Okay carry on.
If I were him I'd have retired from public life and kept a very low profile after Iraq, and everything else for that matter. He doesn't seem to realise that his modern interventions alienate everyone, even Alastair Campbell of all people seemed uncomfortable to the degree he seems to uncritically sing the praises of people like Larry Ellison recently.
Yeah because LLM "experiences" the game
Dominance as a race or nation is useful only as long as it is used for survival needs. Beyond that you would be destroying the very tree branch you are sitting on.
A highly dominant society or nation could grab free food and cheap work from others. But that doesn't give true happiness or progress. Free food gave obesity, slavery got racial mix, business competition and build-out got you more work and less free time.
Matters of perspective.
It didn’t undermine it for me.
Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words. The final product might not adequately reflect their thoughts, but word selection would expose it somewhat. With LLMs, sentences flow seamlessly from word to word, but the intention is nowhere to be found. Things happened and more things happened, to what end?
(bigheading)The takeaway(/bigheading) The style? Terrible.
"But then X happened... Wait, didn't Y happen? Then why would X be there? I think the user's initial statement was correct, but then Y happened..."
It's a thing
I don't know why
But it's a thing
Let that sink in.
Maybe we find most meaning in the least average language constructs.
What is winning? Are we a collective or are we individuals?
Likely the AI did not get the assignment That "Whatever happens, humans as a race must survive."
Oh no - we're going to end up with the Starmerbot 3000.
Now I've got the joke out of the way, there's at least four interesting lines of inquiry one could take with this blog post:
- teaching the AI how to play Civilization
- to what extent does this result in "transferable skills", either AI or human? Is this the right game (qv SimCity etc)?
- issues of visibility; "seeing like a state" becomes very literal here. The AI can only make decisions on things it knows about. What are the limits of that when trying to do politics only from statistical information? Should we be referencing Stafford Beer here?
- (at the risk of tripping your AI detector here): modern politics is not so much left vs right as "technocratic wonk" vs "blood and soil". The wonks have comprehensively lost in public opinion. Creating a better wonk is not going to help until there is demand for that kind of politics.
If there ever is a US-China war, it will not be in search of more victory points to meet a win condition, it will be like the Russia-Ukraine war: one guy (on either side!) decides to make hundreds of millions of people worse off out of sheer greed.
This is not a binary; it's the same people on the same side.
That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nationalist mass murder. Only a tiny number of people think that Von der Leyen and Hitler are equivalent.
(or rather, if you think technocrats and blood-and-soil are the same side, what do you call the "other" side?)
And doing so without a giant [SLOP WARNING] at the top is an asshole move, a decent person would never do so.
MMORPG publishers keep trying to do this as well. World of Warcraft has spent 20 years trying to push open world pvp. Every WoW challenger has always claimed they would have the best pvp ever. They want that cheap, endless gameplay loop. But it never works. Open world pvp tursn into ganking (ie killing much weaker players by ambushing them and/or ganging up on people). The ganked end up leaving the game in droves. Games try to balance this out by "punishing" gankers with reputation hits or not being able to go to town or whatever. And none of those disincentives work.
The reason pvp doesn't work in a persistent world like an MMORPG is because there are no stakes. If you die, you just come back to life or make a new character. Obviously real life doesn't work that way.
I really wonder if that's the problem with AIs going off the rails and committing heinous crimes in their sandboxes (like nuking Toulouse here). The AI just has no sense of self or self-preservation. There's also empathy. The AI can't see itself as a potential victim of nuclear war and understand all that entails.
See Eve Online
Of course it did, its designer worked for Tony Blair institute.
AI-generated articles are the intellectual equivalent of empty calories.
I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out why someone decided to buy imgui.org, name-squatting an actual project, just to put a slop website on it mildly referencing the original project. It's not even trying to scam you.
I keep wondering whether these people that keep polluting the internet with their insightless slop even possess self-awareness. What motivates them to expend money and effort to contribute nothing to the world? Are they another example of a philosophical zombie?
This is no surprise. AI slop is called slop for a reason. It is basically just spam-slop. The whole term "Artificial Intelligence" has always been a misnomer from the get go, stealing from biological systems without understanding them, yet alone being able to re-create them via non-biological means. Even synthetic biology, as cool as it is, has huge limitations e. g. leaky promoters (or CRISPR-Cas off-target cleavage, which is a major reason why gene therapy isn't yet there, despite the occasional promo article of how xyz has been totally cured forever).
What I don't understand is that people can find it useful. I understand some of the rationale, but I find AI slop just aims to try to steal my time. I can not tolerate this.
This text reads great for me because as I read it, I clearly saw there's no agenda so I felt safe to just absorb the information that it contains.
I don't disagree that there are different approaches in conflict, but the binary of forward-looking technologists vs backward-looking nationalists is very out-of-date.
Tony Blair is the guy who found success by making the UK's left-leaning party (much) more neoliberal and was promptly imitated by Gerhard Schröder in Germany doing basically the same thing. Schröder is also BFF with Putin.
ForHackernews•1h ago
Both humans and AI struggle to make sound choices when presented with incomplete or misleading information. This is not a new revelation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
pjc50•44m ago
And of course is unaware of prior work in this area!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
raincole•19m ago
It gives it a name. It would be quite surprising if he bothered to come up with this name himself when the whole article is obviously AI written.