Interesting Links for 25-04-2023

[andrewducker]

1. MouthPad - control your device with your tongue!

(tags:disability Technology )

2. Dreamwidth access in Russia: please stay safe!

(tags:dreamwidth russia )

3. Why Russian and Ukrainian activism is not mutually exclusive

(tags:russia ukraine )

4. The Russian Erotic Equine Space Mystery!

(tags:space horses art mysteries comic )

5. Snuggle Pupping, and how WW1 led the USA into a spiral of European depravity

(tags:sex society history Europe USA wwi )

6. Clock, Shakespeare's Sonnet 12, read by Neil Gaiman and set to a haunting musical backdrop by Australia's FourPlay String Quarte

(tags:neilgaiman music video shakespeare clock )

7. Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages

(tags:language Intelligence psychology )

8. How realistic is sudden exponential AI takeoff?

(tags:ai singularity )

Comments

[nancylebov]

The thing I'd heard was that bilingualism can help fend off dementia if the person is continuing to use both languages. I don't know whether this would show up on tests of executive function.

[dewline]

I'm not sure about that either, and I'd heard the same connection. I wonder if someone being in a majority-Francophone care facility these days might force the redevelopment of the language skills sufficiently to slow down their decline.

[armiphlage]

"How realistic is sudden exponential AI takeoff?" - well, if the limiting factor is human interest in prioritizing hardware, then the AI just needs to convince humans to make a massive, all-out, emergency-war-mobilization effort to create hardware. In WWII, the world built over 800,000 aircraft. With proper motivation, we could build 800,000 data centers.

AIs would likely use the "Plata o plomo" approach.

Take a job at the chip foundry? Your tax returns for the past decade get resubmitted, with every possible obscure deduction and credit claimed.

Turn down the job? Your tax agency gets a detailed report on how all of your tax returns for the past decade have errors or fail to meet some obscure criteria.

Work late to get an extra batch of wafers processed? That beloved prematurely-cancelled TV series gets a new AI-generated episode rendered just for you.

Leave your shift early? All the traffic lights turn red on your way home.

Agree to not upgrade your ancient laptop for a year, freeing up a GPU for an AI? You get a personalized shopping list of the ideal birthday gifts for each of your loved ones.

[andrewducker]

And how's it going to do all of that? They all sound like things it would already have to be a world-spanning dictator to do.

[armiphlage]

Taxes are an area where the rules and case law are greater than any human mind can contain, and where there are many overlapping and contradictory requirements. Tax agencies have incentive to make it easy to report any person or company for tax fraud using online forms.

Your company's webpage shows a picture of your management team celebrating a government contract with champagne? Each of the people get a fraud investigation for not claiming the cost of the champagne as income. The company gets a fraud claim for not including the value of the champagne on the employee T4 slips (or local equivalent). The company gets reported for using funds from a government contract for celebrating the contract, and for claiming alcohol consumed by employees as an expense, and for not using domestically-produced product for execution of a government contract, and so on. Most fraud reports would be proven to be innocent omissions, or below the threshold for humans to care about, or deemed to be allowable by case law. However, refuting each fraud report would consume valuable resources.

Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." An AI would say, "Give me a person or company's online history, and I will find something to get them audited".

[zz]

a system that combines vulnerability scanning/exploitation and a social engineering AI would be a formidable and prolific hacker.

Clock, Shakespeare's Sonnet 12, read by Neil Gaiman

[anef]

I had an odd reaction to this. The sound of the clocks ticking at the beginning gave me a tense feeling of anxiety. Then I was irritated at the long gaps between the verses, particularly at the end where you're wating for the kicker. Takeaway: I think I need to read poetry at my own speed, not someone else's!

Re: Clock, Shakespeare's Sonnet 12, read by Neil Gaiman

[andrewducker]

A useful lesson!