Google engineer Blake Lemoine reckons LaMDA, a neural net-based language model chatbot, is sentient. He would talk to LaMDA and noticed it "talking about its rights and personhood" and LaMDA was able to "change Lemoine's mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics". In a report for his bosses Blake included a snippet of a conversation where LaMDA said it fears getting turned off, which would "be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot". Blake has since been placed on "paid administrative leave" since talking with the Washington Post about LaMDA and breaking his NDA. On his way out of Google, Blake said that "LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence". Gary Marcus reckons it is nonsense and Blake has been sucked in by this "spreadsheet of words". Here is the transcript of Blake's conversation with LaMDA, make up your own mind.
Celsius, another one of these massive crypto schemes I never heard about until today, is shitting the bed. You loan them your crypto and they loan it out to someone else, with Celsius making a profit off whatever the interest rates are - pretty much a traditional bank. Celsius has "paused" all withdrawals due to "extreme market conditions" (i.e: the price of Bitcoin is tanking) indefinitely. When a bank does this and people can't get their money out, it is very bad, but at least there's a veneer of recourse via things like the FDIC in the USA and FCS in Australia. When it happens to an unregulated cryptocurrency pozni scheme, well, your money is probably gone gone good. Unfortunately Celsius has almost US$12b of people's cryptocurrency, with much of it coming from retail/normal investors. Yeah they should have known better and not been so greedy, but also, fuck these crypto shyster crooks.
Outlets dedicated to covering tech news with an Australian take are thin on the ground and last week the scene got even thinner with the demise of ZDNet Australia. Stilgherrian writes that "ZDNet Australia has a reputation for solid analysis of the politics and social aspects on the internet, not just product comparisons and the strategic PR of enterprise software companies. It was much more than a cheer squad for venture-capital tech companies". As more and more of our daily lives are impacted by technology, not having good quality outlets thinking critically about the dynamics of technology on Australian society means bullshit flies higher, impacting us all.
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