Sad to hear of the death of Mungo MacCallum - a giant of the craft. A razor sharp mind till the end and a sparkling wit. I loved him in The Nation Review way back when but he was just as good in recent times in @THEMONTHLY and the @SatPaper cryptic. Vale Mungo
Everyone has the chance to vote for our plan to rebuild Qld ✊ To vote for thousands of jobs, free education, healthcare & public transport & 100,000 social homes - all funded by making mining corporations, banks & developers pay their fair share in tax: greens.org.au/qld/team
I arrived in Australia speaking precisely 11 words of English. I now have a PhD in Australian history, which is how I know that language-based exclusion was a primary mechanism of the White Australia Policy. twitter.com/alantudgemp/st…
English is our national language and is critical to getting a job, fully participating in our democracy and for social cohesion. From late 2021, new partner visa applicants will need to demonstrate they have made reasonable efforts to learn English. minister.homeaffairs.gov.au/alantudge/Page…
If a single grain of rice is worth about $58,000 (the median salary), how much rice do you think Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer will have after this government’s new tax cuts? I decided to find out.
Dear @abcnews and @australian. When a Court hands down a decision and makes a statement it is not an "accusation" it is a finding. So this headline should be "Judge finds Minister engaged in criminal conduct". No need for the hand-wringing apologetic apostrophes either.
It feels strange to say that you miss someone that you've never met, but the internet is a strange place. When it constantly provides updates, articles and books from someone like David Graeber, it follows that there's a huge sense of loss now that he is no longer with us.
Out of all of his amazing writing, the article that has stuck most with me is a piece he wrote for The Baffler. It is a beautiful and profound discussion on what may be the origins of consciousness. I thought of it again today after reading an article in The Guardian, which was written by a piece of software called GPT-3.
These two articles might not seem related at first glance, but I would still have loved to have heard David's thoughts on the latter. What can we say about GPT-3 based on the writing it's currently able to produce? If it keeps getting better, will we eventually say that it's "self aware"? It feels like the same "jump" to consciousness that David was talking about.
What if there are no jumps? Emergence is a continuum. AI is the result of yet another layer of complex social behaviours, namely the work of the software developers who built it combined with the work of countless people who provided data for it by openly sharing on the internet. Do we dare ask GPT-3 how it knows that it knows? That question itself may be the proof that Zhuangzi was alluding to at the end of David's piece.
My new year's resolution is to read and respond to comments on my blog. Getting a bit hard to respond to every question on twitter, and I think this might be bit more manageable. conscienceandconsciousness.com
https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff/status/1350212744075743238
https://twitter.com/PaulBongiorno/status/1336638604546719745
https://twitter.com/ddoniolvalcroze/status/1329243556385419265
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https://twitter.com/panoparker/status/1321927976318099456
https://twitter.com/asobocinska/status/1314368441545973760
https://twitter.com/zacchiro/status/1309520398317387780
https://twitter.com/BrianMitchellMP/status/1308745427127156736
What is consciousness? and missing David Graeber
Out of all of his amazing writing, the article that has stuck most with me is a piece he wrote for The Baffler. It is a beautiful and profound discussion on what may be the origins of consciousness. I thought of it again today after reading an article in The Guardian, which was written by a piece of software called GPT-3.
These two articles might not seem related at first glance, but I would still have loved to have heard David's thoughts on the latter. What can we say about GPT-3 based on the writing it's currently able to produce? If it keeps getting better, will we eventually say that it's "self aware"? It feels like the same "jump" to consciousness that David was talking about.
What if there are no jumps? Emergence is a continuum. AI is the result of yet another layer of complex social behaviours, namely the work of the software developers who built it combined with the work of countless people who provided data for it by openly sharing on the internet. Do we dare ask GPT-3 how it knows that it knows? That question itself may be the proof that Zhuangzi was alluding to at the end of David's piece.