Andy Jassy: “If your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive…It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.”
The Generalist: “The logical narrative endpoint of artificial intelligence is that every story will have an audience of one.”
Vasant Dhar: “Anil [Seth] describes two broad perspectives on consciousness. The first perspective is that consciousness is a “functional” one, that is, the functions can it do. It’s like having a checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions of things that a system needs to do or exhibit to be called conscious. The alternative view is that consciousness is about being, not doing, that is, it is about our subjective experiences as living beings. That suggests that biology is essential for consciousness. In this view, AI machines that aren’t living things are unlikely to achieve consciousness, however intelligent they may become functionally.”
WaPo: ““Where the Axe Is Buried” by Ray Nayler deserves to be read and discussed for its futuristic, philosophical exploration of our era’s problems…[It] takes place in a future of indeterminate distance from our moment, though its broad geopolitical contours map onto our own. In the West, nations have ceded most government functions to AI “prime ministers” that rule autonomously, setting policies that ensure economic flourishing even as they meticulously maintain the status quo. Ostensibly free, the peoples of these nations — who have given up all but the bare semblance of democratic self-rule — are further constrained by an almost unlimited surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, in the faraway Federation (a clear stand-in for Russia, though it is never named as such), a Putin-like president has ruled for generations, thanks to technology that allows him to move his mind to a new body whenever his old one begins to decline. The nation he controls is a brutally repressive totalitarian state, in which citizens’ movements are limited by social credit scores and even the most benign utterance can lead to forced labor.”
Dean W. Ball: “When you are trying to understand a new topic from scratch, it’s hard to start at the beginning of the story and work your way forward. There is so much history to know, and you will just end up bogged down in details. So I often take the opposite approach, starting my inquiry at the end of the story rather than the beginning. For many topics, there are debates in the here and now where knowledge is accruing at the margin. These debates, I decided, would be my entry point. Step one is to pick the best thinkers on different sides (usually just two sides, sometimes more) and understand the substance of their positions in depth, including how they have evolved. If there are good biographies, I will scan them. This is easier for the humanities than it is for the sciences, but still possible in the sciences, particularly if you can talk to live practitioners.”
