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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

#pluralistic #elon musk #neuralink #potemkin ai #neural interface beta-tester #full self driving #mechanical turks #ai #amazon #amazon go #clm #joan westenberg

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unpretty · 11 months

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oh holy shit the $20 tier of this audiobook bundle (affiliate link) includes... murderbot? all of murderbot. every murderbot novella and novel, narrated by kevin r. free (who you may know from welcome to night vale), in mp3 format and with a portion of every purchase going to the national coalition against censorship. there are other audiobooks included but. MURDERBOT.

#original #affiliate links jsyk #THAT'S A REALLY GOOD DEAL HOLY SHIT #i already have all the ebooks and even i am tempted on principle

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drchucktingle · 1 year

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do you have any tingler suggestions for an asexual and aromantic buckaroo?

YES BUD all preferred pounds are valid including NO POUND AT ALL and this is very important, as i am sure my aromantic and asexual buds know.

as a buckaroo who spends a lot of time fighting against gatekeeping i will use this as opportunity to say yet again ALL ARE WELCOME IN THE TINGLEVERSE ESPECIALLY MY ACE AND ARO BUCKAROOS.

in fact, after chucks upcoming horror novel CAMP DAMASCUS i have another horror novel coming out next year from same publisher called BURY YOUR GAYS (i am being secret about plot of for now but trust me tumblr buds will like this one) but one of the MAIN LEADS of 'bury your gays' is an asexual aromantic bud and she is such a fun character REALLY enjoyed writing her and i am excited for everyone to meet her.

ALRIGHT as far as tinglers go i have written MANY pound free books that you can enjoy, some are about an ace or aro way and some are about consent or saying NO THANKS BUD but they all do not have sex in them. the favorite of most buckaroos is probably ABSOLUTELY NO THOUGHTS OF POUNDING DURING MY FUN DAY WITH THIS KIND T-REX BECAUSE I'M AROMANTIC AND ASEXUAL AND THAT'S A WONDERFULLY VALID WAY OF PROVING LOVE IS REAL

if you are interested in whole collections there are paperbacks name of NOT POUNDED BY ANYTHING that you would probably enjoy. this series has three whole volumes just keep in mind not all characters in these bundle are ace and aro but MANY are. others just dont feel like a pound.

examples of stories that are more about consent and importance of HOLDING BOUNDARIES would be something like JUST KIND OF IGNORING THIS SAD LONESOME T-REX WHO IS SCREAMING "DEBATE ME" FROM HIS FOLDING CHAIR which is about how sometimes best way to deal with goofball conservative 'commentators' is just ignore their scoundrel whining as they moan their lonesome ways in the dark. so there are no pounds in that one just ignores. it is available as audiobook and so is ace aro story above too.

anyway buckaroo hope that helps. if you want to see full list you can look on chuck website and trot down to section of tinglers that says NO SEX

thank you for proving love is real in your own way i am SO GLAD our timelines have crossed it is an honor and i appreciate it very much. had fun time revisiting these books today and look forward to writing more for my asexual and aromantic buds. LOVE IS REAL

#ace #aro #asexual #aromantic #tingleverse #LGBTQIA #love is real #chuck tingle #no pound #no sex #pound free #tinglers #writers of tumblr #writing

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fanonical · 6 months

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PSA to all Doctor Who fans!!!

humble bundle is currently selling a collection of doctor who comics, audiobooks & tabletop RPG sourcebooks from the extended universe for incredibly cheap.

the full bundle is 36 items and features a collection of stuff from all different eras, with lots of different Doctors/characters like there's obviously a bunch of cool Big Finish stuff, some classic who-themed tabletop sourcebooks, multidoctor crossover comicbooks, etc.

it's only $18 for the whole bundle, which is insanely cheap like would be very lucky to get even one Big Finish audio for that little, PLUS it's on a pay-what-you-want sliding scale, so if you don't want to spend $18 there are lower tiers too. AND it goes to support both this blog and a charity of your choice!!! just this once everybody wins.

there's something for every doctor who fan (or even potential new fans!) especially if you're into D&D or other tabletop RPGs or looking to get into them. it's only available until November 24th so grab it whilst you can and reblog it so all your doctor who fan friends/followers can see!!!

#Doctor Who #New Who #Classic Who #Big Finish #sorry for shilling this is my jobbbbb

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islamfakrul · 2 years

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Top 10 Best lego batman minifigures [2022]

1. LEGO Super Heroes 76035 Jokerland Building Kit Buy On Amazon Avoid the man-eating plant’s snapping jaws; fire the Batmobile’s missiles and stud shooters Activate Batman’s Super Jumper to knock The Penguin off his perch; super-jump to launch Harley Quinn’s bike and rescue Robin Knock The Joker down the slide and into his poison pool chamber; the Joker ride measures 11″ (29cm) high, 9″ (23cm)…

View On WordPress

#Audible Audiobook #Product Bundle #Toy

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incorrectbatfam · 7 months

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how would bruce be at the retail jobs?

Previous: Margie | Batfam | Rogues | Justice League | Batkids in training

[clothing store]

Steph: Bruce, you're on menswear.

Bruce: Yes ma'am.

Bruce: Need help with anything?

Dick, pulling a shirt off the rack: How does this look?

Bruce: It's very flattering, chum.

Dick: You think? 'Cause I'm really looking forward to this weekend at Wally's and I wanna impress his folks.

Bruce: Never mind, it's all wrong.

———————

[furniture store]

Steph: I'm gonna take inventory. Why don't you help that guy over there?

Bruce: Sure.

Bruce: You've been looking at that recliner for a long time.

Jason: Yeah, it's pretty nice.

Bruce: You thinking of buying it?

Jason: Nah, I'll just take my dad's.

———————

[coffee shop]

Steph: Remember to write their names, especially since it's the morning rush. We don't wanna get the orders mixed up.

Bruce: Don't worry, I have it all taken care of.

Tim: One espresso, please.

Bruce, writing on a cup: You got it. That'll be $3.25.

*5 minutes later*

Bruce: Espresso for Dick– I mean, Jason– I mean, Damian– I mean– oh, you know who you are, get over here.

———————

[call center]

Steph: I'm taking a break. Cover for me.

*phone rings*

Bruce: Wayne Enterprises account support, how can I help you?

Damian: I would like to purchase the Horror and Slasher movie bundle.

Bruce: Sorry, you have to be at least 18 for that.

Damian: This is an outrage! Do you know who I am? I am the son of the CEO himself. I demand you put him on the line right now.

Bruce: As you wish.

Bruce: *spins around in his chair*

Bruce: CEO of Wayne Enterprises here. I'm afraid we can't get that for you. To make up for your troubles, though, I've given you a free trial of our Goodnight Gotham children's bedtime audiobooks.

———————

[grocery store]

Bruce: That'll be $50.36.

Duke: Shoot, I only brought forty.

Bruce: Wait, I can give you the friends and family discount.

Bruce: *swipes his credit card*

Duke: Sweet, thanks!

Bruce: Steph?

Steph: Yeah?

Bruce: Did I just buy my son fifty dollars worth of applesauce?

———————

[drive-thru]

Cass: Just a water.

Bruce: Alright, please go to the next window.

Bruce: *hands her an ice cream cone*

Bruce: You sound like you need this.

Cass: *smiles*

Steph: How did you—

Bruce: *pulls out his Girl Dad badge*

———————

[restaurant]

Steph: Here's a menu and your server will be with you shortly.

Barbara: Thank you.

Bruce: Good evening. I'll be your server tonight. Have we decided on what we're going with?

Barbara: Yeah, I'll have the chicken.

Bruce: And would you like a soup or salad with that?

Barbara: Depends. Do you spin the salad in front of me?

Bruce: Yes.

Barbara: Then I'll do the soup.

———————

[at home]

Bruce: *face down on his bed*

Steph: Lemme guess, long week?

Bruce: *grunts*

Steph: Me too. Hope you don't mind if I take a nap here.

Steph: *curls up in the blanket*

Bruce: *grunts and pats her head*

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studentofetherium · 21 days

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humble bundle has a Nisioisin ebook/audiobook collection up! great way to get your hands on the Monogatari novels, and it also includes:

the Monogatari audiobooks (Kizu and Neko White)

the Zaregoto novels

the Bishounen Tanteidan novels and also the manga

all of Katanagatari

all of Imperfect Girl

a lot of the Monogatari manga

if you're interested in Monogatari or Nisioisin, you should absolutely check this out. this is nearly everything officially available in English, so it's a great place to start if you're curious about Nisioisin/Monogatari, or you want to go further with his writing

#monogatari #zaregoto #nisioisin

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astro-nautics · 1 year

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witcher media masterpost:

The Hexer: 2001 movie (aka The Witcher; polish movie) 2 hours long, contains english subtitles, audio cuts out for a brief period towards the end. The Hexer: TV series (2002) (aka The Witcher; polish tv show)13 episodes long, contains english subtitles

Wiedźmin audiobooks (aka The Witcher audiobooks; polish) a bit harder to navigate for non-polish speakers, fragments of them can also be found on youtube.

The Witcher books Multiple translations exist. You can buy both physical copies or the e-books. There are PDFs of them floating around online also.

The Witcher comics (english translation) You can find these at various sources online in a variety of languages, or in bookstores!

The Witcher games (The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt + DLCs) You can buy them yourself on Steam (or elsewhere), they're frequently on sale (as a bundle) on Steam for dirt-cheap. There are also playthroughs of all of the games available on youtube.

additionally there's Online Gwent (or stand-alone Gwent), which is free, though you can buy in-game items and things. The mechanics are different from TW3 Gwent. There's also Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales (available on steam; playthrough available on youtube), which makes use of the Online Gwent mechanics.

#I dont feel comfortable linking the PDFs of the witcher books publicly 💀#but u can DM me instead or smthng & i'll help out 🏴‍☠️#i'll update this list if necessary #also no i shall not list That One Adaptation that's currently ongoing #im pretty sure everyone knows about that one already #the witcher #wiedzmin #the hexer #the witcher books #the witcher games #tw3 #tw2 #witcher #masterpost #making this bc i linked the hexer tv show to people earlier and turns out its a hard-to-find link? so maybe this'll make it easier <3

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cowperviolet · 8 months

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4 queer Regency romance stories?

It was... what, late 2021 when I first had a thought to maybe write a fun romance novel, the first romance novel in my life, about a couple of Regency ladies doing Greenmantle-esque adventure shenanigans and falling in love?

Last year, September 2022, Her Morning Star came out on Amazon (under the pen name of Violet Cowper. I've switched to Ann Hawthorne for m/f).

And now, a year later, I want to offer you a whole bundle (3 full-length novels and one long-ish novella) with a 30% off.

Audiobooks also coming this year!

#writers of tumblr #writers on tumblr #wip #writeblr community #amwriting #writeblr #writing community #writing #f/f romance #queer romance

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onceuponarainbowzine · 8 months

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✨🌈 Pre-orders for Once Upon A Rainbow are now open! 🌈✨

Come get our wonderful lgbt+ fairytale themed zine and merch from Sept 1st-30th at our store:

🛒 https://onceuponarainbow.bigcartel.com/

🥚 Golden Egg (full bundle) - $55 🥚

This bundle includes:

Physical Zine & PDF

All digital merch including bonus pdf and audiobook

1 Acrylic Charm

1 Postcard

2 Page Prints

1 Double Sided Bookmark

4 Die-Cut Stickers

1 Sticker Sheet

2 Buttons

This bundle is eligible for all stretch goals!

🛒 https://onceuponarainbow.bigcartel.com/

🍄 Fairy Circle (half bundle) - $40 🍄

This bundle includes:

Physical Zine & PDF

All digital merch including bonus pdf and audiobook

1 Postcard

1 Page Print

1 Double Sided Bookmark

2 Die-Cut Stickers

1 Button

This bundle is eligible for sticker, print and foil upgrade stretch goals!

🛒 https://onceuponarainbow.bigcartel.com/

📚 Storybook (physical bundle) - $25 📚

This bundle includes:

Physical Zine & PDF

Audiobook

Bonus PDF

Colouring Book

Phone Wallpaper

Icon Set

This bundle is eligible for the sticker stretch goal

🛒 https://onceuponarainbow.bigcartel.com/

✨ Pixie Dust (Digital Bundle) - $13 ✨

This bundle includes:

Digital Zine

Audiobook

Bonus PDF

Colouring Book

Phone Wallpaper

Icon Set

This bundle is not eligible for stretch goals

🛒 https://onceuponarainbow.bigcartel.com/

✨🌈 Stretch goals! 🌈✨

With every purchase we get closer to unlocking our wonderful stretch goals:

Die-cut Sticker - 50 orders

Button - 100 orders

Page Print - 150 orders

Postcard Foil Upgrade -200 orders

Acrylic Shaker Charm - 250 orders

Check the bundles to see which qualify!

#zine #lgbt zine #zine preorders #zine promo #lgbt+#fairytale #fairy tales

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thesylverlining · 5 months

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Almost over! This November, every sale of CHAMELEON MOON's audiobook + ebook bundle on Itch.io will benefit Doctors Without Borders' efforts in Palestine.

We're all angry and helpless feeling right now, I definitely am, but this is one thing I CAN do, so. Please do it with me. (also the audiobook is good, OK. Not the most important thing, but it is!)

#chameleon moon #doctors without borders #palestine #audiobook #chameleon moon: the audiobook

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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#pluralistic #ai #absent indians #mechanical turks #scams #george carlin #comedy #body-snatchers #fraud #theranos #guys in robot suits #criti-hype #machine learning #fake it til you make it #too good to fact-check #mturk #deepfakes

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