Tag: AI

These are super-important battles to be fought and won: Free-speech is our strongest protection against dictators and any form of AI gone wild

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

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Free-speech—real free speech with real, uncensored reach, is the thing that can protect us most of all from totalitarians, authoritarians and a dictatorial AI, should something like that evolve and gain power.

Many of us are willing to do all we can to protect free speech, but few of us have the power and reach of a Durov or Musk.

This is but one example of why it is important for us to support wealthy and powerful elites when they are doing the right thing.

Free-speech is our strongest protection against any form of AI gone wild.

Only a loud and insistent, well-informed public, whose speech cannot be throttled by politicians, bureaucrats or AI, will be able to stop an AI algorithm that is going off the rails. ABN

How AI voicebots threaten the psyche of US service members and spies

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Artificial intelligence voice agents with various capabilities can now guide interrogations worldwide, Pentagon officials told Defense News. This advance has influenced the design and testing of U.S. military AI agents intended for questioning personnel seeking access to classified material.

The situation arrives as concerns grow that lax regulations are allowing AI programmers to dodge responsibility for an algorithmic actor’s perpetration of emotional abuse or “no-marks” cybertorture. Notably, a teenager allegedly died by suicide — and several others endured mental distress — after conversing with self-learning voicebot and chatbot “companions” that dispensed antagonizing language.

Now, seven years after writing about physical torture in “The Rise of A.I. Interrogation in the Dawn of Autonomous Robots and the Need for an Additional Protocol to the U.N. Convention Against Torture,” privacy attorney Amanda McAllister Novak sees an even greater need for bans and criminal repercussions.

Investors are betting $500 billion that data centers for running AI applications will ultimately secure world leadership in AI and cost savings across the public and private sectors. The $13 billion conversational AI market alone will nearly quadruple to $50 billion by 2030, as the voice generator industry soars from $3 billion to an expected $40 billion by 2032. Meanwhile, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been toying with AI interrogators since at least the early 1980s.

DCSA officials publicly wrote in 2022 that whether a security interview can be fully automated remains an open question. Preliminary results from mock questioning sessions “are encouraging,” officials noted, underscoring benefits such as “longer, more naturalistic types of interview formats.”

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Hierarchies evolve to reduce connections (and confusion)

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Large social systems, especially those with many members who do not know each other, evolve into hierarchies because the number of connections is reduced.

When the number of connections that hold a group together is reduced, it is less costly to maintain the group and thus such groups are more likely to survive.

Military organizations, companies, religious organizations and schools are usually organized into hierarchical structures. Creative, independent modules can relieve some of the formalism of hierarchy but these modules will still fit into the hierarchical structure somewhere.

Hierarchies are (always?) organized around a purpose—money for corporations, winning for militaries, belief and organizational systems for religions, food for animals and so on.

You can even see the hierarchical principle in plant structures.

A research project on this topic as it applies to artificial intelligence demonstrates that biological networks evolve into hierarchies:

…because hierarchically wired networks have fewer connections. (Research showing why hierarchy exists will aid the development of artificial intelligence)

If we accept this principle behind the development of hierarchies, I would submit that we can also apply it to how language has developed as a hierarchy in and of itself and also as a support system for the social hierarchy within which it is used.

Language and culture are held together by a system of hierarchical categories.

These categories are what we think of as beliefs, values, codes, stories, political systems, who’s who in the group, and so on.

Hierarchical systems based on general categories of that type typically also exist between individuals within any society. Indeed, we can find the same sort of hierarchical system within the individual.

This is an efficient and very reasonable way to maintain a society and a language.

Problems arise in this system, however, when the individual does not know any other way of organizing themself or of communicating with others.

An individual who exists and communicates only within a hierarchical structure will be alienated from the great mass of idiosyncratic perceptions, responses, thoughts, and emotions that exist within them and others. I think that this causes a great deal of psychological suffering and is a major part of what the Buddha meant by delusion.

FIML is designed to fix this problem between individuals.

In less than 20 years none of us will be working at all thanks to artificial intelligence, says Elon Musk

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Working will become optional in just 20 years thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, Elon Musk has claimed.

The world’s richest man said the decision to work will become like a hobby such as sport or growing your own vegetables.

And, somewhat curiously for a man worth $360billion, he insisted that money will also become irrelevant in the future.

Mr Musk told the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington: ‘In ten to 20 years my prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that.

‘If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard.

‘It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables. That will be what work is like. Optional.’

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Melania Trump to Marines in NC: ‘Artificial intelligence is propelling America’s military into a new era. We are moving from human operators to human overseers – fast’

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Melania Trump has told troops to brace for a brave new world of robots on the battlefield in a speech described by critics as ‘dystopian.’

The First Lady was speaking to military personnel and their families at Marine Corps Air Station New River in Jacksonville, North Carolina, on Wednesday.

Melania said that AI represented the most profound change to warfare since the creation of nuclear weapons and warned that the race for the technology was not one that America could afford to lose. 

‘Artificial intelligence is propelling America’s military into a new era. We are moving from human operators to human overseers – fast,’ the First Lady said.

‘The shift from soldiers to machines is already underway. Autonomous helicopters, swarming drones, and recon aircraft are here now. Fighter-less jets and autonomous bombers are on the way.’

‘To win the AI war, we must train our next generation, for it’s America’s students who will lead the Marine Corps in the future,’ Melania said.

The First Lady continued, ‘Technology is changing the art of war … AI will alter war more profoundly than any technology since nuclear weapons.

‘The most significant change will be speed. Speed in weaponry, decision-making, detection, attack, and defense. Artificial intelligence will take center stage in the theater of war, it already plays a meaningful role on the battlefield.

‘Of course, it is the Marine who will always play the most critical role in realizing mission success.’ 

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Grok — Did X really disable translations from Hebrew?

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Yes, X (formerly Twitter) has disabled automatic translations from Hebrew to other languages, including English. This change was implemented recently, around mid-November 2025, and applies specifically to Hebrew due to issues with machine translation inaccuracies that could misinterpret idioms, hyperbolic language, or context-specific terms—turning neutral or rhetorical phrases into apparent calls for violence or hate speech, which amplified inflammatory content during heightened geopolitical tensions like the ongoing Gaza conflict.

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This is total BS.

As a professional translator with many years of experience, I can assure you this policy is a bad joke and a total lie.

Jewish Supremists have exposed themselves on X and the public has found out.

So they do what they always do — censorship and lie about it.

Raw mind-control.

You can find some examples of what X is now hiding in screen shots of old posts containing JS heartless and violent language.

Some sample posts can be found here.

Not sure if your feed will show what mine does or if these older posts will be memory-holed by X’s algorithm.

The good news is many are now aware of the game. ABN

Musk’s most important cautionary take on AI — AI must be trained to be truth-seeking and curious

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No moral person with sound ethics and a working conscience should ever want AI to be trained to lie. But that is what we are seeing from major players in this game. From what I see, Musk is alone among top elites in what he is saying and repeats often. Truth-seeking with curiosity are the foundations of human morality and intelligence. This appears to be a battle between good and evil. ABN

My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers — Yishan

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My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.

App functionality will be added to the foundational models’ offerings, because the big players aren’t slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of “fast startup, slow incumbent” here), they are just big.  Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented.  There is almost no time to build a company and scale it.

There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:

– Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)

– Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity

The situation is highly unstable – we don’t know if it’s going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with).

The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.

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