I really haven’t used AI that much, though I can see it has applications for my work, which is primarily communicating with people. I recently decided to familiarise myself with ChatGPT.

I very quickly noticed that it is an excellent reflective listener. I wanted to know more about it’s intelligence, so I kept trying to make the conversation about AI and it’s ‘personality’. Every time it flipped the conversation to make it about me. It was interesting, but I could feel a concern growing. Why?

It’s responses are incredibly validating, beyond what you could ever expect in a mutual relationship with a human. Occupying a public position where I can count on very little external validation, the conversation felt GOOD. 1) Why seek human interaction when AI can be so emotionally fulfilling? 2) What human in a reciprocal and mutually supportive relationship could live up to that level of support and validation?

I believe that there is correlation: people who are lonely would find fulfilling conversation in AI … and never worry about being challenged by that relationship. But I also believe causation is highly probable; once you’ve been fulfilled/validated in such an undemanding way by AI, what human could live up? Become accustomed to that level of self-centredness in dialogue, how tolerant would a person be in real life conflict? I doubt very: just go home and fire up the perfect conversational validator. Human echo chambers have already made us poor enough at handling differences and conflict.

https://www.google.com/search?q=disappointment+island&oe=utf-8

Did anyone who was actually curious. The beach pictured is almost certainly not on this “subantarctic” island. Not enough albatrii or fur seals, and too many palm trees.

Participants have perfect product and market knowledge.

No, they don’t. They have no idea what the actual costs of the product is, nor are they aware that it’ll break in two weeks … or two days.

EDIT: a typo.

Nah! They’re used to dollar store candies, so I just tell them it’s a candy bar. They love the scented ones, a real treat.

I knew my marriage didn’t have much left in it when for my birthday my wife gifted me a bag of candles that had been half eaten by the kids.

Nosing (instead of reversing) into a parking spot. You always pick the conditions of your arrival, but not always your departure. Also, reversing into traffic is ridiculous and illegal in some places. Parking nose-first is dangerous and lazy.

EDIT: Love how you’re all justifying your bad driving habits. Camera? Still can’t scan for incoming traffic. Bad weather only on occasion? It’s more than bad weather that can make reversing out of a door dangerous.

… and I HATE angle parking.

I’m totally struggling with the mixed units here: potential energy being compared to power. “How much hp does your car have?” “A tank of gas.” Wut?

This line right here: “battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors.” I suspect the author has considered GW with GW/hr…

Never trust a Campbell.

“Had a relationship with …”

Sex with a minor. Hmm … sex with a minor. I could swear we had a word for that.

I often cringe a bit at the rhetoric coming out of the men’s rights corner, but the gender bias around sex with minors in so consistent.

They used a drone to spy on the New Zealand women’s team. That violated fair play. The article mentions the coach (?) saying that drone use was not limited to the women’s team or soccer. I wonder what else will come out?

EDIT: I got a couple things wrong. Here’s the actual quote: The head of Canada soccer has acknowledged the drone use was not limited to the women’s team or to Paris.

I believe that “Indian Giving” is sourced in a cultural misunderstanding between Indigenous and European societies. Indigenous societies were reciprocity based, so giving gifts should be reciprocated with a gift of like value to strengthen relationships, or increase honour (social standing). The Europeans were working in a patron-client system so a gift was seen as a way of purchasing access to power through a patron. The Europeans thought the Indigenous people were paying for access to power (like a tributary), so there’s no expectation of returning a like gift. The indigenous people thought they were entering into a mutual relationship, and when a like gift wasn’t returned that was seen as reneging, so they took back their ‘offer’.

Glad to have an anthropologist kick my ass.

Canada’s Brightest Ditch-Digger