
Sun Don't Shine
A genuine salad tossing bummer IMHAIO!
OpenAI has made the return of Sam Altman as its CEO official. A Wednesday post delivered the news, sharing two missives sent to OpenAI employees and shared with the world: one from Altman and the other from board chair Bret Taylor. Both deliver news that the OpenAI board will henceforth include a non-voting observer from …
I’m center left politically and mixed race, have many(not just the one) friends, worked with and hired the most diverse set of people imaginable over decades in tech, yet for some reason this sentence irks me. Choosing skin colour as the sole characteristic to represent the diversity of experience and thought necessary for this critical role feels ridiculous and having just running a thought experiment where the word white was replaced with any other skin colour/racial group/identity driven divisor and could not come up with an acceptable equivalent, made me question whether we have gone too far. El Reg was never a source of divisive identity politics in the past. People should be judged and accepted based on the entirety of what they have said and done, not what they look like.
Skin color is one factor. What if "properly done", the diversification should employ haplogroups. Or should we consider that whites are a global minority?
From personal experience inter-race acceptance depends on many factors, some of which have nothing to do with physical looks. Language skills, lack of common cultural references, or food eaten - are often sufficient divisive factors. We have not even touched the religion yet.
Even within "whites" there are sufficient divisions based on looks, if you are from a different country. Not all whites look the same. For example, could you distinguish between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese? Or African ethnicities?
Summarizing: the problem is harder than it seems. Meritocracy is probably the optimal way.
Besides, it is not that fun to spend your whole life doing hard science, as they do in OpenAI. Why suddenly so attractive? High paycheck?
Feh. I note the distinct shortage of not-as-old-as-you-might-think Irishmen, born in British East Africa, married to Sikhs, and currently residing in Florida. I think that every Big Tech board should have at least one. Why, yes, I do have one in mind. Going cheap, too.
Irish Africans unite! Rebel against this blatant discrimination!
On a related note: when the next census arrives, I plan to fill in the African-American box. Just to screw with TPTB.
Any consideration of race in personnel decisions is by definition racist. Ditto for sex, religion, national origin, etc. Those things have no business being included in personnel files. If they must be included, they must be redacted (including names) wherever possible when an individual is being assessed for any personnel decisions. It's impossible to be racist if it's impossible to know the race.
Is Uncle Sam Altman also back at the helm of the OpenAI/Microsoft vessel because of the understandably secret [as in proprietary intellectual property] in-house research which led to others declaring him as not being “consistently candid in his communications,” now being outed as a leading AI development being bred and groomed for public deployment and new virtual flight operations from a UK/USA Google DeepMind facility ..... https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/ai_agents_can_copy_humans/ ....... and thus is there something of a cyber space race on between the two mega metadata base protagonists to be first past the post as often as is possible to pick up any sponsors' prizes, technocrat rewards, noble and Nobel awards?
Strangers things have happened whenever allies tangle as competitors and become Sp00Key Quantum Leap Entangled ...... :-) Licensed to Thrill.
And here's some opinion providing similar context to the above alien speculation on the OpenAI shenanigans ..... and from someone well known for not suffering the useless fool.
The xAI founder warns that "AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs," when asked about about OpenAI (the company he co-founded):“I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Musk said about CEO Sam Altman, who was recently ousted and reinstated.
“The ring of power can corrupt.”
Musk added that he wanted to know why OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever "felt so strongly as to fight Sam."
"That sounds like a serious thing. I don't think it was trivial. And I'm quite concerned that there's some dangerous element of AI that they've discovered," he added.
Musk said he believes Sutskever has a "strong moral compass."
"He really sweats it over questions of what is right," Musk told Sorkin.
"And if Ilya felt strongly enough to want to fire Sam. Well, I think the world should know what was that reason." ..... https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/they-can-go-fk-themselves-musk-slams-advertising-boycott-blackmail
Now, .... regarding these more dangerous than nuclear bombs/NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT Bombes.? Who/What do you think is in command and control of them and able to drop them on humanity with impunity/without suffering colossal collateral damage?