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Dicks out for Tim the pencil!

The Harambe of writing implements

I would be honestly upset at the tragic death of the Tim the pencil.

I call my google assistant a dumb bitch regularly. I'm trying to turn the lights on, why are you playing fucking Spotify? Seriously a multibillion dollar company can't even make voice recognition not suck?

To be fair to science fiction, we'll probably treat them worse once they start looking like people

Saying thank you is just a precautionary measure. Just in case, you know...

Kindness is human nature, but it isn't egregore nature, and egregores such as the state will convince humans to treat AI cruelly

What I read is that religion was a way to codify habits for survival. Pork meat that spoils quickly in a dessert climate is a health hazard, but people ate it anyway, but when the old guy says it angers the gods the chances of obeying is a lot bigger. That kind of thing. Of course when people obey gods there are those that claim to speak for the gods.

Those who saw tigers where there were none were more likely to pass on their genes than those that didn't see the tiger hiding in the foliage.

And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.

A lot of behaviors that would be advantageous in a pre-technical setting are troublesome today.

A guy who likes to get blackout drunk and fight is a nice thing to have when your whole army is about ten guys. The one who will sit and stare at nothing all day is a wonderful lookout. People who obsess about little things would know all the plants that are safe to eat.

The Brave Little Toaster is still giving me the feels decades later.

This exact joke is used in a Community episode, but I never saw it attributed to a professor

Just sounds like the first episode of community with less context and more soapboxing

It is a classic Pop Psychology/Philosophy legend/trope, predating Community and the AI boom by a wide margin. It's one of those examples people repeat, because it's an effective demonstration, and it's a memorable way to engage a bunch of hung-over first year college students. It opens several different conversations about the nature of the mind, the self, empathy, and projection.

It's like the story of the engineering professor who gave a test with a series of instructions, with instruction 1 being "read all the instructions before you begin" followed by things like "draw a duck" or "stand up and sing Happy Birthday to yourself" and then instruction 100 being "Ignore instructions 2-99. Write your name st the top of the sheet and make no other marks on the paper."

Like, it definitely happened, and somebody was the first to do it somewhere. But it's been repeated so often, in so many different classes and environments that it's not possible to know who did it first, nor does it matter.

a technology that has the greatest potential for destruction that any humanity could theoretically produce: Artificial General Intelligence.

The part that should be making us all take notice is that the tech-bros and even developers are getting off on this. They are almost openly celebrating the notion that they are ushering in technology akin to the nuclear age and how it has the potential to end us all. It delights them. I have been absorbing the takes on all sides of the AI camp and almost as worrying as the people who mindlessly hate LLM's to the degree that they are almost hysterical about it, are the people on the other side who secretly beat it to the fantasy of ending humanity and some kind of "the tables have turned" incels-rise-up-like techbro cult where they finally strike back against normies or some such masturbatory fantasy.

It's not real to any of them honestly, nobody has been impacted personally by LLM's besides a few people who have fallen in love with chat bots. They are basking in fan-fiction for something that doesn't exist yet. And I'm talking about the people who are actually building the things.