In classics it usually stands for Marcus. Marcus Aristotle, the famous stoipatetic philosopher.
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[…]
Last week, Sam Altman started ringing the alarm bells on the same problem—though he’s not just worried about scammers taking advantage, but rather the entirety of our existing security apparatus getting defeated. While speaking at a banking regulatory conference, Altman said that AI has already “fully defeated” most authentication services that humans rely on to verify their identity and access their sensitive accounts.
“Society has to deal with this problem more generally,” Altman said, presumably while dressed in a hot dog suit and shouting, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” To that end, Altman’s own company announced earlier this month that it was releasing a ChatGPT Agent that could effectively interact with a computer the same way a human can, switching between apps and completing multi-step tasks that require doing things like logging into different accounts and making decisions.
Altman’s warning of a scam apocalypse seems to have shades of the general warnings that AI execs have been offering about the potential risk of artificial general intelligence, ie, “This could be really bad, but we are absolutely not going to stop.”
Also, nice work on the illustration’s caption in the article.
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My son has always said Please and Thank You to any machine he interacts with: vending machine, train ticket machine, etc. I asked him about it when he was 10. “I don’t know when the machines will have AI. I want to be in the habit, so when the day comes, they remember me as one of the friendly humans.”
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Good thinking.
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Actual ethicists say that being kind to electronic devices help teach children the proper way to interact with others. The guy how shouts, “Siri you stupid $%#&, what’s the weather today?” is going to be crappy to almost everyone he meets, electronic or not. Saying thank you to a device promotes kindness to people and objects that do things for you. When I was young and dating, I dropped a few people because they acted shitty to clerks, busboys, and waiters.
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I can’t find it because Google sucks now, but I think it may have been Asimov who wrote “a gentleman is someone who says ‘thank you’ to a robot.” (riffing off an older bon mot “… to a servant”, which I also can’t find arrgh.)
Also, Sam Altman has said that the extra processing required to parse and deal with “please” and “thank you” in everyone’s AI queries is costing him millions. So there’s another excellent reason to be polite to robots.
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Can’t wait until President Lisa Simpson
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There’s certainly no benefit to acting angry or hostile towards inanimate objects, but I think society would be well served to remember that, at best, these machines are just tools for completing tasks. They aren’t conscious and really don’t need the same courtesy extended to them that’s due to a human service worker, or even the courtesy due to a farm animal. IMHO we’re in a bad spot ethically if we as a society decide that we need to say please and thank you to machines but don’t give a second thought to the treatment of the pigs that a robot waiter is serving up for a meal.
Do the ethicists recommend saying thank you to all machines, or just the ones that talk? Do they thank their cars daily? How about the automatic doors at a supermarket?
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I am not sure i would describe the ghosts in pacman as AI. The underlying code is just using a basic set of instructions based on a player’s actions, it’s not thinking or analyzing a player’s actions.
But that’s besides the point. I think these large publishers are misreading the room, they seem to be gleefully waiting for AI so they can lay off workers but what this will do is further make large publishers less relevant. Right now a lot of the games that i’ve seen friends play and really love have mostly been games put together by indie devs.
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Oh fuck off, NYT. The ghosts in Pac-Man are not “AI” and not even a little bit relevant to replacing artists, writers and programmers. Atari was never going to pay people to remotely control Winky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde against some kid with a quarter.
Even the much more sophisticated (and hilariously not very “alive”) NPCs in Elder Scrolls games aren’t really “AI” (not even in the same sense that LLMs are, which is… still not really AI). It’s programmed behavior with random factors.
(I wrote general behavior scripts for monsters in an MMO. It’s a state machine, and a fairly simple one. The code for pathing is much more complex than the code for “what should I do now?” but even that isn’t a super difficult algorithm to understand.)
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This is obscene.
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The article was on Google Home Assistant, Siri, and Alexa.
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As you note, the ghosts were a simple algorithm that oriented the ghosts movement towards where the player was located. The most complicated parts of the equation were ensuring the ghosts stayed in the lanes, and whether they had line of sight to the player.
I was able to build a simple if:then:else algorithm for similar movements of the baddies for a game I built for HS coding class. I guess I was an early AI programmer in HS?
So… where are my billions?
Ah… your edit beat my post: I owe you a frosty one!
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Yeah but Sergey Brin says to threaten and abuse them to get better results.
He must be wonderful to be a hostage, I mean employee of.
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Ireland is set to have data centres use more electricity than homes do in a few years.
This is obscene.
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One of my classmates wrote his own PacMan in 1984 or so. On his C64. In assembler. Over a long weekend. Without any “AI” in the code or the act of programming.
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Sure, why not encourage students to offload as much cognition as possible and let a machine do all the learning and thinking for them in an educational setting? So much more efficient!
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