Call it SALAMI, not AI
It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
AI-driven vaccine development = one giant leap for mankind!
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Call it SALAMI, not AI
Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html
Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:
Please do not conflate word form and meaning
Mind your own credulity
As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
“GenAI is going for the gutter and the world is laughing at the disconnected-from-reality Davos elite still singing it praises”
Reading this article, you can't escape The Economist's subtle put-down of Nadella and Altman -- "the Sam and Satya show", "tech’s best bromance", "they were upbeat and, for the most part, singing from the same hymn sheet" -- which is not particularly courageous of the magazine now that it's clear GenAI is going for the gutter and the world is laughing at the disconnected-from-reality Davos elite still singing it praises. Yet at the peak of the GenAI hype, The Economist itself was singing along with the rest of the parrot choirs: just last April, for example, they wrote, "Large, creative AI models will transform lives and labour markets".
The Economist bills itself as a publication that helps you stay on top of current affairs, but it only ever gets right that which is trivial. They simply wrap what everyone else is talking about in a package that sounds oh so Oxford-learned and sophisticated, so sophisticated even that it is boring, because it must appear so to us who do not posses such great erudition and understanding of the world -- which makes it harder to notice that their articles have nothing of substance.
The Economist's business model is, get people to buy the magazine for its current-sounding titles and clever cover art and then leave it sitting on the coffee table or the bookshelf almost entirely unread, while providing its owner with that warm fuzzy feeling of being on top of things, even more so if he actually read it, and all that for $21 a month. The boringness is not a bug; it's working as designed.
There are two ways to confirm this: one, do you remember ever reading in The Economist something so insightful that it hit you, it stayed with you, and it hit you twice as hard when it came to pass? Me neither. And two, simply go check the magazine covers a few years back and look at what they wrote about or predicted. It was either trivial, or it was wrong.
My not-so-subtle contempt for The Economist is due to their complete absence of intellectual courage and intellectual honesty, which is why in my opinion they produce nothing of value, unlike Nadella and Altman. For all I think of the latter's so-called-AI, I'd pick those two over the writers at The Economist any day of the week.
states should be stripped of their powers to make disease control rules during pandemics
Some lockdown lackeys still swear by the tyrannical pursuit of the impossible castle in the sky of zero covid by Australia, China, New Zealand and Singapore among others.
They must know better than Australia's former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth as he says "states should be stripped of their powers to make disease control rules during pandemics".
The good doctor points out that officers suffering from "group think" failed to evaluate the decisions they took and enforced "against an agreed ethical framework".
Could it be because they had no such framework to begin with?
I wonder how many of them know what a quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is.
While they were on a hysteria-fueled power trip between 2020 and 2022, they didn't want to know.
Keeping everyone alive at any cost is not the government's role. If it were, then fast food and smoking would need to be banned too.
The government's role during a pandemic, if anything, should be to coordinate the response while keeping the economy open and let people make their own decisions with regard to the level of risk they are comfortable taking with their own lives.
There must never ever be any mandates, nudge units or divisive rhetoric against any segment of the population.
The desire to be seen to be doing something is powerful but equally dangerous and must be resisted.
Sometimes the best option may be to adopt a hands-off approach.
And finally, this must go without saying but there must NEVER EVER be any:
- state-sanctioned violence against the people,
- protests being banned,
- rubber bullets being used against protesters,
- protesters being taunted by saying "come on p%$$ies",
- pregnant mothers assaulted and taken into custody in front of their children,
- people going about their business being slammed into the concrete in train stations,
- postcode apartheid,
- police helicopters violating citizens' privacy,
- people being harassed for lying on the beach or sitting on a park bench,
- underage children being beaten for not wearing a mask.
NEVER EVER.