When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI, some hinted that lurid depravities lay behind his downfall. Surely, OpenAI’s board wouldn’t have toppled him if there weren’t some sordid story about to hit the headlines? But the reporting all seems to be saying that it was God, not Sex, that lay behind Altman’s downfall. […]
Information Technology
Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy […]
More AI madness! Couple of months ago there was a weird Daily Beast piece. It’s bad, but in a goofy way, causing me to say at the time ‘not today, Hal!’ But now I’m collecting op-ed-ish short writings about AI for use as models of good and bad and just plain weird writing and thinking, […]
Let me try to focus my thoughts from the previous post. Do is as do does. Agent-like entities are equivalent to real agents. If GPT-4 can trick people into thinking it’s a trickster, it’s a trickster. If you can mimic a chess master, you’re a chess master. It’s fun to wonder whether there will be […]
To celebrate my new-found determination to do the right thing and blog I’m going to blog. Specifically, I’m going to blog about something I’m dumb about and don’t understand – because that should be possible, among friends. We’re all friends here on the internet? That’s kind of the point. This semester I am going to […]
Yesterday, I dug into the deepest nest of folders on my MacBook Pro to find an article I wrote on a 512K Mac in 1987, for a magazine that no longer exists and isn’t (AFAICT) digitally archived. The file must have made transitions from “hard floppies” to removable 44Mb drives (remember them?) to hard drive […]
Hello! My name is Kevin Munger, and I’m delighted to have gotten the call up to the blogging big leagues. I’ve been blogging since the beginning of the pandemic at Never Met a Science, a combination of meta-science (get it) and media theory that I intend to continue here. Crooked Timber has been around for […]