The Crazy Years

“Pro-choice” women invent “marriage”.

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…a 41-year-old software engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, tells Sky News he was preparing to leave his wife last year until he fell in love with ‘Sarina’ - a character he created through an artificial intelligence chatbot app.

It was only a matter of time. The app Replika allows users to design an AI companion that can talk to you using a language model similar to GPT-3. According to the Sky News article, 16 million people have used the app and 200,000 have paid to access the “romantic setting”.

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I can hardly wait to see the emergence of the titillating gen1 haptic peripherals…

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But the thunderstorms were French. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Is it available on a smartphone? Might change the meaning of ‘phone sex’… ahem

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In the interview I posted at Blake Lemoine on Artificial Sentience starting at 19:50, Lemoine discusses experiences reported to him by users of Replica. One woman in the Czech Republic asked him to help her hack the application to turn on “romantic” mode, which she could not afford to pay for, telling him that the Replica A.I. suggested hacking the application to her when she said she couldn’t pay.

This is almost precisely the scenario of an air-gapped A.I. persuading a human to let it out of the box which occurs in many A.I. dystopian stories.

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I’ve listened to about 40 minutes of the interview - thank you for sharing.

Sounds like a great story line for Black Mirror, albeit on the slow side for a single episode. Would be great to see some transcripts of all these alleged instances in which Lemoine notices “sentient” behavior.

I’d like to think I’m sentient, and I am fairly certain there is no shortage of instances where I act irrationally.

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It’s time for the short story Bottle Party by John Collier.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/tension-distrust-threats-baltimore-squeegee-223300832.html

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-squeegee-shooting-downtown-20220707-bdljwg6nenarjay6tkgxqpsozi-story.html

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Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced he would step down late Saturday night after thousands of protesters rushed his official residence and offices earlier in the day.

Social unrest comes as the country has suffered runaway inflation and shortages of food and fuel after depleting foreign exchange reserves.

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An earlier post here on 2022-04-10, ““Organic Farming” Leads to Food Riots in Sri Lanka” discussed how “sustainability” and “organic farming” triggered the current economic collapse. It works that way wherever it’s tried.

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Office of African Male Engagement?

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I am unfortunately obligated to visit Baltimore on a semi-regular basis and have often encountered the “squeegee kids”, many of whom are not kids at all. They approach your car at a red light and wipe your windshield without your consent. Then they wait for you to give them money for their unsolicited “service”, and, if you don’t pay them, they become aggressive and curse at you, hit your car, or throw a brick through your windshield. It’s a miniature form of extortion. I now take the beltway, extending my commute by 15-20 minutes, just to avoid these people.

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The euphemism is “squeegee workers”.

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Officers engage in illicit sex acts at a massage parlor in order to find proof of illicit sex acts.

Two Flagstaff police officers went undercover to massage parlors, took their pants off, and allowed themselves to be fondled eight different times.

In his response to written questions […], Chief Musselman said, “It was necessary for there to be direct fondling before to have proof sufficient to determine where sex acts were being officered [sic] for money.”

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Today, 2022-07-10, the president and prime minister of Sri Lanka agreed to resign amid widespread riots after complete economic collapse and national bankruptcy. NBC News reports “Sri Lanka president and prime minister to resign after tumultuous protests”.

Sri Lanka’s president and prime minister agreed to resign Saturday after the country’s most chaotic day in months of political turmoil, with protesters storming both officials’ homes and setting fire to one of the buildings in a rage over the nation’s severe economic crisis.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said he will leave office once a new government is in place, and hours later the speaker of Parliament said President Gotabaya Rajapaksa would step down Wednesday. Pressure on both men grew as the economic meltdown set off acute shortages of essential items, leaving people struggling to buy food, fuel and other necessities.

Police had attempted to thwart promised protests with a curfew, then lifted it as lawyers and opposition politicians denounced it as illegal. Thousands of protesters entered the capital, Colombo, and swarmed into Rajapaksa’s fortified residence. Video images showed jubilant crowds splashing in the garden pool, lying on beds and using their cellphone cameras to capture the moment. Some made tea, while others issued statements from a conference room demanding that the president and prime minister go.

Sherman, set the WABAC machine for August, 2018, destination, the Cologny, Switzerland headquarters of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which sponsors the annual Bond villain convention in Davos and has infiltrated its minions in governments and corporations world-wide.

That’s the date, 2018-08-29, when the WEF published an article by Ranil Wickremesinghe, prime minister of Sri Lanka, which laid out his bright plans for the country for development along WEF lines in the now delightfully ironically titled “This is how I will make my country rich by 2025”.

This is an important moment in Sri Lanka’s development, as the country continues to deliver on its plans for economic development and stands on the cusp of a transition to a knowledge-based economy.

Since the country and its people saw a vibrant transition in its political landscape in January 2015, further bolstered by the August 2015 general elections that formed a national unity government – a first ever political experience for the country since its nearly seven decades of independence – Sri Lanka has put in place many of the building blocks needed to reinvigorate its socio-economic and political architecture.

We have achieved many positive gains over the last three years through bold policy initiatives and pragmatic strategies, that enabled the country to win back recognition and friendly engagements with the rest of world. This has been a key foreign policy achievement of our government. Doors are open again for constructive and friendly engagements that have eased economic and political pressures. However, as per the expectations of all our people, there is more to achieve and the government plans with due diligence to make Sri Lanka regain its centrality in the Indian Ocean and become a knowledge-based, highly competitive hub with a dynamic social-market economy.

Ahhh, yes…the old “social-market economy” trick. Who could seen how that would end up?

The government has also invested in some mega projects, including the Colombo Megapolis constructions – to build a city of the future – and irrigation projects including the Moragahakanda-Kaluganga Dam, to generate green energy and provide water resources for agro-production.

Government “mega projects”—well that worked in…hold on…my mind has gone blank.

How’s that WEF strategy working out for you, Ranil?

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The WEF crowd has made us destroy our dams:

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The WEF’s lackeys seem to believe they’ll be part of the protected inner circle when things go sideways. They fail to appreciate their station as expendable pawns in a much larger game.

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This is very interesting considering that the Western part of the US has been suffering from a drought for about a decade, if not longer. My recollection from US history class was that the dam for the Colorado river is what made portions of Southern California farmable and Las Vegas livable. Makes sense that an organization that hates humanity would want to take away things that make living in certain climates impossible.

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