AI Will (Maybe Someday) Enslave Us All (Still)

I know I’ve done my whole fearmongering about Artificial Intelligence thing before, but this time I REALLY MEAN IT WE’RE ALL FUCKED AND ARE GONNA DIE OMG WTF AHHHHHHHHHHH.

MIT released a report on how they have integrated the probabilistic approach to AI with a stricter, rule-based one, and the result, they claim, is a new unified theory of AI. What had happened is they started off trying to simulate intelligence by a rigid model of thought based on rules of logic. For example if all ravens are black and X is a raven, then X is black. Since this rules out nuances, researchers decided to abandon that approach in favor of one based on probability.

More Collateral Murder

And in similar news in the “good war,” the US military has admitted to killing three civilian women in Afghanistan after denying involvement, having claimed that they were killed by the insurgency in an “honor killing.” Two of the women were pregnant.

The initial reaction by the military was that all of the witnesses had somehow conspired to blame it all on the “innocent” members of the military. And this was accepted as the correct response even though the witnesses all seemed to be coming forth with the exact same story. If you apply Occam’s Razor, you would have to accept that they were simply telling the truth and it was the military who was lying here.

Collateral Murder

So there’s this site called WikiLeaks. It’s a good way for people to anonymously leak documents which some people might not want you to see. A typical example would be a former Scientologist keeping some weird doctrine or incriminating document and putting it online. And like Wikipedia, it’s best not to always take everything you read there as 100% true. But it is a good starting point for people trying to find information about topics.

Neil deGrasse Tyson at University at Buffalo

So I went to see Neil deGrasse Tyson last night at UB. He spoke for about 2 hours, doing his normal talk about basic physics and astronomy, then did a pretty long Q&A afterwards.