Some absolute heaters this week! Lots of quotes, and AI commentary.
Tech
Ted Chiang on why AI will never be conscious.
I started reading his book Exhalation this week, and there will certainly be a review coming for that as well. His writing is clever in the best of ways, and his articulation of his thoughts on AI are equally coherent and cogent.
An excerpt:
"Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category."
Om Malik, with a beautiful collectors edition pen, commentary on the original Pinocchio, and how it relates to life today:
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
Chad Whitacre is Retiring from Tech. Merely copying a quote from this page would be a disservice. See it for yourself.
Charity Majors, on navigating the cognitive gap between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics:
The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.
The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.
Cybersecurity
Lastly, researchers at the University of Toronto have created a prototype of an LLM powered worm. This worm compromises a single host first, then using open weight community LLM models, devises a way to compromise other machines nearby. Each machine that it can break into is added to its total computational resources. In this way, the LLM has more distributed compute available with each machine that is compromised. This worm was developed and tested in a sandboxed environment, so time will tell if it's effective in the real world. From their research, it's slower than traditional worms, and takes days to spread out over a test network. But as models and computers get faster, that time to react will shrink.