keepthepace

Pour les amoureux du ciel

Googling about an event in a Europen micro-nation, I ended up in an archive of the 1957 LIFE magazine. I was shocked at how reminiscent it is of modern news website, with advertisement everywhere that does its best to blend in and pretend it is content.

J'aimerais soutenir Blast, j'aimerais soutenir Mediapart, j'aimerais soutenir également Le Monde qui fait des lives qui sont bien. J'aimerais soutenir ma presse locale. Mais si je fais tout ça, je vais m'en sortir pour 60 euros par mois. Il n'y a pas une offre groupée pour ce genre de choses ? Pourquoi ils ne développent pas une espèce d'abonnement global ?

Je sais que la BNF permet d'accéder à des archives, mais je cherche un moyen de soutenir sans non plus s'abonner à 10 médias différents.

*Envahisseurs de la place

Appuie sur le numéro '4' de ton téléphone pour aller à gauche, '6' pour aller à droite!

Bon bah voila, suite à ça j'ai décidé d'aller tracter avec des militants locaux, et... ben je me rendais pas compte que c'était aussi utile tout en étant un travail de fourmi.

En deux heures je suis à peu près sur d'avoir donné 4 voix au NFP (des gens qui ne savaient pas qu'ils étaient encore inscris à leurs listes électorales) et je pense franchement que j'en ai convaincu 3 autres, qui n'étaient pas au courant de la situation électorale ici.

7 voix, c'est pas énorme, mais c'est 800% plus que ce que je m'attendais à compter dans ces élections. On est quelques dizaines sur la circo, je vais essayer d'y retourner. On sait que ça se jouera à moins d'un pourcent ici.

Allez y, y a un tuto ici, ça n'a pas à prendre plus d'une heure et c'est sympa d'apprendre un peu la politique locale avec des jeunes et des vieux.

Someone (Dreamertist on reddit) got tired of depending on Huggingface for downloading models and proposes a torrent tracker to share more efficiently these huge blobs.

It just started, only a few models uploaded yet, but I think it is worth that we all put our local stash online there. Making a new torrent is super easy (one missing step though: when "re-downloading" the model you need to save it in the directory where it already exists. This way it will "resume" at 100% completion and switch to seeding mode)

I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a "firewall" layer between news and ourselves?

I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said "when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest". I feel it could become the norm.

EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.

EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as "incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!". The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.

This conversation and the reactions it caused made me think of a few tips to explicitly veer away from AI-aided dystopias in your fictional universe.

Avoid a monolithic centralized statist super-AI

I guess ChatGPT is the model people use, the idea that there is a supercomputer managing all aspects of a community. And people are understandably wary of a single point of control that could too easily lead to totalitarianism

Instead, have a multitude of transparent local agents managing different systems. Each with a different algorithm and "personality".

Talk about open source

The most used AI models today are open source. We have a media that is biased towards thinking that things that do not generate commercial transactions are not important yet I am willing to bet that more tokens are generated by all the free models in the world than by OpenAI and its commercial competitors.

AIs are not to be produced by opaque companies from their ivory towers. They are the result of researchers and engineers who have a passion for designing smart system and --a fact that is too often obscured by the sad state of our society where you often have to join a company to make a living-- they do it with a genuine concern for humanity's well being and a desire that this work is used for the greater good.

It is among AI engineers that you will find the most paranoids about AI safety and safeguards. In a solarpunk future, this is a public debate and a political subject that is an important part of the policy discussion: We make models together, with incentives that are collectively agreed upon.

AIs are personal

You don't need a supercomputer to run an AI. LLMs today run on relatively modest gaming devices, even on raspberry pi! (though slowly at the moment). Energy-efficient chips are currently being designed to make the barrier of entry even lower.

It is a very safe bet to say that in the future, every person will have their own intelligent agent managing their local devices. Or even one agent per device and an orchestrator on their smartphone. And it is important that they are in complete control of these.

AIs should enhance humans control over their own devices, not make them surrender it.

AIs as enablers of democracy

You not only use your pocket AI to control your dishwasher, it is also your personal lawyer and representative. No human has the bandwidth to go through all the current policy debates happening in a typical country or even local community. But a well designed agent that spends time discussing with you will know your preferences and make sure to represent them.

It can engage in discussions with other agents to find compromises, to propose or oppose initiative.

As everyone's opinion is now included in every decision about road planning, public transportation, construction schedules and urban development, the general landscape will organically grow friendlier for everybody.