🤖No, Your Robot Is Not A Sentient Being🤖
I have to start this newsy off by saying a massive thank you for your support so far on our extremely special partnership with KidsCan!
Your generosity has absolutely blown us away (I knew we had the best community, but this has cemented that), and the amount of Kiwi kids you’re helping to feed is phenomenal! In saying that, so many kids still need your help - we’re going to be working with KidsCan for the next few weeks to see how many Kiwi kids we can continue to help feed, so please donate what you can!
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH! 🥺🥺
Lil Luce note - you won’t be hearing from me tomorrow - it’s Aotearoa’s first-ever national holiday to celebrate Matariki and I plan on enjoying it! By enjoying it, I mean leaving the city to sit by a chilly lakeside for the weekend, hopefully with a clear view of Matariki herself - I hope you find the time to do something similar.
Over the weekend I HIGHLY encourage you to sink your teeth into any of the books on our huge reading list, and PLEASE let me know what you think. My heart and inbox are also open to your recs, always.
We’ve all also been updating our playlists (the new King Princess is SOOO good!!)
You must also catch up on Love Island and listen to all our debriefs so far!
And the last thing you should do while I'm away is donate to KidsCan's $15 for the 15% appeal - give up a coffee or two this weekend to help feed a child for a week!
Bel Chimes In: On Being A Woman At Work
No, Your Robot Is Not A Sentient Being
An earthquake in Afghanistan has killed over 1000 people
INPUT’s ‘Bad Tweet Hall of Fame’
Have some horoscopes!
How do you dry your hands?
Bel Chimes In: On Being A Woman At Work
This section is written by my crush, the refreshing-as-a-house-chardonnay-on-a-steamy-day, Bel Hawkins. You should check out more of her beautiful words here.
Wow wow wow, last week unleashed a whole lot of glass ceiling stories that both made me feel bleak and hopeful! Bleak because being 'Glass Ceilinged' is not an experience exclusive to just my female friends and I, and hopeful that things feel like they're changing.
After a quick goss with Luce, we decided to turn this into a small series called ‘Women At Work’. I must caveat that I work for the best place now and feel grateful for it every day! And that these are based on true stories with small embellishments to make you lol. I tell you this because good places are out there and each and every one of you deserves to work somewhere great. Because you’re a SYSCA bestie, of course. NOW, WHERE WERE WE...
INTERNAL. MEETING ROOM. A COMPANY WITH AN EDGY NAME THAT’S EITHER A NOUN OR AN ADJECTIVE.
Men gather, mostly all wearing black t-shirts under blazers and statement sneakers. One woman is present, carrying a laptop and reams of paper. A drinks trolley nurses cut-glass tumblers and an array of bottles of whiskey in the corner. A cardboard deer’s head hangs on the wall, and a neon sign blazes over the meeting table reading ‘MAKE DOPE SHIT’ in loopy handwriting, casting yellow light. It's late. Everyone's starting to pack up.
Boss Man: So, the pitch is at 9am tomorrow. I know we’ve all been pulling a few late nights. But let me just say, this work is fucking dope!
Working Woman: [internal monologue] I’m so tired I feel like a melted candle. I literally feel grey inside. Last night I got home from work so late I ate a quarter of a cucumber on my bedroom floor for dinner. I wish I had washed my hair this morning.
Boss Man: So if you could proofread the deck tonight and print out 12 copies – not double-sided, they'll think we're poor — get them bound and organise Ubers for us to all get through the city in peak hour traffic from our respective houses to the client's office in time for a morning coffee that'd be great.
Working Woman: Um, it's 9.45. PM.
Man: [phone ringing, putting up his hand and mouthing 'SORRY' and fake-grimacing]. Gigi! Babe, how are you! No, leaving now. Is the restaurant busy?
The Working Woman looks around the room and notices all the other men have pulled on their zippy bomber jackets and left the building. Printouts, pens, empty glasses and vape cartridges litter the meeting room table. She is suddenly reminded of Andy Sachs in the film Devil Wears Prada.
Man: [puts his hand to his phone and speaks directly to Working Woman, who is by now the only one left. He himself is halfway out the door] Hey — quickly before I go — could you make sure you dress quite edgy tomorrow? Like really cool. Like not what you’re wearing right now — something really sick that says — wow!
[talking back into his phone] No no — I'm coming! Be there in 10. Order me a negroni while you wait.
He winks and walks out the door. Wow. Life is a movie, she thinks. Years later, something good will happen. Something so unforeseeably great and she will think back to that very moment and truly believe: success is the best revenge.
No, Your Robot Is Not A Sentient Being
In the latest instalment of: “are robots taking over the world?” someone from Google legit reckons that one of their AI chatbots (LaMDA) is sentient (able to perceive or feel things.)
LaMDA, for anyone wondering, is a “language model that indiscriminately ingests hundreds of gigabytes of text from the Internet (what could go wrong?), and in doing so, learns to respond to written prompts with human-like speech."
The thing is, a former Google engineer - Blake Lemoine - has published an “interview” he conducted with LaMDA, where he claims it shows that the AI has become sentient. The interview shows LaMDA saying (it feels weird to even use the word ‘saying’) things like:
Here’s the full interview, if you dare to read it (it creeped me out a bit.)
Really chill. Super chill and normal things for a robot to be saying.
Blake Lemoine - the dude who published the interview, says that LaMDA also wants to be considered an ‘employee’ rather than ‘property’ of Google, and Lemonie has even hired a lawyer to represent LaMDA.
Lemoine has since been placed on administrative leave (based on the fact that he broke the company’s confidentiality policy), but still maintains that LaMDA is sentient.
The big question is obviously whether this AI can feel things or not. The big answer is no, it can’t… for now.
Here’s what Google has said about it:
“Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our A.I. Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. Some in the broader A.I. community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general A.I., but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient.
Google also says that “hundreds of its researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA, an internal tool, and reached a different conclusion than Mr. Lemoine did. Most A.I. experts believe the industry is a very long way from computing sentience.”
The thing is, as humans we love to give extra meaning to things. Myths, legends, blind items, conspiracy theories - we often instil meaning when there is none, either to make things more interesting or because we genuinely believe it. That’s what I think has happened here.
I want to leave you with this quote from Jacqueline Nesi in her newsy ‘Techno Sapiens’ which speaks to my above point:
“We are primed to see humans in machines. We know from psychology research that we often anthropomorphize, or attribute human qualities to nonhuman objects (remember that grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary’s face on it?). When it comes to words, we tend toward a psychological bias called pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity (seriously). That is, the tendency to ascribe deep meaning (i.e., profundity) to vague, but meaningless, statements.”
She also talks about the irony that by all of us talking about LaMDA we are ‘feeding the beast:
“Faced with an imminent dystopian future in which the computers are human, we turned back to our screens. Churning out words soon to be ingested by LaMDA. Feeding the beast. As we sunk deeper into our endless streams of content, ascribing great profundity to our tweets and retweets and comments, we feared that the machines would soon take over. But perhaps they already have.”
You can listen to Squish and I talk way more about this on The Shit Show today!
Did I mention you're getting an early shit show ep this week?
No, Your Robot Is Not A Sentient Being - The Shit Show | Podcast on Spotify — open.spotify.com
On today's agenda: Why the HELL is everything so expensive right now? What happens if my AI chatbot starts talking to me like it's a... human? Why have we already started leaving junk on Mars? What good thing has Dolly Parton done now? All of this and more in this week's episode!
An earthquake in Afghanistan has killed over 1000 people
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake hit eastern Afghanistan yesterday, killing over 1000 people and injuring over 1500. The Taliban - who control Afghanistan - have appealed for international help, as significant damage has been cause to homes & crucial infrastructure, and it's difficult to get rescue teams to some of the remote areas that've been affected. More on this story here.
👀Let me put you onto a new newsy 👀
If you’re into sports but don’t have time to catch up on all the headlines, let the Gist do it for you. The Gist is a women-led (& women written) newsletter that comes out 4 x a week - it’s kinda like the sports version of SYSCA!! If this sounds like something you’d be into, you should defs sign up here!!
📚Shit You Should Read About📚
Every ✨SYSCA Supporter✨ gets access to our bumper book list as soon as you sign up! It's all the books we loved, hated, and the books that changed us.
🎶SYSCA Playlists🎶
If you’re a monthly or annual ✨SYSCA Supporter✨ then we are opening up our souls to you and gifting you some 🎶playlists🎶
Become a supporter to get access to all of these perks🥺
INPUT’s ‘Bad Tweet Hall of Fame’
Yesterday I found INPUT’s Bad Tweet Hall of Fame. Obviously, ‘bad’ is subjective, but I think most of you will agree that… these are bad. Here’s an honourable mention:
Here, have some horoscopes!
Here u go!
How does you prefer to dry your hands?
76% like paper/ hand towels
15% like electric hand dryers
9% just shake em off
Help to feed a Kiwi kid for a week, for only $15! (Our partnership with KidsCan)
No, Your Robot Is Not A Sentient Being (The Shit Show)
Emma Thompson Is Addressing the Orgasm Gap Head-on (The Cut)Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas - where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers - will be demolished (BBC)
Microsoft, Meta, and others are founding a metaverse open standards group (The Verge)
Cancelled at 17 (The Cut)
Lizzo's Quick FIx, & Explaining DALL-E-2 (Culture Vulture)
SYSCA playlist (✨Supporters only✨)
Our HUGE SYSCA reading list! (✨Supporters only✨)
