Guest post by Patrick Wood
I wrote on August 17, 2017, “Proponents of Technocracy are counting on the coming-of-age of quantum computers to enable their science of social engineering and world control. However, this leading physicist says that quantum computers will be ‘tools of destruction, not creation,’ and I think we should be asking some hard questions.” You may think this is over your head, but it’s not a stretch for you to see the train about to hit us.
Guest post by Patrick Wood
I wrote this article for my PatrickWood.Substack.com subscribers recently. After more reflection, this needs to be released to the world as a stark warning: The total collapse of reality may be at hand. We have already witnessed mass formation during the Great Panic of 2020, where large swaths of the world seemingly lost touch with reality. That was just a foretaste of what is about to come.
This is hard to understand, and you might need to read it multiple times. Do it, lest you fall prey to a simulacrum. If you get it, weigh in the comment section below.⁃ TN Editor
There’s a big word that you can add to your vocabulary: Simulacrum. It is a hard word to wrap your head around, but one you are not too likely to forget. Indeed, you should not forget it!
Continue reading “Warning : Reality Is Escaping Out The Back Door”
This was sent to me by a reader and said to have been a full-page ad in their local newspaper. What could go wrong?
Hat tip Hardscrabble Farmer
Microsoft’s newly launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due to concerns with its inability to recognize when it was making offensive or racist statements. Of course, the bot wasn’t coded to be racist, but it “learns” from those it interacts with. And naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things online users taught Tay was how to be racist, and how to spout back ill-informed or inflammatory political opinions. [Update: Microsoft now says it’s “making adjustments” to Tay in light of this problem.]
In case you missed it, Tay is an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. That is, it’s a bot that you can talk to online. The company described the bot as “Microsoft’s A.I. fam the internet that’s got zero chill!”, if you can believe that.
Tay is able to perform a number of tasks, like telling users jokes, or offering up a comment on a picture you send her, for example. But she’s also designed to personalize her interactions with users, while answering questions or even mirroring users’ statements back to them.
As Twitter users quickly came to understand, Tay would often repeat back racist tweets with her own commentary. What was also disturbing about this, beyond just the content itself, is that Tay’s responses were developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians. That means even as she was tweeting out offensive racial slurs, she seemed to do so with abandon and nonchalance.