IIRC they swept because Hugo membership is open and they made a coordinated effort to join and sweep those categories. The idea of a coordinated anti-diversity effort pissed off a lot of people. For a few friends of mine who are lifelong sci-fi nerds, it was motivation to finally join Hugo so they could vote “no award”.
Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- who the Puppies mostly adored -- off the shortlist for Best Related Word (a Hugo category usually occupied by scholarly works of SF history and criticism) in favour of utter garbage like "Wisdom From My Internet" by Michael Z. Williamson because the Sad Puppy organizers were so out of touch with events outside their bubble that they weren't aware the biography had been published.
You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.
They swept for of the same reason the Chinese worldcon was a mess: we are used to operating much of society by an unwritten set of rules that assume everyone is pretty much a good actor. Sure, they may have an axe to grind, and might stretch things, but no one will deliberately find loopholes at scale to abuse. This worked for several millenia. Whole countries used to not have written constitutions, just unwritten agreements on how to behave.
But in the age of the internet, it's much easier to find communities that you can break this way. These systems are resilient to a few people who are bad actors, but totally fall apart if there are coordinated actions.
It's exactly what the Republican party is doing in the US now. And what Trump supporters plan to do if he's elected with Project 2025.
A lot of it is what you pay attention to. It's easy to get pinned to trends that looked optimistic when you were young. Those trends may falter and fail, but they're blades of grass in a field.
> A national lobbying group has retracted its startling estimate that “organized retail crime” was responsible for nearly half the $94.5 billion in store merchandise that disappeared in 2021, a figure that helped amplify claims that the United States was experiencing a nationwide wave of shoplifting.
> In fact, retail theft has been lower this year in most of the country than it was a few years ago, according to police data. Some exceptions, including New York City, exist. But in most major cities, shoplifting incidents have fallen 7 percent since 2019.
TAD has just about the right sound, too. I've found it's a useful tool for very specific tasks. I found TDD perfect for writing functions or modules with a wide variety of possible state-dependent outputs. While not strictly TDD, I've also found it helpful to sit down and frame a list of desired behaviors for a piece of code as expectations first, then go through the process of writing the code and tests in tandem. It's nice when you know exactly what you need to do, but not how to do it. It's much less helpful when you know the how but not exactly what.
It’s difficult to talk about this when the concept of time is so deeply embedded in our language. To a timeless being (or universe or whatever), there would be no concept of “first”. “Always existed” would only make sense to a time-bound creature, as would a chain of causation. Even to call it a timeless “being” is to use a word that is in some sense chained to time.
Simplifying greatly, but
1. LLMs “create” these cultural artifacts by recombining their inputs (text, images, etc), all of which are cultural artifacts created by humans
2. Humans also create cultural artifacts by recombining other cultural artifacts. The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective.
I’m not saying computers can’t have something like it, but it would be so fundamentally different as to be completely alien and unrelatable to humans, and thus (IMO) non-contiguous with human culture.
> The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective.
I wish we could keep this as an immutable truth, but give some sick girls and boys in Silicon Valley a few more years and they will make true creatures. No, I think that we should be honest to ourselves and stop searching for what make us special (other than our history, and being first, that is). It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us."
> It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us."
Thank you for solving the riddle!
What AI lacks compared to humans, is what humans share in common with all of life, a motivation for survival.
As the creators of AI we need to be mindfully aware that we are the moral agents, we are the ones with motives, desires and goals, and we are responsible for making ethical decisions.
My bicycle can go down a hill much faster than my feet, but it doesn’t go anywhere without me because it doesn’t have anywhere it wants to go. I’m the one providing directions.
