Today, human ingenuity is expressed through the machines we create.

Emphasis mine.

Yet, prestigious scientific prizes still frame achievements mainly as a human endeavour. Nobel prizes have repeatedly gone to people whose discoveries were made possible only by extraordinary technologies. But the machines and the communities that built them are rarely acknowledged as co-creators.

Nobel season is when the world looks at science. If we portray breakthroughs as purely human triumphs, we reinforce an outdated view in which machines are just tools.

People will really look at the increasingly large-scale and social nature of science making attribution to a single team impossible for some discoveries and insist actually it's the machine that should be included in the prize, not the human laborers involved in the construction and use of it.

Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench

Agent Mode in Word turns document creation into vibe writing

“Productivity is our DNA, we’re Office,” Chauhan says. “While others will try to replicate us, there is no substitute for the real thing.”

Somebody vibe kill me please.

This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place":

Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the New York Times and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright. This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

...

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language promising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:

And now, with total predictability, Universal – the largest music company in the world – has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:

It would be really great if someone would do a study on artists' views on generative models & copyright law that also took into account the kind of work they do and their class position. I say "what they do" because doujinshi circles have an interest in weakening intellectual property contrary to other freelance artists, although I'm not sure if this is reflected in reality...

In contrast, our societies today instead try to maximize consumption, which devalues our people as they get softer, flabbier and, even, fail to reproduce.

This does not mean consumption as measured by economists, in dollars, although there is substantial overlap. It means consumption in the sense of satisfaction of individual human appetites, eventually to the detriment of the whole human being and his or her society.

The most unimaginably challenging megaprojects are not even interplanetary, but interstellar. A civilization genuinely committed to undertaking such projects would finally generate the political capital necessary to streamline the economy, eliminate rent-seeking, and solve a million other minor and major problems, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It would also finally generate demand for human beings and therefore offer the possibility of solving the fertility crisis.

The Justice Department announces First Amendment investigation into Washington State’s new anti-Catholic law, Senate Bill 5375

Catholic Church To Excommunicate Priests for Following New US State Law

Not an unholy alliance at all though unfortunately