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May 31 · Issue #19 · View online
This newsletter has moved to https://buttondown.email/jkleske
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“My cynicism is just the scar tissue over wounds inflicted by my optimism’s many battles with reality.” Welcome back. This is a quick one. You might remember that I said about cycling that I am surprised how much I can torture myself on the bike. Well, turns out I can also actually hurt myself. Twice within the last two months, I pedaled a bit too hard and got sick for a week each time. Well, I know my limits much better now. I’m also still recovering from the winter depression. So the last weeks were all about taking it a bit slower. But with the sun out in Berlin and lots of walks, I’m feeling much better now. My cycling training is picking up again and my concentration is coming back. In the meantime, some great articles and essays have been piling up in my Instapaper queue. I’ll be back soon with more. Take care of yourselves (really, you should listen to Warren). |
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Here Be Dragons: A Playboy Conversation with Clayton Cubitt
This one is so, so good. Cubitt has an ability, similar to Brett Scott, to put ideas into punchlines. Good, challenging stuff.
“I think the charge of ‘obscenity’ is the same as ‘here be dragons’ at the edge of ancient maps of the ocean. It’s a placeholder for ignorance and fear.”
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[Fractal Interpolation] Ep 25 - TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF NONHUMAN INTELLIGENCE
E. Steen Comer with a fascinating take on what is currently discussed as “artificial intelligence.” Lots of good lines in this one.
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Uncanny Valley
Someone described this article by Anna Wiener as Douglas Coupland for Silicon Valley startup culture. It’s really, really good. Biggest problem is that n+1 Mag servers can’t handle all the traffic it is getting. So you might need to come back to it. And you should.
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The empty brain
And along comes an essay that manages to shred the whole notion of the singularity and our brains as computers by showing how it is all based on a (false) metaphor. I should go and make a TextExpander shortcode for this one right now.
“We are organisms, not computers. Get over it.”
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Disruption is not a strategy
This paragraph alone… “Technological disruption has gone from an interesting way to illuminate the workings of the innovation machinery, to an imprecise strategic crutch, to a magician’s misdirection, to, now, the cargo cult of technology commercialization. Cargo cults are fascinating because they mirror our own tendencies to confuse cause and effect, but they have real costs. They misdirect resources to ineffectual ritual from actual problem-solving.”
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If You Talk to Bots, You’re Talking to Their Bosses
Another fantastic article by Brett Scott. This time looking under the hood of chatbots. “We speak to it. We think we are talking to it. And yet what we are really doing is interacting with a machine process put in place by a particular group of humans with a private economic agenda, denying their own existence and maintaining the illusion that the agency resides with an external being, dressed up in the form of a friendly helper.”
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True AI is both logically possible and utterly implausible
Luciano Floridi tackles the questions about true AI and it’s dangers, while taking both extremist groups, singularitarians and AItheists, to task. Kudos to Aeon for publishing these super-helpful essays. “Like all faith-based views, Singularitarianism is irrefutable because, in the end, it is unconstrained by reason and evidence.”
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