All posts tagged: Horrified

Chinese Workers Horrified as Bosses Direct Them to Train Their AI Replacements

Chinese Workers Horrified as Bosses Direct Them to Train Their AI Replacements

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech For years, a buzzy Silicon Valley startup called Mercor has been hiring an army of desperate job-seekers — often including educated and underemployed experts — to train AI models to replace them in the workforce. It’s a grim facet of an AI-dominated future in which the business world continues to push for automation, hoping to wean itself off relying on pesky and expensive human labor once and for all. As MIT Tech Review reports, an eerily similar situation is now playing out in China. Workers told the publication that their bosses are directing them to painstakingly document their workflows with the eventual goal of automating specific tasks using AI agents, such as OpenClaw, an open-source piece of software that has become immensely popular in the country. Chinese employees already got an early glimpse of what an AI agent-led future could look like. A GitHub project called Colleague Skill, which was originally set up as a joke, went viral …

A Furious Stranger Called Out My Son In An Airport Bathroom. What Happened Next Horrified Me.

A Furious Stranger Called Out My Son In An Airport Bathroom. What Happened Next Horrified Me.

Published by Sam Flores

As my daughter and I stepped out of our respective stalls in the airport bathroom, I saw my son standing in the corner waiting for us, having come in after he had used the men’s room next door. He has a habit of eloping at airports, so I was relieved to see him. “Love,” I told him. “Thank you for coming in and waiting for us.” The three of us moved to the sink to wash our hands. That’s when things got weird. My son has high-functioning autism, what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome, now called autism spectrum disorder, level 1 support. When people look at him, they notice nothing different. When they hear him speak, they are often impressed at his verbal comprehension and articulation (indeed, his IQ is very high in this area). His challenges lay in perseverations (obsessions or ruminations), recognising social cues, and having spatial and environmental awareness. He received his diagnosis at age 7, in March 2020, days before the COVID shutdowns. Suddenly every resource in our small town …

OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched “Insane” Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other

OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched “Insane” Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech OpenAI leaders horrified staffers after proposing an “insane” plan to enrich the company by pitting world governments against each other. This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from The New Yorker’s sweeping new investigation into CEO Sam Altman, which documents his alarming pattern of lying and manipulating to build his AI empire, a behavior that some insiders likened to that of an actual “sociopath.” Altman’s second-in-command Greg Brockman features heavily. In 2017, according to the reporting, he hatched a geopolitical scheme which internally came to be known as the “countries plan.” Unimpressed by his ethics adviser’s suggestion to avoid a nuclear-like arms race by forming an international body to cooperate on AI safety, Brockman openly mused about playing world powers like China and Russia against each other, such as by starting a bidding war for its tech. According to the ethics adviser, Page Hedley, Brockman’s logic seemed to be, “It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?” “The premise, …

60 New Yorkers Revealed How Much They Make A Year And People Are Horrified

60 New Yorkers Revealed How Much They Make A Year And People Are Horrified

Published by Jenni Sidey

For the first time in about 20 years, the editors of New York Magazine surveyed a chunk of New Yorkers to find out what kind of work they do and how much they make doing it. While the results were disappointing, they certainly weren’t surprising. The salaries ran the gamut from a newsstand owner barely getting by on $4,000 a year to a consultant who made $17 million last year through a combination of actual consulting work and investments. These numbers prove that not everyone in New York is hurting, but one of the most unaffordable cities to live in is definitely taking a toll on many, especially those who are doing some of the most important work. Many New Yorkers’ incomes sound pretty great on paper, but they aren’t enough for where they live. Data from the World Population Review showed that New York has the second-highest cost of living in the United States. For a typical family of four, the living wage is a whopping $110,255. For an average American family, it’s just …

‘At first I was horrified by it!’: the Royal Ballet brings back 60s cult classic Pierrot Lunaire | Dance

‘At first I was horrified by it!’: the Royal Ballet brings back 60s cult classic Pierrot Lunaire | Dance

Published by Sam Flores

Marcelino Sambé is hanging upside down from a scaffold tower. “It’s scary,” he tells me. Nevertheless he swings, he swoons, he balances with limbs entwined around the narrow bars, reaching up to an imagined starry sky (it’s actually the high ceiling of a Royal Ballet rehearsal studio in Covent Garden). This is the iconic opening of the ballet Pierrot Lunaire, where a childlike clown is wonderstruck by the sight of the moon. Eccentric, challenging … Bob Powell (left) and Glen Tetley perform in Tetley’s ballet in 1962. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images Made in 1962 by the US choreographer Glen Tetley – whose centenary is celebrated this year – Pierrot Lunaire is a distinctive, eccentric, challenging work, set to Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal song cycle of the same name. It’s based on poems by Albert Giraud, delivered in sprechstimme, a vocal style halfway between song and speech that sounds sometimes like singsong nursery rhymes, elsewhere like a ghostly aural apparition. The ballet is not regularly performed – the last time the Royal Ballet danced it was 20 …

Scientist Horrified as ChatGPT Deletes All His “Research”

Scientist Horrified as ChatGPT Deletes All His “Research”

Published by José Betancourt

ChatGPT may be an excellent tool in case your strongly-worded email to your landlord about that ceiling leak needs a second pair of eyes. It also excels at coming up with a rough first draft for non-mission-critical writing, allowing you to carefully pick it apart and refine it. But like all of its competitors, ChatGPT is plagued by plenty of well-documented shortcomings as well, from rampant hallucinations to a sycophantic tone that can easily lull users into gravely mistaken beliefs. In other words, it’s not exactly a tool anybody should rely on to get important work done — and that’s a lesson University of Cologne professor of plant sciences Marcel Bucher learned the hard way. In a column for Nature, Bucher admitted he’d “lost” two years’ worth of “carefully structured academic work” — including grant applications, publication revisions, lectures, and exams — after turning off ChatGPT’s “data consent” option. He disabled the feature because he “wanted to see whether I would still have access to all of the model’s functions if I did not provide …