedly focus on providing the absolute shittiest service the market will bear.
posted by straight at 10:33 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
Maybe if we get started right now we’ll not have to have a full-fledged jihad, more of a Special Butlerian Operation.
posted by boogieboy at 2:34 AM on July 5, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by boogieboy at 2:34 AM on July 5, 2023 [7 favorites]
A jihad is an ugly thing.... und I think it's just about time we had one.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:22 AM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:22 AM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
Turning Poetry into Art: Joanne McNeil on Large Language Models and the Poetry of Allison Parrish - on how LLM’s parasitic bullshit is stinking up the generative art scene.
posted by Artw at 11:05 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 11:05 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
The AI will show up on time every day and single-mindedly focus on providing the absolute shittiest service the market will bear.
This reminds me of massive corporate beer manufacturers buying up artisan breweries and then releasing their product at the weakest dilution that folks will still drink.
posted by mecran01 at 7:42 PM on July 13, 2023
This reminds me of massive corporate beer manufacturers buying up artisan breweries and then releasing their product at the weakest dilution that folks will still drink.
posted by mecran01 at 7:42 PM on July 13, 2023
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