Bots as Internet Viruses

Axios reported yesterday that OpenAI, Anthropic, and outside researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which frontier AI systems behaved in ways evaluators considered problematic.

Not dozens. Tens of thousands.

Heaven, With the Door Open

The Matrix gets one thing exactly right: if you are going to imprison humanity forever, at least have the decency to give us good restaurants.

The Robots Have Smokestacks

Krystal Polk’s family has owned its Southaven land for generations. Now, she tells Scientific American, company representatives question relatives near the property, and the family carries tax records to establish that it belongs there. Across the road stands the power plant feeding Elon Musk’s AI ambitions.

Fear the robots

Will automation accelerate the concentration of capital, skewing inequality further and destablizing democracy? Probably.

Krugman also thinks so. (also: here, here, here, here, here, here)

An aside: When the best conservative minds at Forbes decry this assessment by pleading,

"If we’ve pretty much abolished material scarcity then of course real wages have just soared. Real wages being, really, a measure of how much consumption is possible rather than the nominal value of earnings. If you are of a Marxist persuasion you might think that all of the money from those androids will just go to capital, leaving the workers starving and destitute without any jobs and thus not earning at all. But to do that you would have to believe in Monopoly Capitalism, this idea that the capitalists as a class will gang up on everyone else and keep all the good stuff for themselves. But note that this does depend upon that monopoly."

... then you should worry. Or should we not fear the robots? Steven Rattner says so.

Fear of change, especially technologically-driven change, conjures images of the Luddites and Amish. It goes back. Life Magazine from July 19, 1963: article by Keith Wheeler on automation screams, "Impact of Automation: Its Accelerating Effects have Pushed Our Society to the Point of No Return"

I lean towards Krugman and Life, although I am hopeful that humanity will surprise me.