The potential effect of Artificial Intelligence on civilisation - a serious discussion

Worst case scenario: Stupid investors rally to crappy stocks, the market tanks, Trump bails the market out with fedgov cash - is there a problem?
 
An interesting conversation between Paul Krugman (Nobel winning economist) and Lina M. Khan (assoc. prof. Columbia Law School, fmr. US FTC commissioner). Just published, even.

Goes through a variety of themes (after spending the first few minutes off topic, NY efforts of digital accessibility and consumer protection) like the tendency of monopolization to cascade through AI stacks, its (obvious) effects on competition, gatekeeping (NVidia, hyperscalers etc.), opaque interdependencies and conflicts of interests causing (energy) inefficiency of models. Also mentions of data security, IP, personal data being saved on systems not with AI training in mind but still ending as such material through unilateral ToS changes. Khan notes that innovation (based on examples or research) is qualitatively different in large corporations/monopolies (incremental) than in outsider upstarts (breakthroughs) so allowing excessive consolidation and even partial state ownership in "strategic" corporations has implications and risks.

Based on this, I assume, that democratic middle powers and the EU should guard against monopolization and try and shelter a lively startup culture from (US, Chinese) AI behemoths, enabling a different dynamic and offering an insurance against network effects that can cause systemic crises.

View: https://youtu.be/xqfx8i99jNQ
 
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been a key player in the current wave of consumer artificial intelligence (AI) flooding the world. But so far it has all been software behind a screen.

Last week, that began to change: the tech giant released its first branded hardware. At the same time, it was sued by Apple – legendary for its hardware nous seen in devices such as iPhone and MacBooks – over alleged industrial espionage.
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AI companies are trying to escape the screen. Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI shows how hard it will be
 
An interesting Opinion piece

One would think, after the colossal failure of iPads in schools, we would learn that children deserve evidence-based education, not expensive digital experiments.

Yet the lure of educational technology with its glitzy marketing campaigns remains big business, estimated to be worth £106 billion globally by 2034. It has now inspired what has been billed as London’s first ever “AI-enabled primary school”, due to open in the capital next year. Other schools have, of course, adopted the use of AI in some areas, but Inspired Edge has a specific plan to integrate widespread use of the technology into the classroom. Rather than using AI to teach pupils directly, it will use AI software to help students learn at their own pace, while being able to “diagnose misconceptions, provide practice” and allow parents to access a “24/7 dashboard to see their child’s learning in real time”.
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AI primary schools distort the purpose of education
 
So far, the (wannabe influencer) effects appear to be trivial, but we better brace ourselves in any way we can... written records seem like a solid base of any refutation, if necessary.
 
This will not end well...

Artificial intelligence is becoming a go-to source for health information, with many people asking chatbots about symptoms before contacting a healthcare professional. While AI can provide quick answers, dental experts say it should never replace a proper examination.

A new survey from Denmark highlights how rapidly those habits are changing. The research, conducted by Bilendi on behalf of Danish dental provider Godt Smil, found that more people are relying on search engines and AI tools such as ChatGPT instead of speaking with a dentist when dental problems arise, reports B.T.
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More young adults are choosing AI over the dentist
 
Remember what life was like before AI? When you directed your questions to search engines, sifted through the results for relevant details, and came up with answers and solutions to problems yourself? It seems so long ago now, but in reality it's only been a few short years; it's a testament to how rapidly AI technology has grown in such a short amount of time. Nowadays, you can't scroll through your phone, open a customer service chat, or search for a recipe without bumping into AI in some form. What started as a novelty has transformed into something that touches nearly every part of daily life, something that most people would probably say they can never live without anymore. Unsettling, right?

AI tools promise convenience, speed, and answers on demand, but as great as that all sounds, those promises don't always line up. Between chatbots that occasionally make things up and deepfakes that fool even careful viewers, the same technology that saves you time can also lead you astray if you're not paying attention. You can't escape AI, that's the uncomfortable truth. But still, it's worth taking a closer look at where it's actually embedded itself and how you can use it without losing your grip on reality.
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AI tools are everywhere—but are they actually helpful?
 
ai.jpg

This highlights the way AI can produce unforeseen results. It is funny here but has the potential to be very serious, if not deadly, in other circumstances. In the rush to implement so-called AI, we need to pause to make sure all outcomes are considered.
 
Opinion
AI in orbit is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to keep it from cutting space cooperation apart
by Mihail Várdai July 27, 2026
https://spacenews.com/ai-in-orbit-i...keep-it-from-cutting-space-cooperation-apart/

When we talk about stopping an arms race in space, people usually say that we need treaties that every state must follow or agreements that states can choose to follow. Many states are focusing on things they can do on their own to build trust. Now, it seems like trust is the most important thing in space — and it seems like we do not have enough of it.

We need to make sure we are open and honest with each other to build trust. This helps keep things in space stable. There are some central ideas that most states agree on, such as the assumption that if one state messes with another state’s satellites, it is a threat to the whole space ecosystem. If someone damages space infrastructure on purpose, it can create a lot of debris that can cause long-term conflict among states. Luckily we have rules that can stop fights from getting out of control and help states trust each other again. The Outer Space Treaty said that space should be a conflict free place, and we have flexible rules that let us solve problems quickly.

Using agreements that are not legally binding helps us work together and be transparent, which reduces the chance of mistakes that could lead to conflict. This helps us make sure that space is used in a way that’s good for everyone. Now, the whole world is facing a problem that could change everything we have agreed on so far: artificial intelligence. We need to consider carefully what will happen when military forces start using artificial intelligence in outer space.

The AI blind spot

The space industry is aggressively pursuing artificial intelligence with lots of uses like autonomously preventing collisions. Artificial intelligence can also help with looking at the Earth from space and analyzing the data.

If a state does not have resources on the ground to respond to disasters or to do precision farming, it can still use artificial intelligence. However, artificial intelligence also creates risks for the prevention of an arms race in outer space.
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hayatheauthor
Reblogged write-on-world
49m
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writingdose
16h

protect em dashes.

protect “not x, not y, but z” format.

protect short sentence stacking as a stylistic choice.

protect fanfic writers—who are kind enough to share their works with people to read for free—from ai witch hunts, speculations and accusations.

“don’t like don’t read” also applies to any fic that is ai-generated and any fic you think is ai-generated by the way. if you don’t like what you’re reading for any reason, you can always stop reading and exit the fic at any point. but harassment is never ever justified. no matter if you think you’ve found a noble excuse to do it. and also…

witch hunts, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does. if not more. I don’t want to see another innocent writer get driven away from the community because someone decides to harass and accuse them for using ai just because their fic happens to have “ai telltales” — the same telltales ai got from having been trained on millions of human-made works to mimic how real humans actually write.
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Avatar
hayatheauthor
49m

This is so important and occurs outside of the fanfic space as well. I've seen authors get rejected because their book sounded 'too AI' when they're just the type of writer who knows how to use em dashes. I've seen content writers and copywriters spend hours on assignments they submit for job applications that reject them for 'using AI' that they never used to begin with! All while those jobs hire writers who did in fact use AI and prompt it NOT to 'sound like AI' (because yes that is something you can very easily do), and publishers work with authors who have openly mentioned using AI for 'editing and brainstorming' while receiving little to no backlash for it.

Also, no you're not some holier than thou smartass for presuming everyone who does not have em dashes/'not x, not y, but z' writing is writing without AI and vice versa. I especially hate when people in power like publishers, employers, and professors use this presumption to make life miserable for writers who genuinely love writing

#haya: rb
#ai writing
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https://hayatheauthor.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F824029498267811840
View: https://www.tumblr.com/hayatheauthor/824029498267811840/this-is-so-important-and-occurs-outside-of-the?source=share
 
Shanique Miller has been job hunting for the past year, sending hundreds of applications in the hope of securing her big break in publishing or media.

In that time, she’s secured four interviews – for a publishing company, a gardening magazine, and a coffee chain – and three of them were with AI bots.

The interview experiences left Miller feeling like “a deer in the headlights”, she says. Because she knows how AI vets interview transcripts, she found herself adapting her personality and natural way of speaking to meet the formulaic questions delivered, essentially, by a robot.

“To know that AI is looking over those videos and saying you’ve paused too many times, you hesitated, you stuttered, you’re not using optimal keywords – it’s like I now have to kind of be robotic in order to get the AI’s validation,” says Miller, 25, from Slough.

What further deflates Miller is the idea of being struck off by AI, when a human would give her a chance.
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At 25, I’ve been turned down for hundreds of jobs – AI robots keep rejecting me
 
Trevor Paglen and the new book ("How to See Like a Machine") he launched might be of interest to some in this context. Here's a short video where he goes through the basic themes i.e.

  1. Industrialization of vision; how the commodification of seeing and imagery, the ubiquitous extraction of value from the processes has brought about an underlying literalization, a "machine realism" as he calls it.
  2. Neural activation; a neuroscience view as a bottom up process as the dominant, quantifiable model of perception, images as named experiences.
  3. Generative psyops; the conscious, involuntary and emergent immediate active dialogue between us and imagery, "images looking at us" through metrics and as manipulation based on previous (often defense related) research. Paglen, taking this to an extreme considers media designed to bypass conscious reasoning as "cognitive injections". Attention economy being comparable to "chaos magic" where perception and reality are inseparably intertwined, notes gnostic ideas of creation as prompting as a possible context.
He notes experiencing an "indexical flip" of media where a presupposition of generated and generative imagery replaced assumptions of recordings. Images, having "broken containment", lessen empiricism, semiotic and art as applicable tools in dealing with optimized triggers, industrial scale, images that primarily produce instead of represent.

View: https://youtu.be/YMTz-_LexEs
 
Reflections on OSINT, visual investigations from Malachy Brown, a pioneer in the field.

Malachy Brown said:
Q. How do you see AI changing this field over the next few years?

A. I think visual verification, and particularly audio verification, is going to become extremely challenging. We interviewed Hany Farid, who is an expert in media manipulation and AI-generated content. He’s been at the forefront of this work for decades, and he warned that detection tools are struggling to keep pace with generation tools. It’s becoming an arms race. We’re going to see a lot more of it. It’s going to continue to erode trust, and when you have political leaders who deny what’s obvious to everybody, that only creates greater distrust.

That’s also where the value of rigorous methods, processes, and standards comes in. Teams like ours are trying to separate fact from fiction and arrive at the truth in highly contested environments. My hope is that audiences will increasingly recognise that value.

On the positive side, AI is also a fantastic tool that we’re only beginning to understand. As long as it’s used appropriately, it can be a tremendous aid to reporters. We’ve already used it to analyse imagery at scale. One example was during the early stages of the war in Gaza. Israel had designated parts of southern Gaza as safe zones for civilians fleeing from the north. We knew bombs were falling there, but we didn’t know how many. The largest bombs leave distinctive craters in sandy terrain. We obtained satellite imagery, and an AI model scanned before-and-after images of the area. It identified more than 500 craters consistent with 2,000-pound bombs in areas designated as safe. One of our reporters verified every single one of those strikes: confirmed it wasn’t an old crater, that it wasn’t a water tower mistaken for a crater. There were over 1,600 other craters as well, which shows the scale of bombardment, and this was only a month to a month and a half into the conflict.

It’s harder to use AI to detect more complex shapes with inconsistent features. The machines are learning, though. AI can also scan large volumes of video or imagery for objects or activity. If you have a week of CCTV footage, for example, you don’t necessarily need a reporter watching every second. An algorithm can identify moments when movement occurs or when a specific object appears in frame.

Another example was the Chinese surveillance balloon that crossed North America. We worked with a computer vision company and searched large amounts of satellite imagery for the distinctive characteristics of the balloon. We were able to track it from shortly after launch in China all the way across the Pacific and into North America.
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https://reutersinstitute.politics.o...hy-browne-future-visual-investigations-age-ai
 
Quite an interesting interview/discussion:

View: https://youtu.be/-dAIJRjb-Bw?si=5VHhniBK3lfodzx1


The author's book related to is:

71l2N5sHsvL._SY522_.jpg

https://www.amazon.com.au/Reverse-Centaurs-Guide-After-Intelligence-Before-ebook/dp/B0GBZFWCTT
 
UpForce said:
Reflections on OSINT, visual investigations from Malachy Brown, a pioneer in the field.
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Well, with AI processing & manipulating videos on vidoe hosting sites like youtube and websites using re-encoding original uploaded images to webp... it looks to me OSINT is rendered half pointless.
 
Halcyon66 said:
Project Panama: How Anthropic secretly destroyed millions of books to train its AI

https://www.euronews.com/culture/20...y-destroyed-millions-of-books-to-train-its-ai
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Somewhere in America’s sprawl of warehouses, book spines were sliced by machines like cuts of salami. Scanners then processed their contents in bulk. Within milliseconds, work that may have taken humans years to produce was uploaded into the digital ether, and later used to train AI models to replicate the voice and structure of our languages.

From there, the paper became waste, which was shipped off to recycling plants to be pulped and repurposed into products like toilet paper and cardboard boxes.
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AI isn't going anywhere. The CAPEX will continue until morale improves.
 
Seragina said:
Well, with AI processing & manipulating videos on vidoe hosting sites like youtube and websites using re-encoding original uploaded images to webp... it looks to me OSINT is rendered half pointless.
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I thought Brown was unexpectedly upbeat in that quote about OSINT over the next few years and found his examples encouraging. When it comes to evidence chains of custody they will probably become more important and tools for that will (hopefully) be developed. The lossiness of data formats precedes LLMs and GenAI as well so is not an entirely novel problem. One could've said that the pioneers who started investigating Malaysia Airlines Flight 17's downing were engaged in a half pointless exercise but were able to stitch together the sequence of events anyway; if OSINT was easy, it wouldn't be necessary. So let's not be (discouragingly) defeatist about it.
 
GTX said:
Quite an interesting interview/discussion:
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Ed Zitron of whom Doctorow speaks highly has his own blog and newsletter, "Where's Your Ed At":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/

... and a podcast, "Better Offline":

https://linktr.ee/betteroffline

He's been a guest on Bloomberg (and BBC, CNN, CNBC) a couple of times as well, so perhaps his point of view is becoming somewhat mainstream/being mainstreamed (at the very minimum in the role of a contrarian or a foil):

View: https://youtu.be/N2lUu1Mg5B8
 
Tattoo artists are concerned about customers increasingly requesting designs based on AI-generated images, which they say often contain errors and set "unrealistic expectations".

Adelaide tattoo artist Courtnii Shaw said about one in four enquiries her studio received included AI imagery.

She said sometimes the enquiries themselves appeared AI-generated.

"We're getting entirely [AI-]generated enquiries of people telling ChatGPT what they want and then they're copying that to us," she said.

"It's really, really common now. People seem to really trust what AI gives them and tells them, so I find that it's just setting some unrealistic expectations."
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Tattoo artists report rise of AI-generated images in customer design requests
 
Readers gave the highest ratings to stories created by artificial intelligence (AI), believing they had been written by humans, according to new research.

The study, published by Cambridge University Press, tested to see whether people aged 18 to 81 could tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated short stories.

Led by researchers at Villanova University (VU), USA, it found that participants could not tell which was which.

Senior author Dr Deena Weisberg, from the department of psychological and brain sciences at VU, said: "I'd say that public assumptions about AI's capabilities are increasingly out of date."

The study also examined how participants rated the appeal and quality of each story and whether they could identify AI-generated content.
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AI stories preferred to human-written ones - study
 
A fascinating area of research.
'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds'
 

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