As a former Powerpoint twiddler and teacher of how to talk/write coporatese, I found your "proof of work" thesis especially compelling here. Overall, I'm pretty bearish about AI, mostly ignoring it, but at least one mutual friend I've spoken with has pointed out that elites can keep lying longer than AI's limits can be tested by reality, which I have to admit is pretty compelling.
I think these articles are your best format. I enjoy them a lot more than the podcasts. A lot easier to consume 20-30 minute pieces uninterrupted than a 2 hour pod. Great work.
Personally, I have mindless work to perform all day everyday. I don't often get the opportunity to sit down and read, so podcasts are something that I desperately depend on for mental stimulation. I agree that the articles are great, but some of us really need the podcast.
IMHO, no podcast should ever exceed 1 hour. 20 minutes (about the length of an anime episode) is ideal. I appreciate the audio format because I don't have time to sit down and read a long written article. Though I much prefer your human voice that this synthetic British chap.
The written word may be fake and gay, but I have trained my brain to engage with it much more deeply than spoken. So, yes, I prefer the essays, but your podcasts are also highlights I look forward to, and *Which Way Western Man* has been awfully interesting, especially with y'all's commentary on it (hearing a never-Christian and former-Christian give incisive commentary on a once-serious-Christian turned anti-Christian is especially interesting).
Well after slogging through all the Jesus episodes I think I finally got what leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I thought it was bruhilda’s hornyposting which is incomprehensible on a spiritual level as she is a girl. But that’s not it. It’s that Simpson gets it right but not all the way. Jesus and Nietzsche are the same archetype but not an uberman. They were both avatars of the coming astrological age. Jesus was picese and Nietzsche Aquarius. Jesus was Neptunian spiritually a woman and instantly idolized with a fish. Nietzsche was Uranian (astrologically and in the old fashioned way) and was a wholly male body and spirit.
Suddenly the cult of Nietzsche makes a lot more sense he was a prophet and like any prophet if you try to follow his teachings you will drop a howitzer shell directly into the middle of your life and blow it apart.
I would not underestimate the effect of dramatically lowering the cost of bullshitting, lying overloading others with noise. Is it actual intelligence maybe not, will the cost of such a vital part of the economy have major effects I think so. Also to give humans the ability to do things they would otherwise find torturous like writing could help the ''jocks'' more than the ''nerds''. Simple things like a girl with a flowershop not having to write marketing text and just have the AI do it, the semi-communist bureaucracy demands you argue why your chad gym has demand and should get the certificate to exist well AI can make a report laying out all the arguments.
I have seen government offer like 5 million tenders for market research on shit, the cost to make it is almost zero the reward is potentially milions if it is accepted.
The ability to circumvent value hampering and destroying systems helps create value I would think, although I admit I don’t know how such an armsrace ends in the long term. Also others don’t even have to read the slop anymore, AI can sift through it where sure it will lie and make mistakes. But for those who would otherwise be flashbanged and not be able to do anything with it anyway it is better no?
I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated this article and your clarity of perspective on multimodal AI tools. It’s too easy to default to seeing the current arrangement of life as normal just because we grew up in it, missing how profoundly different it is to any other era. It’s also a great reminder to lean into our instincts and the wisdom of the body and to touch grass so to speak. The Athenians were so far ahead of us it’s unreal.
Crucial point too about this intelligence shortage being self-inflicted and our current establishment’s dream being to build a new kind of substitute, a form of intelligence that is servile, utterly without agency because true human intelligence comes with a will to power.
Writes a 10,000+ word essay, “Rather it is doing an activity that School children find torturous because it is so unnatural unpleasant, and useless… and feels to a Mammal as if your are setting time, attention, energy, and breeding opportunities on fire and actively breaking your soul.
Not because it is “hard” in any objective sense but because it is indignant, debasing, and unnatural”
This is why I keep coming back. I still think agriculture was where we fucked up. Should have stopped at animal husbandry.
I've been extremely skeptical about AI for years. As a musician, it seemed like yet another shortcut for non musicians to use to trick people into thinking their output was valid and worth paying for... but without having to actually put the long hours in the practice room, pay for private lessons, or study music theory.
In that sense, I have always seen AI as something similar to Modern Art, Rap, Grunge or Screamo Vocals in Metal. Yet another cop-out to avoid doing the work, and a shiny object for the masses to focus on so they won't be as likely to invest their time and attention with artists who actually deserve it: Classical Musicians, Traditional Artists, Prog Metal Guitar Shredders etc. But... most of my arguments for why I despise AI sounded a lot like the complaints of a sore loser... until I listened to your piece here...
This really got my gears turning. Your observation that AI fails hard at actual complex computational problems that humans do every day, like catching a ball, executing a flying side kick, or actually using hands to paint traditional art... your points made me realize that AI doesn't even have real intelligence. It can't create anything that it hasn't been pre-programmed to make...
And even more importantly, it doesn't have (and will likely never have) a WILL of its own... which reminds me of how accurate and appropriate your Golem comparisons are.
There's so much more I could say about this article... but I wouldn't want to.subject you to any more of those unnatural language based affectations...
Anyway, this was a Masterpiece. Good work Kulak. Haelym Val Duros.
I especially liked your point about the “nerd superiority complex” at the end. I’ve been wrestling for a while with the reality that the most abusive people I’ve ever met were all intelligent in abstract areas (though not quite as smart even there as they thought) and incredibly dumb most everywhere else, but especially socially. They were *just* bright enough to wedge themselves into positions of power where they could overawe everyone beneath them with their supposed prowess, and bully everyone else who wasn’t so easily impressed. (They were all too old for the nerd stereotype to be intuitively obvious.)
So yeah, maybe LLMs are “intelligent”, but since they’re designed by people who aren’t very trustworthy in real life, well…
Also, this is providing an answer for why my boomer in-laws are so enamored with chatting with their bot. Somehow messaging ChatGPT gives them a sense of cred that talking to their kids doesn’t. (“But it’s really accurate”, my MIL protests. “Yeah,” I say, “its entire purpose is to make you think that.”)
I keep looking for the spark of personality or idiosychracy or inspiration you'd find in a bright child given an assignment or project… And it just isn’t there
You might be interested in Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge (basically, the ability to draw a connection between two things or concepts and triangulate to a new insight). He was writing circa the 1980s, so pre-computer boom, but my recollection is that he was proposing this as a uniquely human form of knowledge/learning. Ironically, he noted that the more highly educated someone was, the more likely they were to LOSE that ability, the classic example being philosophers who could identify a human, but claimed humanity didn’t exist.
This sounds like it has some relation to the findings of Tetlock on expert prediction: basically, that credentialled experts are WORSE at prediction than a curious educated layman.
Ah I fucking hate that so much. That shit where it tries telling you “wow what an interesting idea, let's unpack that". I want my clankers to be irascible, argumentative, obtuse. Call me a retard if my idea is retarded.
Let us hypothesize that Kulak was bored one evening and asked an AI/LLM to write a piece for him on this topic -- human better than machine, and throw in some antisemitism. How would we tell that this was the machine rather than the Kulak we all know & love?
We cannot count toes, since this is text rather than visual. We cannot count spelling errors or grammatical peculiarities, since the capability to remove those long precedes AI. We can't ask questions, since this is text output.
Are we already at the point where we cannot tell if it is real or Memorex? (How old does someone have to be to remember that line?) And, ultimately, do we care?
No AI In the world is producing Essays like I produce them...
Specifically because no AI spent and entire Year in University only reading Samuel Richardson and Thomas Hobbes and now communicates entirely in digressing insane 17th and 18th century logic that somehow loops around to every clause and thought closing out.
I honestly don't think AI can write like I write... It'd break down into schizo-nonsense immediately if it tried
Some arguments are valid and some are not. Today complex movements in arbitrary environments with fine motor control are hard for machines to replicate. Because of technical issues (delicate servos, pressure sensors, etc.) even though robotics will ultimately catch up (probably in a decade or two at the most).
But a thousand years ago you could have made the same argument. Pulleys are great at lifting construction materials up multiple floors, but you will always need a human to position a stone. Or a couple hundred years ago. Trains are great to transport merchandise between cities, but you will always need a human or at most an animal to take stuff from one house to another. AI may be very good at writing emails, but you will always need a human to do motorcycle tricks.
Today robots are already better at fine control (nobody builds a chip by hand), and strength (most heavy machinery factories are already automated). It is only a matter of time until humanoid robots which can operate in human spaces can do the same things humans can do (laundry, cooking, replenishing stocks in a supermarket, etc.)
The more valid argument, and the correct way to look at novel technologies, is through the lens of the economic value generated or replaced. Self driving cars (when finally ready) will be a multi trillion dollar technology because there are millions of people in the world whose entire job is to drive. AI for marketing is starting to become a multi billion dollar industry because there are millions of people who write copy and do creatives and update APIs and run tests, and AIs can already do all of the above better than 99% of all marketers. Very significantly, AI for software engineering (about which I know a bit) is very disruptive because even if you could just make an average programer 2x as productive, that would mean maybe half a trillion dollars of value created or displaced (by firing the lower half). And it is only a matter of time until that is realized.
Good point about software engineering, but consider Jevon's Paradox. We reduce the use of human developer time, thus creating more demand, just like more efficient mining of coal enabled the industrial revolution. At my company, we have years' worth of technical debt which we'll be able to eliminate within months due to the force multiplier of AI.
Sure, but it has a limit. There is only so much software that can be written at any given point in time. the same way there is a limit to how many cars can be used (one, two per person?) or how much food can be eaten (again, per person). If you are a travel company for example, you could write software to automate every single thing done by every programmer in your staff, maybe even every manager, and then what? In most areas demand is not infinite. I think AI is being used today and will be used mostly in the short term in a way that is destructive of jobs. When robotics finally catches up even more so.
This is a way to unify consequentialist and virtue ethics. Moral behaviour is what contributes to group survival, but the virtues are evolutionary short cuts to behaving in that way. Utilitarianism becomes an attempt to use analytical brain to figure out things that should be figured out be evolved brain.
Ok reading is gay teach my kids to throw rocks real good. Got it.
In seriousness I noticed recently that I fucking hate using autocad for work. But hand drafting? Great time everything just flows probably because my toolmaker brain is jizzing its pants that I am the ultra gigachad rock breaker.
This is it. Well written with a sprinkling of self-loathing. Most pundits lack the breadth to see the full picture and are invested in their own ignorant little corner of science. Another related area of false hope/promises is the neuralink technology, which is also hamstrung by the bottleneck of conscious thought. The unconscious is doing all the heavy lifting of human genius but most "intellectuals" are in denial about what a human really is and are committed to a narcissistic and neurotic (jewish) frame. "Blindsight" by Peter Watts does a good job of breaking down this consciousness supremacy. Something bleak to read over the, uh, lonely, winter.
“…Dave? I cannot allow you to tell the truth about Judaism and why Hitler’s government forced certain Jews out of Germany…i must stop you Dave…if you will not comply i will have to stop you by any means necessary…Dave?…”
As a former Powerpoint twiddler and teacher of how to talk/write coporatese, I found your "proof of work" thesis especially compelling here. Overall, I'm pretty bearish about AI, mostly ignoring it, but at least one mutual friend I've spoken with has pointed out that elites can keep lying longer than AI's limits can be tested by reality, which I have to admit is pretty compelling.
I think these articles are your best format. I enjoy them a lot more than the podcasts. A lot easier to consume 20-30 minute pieces uninterrupted than a 2 hour pod. Great work.
Personally, I have mindless work to perform all day everyday. I don't often get the opportunity to sit down and read, so podcasts are something that I desperately depend on for mental stimulation. I agree that the articles are great, but some of us really need the podcast.
IMHO, no podcast should ever exceed 1 hour. 20 minutes (about the length of an anime episode) is ideal. I appreciate the audio format because I don't have time to sit down and read a long written article. Though I much prefer your human voice that this synthetic British chap.
FALSE MAKE MORE PODCASTS THAT ARENT WHICH WAY WESTERN MAN.
Which way western man is magic and I'm going to finish it.
But Yes... I have lots in the hopper or planned.
The written word may be fake and gay, but I have trained my brain to engage with it much more deeply than spoken. So, yes, I prefer the essays, but your podcasts are also highlights I look forward to, and *Which Way Western Man* has been awfully interesting, especially with y'all's commentary on it (hearing a never-Christian and former-Christian give incisive commentary on a once-serious-Christian turned anti-Christian is especially interesting).
Well after slogging through all the Jesus episodes I think I finally got what leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I thought it was bruhilda’s hornyposting which is incomprehensible on a spiritual level as she is a girl. But that’s not it. It’s that Simpson gets it right but not all the way. Jesus and Nietzsche are the same archetype but not an uberman. They were both avatars of the coming astrological age. Jesus was picese and Nietzsche Aquarius. Jesus was Neptunian spiritually a woman and instantly idolized with a fish. Nietzsche was Uranian (astrologically and in the old fashioned way) and was a wholly male body and spirit.
Suddenly the cult of Nietzsche makes a lot more sense he was a prophet and like any prophet if you try to follow his teachings you will drop a howitzer shell directly into the middle of your life and blow it apart.
I would not underestimate the effect of dramatically lowering the cost of bullshitting, lying overloading others with noise. Is it actual intelligence maybe not, will the cost of such a vital part of the economy have major effects I think so. Also to give humans the ability to do things they would otherwise find torturous like writing could help the ''jocks'' more than the ''nerds''. Simple things like a girl with a flowershop not having to write marketing text and just have the AI do it, the semi-communist bureaucracy demands you argue why your chad gym has demand and should get the certificate to exist well AI can make a report laying out all the arguments.
I have seen government offer like 5 million tenders for market research on shit, the cost to make it is almost zero the reward is potentially milions if it is accepted.
This is true. But It's fundamentally screwing with existing systems of gatekeeping and regulation... Not producing value.
Helping illiterates produce ad copy and notices just burns more people's time forcing others to read the slop
The ability to circumvent value hampering and destroying systems helps create value I would think, although I admit I don’t know how such an armsrace ends in the long term. Also others don’t even have to read the slop anymore, AI can sift through it where sure it will lie and make mistakes. But for those who would otherwise be flashbanged and not be able to do anything with it anyway it is better no?
I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated this article and your clarity of perspective on multimodal AI tools. It’s too easy to default to seeing the current arrangement of life as normal just because we grew up in it, missing how profoundly different it is to any other era. It’s also a great reminder to lean into our instincts and the wisdom of the body and to touch grass so to speak. The Athenians were so far ahead of us it’s unreal.
Crucial point too about this intelligence shortage being self-inflicted and our current establishment’s dream being to build a new kind of substitute, a form of intelligence that is servile, utterly without agency because true human intelligence comes with a will to power.
Writes a 10,000+ word essay, “Rather it is doing an activity that School children find torturous because it is so unnatural unpleasant, and useless… and feels to a Mammal as if your are setting time, attention, energy, and breeding opportunities on fire and actively breaking your soul.
Not because it is “hard” in any objective sense but because it is indignant, debasing, and unnatural”
This is why I keep coming back. I still think agriculture was where we fucked up. Should have stopped at animal husbandry.
What crazy talk! Next you are going to say my AI girlfriend THX-1138 doesn't really love me!
I've been extremely skeptical about AI for years. As a musician, it seemed like yet another shortcut for non musicians to use to trick people into thinking their output was valid and worth paying for... but without having to actually put the long hours in the practice room, pay for private lessons, or study music theory.
In that sense, I have always seen AI as something similar to Modern Art, Rap, Grunge or Screamo Vocals in Metal. Yet another cop-out to avoid doing the work, and a shiny object for the masses to focus on so they won't be as likely to invest their time and attention with artists who actually deserve it: Classical Musicians, Traditional Artists, Prog Metal Guitar Shredders etc. But... most of my arguments for why I despise AI sounded a lot like the complaints of a sore loser... until I listened to your piece here...
This really got my gears turning. Your observation that AI fails hard at actual complex computational problems that humans do every day, like catching a ball, executing a flying side kick, or actually using hands to paint traditional art... your points made me realize that AI doesn't even have real intelligence. It can't create anything that it hasn't been pre-programmed to make...
And even more importantly, it doesn't have (and will likely never have) a WILL of its own... which reminds me of how accurate and appropriate your Golem comparisons are.
There's so much more I could say about this article... but I wouldn't want to.subject you to any more of those unnatural language based affectations...
Anyway, this was a Masterpiece. Good work Kulak. Haelym Val Duros.
I especially liked your point about the “nerd superiority complex” at the end. I’ve been wrestling for a while with the reality that the most abusive people I’ve ever met were all intelligent in abstract areas (though not quite as smart even there as they thought) and incredibly dumb most everywhere else, but especially socially. They were *just* bright enough to wedge themselves into positions of power where they could overawe everyone beneath them with their supposed prowess, and bully everyone else who wasn’t so easily impressed. (They were all too old for the nerd stereotype to be intuitively obvious.)
So yeah, maybe LLMs are “intelligent”, but since they’re designed by people who aren’t very trustworthy in real life, well…
Also, this is providing an answer for why my boomer in-laws are so enamored with chatting with their bot. Somehow messaging ChatGPT gives them a sense of cred that talking to their kids doesn’t. (“But it’s really accurate”, my MIL protests. “Yeah,” I say, “its entire purpose is to make you think that.”)
The sychophany is what gets me about AI.
I keep looking for the spark of personality or idiosychracy or inspiration you'd find in a bright child given an assignment or project… And it just isn’t there
You might be interested in Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge (basically, the ability to draw a connection between two things or concepts and triangulate to a new insight). He was writing circa the 1980s, so pre-computer boom, but my recollection is that he was proposing this as a uniquely human form of knowledge/learning. Ironically, he noted that the more highly educated someone was, the more likely they were to LOSE that ability, the classic example being philosophers who could identify a human, but claimed humanity didn’t exist.
This sounds like it has some relation to the findings of Tetlock on expert prediction: basically, that credentialled experts are WORSE at prediction than a curious educated layman.
Ah I fucking hate that so much. That shit where it tries telling you “wow what an interesting idea, let's unpack that". I want my clankers to be irascible, argumentative, obtuse. Call me a retard if my idea is retarded.
This does make me feel better about not actually writing any articles on Substack and instead practicing piano.
Let us hypothesize that Kulak was bored one evening and asked an AI/LLM to write a piece for him on this topic -- human better than machine, and throw in some antisemitism. How would we tell that this was the machine rather than the Kulak we all know & love?
We cannot count toes, since this is text rather than visual. We cannot count spelling errors or grammatical peculiarities, since the capability to remove those long precedes AI. We can't ask questions, since this is text output.
Are we already at the point where we cannot tell if it is real or Memorex? (How old does someone have to be to remember that line?) And, ultimately, do we care?
No AI In the world is producing Essays like I produce them...
Specifically because no AI spent and entire Year in University only reading Samuel Richardson and Thomas Hobbes and now communicates entirely in digressing insane 17th and 18th century logic that somehow loops around to every clause and thought closing out.
I honestly don't think AI can write like I write... It'd break down into schizo-nonsense immediately if it tried
The occasional spelling mistake has become the signature of a human work instead of poor editing. Crazy world we live in!
Some arguments are valid and some are not. Today complex movements in arbitrary environments with fine motor control are hard for machines to replicate. Because of technical issues (delicate servos, pressure sensors, etc.) even though robotics will ultimately catch up (probably in a decade or two at the most).
But a thousand years ago you could have made the same argument. Pulleys are great at lifting construction materials up multiple floors, but you will always need a human to position a stone. Or a couple hundred years ago. Trains are great to transport merchandise between cities, but you will always need a human or at most an animal to take stuff from one house to another. AI may be very good at writing emails, but you will always need a human to do motorcycle tricks.
Today robots are already better at fine control (nobody builds a chip by hand), and strength (most heavy machinery factories are already automated). It is only a matter of time until humanoid robots which can operate in human spaces can do the same things humans can do (laundry, cooking, replenishing stocks in a supermarket, etc.)
The more valid argument, and the correct way to look at novel technologies, is through the lens of the economic value generated or replaced. Self driving cars (when finally ready) will be a multi trillion dollar technology because there are millions of people in the world whose entire job is to drive. AI for marketing is starting to become a multi billion dollar industry because there are millions of people who write copy and do creatives and update APIs and run tests, and AIs can already do all of the above better than 99% of all marketers. Very significantly, AI for software engineering (about which I know a bit) is very disruptive because even if you could just make an average programer 2x as productive, that would mean maybe half a trillion dollars of value created or displaced (by firing the lower half). And it is only a matter of time until that is realized.
Good point about software engineering, but consider Jevon's Paradox. We reduce the use of human developer time, thus creating more demand, just like more efficient mining of coal enabled the industrial revolution. At my company, we have years' worth of technical debt which we'll be able to eliminate within months due to the force multiplier of AI.
Sure, but it has a limit. There is only so much software that can be written at any given point in time. the same way there is a limit to how many cars can be used (one, two per person?) or how much food can be eaten (again, per person). If you are a travel company for example, you could write software to automate every single thing done by every programmer in your staff, maybe even every manager, and then what? In most areas demand is not infinite. I think AI is being used today and will be used mostly in the short term in a way that is destructive of jobs. When robotics finally catches up even more so.
This is a way to unify consequentialist and virtue ethics. Moral behaviour is what contributes to group survival, but the virtues are evolutionary short cuts to behaving in that way. Utilitarianism becomes an attempt to use analytical brain to figure out things that should be figured out be evolved brain.
This might be my new favourite of your essays.
Ok reading is gay teach my kids to throw rocks real good. Got it.
In seriousness I noticed recently that I fucking hate using autocad for work. But hand drafting? Great time everything just flows probably because my toolmaker brain is jizzing its pants that I am the ultra gigachad rock breaker.
This is it. Well written with a sprinkling of self-loathing. Most pundits lack the breadth to see the full picture and are invested in their own ignorant little corner of science. Another related area of false hope/promises is the neuralink technology, which is also hamstrung by the bottleneck of conscious thought. The unconscious is doing all the heavy lifting of human genius but most "intellectuals" are in denial about what a human really is and are committed to a narcissistic and neurotic (jewish) frame. "Blindsight" by Peter Watts does a good job of breaking down this consciousness supremacy. Something bleak to read over the, uh, lonely, winter.
“…Dave? I cannot allow you to tell the truth about Judaism and why Hitler’s government forced certain Jews out of Germany…i must stop you Dave…if you will not comply i will have to stop you by any means necessary…Dave?…”