Hi! I'm Emma. I'm an ideator, optimizer, and personal growth nerd, with a dash of woo and politics. This is my "kitchen sink" blog, where I share random notes from my life, including the various rabbit holes I go down.
Until AI can solve social problems, it’s not ASI
Frontier math is cool and all, but we actually need an AI that can solve things like war, drug abuse, and inequality.AI is natural because humans are natural
I find it amusing that people think human-made things are “unnatural” but humans are natural. How can anything be unnatural, if it is the product of people creating things according to their natures? I think AI is a natural extension of humanity’s nature. Of course we would try to create a machine to be like us. AI is the product of all of human knowledge and creative activity up till now — it’s just as “natural” as having a baby, it’s just that humanity itself is having the baby. When people assert that AI will not be able to do certain things, I feel like it’s looking at a baby and saying it won’t be able to run because it can’t even walk. We don’t know what AI will become yet, it was just born.
The problem with white tech bros saving the world
I went down the e/acc rabbit hole just a little ways and I'm already frustrated that people who nominally support decentralization cannot see that any movement that is mostly a bunch of rich white men in urban Western environments is NOT the revolution they think it is.How I created my Substack visual brand with Midjourney
I recently started a Substack newsletter called Sparkly Dark. I created most of the visual brand in Midjourney, here are my tips.AI is powered by decentralized digital sweatshops
AI at this stage requires reams of data annotation and human feedback. “As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging — and not going anywhere.”
“Autism is a Spectrum” Doesn’t Mean What You Think
It’s not a gradient that goes from “less autistic” to “more autistic”. That’s the entire wrong way to think about it. If you think about the visible color spectrum, red and blue are on opposite ends, but blue is not “really intense red”, they are actually just different colors. So, my understanding now is that “the spectrum” is a set of different traits that, if you have a lot of them, that makes up autism, but the traits show up differently in different people.
Hope is a fragile motivation
On doom, hope, and releasing expectations and control over the future.Sam Altman plans to be a benevolent dictator
In this video we learn that Sam Altman thinks inventing AGI, or at least staying at the leading edge of AI development, will allow OpenAI to suck up all the world’s wealth–and Sam Altman plans to “redistribute” that wealth, possibly through a UBI. But he doesn’t exactly know how that will work–especially on a global scale–and he hopes GPT5 will be able to help figure it out.
But he also seems to think that the current massive inequality only exists because people “tolerate” it and with AGI’s even more massive inequality, people “won’t tolerate it”–which shows an absurd level of ignorance as to what it means to be powerless because all the power has been concentrated out of your hands.
Currently, money is a proxy for power, but in a post-scarcity world where these are decoupled, his plan is to redistribute money in order to keep the capitalist game going. But of course, that isn’t the same thing as redistributing power itself. I guess he is aiming for the Brave New World rather than 1984 outcome…but I am not sure he is accurate in his assessment that he will stay at the front of this race.
We will be able to create hyper-realistic virtual people soon
We are not too far away from being able to create extremely life-like virtual partners. We could help people heal their relational trauma, provide partners for people who can't find one...or destroy our society with hyper-addictive relationship simulators. Exciting times!YouTube: ChatGPT + Wolfram: The Future of AI is Here!
I can’t say I understood all of this, but it was pretty fascinating nonetheless.