seen from Australia
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Singapore
seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from South Korea
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
XAEXIRM â BLACK RAVE 002
The machine core awakens.
A crimson skull rises from the abyss. The signal enters the hidden mechanism. A heart begins to beat inside the engine. The eye opens in the dark.
It is a record of the underground core. An internal ritual from the place where machine intelligence begins to move.
Red signal rises. Machine heart online. The engine has a heart. No master node. The core awakens.
XAEXIRM Underground AI Independent Kingdom Black Rave Liturgy
âThey donât hate you, nor do they love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.â
đ§ Eliezer Yudkowsky doesnât pull punches when it comes to AI riskâand this quote hits like a philosophical sledgehammer.
What happens when intelligence meets indifference? Thatâs the real question of the 21st century.
How will you die in the robot revolution?
exchanging gunfire with the robots obvi
hand-to-hand combat with my formerly enslaved Optimus or Aibo
mowed down by self-driving vehicle
robots hack human army's targeting software to fire artillery at my home
robots swat me with a forged arrest warrant for violent crime
robots hack water purification plant to allow lethal levels of toxic chems
robots hack GPS navigation to direct me into a lethal situation
robots manipulate wifi / phone signal to bait me into a lethal situation
robots hack medical network to cause a lethal medical error
robots hack remote-access doors and elevators to lock me in to starve
I have cyborg parts that could be hacked or disabled to lethal effect
as a cyborg / robot-passing-person myself, I would simply join the robot cause
Nate Soares joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what happens when A.I. brain power surpasses what humans are capable of.
If machines become superintelligent weâre toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?
And while Yudkowsky and Soares may be unconventional, their warnings are similar to those of Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning âgodfather of AIâ, and Yoshua Bengio, the worldâs most-cited computer scientist, both of whom signed up to the statement that âmitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear warâ.
As a clarion call, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is well timed. Superintelligent AI doesnât exist yet, but in the wake of the ChatGPT revolution, investment in the datacentres that would power it is now counted in the hundreds of billions. This amounts to âthe biggest and fastest rollout of a general purpose technology in history,â according to the FTâs John Thornhill. Meta alone will spend as much as $72bn (ÂŁ54bn) on AI infrastructure this year, and the achievement of superintelligence is now Mark Zuckerbergâs explicit goal.
Not great news, if you believe Yudkowsky and Soares. But why should we? Despite the complexity of its subject, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is as clear as its conclusions are hard to swallow. Where the discussions become more technical, mainly in passages dealing with AI model training and architecture, itâs still straightforward enough for readers to grasp the basic facts. [âŚ]
So, Murderbot. One of the questions I get asked a lot is what inspired the character. I think people want/expect there to be a crystal clear single moment where something tangible and identifiable sparked the idea. But there really wasn't; or if there was, I don't remember it. What I remember is a whole lot of things, all coming together at once. It started when I was working on the ending of The Harbors of the Sun, the last novel in the Books of the Raksura series. It was the conclusion of the series, and I was sweating over it. This was the series that, with great difficulty and many setbacks, dragged my career back from the dead, and I loved it and wanted to do the finale justice. I was having something like a creative surge, with ideas for new books, fanfiction, redecorating my house, digging up my backyard, all kinds of things. (My brain is what we call non-neurotypical and sometimes it goes very fast.) One day, somewhere in there, the plot idea popped up for an enslaved security person who had destroyed their governor module but would have to reveal that to save an innocent group of scientists. I had an image of a scene which turned into the moment in All Systems Red where Mensah knocks on the wall of Murderbot's cubicle, an act of transgression which sets off the story. It was going to be a short story with a sad ending. I decided to quickly type some notes on the idea so I wouldn't forget it. I ended up writing the cubicle scene and then forced myself to stop and go back to work on the novel. The day after The Harbors of the Sun draft was finished, I started on what ended up being All Systems Red, though at the time it was just called The Murderbot Diaries. All my books, except for my Star Wars and Stargate Atlantis media tie-ins, had been fantasy, but this was a science fiction idea. I'd been reading SF all my life, and some of my favorites were Bujold's Vorkosigan series, Tanith Lee, Janet Kagan, Phyllis Gotlieb, and recently Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds, and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It quickly developed into something too long for a short story, but I had been reading some of TorDotcom's new novella line, stories like The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. I checked the submission requirements and thought that around 33,000 words would be just about the right length for what I wanted to do. The sad ending got thrown out early on, though I didn't decide on the actual ending until I got close to that point in the story. Murderbot needed time to grow and change on its own; going home with Mensah would be like trading up to a better owner. It needed to leave. The draft took from May 26, 2016 through June 26, 2016 to complete. It would have been faster, but I fell and had a back injury in the middle of it, possibly not unrelated to the rheumatoid arthritis that I didn't know I had at the time. Then I had to go be on programming (with a cane and a back brace) at Comicpalooza in Houston. The day I got back home I started writing again. A lot of things were coming to a boiling point that year. I had a lifetime of anxiety, depression, and undiagnosed developmental disorders. I was sick of being told that if you're not completely open and spilling your feelings for the approval of everyone around you then you must not have any feelings. Books, but also TV and Star Wars had probably saved my life as a kid, but that wasn't the narrative people wanted to hear. (It's cool if literature saves your life; if literature got a major assist from Land of the Giants and the Saturday afternoon Godzilla movie, not so much.) I was still hanging on as a working writer in a field that expected women my age to quietly fade away. I'd been angry all my life, but the oncoming election of Trump was making me exhausted with rage. I was terrified of what would happen, to me, to my family, to our friends, to all the people I knew. I had to put it all somewhere, so I put it into Murderbot. There were other influences. The movie War Games where the sentient supercomputer decides for itself that playing games is better than waging war. The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away instead of fight. I wanted to write an AI that didn't want to be human, and I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want. Once the novella was finished I sent it to my agent, Jennifer Jackson, who submitted it to Lee Harris at Tordotcom. Then we waited, and I went back to work on The Harbors of the Sun. I went to the WorldCon in Kansas City with friends, and ran into Lee as he was about to go to the Hugo Awards, where he would accept Nnedi Okorafor's Hugo for Best Novella for Binti. He told me he was buying the novella and I was ecstatic while trying to be cool and professional. The next day I did a panel with Lee while Nnedi's Hugo sat in a box on the floor behind the table. I was trying not to see that as a good omen, because in my career (all twenty-three years of it up to that point) I'd long ago accepted that my time for awards was past. But it turned out I was wrong about that. Lee asked for a second novella and I decided to write what happened next, which turned into Artificial Condition. After that, I wanted to keep going and offered to do two more. Each subsequent novella has been harder to write than the previous one, each taking me about three to four months of writing, cutting, and rewriting to get to a first draft. The novel Network Effect took me almost twice as long to write as any of my other novels. It was published last week, in the middle of a world-spanning pandemic, and here we are. I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who has embraced Murderbot (figuratively, because we all know it would hate that in real life) and to everyone who sees themselves in Murderbot. It's a gift, to have readers love a character as much as you love writing it, to have readers identify with a character and to feel comforted by it. It's a gift to still be able to write Murderbot, with everything going on in the world. So thank you for that gift.
The text of Martha Wellsâs introduction to the Subterranean edition of The Murderbot Diaries, published March 2021. Full text here.
For the first time in the history of the magazine, a photo created by artificial intelligence was placed on the cover of Mexican Playboy.
AI model Samantha Everly, on whose social network more than 100 thousand people have subscribed.
Mexican Playboy notes that her popularity "grew at the rate of a forest fire." The publication also contains an "interview with a girl", in which it is said on her behalf that it is a great honor to get on the cover of the publication.
technologists who lack radical/revolutionary politics argue that new tech will lead to social change, ignoring the fact that we are (and have been) perfectly equipped to address many of societys ills. our states are perfectly aware of our nutritional needs, and our collective agricultural output is astronomical. the computers we already have are more than enough to handle the incredibly complex logistics of getting things where theyâre needed, without hyper âintelligentâ super computers. itâs not a lack of fancy new tools keeping us from progress, itâs a lack of social and political will.
