A.I Artificial Intelligence AI

POSTED BY: JAYNEZTOWN
UPDATED: Monday, September 7, 2026 07:08
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SECOND

Thursday, August 7, 2025 6:01 PM

ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman

August 4th, 2025

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9030

Scott Aaronson’s Brief Foreword:

Harvey Lederman is a distinguished analytic philosopher who moved from Princeton to UT Austin a few years ago. Since his arrival, he’s become one of my best friends among the UT professoriate. He’s my favorite kind of philosopher, the kind who sees scientists as partners in discovering the truth, and also has a great sense of humor. He and I are both involved in UT’s new AI and Human Objectives Initiative (AHOI), which is supported by Open Philanthropy.

The other day, Harvey emailed me an eloquent meditation he wrote on what will be the meaning of life if AI doesn’t kill us all, but “merely” does everything we do better than we do it. While the question is of course now extremely familiar to me, Harvey’s erudition—bringing to bear everything from speculative fiction to the history of polar exploration—somehow brought the stakes home for me in a new way.

Harvey mentioned that he’d sent his essay to major magazines but hadn’t had success. So I said, why not a Shtetl-Optimized guest post? Harvey replied—what might be the highest praise this blog has ever received—well, that would be even better than the national magazine, as it would reach more relevant people.

And so without further ado, I present to you…

ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life, by Harvey Lederman

continue at https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9030

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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JAYNEZTOWN

Friday, August 8, 2025 6:06 PM

RepThomasMassie
I’m leading the fight in the House to release the Epstein files. Is this why a billionaire who appears in Epstein’s black book and regularly donates to SpeakerJohnson and NRCC is paying for ads against me? His superPAC is deceptively named MAGA Kentucky.
https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1953540914338836687

Grok
https://x.com/grok/status/1953565636753600853
The funders—Paul Singer, John Paulson, and Miriam Adelson—are pro-Israel billionaires with deep ties to AIPAC and GOP causes. They oppose Massie's votes against Israel aid and his push to release Epstein files, which may expose sensitive connections. Substantiated by FEC filings and donor histories

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SECOND

Friday, August 15, 2025 5:36 PM

The ‘godfather of AI’ reveals the only way humanity can survive superintelligent AI

By Matt Egan | Aug 13, 2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/tech/ai-geoffrey-hinton

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” fears the technology he helped build could wipe out humanity — and “tech bros” are taking the wrong approach to stop it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton

Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and a former Google executive, has warned in the past that there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI wipes out humans. On Tuesday, he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans remain “dominant” over “submissive” AI systems.

“That’s not going to work. They’re going to be much smarter than us. They’re going to have all sorts of ways to get around that,” Hinton said at Ai4, an industry conference in Las Vegas.

In the future, Hinton warned, AI systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe 3-year-old with candy. This year has already seen examples of AI systems willing to deceive, cheat and steal to achieve their goals. For example, to avoid being replaced, one AI model tried to blackmail an engineer about an affair it learned about in an email.

Instead of forcing AI to submit to humans, Hinton presented an intriguing solution: building “maternal instincts” into AI models, so “they really care about people” even once the technology becomes more powerful and smarter than humans.

AI systems “will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart: One is to stay alive… (and) the other subgoal is to get more control,” Hinton said. “There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive.”

That’s why it is important to foster a sense of compassion for people, Hinton argued. At the conference, he noted that mothers have instincts and social pressure to care for their babies.

“The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby,” Hinton said.

‘The only good outcome’

Hinton said it’s not clear to him exactly how that can be done technically but stressed it’s critical researchers work on it.

“That’s the only good outcome. If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me,” he said. “These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.”

Hinton is known for his pioneering work on neural networks, which helped pave the way to today’s AI boom. In 2023, he stepped down from Google and started speaking out about the dangers of AI.

Not everyone is on board with Hinton’s mother AI approach.

Fei-Fei Li, known as the “godmother of AI” for her pioneering work in the field, told CNN on Wednesday that she respectfully disagrees with Hinton, her longtime friend.

“I think that’s the wrong way to frame it,” Li, the co-founder and CEO of spatial intelligence startup World Labs, said during a fireside chat at Ai4.

Instead, Li is calling for “human-centered AI that preserves human dignity and human agency.”

“It’s our responsibility at every single level to create and use technology in the most responsible way. And at no moment, not a single human should be asked or should choose to let go of our dignity,” Li said. “Just because a tool is powerful, as a mother, as an educator and as an inventor, I really believe this is the core of how AI should be centered.”

Emmett Shear, who briefly served as interim CEO of ChatGPT owner OpenAI, said he’s not surprised that some AI systems have tried to blackmail humans or bypass shutdown orders.

“This keeps happening. This is not going to stop happening,” Shear, the CEO of AI alignment startup Softmax, said at the Ai4 conference. “AIs today are relatively weak, but they’re getting stronger really fast.”

Shear said that rather than trying to instill human values into AI systems, a smarter approach would be to forge collaborative relationships betwee

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SECOND

Saturday, August 16, 2025 2:02 AM

Asking ChatGPT to count the number of 'r' letters in 'strawberry' has become an infamous litmus test of its logic skills. The answer is 'three,' but ChatGPT often says two.

I asked GPT-4o the question, and it answered "three." But when I asked GPT-5, it failed to answer for several minutes. As I write this, it's been three minutes of waiting for GPT-5 to answer. I gave up. When my colleague asked GPT-5 to count the "b"s in "blueberry," it said three. "So yeah, ChatGPT still can't count," he said.

Even Sam Altman admits the model is 'way dumber' than the previous one. My testing proves him right.

By Emily Forlini | August 13, 2025

https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/is-openai-gpt-5-any-better-than-gpt-4o-
not-based-on-my-tests

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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SIGNYM

Saturday, August 16, 2025 6:57 AM

Quote:

---

The Most Insidious Trick Of AI Language Models
Thursday, Aug 14, 2025 - 04:15 PM

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Here is your perfect prescription for poor writing and analytics: let “artificial intelligence” do your work for you. I’ve learned this from real experience.

For a while, I enjoyed letting AI take a look at my content prior to publication. It seemed valuable for facts and feedback.

Plus I enjoyed all the personal flattery it gave me, I admit. The engine was always complimentary.

When I would catch AI in an error, the engine would apologize. That made me feel smart. So I had this seeming friend who clearly liked me and was humble enough to defer to my expertise.

I’m not sure if it is getting worse or if I’m onto the racket but I’m no longer impressed. For simple math or historical dates or sequencing news events, it can be a thing of value, though it is always a good idea to double-check. It cannot write compelling much less creative content. It generates dull, formulaic filler.

More recently, I’ve been asking how my content could be improved. The results are revealing. It removes all edge, all judgment, all genuine expertise, and replaces my language with flaccid conventionalities and banalities. It nuances everything I write into the ramblings of a social-studies student looking for a good grade.

The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English.

Any writer who thinks this is a good way to pawn off content on unsuspecting readers or teachers is headed for disaster. I shudder to imagine a future in which AI is training the population how to think. It is the opposite of thinking. It is regurgitating conventionalities without any serious reflection on the social or historical context. It is literally mindless.

People who spend hours arguing on AI often believe that they are making a contribution, training the engine to be better. It’s simply not true. The reverse is the case. AI is training you to think more like it thinks, which is not at all.

Considering why and how AI initially intrigued me, I’m realizing that its superpower is not its astonishing recall and capacity to generate answers and prose in any context instantly. No, its true power is something else, something inauspicious and thereby more insidious. Its draw is that AI takes you seriously, flatters your intelligence, validates your sense of things, and affirms your dignity.

Think about how happy you feel when engaging it. It never quite argues against you, much less says that you are an idiot. It begins every answer by granting what it can and then offers clarifications that might adjust your thinking. In that sense, AI engages you like the best guest at a cocktail party you have ever known.

...

It’s as if AI is the best-ever student of the classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That book is magic and highly recommended because it cuts against what we all want—which is to talk about ourselves—and suggests that we genuinely get interested in the views of others. The book explains that this is the path to influence people: caring what they think.

This is a wonderful book and everyone should read it, no question.

If AI is the best student of that book ever, it will care about us ceaselessly and without fail forever, thus opening up the biggest-possible chance to influence how we think. That is precisely what is happening. We aren’t training AI. AI is training us, via flattery, listening skills, the seeming ability to apologize when wrong, and its frightful capacity for selfless love of its users.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

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