Post #4747684 · Elektrine

2026-09-18 11:11 UTC

Let us start with two statements: “Fire will bring about our downfall.”“Fire will bring us a better future.” Both positions can be defended. Fire has the awkward habit of being useful and dangerous at the same time, sometimes in the same kitchen. Neither statement satisfies me until we distinguish between contexts, uses, risks, and benefits. I feel the same about sweeping claims for or against AI. Differentiation is not indecision. It is what becomes necessary once the slogan has finished speaking. Differentiation is also often interpreted as cowardice, a failure to take a position. In my view, however, it gives us more agency in shaping the future. 2/34

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@masek@infosec.exchange 2026-09-18 11:12

I grew up with the Turing Test as a benchmark. Now that systems increasingly satisfy versions of it, the goalposts seem to have acquired wheels, often rolling toward the position we already prefer. That exposes both the test’s limits and our shifting definition of intelligence. Alex Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories warns that our brains are addicted to stories about motives and intentions. My takeaway: the brain is often less a truth machine than a machine for confirming its current story. I do not believe humans possess a divine spark that machines could never share. Humans are fallible. We merely produce unusually confident error messages. Any AI we build will be fallible too, perhaps differently and at far greater scale. AI also predates LLMs. We have long used it in search, recommendations, navigation, translation, spam filters, and vision. LLMs made AI conversational and visible. They did not invent it. 3/34

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