AI Toys

 

For the past 5 years I’ve been reading about the mythic nature of AI, and now it’s creating its own myths that I have little interest in, even though it was of deeper interest around Ancient AI (2017). A friend said it’s like all cultural memes, like the cabbage-patch dolls, etc., but it’s a creepy doll, like Elon Musk.
 
I’ve been interested in AI for some time—since the mid 90s when I started to get interested in Marvin Minsky, specifically Society of Mind. It’s interesting to revisit what he said then compared to what’s happening today. I think what we have now is the demon-haunted world that Carl Sagan warned us about. Once it gets to that point where there’s no rational collective discussion, it’s more difficult to be personally rational because we seem to now be insidiously influenced by whatever the network wants.

5/27/2023

[5/27/2026: An interesting podcast, setting the record straight on how AI should be defined. Most of what we’re now using isn’t AI per se, but rather various specific tools used for specific purposes like machine vision. The new models are probably full of junk that contaminates them and require huge data centers to keep them running. A big waste].