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Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Misreading of Science Fiction
Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer’s Odyssey, or Christopher Nolan’s? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a “historically accurate” version of the The Odyssey—turning epic poetry into atrocious slop—even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.
The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their heads frozen when they die and, possibly, consciousnesses uploaded onto computers, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys.
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Sam Altman says we’re ‘in the singularity’ with AI. Here’s why he’s wrong
These are the words of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking on the Relentless podcast on July 25.
He added: “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world”.
Days earlier, OpenAI had disclosed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, during an internal cyber security evaluation, had escaped their sealed testing environment, reached the open internet, and broken into the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the intrusion.
But what exactly is “the singularity”? And is Altman right that we are in it?
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