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Peter Lambri's avatar

This is the kind of analysis that is urgently required. However my I interest here is, erm, more fundamental, dare I say, and without minimising your newsletter today.

Simply, can liberal democracy as we have known it, survive a full implementation of AI potentialities? I think that means activities and consequences not yet know. This should be, in a way, exciting to think about, but I am not really excited. Why? Fear of the unknown or unknowable?

What I do know that, in essence, it’s all about control of one’s.life, community, country…

I’ll leave it there as this is not a political sociology seminar!

Jack Kessler's avatar

Certainly more fundamental questions! But I have no idea, which perhaps explains why I clung to the inflation/deflation angle…

Peter Lambri's avatar

And that’s absolutely fine. What I said is perhaps far too broad in scope.

Jack Kessler's avatar

I guess it's partly an age thing. I was pretty excited about the internet but I was also in school and excited by lots of things.

Peter Lambri's avatar

Jack, a late, light-hearted question: have you ever tried to trick ChatGPT with what you thought was a good trick question? Like which of four things is the odd one out?

I did recently and no chance. Below just for interest:

Which is the odd one out?:

Isthmus of Suez

Isthmus of Panama

Isthmus of Kra

Isthmus of Corinth

It answered correctly that this related to canals and that Kra doesn’t (yet) have one dissecting it.

Is it possible, even in theory?

Jack Kessler's avatar

Do LLMs not usually just make stuff up when they don’t know the answer? Much like… humans.

Peter Lambri's avatar

I reveal my absolute ignorance by asking this odd-one-out q in the first place. Sorry. But I think you’ve alerted me to a fundamental philosophical question about AI: declared ignorance is an impossibility. Am I right? So how to verify? Cue: where’s the vomit bag…..