Ayyyyyy Eyeeeee

The lie that raced around the world before the truth got its boots on.

A portrait of OpenAI founder Sam Altman. It has been altered so that his eyes are replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He is holding a flashlight under his chin and is shrouded in darkness.
Jasleen Kaur/CC BY-SA 2.0; TechCrunch/CC BY 2.0; Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

It didn’t happen.

The story you heard, about a US Air Force AI drone warfare simulation in which the drone resolved the conflict between its two priorities (“kill the enemy” and “obey its orders, including orders not to kill the enemy”) by killing its operator?

It didn’t happen.

The story was widely reported on Friday and Saturday, after Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, USAF Chief of AI Test and Operations, included the anaecdote in a speech to the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) Summit.

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Pluralistic: Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things (03 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: The long lineage of private equity's looting (02 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: To save the news, ban surveillance ads (31 May 2023)


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Pluralistic: Ian McDonald's "Hopeland" (30 May 2023)


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Monopolizing turds


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Ideas Lying Around

Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this.

A workbench with a pegboard behind it. from the pegboard hang an array of hand-tools.
btwashburn/CC BY 2.0

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

-Milton Friedman, 1972

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Pluralistic: Steven Brust's "Tsalmoth" (27 May 2023)


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Pluralistic: How (and why) Biden should overcome the Supreme Court to end the debt showdown (26 May 2023)


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Pluralistic: To save the news, shatter ad-tech (25 May 2023)


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