The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Unique among technologies so far in human history, AI has the potential to make decisions for itself. Though this may invoke Terminator-style nightmares, autonomy isn’t necessarily bad: autonomous cars are likely to be much safer than ones driven by humans. But what happens when autonomy and hyper-evolution combine? When AI starts to refine itself and head off in new directions on its own? It doesn’t take much imagination to be concerned about that – and yet Suleyman believes the dangers are too often dismissed with the wave of a hand, particularly among the tech elite – a habit he calls pessimism aversion.”

— David Shariatmadari / “‘I hope I’m wrong’: the co-founder of DeepMind on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it” / The Guardian

“Those smiling faces one saw at lynchings a hundred years ago are back among us and are still smiling.”

— Charles Simic / The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

“King indeed had a dream. But it was not the American dream. King’s dream was rooted in the American Dream—it was what the quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness looked like for people enslaved and Jim Crowed, terrorized, traumatized, and stigmatized by American laws and American citizens. The litmus test for realizing King’s dream was neither a black face in the White House nor a black presence on Wall Street. Rather, the fulfillment of his dream was for all poor and working people to live lives of decency and dignity.”

— Cornell West / “Introduction,” The Radical King

“Dear Y, thank you for being such a good poetry friend. By finding friends

like you, I had inadvertently located the general coordinates of myself.”

— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory

“Why would I want to stick around for that?

Eventually the human race will reach its terminus. And afterward the scars it left will fade. Biodiversity will rebound. New species will be born, many of them every bit as remarkable as the ones that were lost. And meanwhile, the species of the past, the ones I’ve saved: there may be good opportunities to reintroduce them.

And how long will all this take?

For a complete recovery from ten thousand years of human civilization–about twelve million years.”

— Ned Bauman / Venemous Lumpsucker

“I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps.”

— Major Jackson / “On Disappearing”

“He memorably calls this ‘the plummeting cost of power’. If the printing press allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in every home, AI will democratise simply doing things. So, sure, that means getting a virtual assistant to set up a company for you, or using a swarm of builder bots to throw up an extension. Unfortunately, it also means engineering a run on a bank, or creating a deadly virus using a DNA synthesiser.”

— David Shariatmadari / “‘I hope I’m wrong’: the co-founder of DeepMind on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it” / The Guardian

What I’m Reading:

“Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses”

— Rage Against the Machine / “Killing in the Name”