It’s Disability Pride Month, so I thought I would take a look at books written by and for disabled people.
(more…)Tag: ethics
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Indigenous resistance to AI
I was researching and writing a post about Indigenous people in tech when I discovered an amazing company called Animikii and their resources about data sovereignty and resisting generative AI (thanks to this article, Celebrating Indigenous Tech).
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Ethical dilemmas around religious exemption
In a previous post, I looked at the possibility of being granted a religious exemption from using AI. This raises a possible dilemma: if people of conscience can get religious exemptions from harmful activities like war and other forms of causing suffering to others, how is that different from allowing bigots to opt out of registering same-sex marriages, or baking a cake for same-sex weddings, or allowing anti-vaxxers to opt out of getting vaccines?
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AI and consciousness
When I was a kid and artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking whether AI could become conscious seemed like an interesting philosophical problem, but mostly irrelevant. Why did the Butlerian Jihad destroy all “thinking machines”? Why did humans hunt the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The AI and robots of older science fiction stories are generally presented as benevolent but misunderstood, or on a different trajectory from humans (as is the case in Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, where the AI has retreated from earth and lives on Earth’s artificial satellites).
Now that something like AI has been created, in the form of machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), some people have already started to believe that it could become conscious, or that it is already conscious. Some people find this fascinating, others find it creepy.
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TBT: Thoughts on AI
A Throwback Thursday post.
First off, the thing that is currently being called AI is not really AI, depending on your definition of AI. It’s not conscious. It’s uncannily able to resemble consciousness because humans tend to attribute consciousness to things that science says are not conscious. I’m not even sure if it would pass the Turing Test, although that has been criticized as insufficient for detecting consciousness.
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No AI slop here
Yesterday I was asked a great question: whether the featured image of the post calling for anthology contributions is AI-generated. To the best of my knowledge, it is not. It’s a public domain image that I found on Pixabay, by searching for “steampunk robot” and filtering out Al-generated images. If you zoom in far enough all the little details make sense. I tweaked the colours in Canva to match the colour scheme of this website. The art is by Bildmonteur.
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