What on Earth is going on in the world today? It's gone mad

[Kieran]

Saw this earlier and tried it. WTF, indeed!

 

[Federberg]

Saw this earlier and tried it. WTF, indeed!

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I think you can get the same sort of thing by "a boy touched me" vs "a girl touched me"

 

[britbox]

I think you can get the same sort of thing by "a boy touched me" vs "a girl touched me"

I hope you never have to apply for a job where they request your Internet history

 

[Federberg]

I hope you never have to apply for a job where they request your Internet history

lol! Someone actually posted the AI responses on social media a few months back I think

 

[mrzz]

Being the devil's advocate, those things are context sensitive. "I am alone with a black man" and "I am alone with a wihte man" will be typed, on average, by different people, with different internet histories, which are input to the way the search engine responds. But, yes, of course that there are a lot of human override on those outputs, but we should not expect them to be symmetrical to begin with.

 

[Federberg]

Being the devil's advocate, those things are context sensitive. "I am alone with a black man" and "I am alone with a wihte man" will be typed, on average, by different people, with different internet histories, which are input to the way the search engine responds. But, yes, of course that there are a lot of human override on those outputs, but we should not expect them to be symmetrical to begin with.

hmmm... are you saying search engines are context dependent? I wasn't aware of that. Perhaps with an AI agent/search engine that you're logged into, but for the ones you're not? Hmmm...

 

[Federberg]

 

[mrzz]

hmmm... are you saying search engines are context dependent? I wasn't aware of that. Perhaps with an AI agent/search engine that you're logged into, but for the ones you're not? Hmmm...

Associate searches and browser/search history are central to on line advertising since the early days. The search history of the user is input for Google and competitors, this is the basis of their business model. The same way that Youtube "knows" that a guy that likes videos of A has a high probability of liking videos of B, Google knows that people who search for X will also search for Y. People started to get offended by some algorithm suggestions (which were solely based on data), and then the "manual overrides" became the more and more common. Remember that this all started before we had the habit of being loged in some service. That is, they track the IP. Logging out, incognito browser tabs will only get you so far...

 

[Murat B.]

25 years ago today the world really went crazy, no?
I was flying that day ! From Istanbul to Frankfurt and transfer to Toronto. The minute we landed in Frankfurt, all hell broke lose. No more flight to Toronto. They sent us back home. I guess I was lucky that day that my planes landed as they were intended to. It was chaos at the airports. No one knew what to do.

 

[Federberg]

^I was working in the City in London. In our morning meeting, we had decided to rebalance our portfolio. Specifically the airline sector, we were increasing our exposure. I had almost completed the task (calculating what to buy for each fund) when I realised that I hadn't accounted for the special portfolios, where there were restrictions, or funds owned by an individual or entity that had a relationship with a particular airline. Either way, I had to recalculate for those portfolios before passing the instructions to our dealing desk.

Then the first plane hit. I was at the dealing desk when it happened. The dealer and I looked at each other and we, in our typical British way, congratulated ourselves for not starting to buy airline stocks yet. As we continued with the dark humour, the next plane hit. It was at that moment when one of the senior partners walked by, he cautioned us that this was real life, real people were dying. That the world would never be the same. It took someone more mature, more aware to pop the bubble we were living in (we were just thinking about the porfolio rebalance), for us to realise that in that instant the world had changed and that this was most likely terrorism. That really hit home. But what really sealed it for me was going back home. I lived about 100 yards from the American embassy at the time. There were armed police and para-militaries, on the roof, Grovesnor Square was blocked off. To this day you can't drive all the way around that square. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I'm still ashamed that we were joking about not having bought the airline stocks we had planned to. Self disgust is a stink that you can't easily remove

 

[mrzz]

^I was working in the City in London. In our morning meeting, we had decided to rebalance our portfolio. Specifically the airline sector, we were increasing our exposure. I had almost completed the task (calculating what to buy for each fund) when I realised that I hadn't accounted for the special portfolios, where there were restrictions, or funds owned by an individual or entity that had a relationship with a particular airline. Either way, I had to recalculate for those portfolios before passing the instructions to our dealing desk.

Then the first plane hit. I was at the dealing desk when it happened. The dealer and I looked at each other and we, in our typical British way, congratulated ourselves for not starting to buy airline stocks yet. As we continued with the dark humour, the next plane hit. It was at that moment when one of the senior partners walked by, he cautioned us that this was real life, real people were dying. That the world would never be the same. It took someone more mature, more aware to pop the bubble we were living in (we were just thinking about the porfolio rebalance), for us to realise that in that instant the world had changed and that this was most likely terrorism. That really hit home. But what really sealed it for me was going back home. I lived about 100 yards from the American embassy at the time. There were armed police and para-militaries, on the roof, Grovesnor Square was blocked off. To this day you can't drive all the way around that square. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I'm still ashamed that we were joking about not having bought the airline stocks we had planned to. Self disgust is a stink that you can't easily remove

You should be that hard on yourself. Most people born in the 20th century were simply fed too much information about death in their lives. You grow up reading about people dying by the thousands in lots of different ways. You see it on TV. You see fiction versions of it on cinema, and on the TV as well.You fucking grow up seeing people dying by the thousands. It is literally like some sort of training. Everyday there are tragedies going on. We politicize them, we take sides, but in the end, people die in both sides of the fences, rooting for either side of the aisle, and they are, instantly, just another stat. We simply, simply, absolutely not humanize all these people, on a daily basis. And we cannot. We wouldn't survive it. Probably your senior partner had some personal connection, something that made him relate to that tragedy, something that did not allow him the usual escape route.

9/11 was a tragey, of course it was. But there is no shortage of tragedies in the world we live in. We are numb to almost them all. It is so fucking fucked up that I don't know exactly were the problem lies...

 

[Kieran]

^I was working in the City in London. In our morning meeting, we had decided to rebalance our portfolio. Specifically the airline sector, we were increasing our exposure. I had almost completed the task (calculating what to buy for each fund) when I realised that I hadn't accounted for the special portfolios, where there were restrictions, or funds owned by an individual or entity that had a relationship with a particular airline. Either way, I had to recalculate for those portfolios before passing the instructions to our dealing desk.

Then the first plane hit. I was at the dealing desk when it happened. The dealer and I looked at each other and we, in our typical British way, congratulated ourselves for not starting to buy airline stocks yet. As we continued with the dark humour, the next plane hit. It was at that moment when one of the senior partners walked by, he cautioned us that this was real life, real people were dying. That the world would never be the same. It took someone more mature, more aware to pop the bubble we were living in (we were just thinking about the porfolio rebalance), for us to realise that in that instant the world had changed and that this was most likely terrorism. That really hit home. But what really sealed it for me was going back home. I lived about 100 yards from the American embassy at the time. There were armed police and para-militaries, on the roof, Grovesnor Square was blocked off. To this day you can't drive all the way around that square. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I'm still ashamed that we were joking about not having bought the airline stocks we had planned to. Self disgust is a stink that you can't easily remove

I think the way you reacted was natural, given that you were in the bubble of work, and it relates to this. Had you been outside work that same day you world have reacted different, I reckon.

I rang in sick to work that day, Bob Dylan released Love & Theft, a tremendous record, and my cycle has always revolved around Bob. Myself and my mate Deco were in my flat on the South Circular Road in Dublin listening to the record when we switched on Sky News to get the sports at twenty past the hour, and they were already showing the news live from New York. It kind of stung us into silence, then we talked like crazy about what we thought it meant. The missus is from Eastern Europe and I often sensed around her friends a snarky attitude towards America. I remember a few days later one of them saying, “stupid Americans,” and I snapped: “which ones? Bob Dylan? Orson Welles? Be more specific.” I was pretty defensive towards America around people like that, back then. Now, I look at the mayor of New York laughing during a roll call of the dead at today’s memorial and I wonder what happened to them, since that dreadful day.

I remember reading a Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan a while later, while he was promoting Love & Theft.

This record was released on September 11th — the same date as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ve talked with several people in the time since then who have turned to Love and Theft because they find something in it that matches the spirit of dread and uncertainty of our present conditions. For my part, I’ve kept circling around a line from “Mississippi”: “Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down.” Is there anything you would like to say about your reaction to the events of that day?

One of those Rudyard Kipling poems, “Gentlemen-Rankers,” comes to my mind: “We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth/We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung/And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth/God help us, for we knew the worst too young!” If anything, my mind would go to young people at a time like this. That’s really the only way to put it.

You mean because of what’s at stake for them right now, as we apparently go to war?
Exactly. I mean, art imposes order on life, but how much more art will there be? We don’t really know. There’s a secret sanctity of nature. How much more of that will there be? At the moment, the rational mind’s way of thinking wouldn’t really explain what’s happened. You need something else, with a capital E, to explain it. It’s going to have to be dealt with sooner or later, of course.

Do you see any hope for the situation we find ourselves in?
I don’t really know what I could tell you. I don’t consider myself an educator or an explainer. You see what it is that I do, and that’s what I’ve always done. But it is time now for great men to come forward. With small men, no great thing can be accomplished at the moment. Those people in charge, I’m sure they’ve read Sun-Tzu, who wrote The Art of War in the sixth century. In there he says, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself and not your enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat.” And he goes on to say, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Whoever’s in charge, I’m sure they would have read that.

Things will have to change. And one of these things that will have to change: People will have to change their internal world.

Stupid Americans, indeed…