“Rain is a very special blessing,” my mother says. Even when I was little, she’d already been saying it to my sister and me for as long as I could remember. Just as my grandmother had said it to her, when my mother was not my mother but only herself, in the dry Texas summers of her own childhood. Eons ago and continents away, as children reckon these things.
It’s summer now. It’s been cloudy all day, but they wait until the thunder starts to clear out the pool.
Continue readingYou know you’re really desperate to put something off when you spend 3 hours binge-reading the archives of your own blog.
Filed under Microblogging
We’ve all heard that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But it hits a little different when it’s your entire country repeating history, including the part of history where everyone in power ignores the folks screaming “You’re repeating history, and it’s not the good kind!”
I imagine it feels a little like watching your best friend fail an open-book exam because he didn’t study and is refusing to open the book.
Filed under Microblogging
Filed under Microblogging
Companies should not be responsible for regulating themselves. That’s the whole reason we have government. Why are people still saying that AI regulation is unnecessary when the companies themselves are asking to be regulated? I feel crazy for even needing to point any of this out!
(And before anybody says “lock-in,”1 let me remind you that the purpose of lock-in is to prevent newer and smaller competitors from catching up. Regulating only the most powerful models, as these companies and their employees are suggesting, would be the exact opposite!)
Filed under Microblogging
Me (to 6yo): “…I said, finish cleaning your room!”
Me (to myself): “Huh, what am I holding?
“Oh, it’s lip balm. Why do I have this?
“…Oh, right. Because I got it out of my pocket. To put on my face. Ten seconds ago.”
Filed under Microblogging
Everyone understands that adolescence is an awkward time.
Nobody prepares you for the awkwardness of being in your 30s, seeing a woman shopping at the grocery store with her mother and her daughter, and not being able to make up your mind about which of them is hotter.
Filed under Microblogging
I’ve had a hard time writing anything recently.
I did start a new hobby (recording) that I’ve discovered I enjoy even more than writing, if that were possible. I’ve been lax in my blog schedule in part because I’ve been recording instead.
I’ve had a hard time recording anything recently.
When it feels like the world might end any minute, it’s easy to despair. Easy to give up. Easy to start thinking, “What’s the point?” If whatever you make only lasts a few weeks or days or hours before everyone who could ever enjoy it vanishes forever, why bother?
I do what I can to earn the happy ending, the story that doesn’t end in the second act with all the heroes dead. It never feels like enough. Sometimes I feel guilty for not dropping everything else to focus my entire being on the problem, to abandon my family and possessions and join the proverbial mountaintop cloister. If the fate of the world really is at stake, wouldn’t that be the sane–the right–thing to do? I hear myself saying that I wouldn’t be worthy, that I’m helping more by just staying out of the way, but I don’t think I really believe that. So why do I keep living like everything’s normal?
Maybe it’s only selfishness and small-mindedness and fear talking, but…I think that would be missing the point.
It’s important to fight for the future, yes, and I’m not going to stop doing that. I’m going to keep thinking of ways I can help that might matter more, that play more to my strengths, that are more efficient. But I’m not going to stop living the life I still have in order to do it. I think that would be missing the point.
After all, living is what we’re working so hard to save in the first place.
Filed under Essays
Just as Socialist Democrats are pro-democracy, transhumanists like myself are pro-human. Current AI developers are working to replace humanity. It’s not a secret; racing to create superintelligence is their entire business model! If you believe that should change, sign here: https://stoptheracetoreplace.org
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
Help, I’m Arguing With People on the Internet and I Can’t Get Up
“Views” is such a frustrating number to optimize for. What does it matter how many people see what you’ve said or done, if you don’t know how many people you’ve actually affected?
You know what a much more useful metric would be? “Number of minds changed.” That sure would be nice. It is so exhausting when someone’s wrong on the internet in a way that it feels so gosh-danged important to try to correct them, but is it really? You can sometimes tell if the person you’re arguing with changes their mind, but what about all the lurkers who never pitch in? Maybe you helped some other people’s understanding, even if you couldn’t get the OP to budge. Or maybe not! Who knows? It’s maddening!
Anyway, to completely and randomly change the subject: AI doesn’t need a personality or instincts or emotions or a desire for self-preservation or even consciousness to be superintelligent and wipe us all out; just because something has been in fiction a lot and has never happened before doesn’t mean it isn’t about to happen; and if some fatuous nimrod says a thing, that (by itself) is not evidence the thing is false. If you disagree, you are being Wrong On The Internet and if you would please just stop now it would save me a lot of aggravation. Thank you.
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Filed under Essays
Tagged as being wrong on the Internet, don't read the comments, funny, relatable, Writing