@Blue Republic
funny though, how the "all knowing" AI gets some of the words wrong on the closed caption readout. And some are predicting it to be God, heh. Figures, huh?

Rollerball (1975)

@enhydra lutris
old buddy. I've been in a vacuous state of mind lately, LOL.

The material implication operator (if a then b), ⊃, used in formal logic has the interesting property that the operator is true whenever the premise (a) is false. Thus, statements of the form: IF demonstrably false premise THEN any old conclusion you can imagine are always true. This, BTW, may be the key to understanding Trumpspeak. It has occurred to me that this may explain a lot of ai hallucinations. It has also occurred to me that this may be something driving our fate since actual empiricism in this day and age and especially under ai is largely absent and waning daily.

"Empiricism? We don't need no stinkin' empiricism". So quoth AI, and Donald "The Great Hallucinator" Trump as well. "Trust my truth" is the way of AI future. "Trust the plan" is the way of the Donald.

Wow, judging by that word salad AI response, Google AI must have been partially programmed by Kamala Harris. Cackle, cackle, cackle.

I suspect it may be too late to right this ship, the best we can hope for is to bail some water to gain a little more time before it sinks.

your "open thread" tag and your "ai" tag are separated by a period instead of a space; accordingly this column does not show up in the "open threads" sidebar. Just sayin'.

The material implication operator (if a then b), ⊃, used in formal logic has the interesting property that the operator is true whenever the premise (a) is false. Thus, statements of the form: IF demonstrably false premise THEN any old conclusion you can imagine are always true. This, BTW, may be the key to understanding Trumpspeak. It has occurred to me that this may explain a lot of ai hallucinations. It has also occurred to me that this may be something driving our fate since actual empiricism in this day and age and especially under ai is largely absent and waning daily.

My question is whether not this can be weaponized against ai, perhaps by feeding variants of it to existing large language models as prompts. This form of "truth" is known as a

vacuous truth

insofar as it is only structurally true, but otherwise nonsensical, so I asked Google's ai if ai will treat such truths as true and it said no, When I assked why ai doesn't treat vacuous truths as true I got the following reply:

AI models do not treat a vacuous truth as "true" because they are trained to prioritize human common sense, real-world facts, and conversational context over rigid, formal mathematical logic.If an AI responded to your first question by simply saying, "Yes, that statement is true," it would be factually misleading and unhelpful to a human user.Why AI Chooses Pragmatics Over Formal LogicSemantic vs. Syntactic Processing: Formal logic only cares about the structure (syntax) of the argument. AI models care about the meaning (semantics) of the words. The AI knows that, in the real world, gold sinks and cats and dogs cannot interbreed.The Gricean Maxims of Conversation: AI models are fine-tuned using a principle in linguistics called the "Maxims of Conversation." One core rule is Quality (do not say what you believe to be false or lacks evidence) and another is Relation (be relevant). Telling a user that an absurd biological claim is "true" violates these conversational rules.Alignment and Safety (RLHF): AI models undergo Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Human trainers penalize AI systems if they generate confusing, misleading, or absurd answers. Trainers teach the AI that if a user asks a question containing false real-world premises, the AI should gently correct those premises rather than agreeing with a mathematical technicality.When Will an AI Treat It as True?An AI will switch to formal logic rules only if you explicitly change the context to mathematics, philosophy, or coding.For example, if you ask a coding AI to evaluate the expression if (2 + 2 == 5) { return true; }, the AI knows that because the premise is false, the code block will be skipped, which is the correct logical behavior.Would you like to see how programming languages handle these types of logical conditions, or do you want to explore how AI is trained to understand human context?Research Communities by Springer NatureIs ChatGPT Really Bullshit? Rethinking Language Models through the Lens of Logic and Mathematical RealityApr 30, 2025 — To evaluate whether a model is engaged in “bullshit,” we must first answer: what would truth-seeking even look like for a non-agen...The ConversationAn AI expert explains why it’s hard to give computers something you take for granted: Common senseAug 17, 2021 — Imagine you're having friends over for lunch and plan to order a pepperoni pizza. You recall Amy mentioning that Susie had stopped...Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Chinese Room Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2016 Edition)Mar 19, 2004 — As we have seen, Searle holds that the Chinese Room scenario shows that one cannot get semantics from syntax alone. In formal logi...Show all

so, there goes that, damnit. We are likely, as yu suspect, truly doomed.

be well and have a good one

@enhydra lutris

be well and have a good one

@Cassiodorus
I agree that the big money AI industry wont be here by 2029, probably earlier than that. But, the LLMs (Large Language Models) are here to stay, the Groks, the OpenAIs, Claude, DeepSeek, etc.

After the fall of the AI big money grift, and I think that's what it's been from the beginning, I can see the LLMs being profitable.

How?

It's very obvious that today's search engines are worthless, their basically set up for commerce. Slowly but surely people are being trained to use AI, the LLMs, it's not by accident that Google's AI results are always at he top of the results. Once people have become accustomed to using a LLM I can see the search engines disappearing, except for commerce, and the only alternative will be an AI agent. Then they'll slap a fee on the AI agent usage and you'll have no choice, other than a library (if their still around) to access the info/data.

That's just one way of earning a profit.

I have this suspicion that once the big money AI industry, data centers, etc, fail they'll be bailed out by good old Uncle Sugar. Could that be a way of reciprocating the campaign donations that got Trump elected? I don't know, I'm just guessing. It's a fail-safe.

Heh, Homo Economicus, I like that. It cuts straight to the human psyche, it's a rare specimen that doesn't belong to that species.

Some day wisdom will disappear.

Then there'll only be AI.

From Nolan Higdon:

Myth 5: AI Industry is Profitable
Rather than operating as a provably viable sector, the AI industry is more accurately characterized as a high-stakes speculative gamble driven by elite capital, one that shifts systemic risk onto the broader public. Demonstrating this economic fragility, OpenAI projects an extraordinary cumulative loss of $115 billion before anticipating profitability in 2029.

I like the disappearing part of the rant. But the idea that AI is going to last until 2029 and then magically become profitable is definitely not guaranteed. So they're going to suck down some huge percentage of US national resources (I think they've already got 6%) in an era in which constant warfare destroys US access to resource bases in other countries? Here's Daniel Davis and Alastair Crooke on that last topic.

My guess is that the US plan for AI comes from the same nutjob scene that inspired "The Nerd Reich." And it just simply isn't going to last long enough to be the primary antagonist in the planned demolition of the US.

By the way, I posted a diary here on this site about said planned demolition, and argued that the best response would be to engage the paleoconservative crowd that calls themselves "America First," without realizing that their slogan is being used against them with far more in the way of force than that which they themselves have. So far I've gotten two comments from other people, and eight tips in the jar.

I think it's good to go back to the founding notions, or axioms as Kees van der Pijl called them, of marginalist (which is to say, mainstream) economics. The history that this would get you into, should you choose it as your mission to investigate further, would be a 19th-century history, of people such as William Stanley Jevons, born 1835, died 1882. At any rate, primary among these assumptions is that people are "maximizers of utility," which is to say that we are all megalomaniacs in the making. Donald Trump, for instance, is a guy whose life has been spent pretending that he has infinite utility, and is constantly being manipulated by people who themselves think they have infinite utility. How are these people not Homo Economicus, creatures of money?

But those are the achievers. AI, you see, is the fulfillment of the original dream of the megalomania of money, because it will make all of our disabilites vanish, thus your list. Karl Marx:

The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has [In the manuscript: ‘is’. – Ed.] power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

@QMS
hope you have some *hair left after it's said and done.

*Don't pull it all out.

Please note I have gone dark. Puter issues. No email. Prolly be a couple weeks before I can
sort this mess out.

Q

@soryang
"Donald will go to Kim" says it all.

Thanks soryang, I'll get to the video later today, I have a full slate.

“북미정상회담 성사되려면 이번엔 트럼프가 평양으로 가야…김정은 체면 세워줄 필요” - 정세현,*

Jeong Se-hyun is a former Unification Minister of South Korea under two presidents from 2002-2004, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. He is a remarkable person and brilliant political observer. He served as an adviser to the Moon Jae-in administration. President Moon of course was the "pacemaker" opening doors in Pyongyang enabling Trump 1's abortive but attention getting overtures to Kim Jong-un in Singapore and Hanoi.

The US president is in deep political trouble recently and the US has lost more international stature under his "leadership," so he's looking for some world attention getting spectacular to compensate all the ill fortune he's invited in an electoral sense in face of the upcoming election. Jeong is of the opinion that it's entirely possible that Trump may go to Hanoi Pyongyang during the middle ten day period in October. I emphasize that all this is speculation. He's reading the tea leaves. I thought something similar and made note of it here a day or two ago, but Jeong in a South Korean MBC Radio current events interview (video on youtube) outlines a step by step procedure for normalizing relations with North Korea which is quite elaborate, requires professional diplomats (something Trump doesn't have) and a lot of planning and attention. Nevertheless he analyzes nuances in Trump's public statements, and those of Kim Yeo-jong, Kim's sister, the NK missile launches, etc., and in spite of the apparent rejection that appears on the face of things, how the doorway is still open, in his estimation.

I'm putting the video here. I don't expect present company here to read it, I want everyone to see Jeong because he is a historic figure in his own right, playing a role opening the door as it was to North Korea with 3 former South Korean presidents. I'll copy it and post it elsewhere for those who monitor such things. The youtube translation was poor, it took me about an hour to make sure I understood it. I kept switching the subtitles back and forth, and checking the dictionary.

He believes that Trump will go to Pyongyang and then to the relatively new Kalma Beach resort area near the Kalma peninsula in Wonsan on the East Sea. Kim will not go to Donald, Donald will go to Kim. Jeong believes in order to avoid the anti Trump, anti Kim, political headwinds, the arrangements could be made behind the scenes through a third party country intermediary, like Sweden or other amenable trustworthy player. There's likely not enough time to set up the institutional structures necessary for actually accomplishing the steps to reduce military tensions, set up contact missions in the respective countries, with a view towards normalizing relations and seeking a "peace regime" on the peninsula. For a first step, Trump could disclose some of these measures at the meeting in October, which would have to include some relaxation of the sanctions regime, which has lost it's impact anyway because of Russian and Chinese relations with North Korea. fwiw

I knew something was up Aug 12. If they need any help they should call Jeong.

Unfortunately I lost 99 percent of my history and political science library in the two floods. I felt a sense of loss, because I can't rely on memory, and went to those books' indexes often to fact check, and evaluate the observations of others.

edit- Pyongyang not Hanoi. Kim was humiliated publicly in front of the entire world by Trump at Hanoi, in Feb 2019, so he's not going anywhere to meet him. Trump has to come to him. * “For the North Korea-U.S. summit to happen, Trump must go to Pyongyang this time… Need to save face for Kim Jong-un” - Jeong Se-hyeon Western observer's usually say critically, Trump is increasing Kim's prestige.

@on the cusp
for watching. I really didn't expect anyone to watch it because of its length, but it is worth the time and effort.

watched the video of the medicine man lecturing students at a university.
Wise, proud, humorous, honest.
My genetic history says I am about 12% Native American. I hope I have 12% of those qualities, at least.

@Lookout
too much science fiction coming to fruition nowadays. What other horrors await us?

Only instead of Winston Smith rewriting history AI will.

I don't know who said this but I fear it is correct -
"1984 was written as a warning, not a road map" Sure seems like it is used as a plan.

Sorry for the day late visit, but thanks anyway for the OT!