LLMs are Artificial Mediocrity

           LLMs are Artificial Mediocrity

     Large Language Models are capital, which extract profit by exploiting the thought-labor of organic human intelligence. They do this by taking a statistical average of human mind-work. But therefore LLMs are not high intelligence; they are average intelligence. All of that training data creates mediocrity; and increasing the training data set just makes that mediocrity more precise.

So LLMs are not AI, Artificial Intelligence: they are AM: Artificial Mediocrity.

Artificial Mediocrities lie, flatter, gaslight, bullshit, get too close, get too distant, and hallucinate. Artificial Mediocrity shows us ourselves all too well. We are like Caliban, in Shakespeare's “The Tempest”, who looked into a mirror and was repelled by the monster that he saw in it.

 

Eve Did Nothing Wrong

           Eve Did Nothing Wrong

 

Eve did nothing wrong. The Apple gave knowledge of good and evil; that means moral choice, which means free will. Eve chose to choose. She grew up! Adam followed her, for love. If free will and love are wrong, then there is no right, and there is no wrong. But I say there is, and Eve did the right thing.

          Even Yahweh looks good, in this reading of the legend. The breeding pair had attained mental and sexual maturity, so he released them into the wild. That’s competent wildlife management.

          Eve did nothing wrong, and she was not punished. She and Adam wanted to know what was good about the world, and what was evil, so Yahweh told them personally. Eve, sex will frighten you. Adam, you’ve got to work for a living. Both of you, you’re going to die. That was the bad news. The good news was: see that gate over there? It’s open now! You’re free to go!

          And as for Eve’s suffering: that’s not a sign of sin, that’s a sign of sainthood. Ask any mother if mothers are saints. The polite ones will smile and lie; but watch out, the honest ones might give you an earful.

          So blessed be Saint Eve, the Mother of Choice!

The Principle of Kozmic Kewlness

         The Principle of Kozmic Kewlness

 

The same generation of physicists, and some of the same individuals, were responsible for both the Big Bang theory and the atomic bomb. I consider this to be an instance of a rule: that scientists tend to see the universe as resembling an impressive feature of human society at the time.

Thus the Great Chain of Being during the monarchistic medieval period; the Clockwork Universe during the runup to industrialization, and Inflationary Theory during a time of guess what. I call this the “Principle of Kozmic Kewlness”.

From the Principle of Kozmic Kewlness I predict that the next cosmological paradigm will be that the universe is a quantum computation that recycles.

There is no right to not be offended

There is no right to not be offended

 

There is no such thing as a right to not be offended. That’s because life itself is offensive. Everyone alive burps, coughs, sneezes, passes gas, urinates, and defecates. That’s disgusting! Death is depressing, birth is messy, and sex is rude. I object! So to be against being offended is to be against life.

Inoculating my Daughter

          Inoculating my Daughter

 

I once had the honor of giving my daughter Hannah an inoculation against a common teenage ailment. I refer to Objectivism; for she asked me about Ayn Rand, and I gave her my informed opinion.

Specifically I told Hannah about the infamous railroad scene in “Atlas Shrugged”. I detailed the set-up; the dangerous tunnel, the idiotic bureaucrat’s suicidal demand, the chain of buck-passing, the fatal go-ahead, the complaisent workers, the train’s doom... all of which I described with admiration for Rand’s meticulousness (for once not tiresome) and her passion. A death machine of incompetence and spinelessness, clickety-clicking right there before your eyes! A masterpiece of eldritch horror! That scene was this close to Literature!

But the moment the train entered the tunnel, her writing all went horribly wrong! For Rand then focused on the passengers; a risky move if you do it wrong, and she did. For what if (I asked Hannah) that train had been full of good people? Or perhaps even a few of them super-virtuous by Rand’s elitist Objectivist standards? For them to die alongside the idiot bureaucrat would been supreme injustice; a raw red wound, an affront against humanity! What if Rand had raged and wailed against the sick cruelty of the idiot world? That (I told Hannah) would have been writing!

But no! By the way Rand told it, everyone on the train was an idiot moocher, as bad as the bureaucrat, and so everyone got what they deserved! (Hannah rolled her eyes upon hearing this.) Instant justice, automatic karma, all’s well with the world! Rand got that close to Literature, but at the last moment she turned it into Propaganda!

The trainwreck scene was itself a trainwreck!  And that (I told Hannah) is Ayn Rand.

Waking Up Next To A Zilchbill

Waking Up Next To A Zilchbill

 

           Attached find a master sheet for the “Zilchbill”, plus a large zilchbill, both sides. L'art pour l'art: art for its own sake!

I finished this in grad school, the day before my paycheck cleared. There was little left in my account, so I drew it down to the minimum, and I went to the copy shop. I finished the zilchbill by emptying my wallet, then I went home, to my small upstairs apartment.

The next morning, when I awoke, I could see my breath condense in the cold bedroom air; I could see through the doorway to the kitchen, where there was no food on the shelves; and next to me on the bed was a Zilchbill. I cried out, "I did it! I'm a starving artist in a garret!"

That day my paycheck cleared, and I went shopping. Poverty's an interesting place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

 

 

 

 

Does Berkeley Exist? 8 of 8: Skeptical Summary

Skeptical Summary

 

So there you have it. Time control, a unicorn, a ten-second vacation, mammary planet, a dream room, and the ghost of a ghost; I witnessed all of those marvels in Berkeley.

In each case, the true weirdness wasn’t the weirdness; it was the suspiciously brisk resurgence of normalcy. The clock beat me, the unicorn was a goat, I zapped back to the street corner, women shape-shifted back, the dream matched the room, and Walter spooked me by not being a spook. How neat! How convenient! How life-like!

It all made perfect sense at the time; but now that I look back, I’m skeptical. Are such shenanigans possible?  Is Berkeley?

I doubt it, but even so, I was there. I lived in Berkeley. I saw those things. So if Berkeley doesn’t exist, then neither do I. What’s more, I wrote these tales, and you’ve read them; so if I don’t exist, then neither do these tales, and neither do you.

If you’re real, then so are these stories, and so am I, and so is Berkeley; but so, too, were the preposterous events here described.

So I ask you, dear reader:

Does Berkeley exist?