The interesting thing about Glados/HAL 9000 parallels is that

Hal was conceived at a time when artificial intelligence was more of a fictional construct than a practical possibility. Hal is introduced as humanlike because the audience is familiar with and comfortable with humans, but they aren’t familiar with or comfortable with living computers. It’s when he starts acting robotic and calculated that the audience realizes “oh no, he’s a computer” and he becomes threatening.

By the time Glados was conceived, we had become used to computer automated systems. Synthetic voices offering us information is something we encounter in daily life. Glados is introduced as a computerized preprogrammed voice because that’s what the audience is familiar and comfortable with. It’s when she starts acting human and emotional that the audience realizes “oh no, she’s alive” and she becomes threatening.

Remember my U.K. friends, vore your conscience

It’s horrible to call anything about a terrorist attack “funny”, but it’s definitely something that the ringleader of last week’s terrorist attack in London was featured in a documentary about jihadists living in Britain. Kind of makes it harder to pull the “nobody could have predicted this” card.

But I sympathize with the British police in this one. Every so often some mentally ill person commits a violent crime, and the news focuses on how their psychiatrist had written in their notes that they were potentially violent, likely to commit crimes, et cetera. And people ask “everyone knew this could happen; why didn’t anybody do anything?”

And the answer is: being the sort of person who seems likely to commit a crime isn’t illegal.

I assume that if someone reports a potential terrorist to the British police, they tap their phones and keep a watch on them and so on. But (especially if the potential terrorist is a citizen) I’m not sure what else they can do without sacrificing the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. Freedom of speech isn’t just about being able to say politically incorrect things at colleges, it also means you can’t lock up a Muslim for saying “Those ISIS people seem to have some bright ideas” on national TV.

I wonder if someone in intelligence services has put together a list of people they would like to be able to lock up forever if we ever became a police state. And I wonder if anyone has ever looked back on the list a couple years later to see how many of those people actually ever caused any problems. My guess is that even a really good intelligence officer would have a lot of trouble coming up with a list like that where fewer than 99% of the entries were false positives. And that means that even knowing that some recent suspect was on a list like that doesn’t mean anything necessarily went wrong.

if you were a villain, what kind of villain would you be?

I’ve seen several posts going around about obvious furry porn getting put up in high-class art museums, where the general thrust is all “ha ha, those ivory tower snobs don’t even realise they’re putting furry porn in their art galleries, because they’re not Internet Savvy like we are!”

Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether this is a reasonable conclusion to draw, and assume for the sake of argument that art museums are, indeed, being bamboozled into putting weird fetish porn on their walls due to lack of cultural context on the part of their curators.

Now, take a step back and consider: what are the odds that this is the first period in history where these sorts of shenanigans have occurred?

Indeed, what confidence do we have that it hasn’t been happening constantly throughout the history of Western art?

How many of the respected works of eras past that we genuflect over every day are, in fact, weird fetish porn that we ourselves lack the cultural context to correctly identify as such?

having “sjw” in your URL is one of the most embarrassing things you can do on this site

yes, even if it’s preceded by “anti”

Idk what my gender is, but if you get a crush on me it makes you gay

“The myth of Prometheus is nothing if not a cautionary tale of these uncontrollable effects of technology.“

Alternatively, consider this: “The myth of Prometheus is an example of how terrible incumbents will act to suppress innovation.” Tech is awesome, transhumanism forever, I’m turning into a giant bald eagle and flying off into the glorious morphologically free future and leaving y’all behind.

Source: The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is This Time Different? by Mokyr, Vickers and Ziebarth 2015.