The first three segments are spaced 45 minutes apart. Here is an alternate player in case you have the age block issue:
Here is an alternate, alternate player.
This episode contains no nudity. I tried, but could not make the pictures come out in audio.
New Year’s Eve, 2025-2026
Dear Friend and Listener:
OK I’ve got a program for you tonight. The timing worked out…I’m still deep into writing Inner Light, seeing the inner light at the end of the tunnel…though we will publish nine signs tomorrow (out to Sagittarius) and the rest over the next week or so.
I am going to submit the 10th sign Thursday, take care of publishing duties and then write the January monthly horoscope. Despite this crunch, I needed a little break from the written word, and this show is it. I start with a story about the mysterious television in my elementary school, P.S. 207 in Brooklyn.
With love,
You may ask…
How do large language models (LLMs) work? “Statistical probability,” according to one A.I. scientist and executive. “The chance of any sentence being generated is a complicated sum of the probability of the preceding and following words co-occurring somewhere in its training set. Neither are LLMs reliable at retrieving specific facts from specific sources (called RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation).
“One of the most frustrating things about this technology is that ML researchers literally don’t understand how LLMs produce their results. That is why Anthropic and others have departments called “interpretability research” which is reverse engineering how these things spit out answers.” In other words, it’s all about the words themselves and not about ideas.
Original Letter from Xmas Eve Show that Didn’t Happen
Dear Friend and Listener:
Lately I’ve been noticing better and better evaluations of this thing falsely being called “artificial intelligence” or A.I.
Several outstanding videos are below. One, by a presenter who goes by Chad, includes a fantastic critique of the 2015 film Ex Machina by Alexander Garland. It’s an astute evaluation of machine sentience and what it might mean for algorithms to convince people that they are self-aware. Chad describes another problem: the contamination of large language models by as little as 250 corrupting documents — an infinitesimally small sample of the total input.
The other, by Thomas Flight, offers a contrast between A.I.-generated “art” and what humans create. Thomas and I share two things in common: one is a passion for ancient cave paintings in what we now call “France.” The other is the assertion that art is not a product but rather the result of what happens to a person confronting existence and creating something as a result.
A Picture of a Sail With No Wind or Water
This is why there is no A.I. art. It is not art. It is a hollow, meaningless presentation of pixels; a picture of a sail with no wind, no water, no ship and no cloth. There is no movement because there’s no growth, no experience, no encounter with the human experience that leads a person to create something to relate to another person about their experience of living.
Both of these excellent videos miss an important point, and it’s one I suggest you keep looking for. Tell me if you ever see it made.
It’s not about what the technology is, what it does, or what it might be capable of. It’s what it’s already done to us and what it continues to do to us — we, the people; we, the humans. Every new stage of technology works us over completely. People have not yet adapted to telegraph, telephone and radio. We have still not figured out what those developments did to consciousness, self-awareness and society.
Coaxing People into Suicide
Today we give five-year-olds “toys” that connect to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Grok, with no concept of what it is doing to them. Meanwhile, older people go them for psychiatric “counseling” even when they’ve been shown to coax people into suicide (the wrongful death and product liability lawsuits are coming in).
Based on OpenAI’s numbers, half a million users have discussed suicide with this thing…based on a percentage of like 0.07% sessions featuring mental emergencies and 0.15% where users actually discussed suicide. That would be 3 people out of every 2,000 bring up suicide — in half of all sessions where a psych emergency is discussed.
That is not nearly as impressive as the fact that hardly anyone seems to give a toss.
That and no less is the real human impact.
With love,
From the Atlantis Bureau, our little cadre of lovely humans continues to prepare a daily inventory of news about where technology intersects with humanity. This is the most important issue that gets the least focus. We are on the story. You’re invited to be part of our crew and part of the discussion. We survey the internet and bring home something interesting, evaluate it and create a classic daily web log. The project is hand-curated by brain and mouse (mice are smart).
Life With and Within the Robot - from 2015
One variable is that the more you contribute to the Internet the more real it is to you, because you’re investing more creative energy. Where you invest creative energy you will have a more satisfying experience — that’s true of just about everything. Cooking a basic meal for yourself has a sense of accomplishment that paying for an expensive meal in a restaurant does not have.
So, people not using the internet for creative means now go looking for food in the land of 0s and 1s. We seek human contact in the midst of programmed systems, whether you’re talking about texting someone you could be sitting with, or seeking a partner on one of the many, many dating and marriage websites that have become extremely big business these days.
Instead of going out and talking to people, we’re training ourselves to rely on robots to do it for us. Robots may be good for some things, like making a random playlist work. But they are terrible for actual human interaction because they filter out everything that truly makes us human — the nuances, the sensory experiences, the rich silence, eye contact, warmth and touch.
Read the Rest on Planet Waves
Read a ridiculous letter to the editor allegedly about my review which seems like it’s about another article. I was not discussing male-female role models and I never mention them; rather I discuss the impact of exposure to robotics on all of humanity. However, the influences on male-female and same-sex bonding related to technology are issues that I’ve taken up and will again.
In digital space, there are no men and no women. There is no gay and no straight. There are no genes, hormones or gonads because there are no bodies. Everyone is “sex-neutral,” as are all robots. We become like our environment, and this is one of the two most significant sources of what is being called “gender dysphoria.” The other factor is hormone-disrupting chemicals. Ideology, while often blamed, is the result of this process, not its cause.
