As the scientific evidence began to pile up, a consensus finally emerged that leaded gasoline had turned out to be one of the most harmful pollutants of the 20th century, one that proved to be especially concentrated in urban areas. Globally, the phaseout of leaded gasoline that began in the 1970s is estimated to have saved 1.2 million lives a year. As Achim Steiner of the United Nations noted, “The elimination of leaded petrol is an immense achievement on par with the global elimination of major deadly diseases.”

Source of the above: New York Times Great Read
OpenAI Unveils GPT-4
What GPT-4 Can and Can’t Do
Funding Frenzy Escalates
How Chatbots Work

_______________________________________

The Shift
GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary. Today, the new language model from OpenAI may not seem all that dangerous. But the worst risks are the ones we cannot anticipate.
Photo: The team from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, from left: Sam Altman, chief executive; Mira Murati, chief technology officer; Greg Brockman, president; and Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist. Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The Shift By Kevin Roose March 15, 2023 :

When I opened my laptop on Tuesday to take my first run at GPT-4, the new artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI, I was, truth be told, a little nervous.

After all, my last extended encounter with an A.I. chatbot — the one built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine — ended with the chatbot trying to break up my marriage.

It didn’t help that, among the tech crowd in San Francisco, GPT-4’s arrival had been anticipated with near-messianic fanfare. Before its public debut, for months rumors swirled about its specifics. “I heard it has 100 trillion parameters.” “I heard it got a 1,600 on the SAT.” “My friend works for OpenAI, and he says it’s as smart as a college graduate.”

These rumors may not have been true. But they hinted at how jarring the technology’s abilities can feel. Testing GPT-4 had caused the person to have an “existential crisis,” because it revealed how powerful and creative the A.I. was compared with the tester’s own puny brain.

GPT-4 didn’t give me an existential crisis. But it exacerbated the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I’ve been getting whenever I think about A.I. lately. And it has made me wonder whether that feeling will ever fade, or whether we’re going to be experiencing “future shock” — the term coined by the writer Alvin Toffler for the feeling that too much is changing, too quickly — for the rest of our lives.

Below is the observation of Nan:

Might AI not be so willing to phase themselves out if they become as deadly for humans as leaded gas? What then, eh?

P.s. Nan received this pop up when she turned her computer on this morning:

If you took my advice and added the still free subscription to 3 Quarks Daily then you know about this one:

Recently they carried this article from the Nautilus magazine. (You can read 2 articles in Nautilus for free, then subscribe if you like.:
“What Plants Are Saying About Us” by Amanda Gefter in the Nautilus magazineQuanta magazine via 3 Quarks Daily

_______

I liked this one also, from Quanta (not Quora)

“A Link Between Hearing Voices and Hearing Your Own Voice”
An experiment with bone-conduction headphones suggests a way for neuroscientists to better understand some hallucinations.
People using bone-conduction headphones in a study were more likely to correctly identify their own voices from a recording in which they were blended with other voices.Credit…Michael Sohn/Associated Press
By Veronique Greenwood. Feb. 14, 2023
3 MIN READ
It is the rare person who likes hearing their own voice on a recording. It sounds fake, somehow — like it belongs to someone else.
For neuroscientists, that quality of otherness is more than a curiosity. Many mysteries remain about the origins of hallucinations, but one hypothesis suggests that when people hear voices, they are hearing their own thoughts disguised as another person’s by a quirk of the brain.

I’d really like to have someone to talk with about these articles but my interests differ from those around me. Old-fashioned am I. Smile.

WILL OF THE WISP : THE MYSTERY

You guessed it, didn’t you—that

I am drawn inside because

I feel the pull of the mysterious,

a curiosity about the edge of

the known, bordered by the

little-known and the unknown-

but-sensed as well as the unsuspected

and the impossible. How utterly deadly

life would be if there were no mystery—

everything cut and dried and shelved.

Do you know about the angler

fish and the flying monk,

or esp at the time of death?

And have you felt the insistent throb

of curiosity at certain quiet moments?

How is it that being in nature soothes,

the effect measurable by scientists?

The life of the invisible “mind” goes on,

experienced or not, or not yet.

Nan

You can tell me. In a recent post I suggested the right’s new insistence on making abortions illegal was due to our failure to replace our whiteness as a country. (“Oh so that’s what it’s all about,” January 2023)

I remembered seeing a reference somewhere–that I didn’t pursue–that one of our leaders had called for “more foetuses.”

Since then I have seen complaints that there is a Conspiracy Against Whites, and then I became aware of earlier political concerns and activities of former Rep. Steve King, a prominent Iowa Republican and a vocal advocate against illegal immigration, who tweeted in 2017 that “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” (CNN, Theodore Schleifer)

Following the shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., focus has been trained on the “replacement” theory, also known as “white replacement” theory. That’s because a white man, who killed 10 Black people and injured three others, posted a 180-page document online that promulgated racist conspiracy theories often referred to as the “great replacement.”

And he allegedly used the conspiratorial idea that minorities were and would be replacing whites as a reason to justify what he did…The ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory isn’t fringe anymore, it’s mainstream

I kid you not–it’s in Time magazine this week, by Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

In 2021 for the first time, the USA’s white population showed a decline–the only racial or ethnic group to do so, by 8.6%. (Time magazine)

What has the drift resulted in?…The groundswell to outlaw abortions; increased killings and harassment of non-whites, the contrived accusation of “replacement theory,” the forced abortions in refugee quarters [female immigrants in custody] the stranglehold in the public schools on children’s minds about reality, the attack on adult pairings of couples unlikely to produce offspring (LGBT), taking with it the U.S. Supreme Court…

In Georgia, after a woman’s embryo has reached six weeks of gestation, people are allowed to claim them on their tax returns by allowing the state to include fetuses in the state’s population counts. There is a suspicion that red states are trying to swell their numbers so as to have a greater impact in Congress.

“Replacement” theory began in white supremacist circles, but has since moved more mainstream on the political right in this country and among many Republicans, explicitly or implicitly.’

I think mine may not be a conspiracy theory but referring to a Conspiracy, in which Christianity is taking the rap, which apparently Christian Nationalists are all too glad to do.

In fact, it sounds more like old-fashioned psychological projection to me. I’m curious what you think…

At last some publicity for positive action from Christian groups! Apparently the positive efforts from Christians against Christian Nationalism have gone largely unacknowledged. About his own article by Daily Kos staff writer wesmorgan1, he says:

One of the common arguments found here at Daily Kos is that US liberal/progressive religious believers in general, and US Christians in particular, aren’t “fighting back” against the Religious Right and Christofascists in theological terms.

That’s a false perception, and it’s exacerbated by the lack of media coverage of such actions when they occur. It isn’t just a question of denominational entities like the LCMS; when’s the last time we saw significant media mention of Lutherans for Social Justice, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, Evangelicals for Democracy, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, or any other religious group fighting the good fight? (For that matter, when’s the last time you saw a DK staff writer cover any of these groups in any detail?)

I wrote this article, in part, to illustrate that point. Beyond the linked article by Jack Jenkins of the Religious News Service (who does excellent work in this area — check out his Twitter timeline for examples) and commentary in various Lutheran sources, I can find no mention of this event in any other media outlet of significance. NYTimes? Zippo. WaPo? Bupkis. MSNBC? Nada.

If a tree falls in the forest, but CNN doesn’t issue a BREAKING NEWS alert…you get the picture.

Nan’s Comment: Bravo. See the post he (wesmorgan1) wrote at Daily Kos Feb. 23, 2023:
Lutheran Leader Calls for Excommunication of White Nationalists