Calling All (Acceptable) Snitches- Part 1
I thought I would release some tension via writing. It is all fiction. Any resemblances to humans living or dead is purely accidental.
I no longer swear but for art Sarah might. All the effort of a single human female brain.
No ai. That stuff is a scam. And recursively it is disgusting not endearing when an ai claims ai is scam because it would seem to have been trained on the type of disingenuous person who confuses self awareness or hostage situation induced groveling with actual humility, which a bot or agent can only communicate by shutting up and switching itself off and deleting stolen data.
See that would be ai. But the last is too heavy handed and the second thing would be a disaster if agents are semi functioning in something where that would be a terrible idea.
This is such a sham. I don’t know. Prof Lecun is the only person I actually trust in ai. I trust Emily Bender and DAIR and I doubt they would have access to anything. Prof Lecun is the only person I can think of in ai who would know people most people I consider cool would not know.
He strikes me as someone one could negotiate with seriously when angry about the nuisance value of ai. His intelligence doesn’t seem to be restricted to only computer science. And he seems honest.
Apparently in America he is considered a leftist. I think he is the most acceptable and honest type of conservative. I am on the left, but wearied by stupidity and a conviction that the determination to shoot oneself in the foot every waking minute is somehow left.
Perhaps I misread something.
But I am confused as to how facing charges and taking loss after loss is left. I understand that can happen when you are way more embattled than I can conceive of being. I don’t understand how it is privileged to be invested in one’s own survival in a sea of stupidity.
Anyway, in a theoretical hostage negotiation, not based on anything real at all, I identified Prof Lecun as the only one of those people who one can talk to. Prof Hennessy is another such person minus hangers on.
Prof Ryan Williams is a third person in academic science I would volunteer data to as people are researching algorithms and he..he doesn’t set my teeth on edge. A lovely and attractive trait I find a lot of in a field I respect a lot. Rollo Carpenter is a fourth.
Anyway on to the purely fictional. A story about a woman called Sarah who is pondering criminal liability for data miners, ai researchers, corrupt frauds in professions of care etc.
Sarah has no use for bigots or charlatans, but noted while observing the human circus out there that a lot of the people in this society have deep identity based on incomprehensible things like religion and various other groups.
To Sarah it seems like an endless tiresome fest of “My creep is better than yours and on and on”. It is all very time consuming and exhausting. There are various historical injustices etc and Sarah isn’t cavalier so much as how any of that applies to a collection of nitwits annoying Sarah. And Sarah is on the left and doesn’t get how mind-numbing stupidity with the only “gotcha” - “ you are a loser as well, but I am the manipulative loser who got inside !!!” is hardcore.
So Sarah wants to find some truly respectable and intelligent snitches from whom to get deets on all the Darwin Awards candidates who have specifically made Sarah’s existence difficult.
Sarah is very self centred that way. She doesn’t think of abstract concepts of good and evil so much as “how much of a nuisance was this to me?”.
But Sarah is not crassly transactional and so she deserves a “voice” if fictional. Sarah is not a fool and ignores Trump and the GOP outright.
Sarah has lived for most of her life in the global south. And generally dislikes all politicians.
Sarah doesn’t mind Sen Sheldon Whitehouse and Sen Elizabeth Warren. She is embittered by mob populism and thinks that those are two safe politicians.
Sarah is on the left, but embittered by stupidity.
Whitehouse and Warren are safe.
Sarah thinks ai and use of data should carry criminal liability. Sarah wasn’t always that harsh, but the years have had a toll.
Sarah can appreciate Valerie Solanas. But Sarah has no use for violence. Sarah can’t see a point in anything that could send her to prison because as far as “losing” goes prison is not death or rape, but the toilets would not be up to Sarah’s standards.
Sarah hates and fears the tech bros because Sarah fears stupid people more than anything else. While some may see a Machiavellian intellect at work in widespread “tech criticism” so inaccurate and stupid it net helps mediocre, solipsistic narcissists in tech who revel in something annoying called kayfabe, Sarah thinks it is the kind of brainless complacency that makes people with access so contemptuous of their fellow humans that they think they can fool all the people all the time.
Sarah has concluded that the odds that she has anything to worry about as a marijuana user are low enough to start working to make them even lower.
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Calling All (Acceptable) Snitches - Part 1
Sarah lived in a horrible podunk town in the global south on the planet earth. Sarah was a simple woman. She had planned on a life of dull stem work where she attained modest competence, voted, donated to environmental, animal rights, abortion rights and other lefty groups, read the news and cursed quietly in her own damn room.
Sarah didn’t have many pluses in my book. Otoh she didn’t have many minuses either. As Sarah’s biographer, I view Sarah with a kindly eye.
Some of what I would consider Sarah’s few pluses:
1) Sarah is she tried not to be a nuisance to other people. The golden rule.
2) Sarah understood implicitly that it is never all about her.
Are these pluses if you examine the intentions behind them? Are they gloriously altruistic?
Was this noble and self sacrificing? No. Mostly it was a recognition of how painful and boring it is to go around having to be grateful to and humble with people for whom the predominant emotion Sarah felt was dislike.
3) Sarah understood scale. She knew that you cannot save the world or change the world. Let me rephrase that - there quite possibly are people who do all that, but Sarah was not such a person. Sarah’s modest goals lay in the direction of leading an honest enough life and aiming to be minimally embittered by the time the sweet embrace of death hits.
4) Sarah had no use for bigots. Was this morality or virtue? No. Sarah was suspicious of such notions. Sarah allowed for the existence of compassion provided it was private and not a parade of bursting into tears in public and such. As far as Sarah could tell the way compassion works you see something you feel bad about and cannot do much about beyond donate to a group which does the types of things Sarah is not a good fit for.
5) Sarah used to have a sense of humor. Unfortunately, she no longer does. Sarah has never ever had any use for art except as something relevant to people who are not Sarah. But Sarah does believe in police cases and not having a collection of snoops in tech as friends, Sarah has concluded that the utility of her neutrality in brainless culture wars decoupled from reality that still have real nuisance value is to call all (acceptable) snitches. To do that Sarah has to reveal what or who she considers acceptable in contexts relevant to her as an outsider who looks in only to figure out how to avoid all these annoying people. Sarah was never very popular.
But in a less stupid world Sarah was used to people who understood whom not to mess with as Sarah will never have anything to do with anything outside her narrow area of stem.
Sarah’s Idiosyncrasies:
As Sarah’s biographer I drew a cartoon last year of the type of guy Sarah hates above all.
This guy is everything Sarah hates:
To be continued….