If someone said to you "hey, I heard they're pulling back on measuring ocean currents, isn't that shitty?" Would you get defensive and start yelling at them about not providing the "other side"? No, you'd say "whoa, I better figure out what's going on here" and make it a point to dig more, not sit there and bitch and moan about incomplete information. Yale.edu isn't a news service, it has no obligation to "both sides" a story for you.

Furthermore, what even would be the point of anyone regurgitating that hopeless pile of words the NSF's chief barfed out (apart from illustrating that's all they have as an explanation)? You mistakenly gave the administration the benefit of the doubt here when you really had no business doing so.

> Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

2) does that answer satisfy you? The bullshitty word salad doesn't surprise me. With this administration I expect incompetence and double speak and am rarely disappointed. I wonder why at this point in time you choose to give them so much leeway.

The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.

We have many folks (not engineers) at our company using LLMs to open PRs, and every one of these PRs has profound architectural design problems.

The line of consciousness, as we understand it, is understanding. And as far as what actually constitutes consciousness, we're not even close to understanding. That doesn't mean that LLMs are conscious. It just means we're so far from the real answers to what makes us, it's inconceivable to think we could replicate it.

> Where did we come up with this caricature of AI’s obsessive rationality? “There’s an article I love by [the sci-fi author] Ted Chiang,” Mitchell said, “where he asks: What entity adheres monomaniacally to one single goal that they will pursue at all costs even if doing so uses up all the resources of the world? A big corporation. Their single goal is to increase value for shareholders, and in pursuing that, they can destroy the world. That’s what people are modeling their AI fantasies on.” As Chiang put it in the article in The New Yorker(opens a new tab), “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.”

I didn't realize it til I read it here, but yes, my fear isn't really about the machine, it's about the machine that drives the machine. We already have a class of amoral beings that treat the world as an expendable thing and are willing to burn it down for profit. We should focus on getting rid of that problem first.