https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-backlash/

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph/Fapar

We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how

AI may appear human, but it is an illusion we must tackle.

^{The Conversation}

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/27/natos-5-pledge-an-obscene-betrayal-of-global-needs/

cross-posted from: rss.ponder.cat/post/217883

Photo: Zachary Schulman

On November 15, 2024, Zohran Mamdani released a video of himself interviewing people on the street in Queens and the Bronx who had voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election the previous week. It was one of the first of the viral posts that propelled him into the spotlight and ultimately helped him all but capture the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. Then polling close to zero percent, Mamdani seemed more like a local news anchor than a candidate, gamely thrusting a microphone into the faces of voters and letting them take the stage. The answers to why they voted for Trump — “Food prices are going up,” “Rent is expensive” — informed Mamdani’s campaign as it homed in on the issue of affordability. But the other answer that came up again and again — one that Mamdani chose to highlight — was Gaza. “They like Trump because they don’t want their Palestinian brothers to be killed,” one man says.

This was a terrible miscalculation on the part of these voters, as is almost any attempt to make common cause with Trump. But voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party for its unstinting support of the Netanyahu regime, just like their anxiety about the high cost of living in New York, was real, and both sentiments carried over into the mayoral primary in June, a setting for the liberal left to confront itself. And once again voters punished the Democratic Party for its inability to address those issues, coming out in droves for the most un-Democratic candidate in the field — a socialist, in fact.

It was not supposed to happen this way, not in a city with nearly 1 million Jews, the historic center of the Jewish diaspora outside Israel. Mamdani’s opponents predicted that his positions on Israel — his reluctance to affirm its right to define itself as a Jewish state, his refusal to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” his assertion that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as an indicted war criminal if he visits New York, all nearly unheard of for a Democratic-primary candidate — would sink him. What’s curious is that while panicked Democrats are now conceding that Mamdani crushed his principal rival, the Establishment favorite Andrew Cuomo, by underscoring pocketbook issues, running a galvanic campaign both on social media and IRL, and not being an alleged serial sexual harasser and all-around goon, they have yet to reckon with the fact that voters, particularly young voters, were drawn to Mamdani and supported him fervently because of his steadfast opposition to the war in Gaza. Publicly at least, the Democrats have yet to acknowledge the enormous, perhaps irreparable toll their support for the war has taken on their party.

Mamdani outperformed expectations in nearly every demographic, upending the conventional wisdom that leftist appeal is limited to young, highly educated, largely white voters. But his campaign was nevertheless powered by an overwhelming show of force from those same voters who reside in what the strategist Michael Lange in the New York Times playfully called “the Commie Corridor,” a stretch of gentrified Brooklyn and Queens that includes Ridgewood (80 percent for Mamdani), Bushwick (79 percent), and East Williamsburg (75 percent). And these voters, as anyone in New York with an Instagram account can attest, are vocal about their opposition to the appalling atrocities Israel has committed in Gaza, as are the Muslim voters whom Mamdani also unlocked.

Foreign policy was not technically a top issue in the race, which makes sense because the mayor of New York does not set U.S. foreign policy (in general, the trend of turning every food–co-op–board election into a referendum on Gaza probably isn’t the ideal way to conduct local affairs). But no matter how hard Mamdani tried to focus on his proposals for free bus rides and free child care, Gaza was still everywhere in the primary, principally because his Democratic opponents, as well as the financial elites who stand behind them and sympathetic media outlets, thought they could use his positions on Israel to turn Jewish voters against him. When Mamdani stood by the use of the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” Cuomo said those words “fuel hate” and “fuel murder” and “there are no two sides here.” But voters in the city with the most Jews outside Tel Aviv simply did not buy the notion that Mamdani is an antisemite who would discriminate against or fail to protect them. In fact, it’s clear that many Democrats, including many Jewish Democrats, voted for him because of his positions on Israel — or at the very least saw little objectionable about them. As the writer Bess Kalb put it in a recent essay explaining Jewish support for Mamdani, “I am not writing this on October 8th. It is June 25th, 2025. And if we do not change our perspective with time and events and evidence, we are living with our heads in the sand.”

Nearly 70 percent of Democrats now have an unfavorable view of Israel, according to Pew. Yet Democratic officials carry on as if full-throated support for Israel were party doctrine. An article in Politico about the lessons Democrats are drawing from Cuomo’s defeat did not contain a single mention of Gaza or Israel; titled “Mamdani’s Surprise Win Reawakens Democrats’ Internal Factions,” the article’s omission suggests there are no pro-Palestine factions to speak of. Instead, Democrats have been more than happy to jump on the much safer affordability train as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, with his usual dead-eyed delivery, “I think what’s clear is that the relentless focus on affordability had great appeal all across the city of New York.”

Democrats have an odd habit of tuning out their own supporters even when those supporters are practically screaming at them to listen. In the past presidential election, New Yorkers were hollering at them about inflation, yes, but also immigration and crime. Democrats did eventually acknowledge they had been weak on those issues, which explains their timid response to Trump’s subsequent assault on undocumented and documented immigrants alike. The Democrats remain indifferent, however, to any pleas about Gaza, in ways that appear to be alienating to voters — especially young ones — on the left side of the spectrum who simply do not understand why the party that supposedly represents them is constantly bowing and scraping before a murderous regime.

Never was this more apparent than after Trump’s strike on Iran, which many Democrats, including Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, refused to condemn, despite the fact that Trump did not get the required congressional approval. In an instant, the pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian coalition revealed itself to be an illusion because liberal Iran hawks and their Never Trump allies viewed the demise of Israel’s sworn enemy as more important than placing a check on a demagogue they have long warned has too much power. The consistent, principled thing to do would have been to oppose the strike outright, but Democrats like Antony Blinken and Steny Hoyer instead offered toothless criticisms of Trump’s brazen warmongering while cheering on the strikes anyway — to please whom, you may ask? Nearly 80 percent of Democrats oppose them.

As Mamdani barrels toward the general election as the heavy favorite to become mayor, Israel’s supporters in New York and beyond are marshaling an effort to remind voters of his heresies. New York’s political power brokers — Schumer, Jeffries, Kathy Hochul, and others — have declined to endorse him. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand slammed him for using words she felt were “permissive for violence against Jews.” Islamophobia has been rampant in the media and the halls of Congress with Republican representative Nancy Mace suggesting Mamdani was somehow responsible for 9/11. But more loudly than ever, Democratic voters in the country’s most formidable Democratic stronghold have declared their opposition to the seemingly unbreakable bond between the Democratic political class and the current Israeli regime. When given an actual choice on the issue of Israel and Palestine, Democratic voters broke hard for the alternative to the status quo, raising the possibility of primary debates over this issue throughout the country, in places with far fewer emotional and political ties to Israel.

Whether Democrats will listen is another matter. Some people have compared Mamdani to Barack Obama, who rose to power channeling voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party’s support for a different awful war. In its embrace of Obama, the party showed it had the capacity to adapt, to listen to reason, to recognize mistakes. He gave people a reason to believe in liberalism again, redeeming its sins. But the once clear-eyed and daring Obama, like so many others in his party, has lost his voice. He has been silent about Mamdani and the mayor’s race. He’s been virtually silent on Gaza, too.

More on Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani on Why He Won‘It’s Nice to Be Right!’Zohran Mamdani’s Win Prompted a Full-Fledged Elite Meltdown

---

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph/Fapar

We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how

AI may appear human, but it is an illusion we must tackle.

^{The Conversation}

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph/Fapar

We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how

AI may appear human, but it is an illusion we must tackle.

^{The Conversation}

https://apnews.com/article/amazon-brazil-starlink-elon-musk-mining-internet-71e99e8e89000865b4b2562fb5ddd2cc

The number of children who have died in the Gaza Strip due to severe malnutrition has risen to 66, the enclave's media office said on Saturday.

In a press statement released today, the Government Media Office said Israel's actions constitute "a war crime and a crime against humanity," demonstrating the Israeli army's "deliberate use of starvation as a weapon to exterminate civilians—especially children—in blatant violation of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions".

https://www.newarab.com/news/deadly-israeli-strikes-gaza-shelter-iran-holds-funerals?blockId=block_57347

Source.

Relevant:

Facebook is now inputting your photos into Meta AI automatically by default

Seasons of Jason 🎒

2025-05-30 23:18:37

Oh hell fucking NO.

“To create ideas for you, we'll select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis, based on info like time, location or themes.”
#Meta #Facebook

This would be a lot more tinfoilesque were a court case on the matter not already underway in New York.

The missing votes uncovered in Smart Elections’ legal case in Rockland County, New York, are just the tip of the iceberg—an iceberg that extends across the swing states and into Texas.

On Monday, an investigator’s story finally hit the news cycle: Pro V&V, one of only two federally accredited testing labs, approved sweeping last-minute updates to ES&S voting machines in the months leading up to the 2024 election—without independent testing, public disclosure, or full certification review.

These changes were labeled “de minimis”—a term meant for trivial tweaks. But they touched ballot scanners, altered reporting software, and modified audit files—yet were all rubber-stamped with no oversight.

That revelation is a shock to the public.

But for those who’ve been digging into the bizarre election data since November, this isn’t the headline—it’s the final piece to the puzzle. While Pro V&V was quietly updating equipment in plain sight, a parallel operation was unfolding behind the curtain—between tech giants and Donald Trump.

The Machines Were Changed Before the 2024 Election. No One Was Told.

A private lab quietly altered voting machines used across the U.S. Then it vanished.

^{Dissent in Bloom}

• Converted a real car into a game controller by intercepting CAN data
• Tapped into the CAN bus using cheap wire splicers and a Kvaser USBCAN interface
• Mapped steering, brake, and throttle signals to game controls using Python
• A car is an impractical demo

How we turned a real car into a Mario Kart controller by intercepting CAN data | Pen Test Partners

If you went to our PTP Cyber Fest over the Infosec week you may have seen the PTP hack car being used as a games controller for the game SuperTuxKart (a free and open-source Mario Kart type game).

^{Joe Bursell (Pen Test Partners)}

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Russia’s war against Ukraine

A man cleans dust from a portrait of his dead brother in arms on the Memorial Wall of Fallen Defenders of Ukraine outside Saint Michael’s Golden-domes Cathedral in Kyiv on June 26, 2025. (Sergei Supinsky/ AFP via Getty Images)

Ukrainian drones strike 4 fighter jets in Russia’s Volgograd Oblast, General Staff says. According to preliminary data, two Russian fighter jets were destroyed, and the other two were damaged.

Clashes ongoing in eastern Ukrainian village near lithium deposits, as military rejects claims of Russian capture. Active fighting is still taking place around the village of Shevchenko in Donetsk Oblast, home to one of Ukraine’s largest lithium deposits, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Khortytsia group of forces told the Kyiv Independent on June 27, denying reports Russia had occupied the village.

EU reportedly fails to adopt new Russia sanctions due to Hungarian, Slovak opposition. Unlike Ukraine-skeptic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Slovakia has not previously attempted to block EU sanctions

Ukrainian manufacturers able to produce 4 million drones per year, Umerov says. Ukrainian manufacturers will supply four million drones to the front line this year, while the Ukrainian army has already received up to 1.5 million drones as of the end of June, according to Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.

Your contribution helps keep the Kyiv Independent going. Become a member today.

Ukraine seeks Zelensky-Putin meeting as next step in ceasefire negotiations. “After completing discussions on humanitarian issues, Ukraine plans to move forward to the topic of a leaders’ summit for substantive dialogue,” Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said during a press briefing on June 26.

Russia ready to hold third round of peace talks with Ukraine, Putin says. Russia is ready to hold a third round of peace talks on the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters on June 27, without specifying if he would directly participate in the negotiations.

Zelensky signs decree to synchronize Russia sanctions with EU, G7. A day earlier, EU member states’ leaders gave their political consent to extend the sanctions previously imposed on Russia for its war against Ukraine.

Ukrainian deputy prime minister hit with travel ban, $2.9 million bail in major corruption case. Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Oleksii Chernyshov was restricted from traveling abroad without permission after a court ruled on June 27 to set bail at Hr 120 million ($2.9 million) while awaiting trial in a high-profile corruption case.

Despite escalating war plans, Putin claims Russia will cut military spending starting in 2026. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on June 27 that Moscow plans to cut its military expenditure beginning next year, in a rebuke of NATO members’ plans to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP.

Read our exclusives

Ukraine war latest: Ukrainian drones reportedly strike 4 fighter jets in Russia

Ukrainian drones struck four Su-34 fighter jets at the Marinovka airfield in Russia’s Volgograd Oblast overnight on June 27, Ukraine’s General Staff said.

Photo: Russian Defense Ministry/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images

Learn more

‘Putin cannot stop’ – Estonian foreign minister says war in Ukraine existential for Russian president

Speaking to the Kyiv Independent on the first day of the NATO summit, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said a new reality means Europe must take up greater responsibility for Ukraine – and its own defense.

Photo: Omar Havana / Getty Images

Learn more

Learn more

Ukraine’s new top prosecutor known for high-profile cases, seen as Zelensky loyalist

Loyalty to the incumbent administration has been the key requirement for prosecutor generals in Ukraine. Ruslan Kravchenko, who was appointed as prosecutor general on June 21, appears to be no exception.

Photo: Andrii Nesterenko / Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

Human cost of Russia’s war

Chinese journalist injured by drone strike in Kursk Oblast, Russian governor says. According to acting Kursk Oblast governor Alexander Khinshtein, 63-year-old reporter Lu Yuguang from the Chinese television network Phoenix TV was wounded in a Ukrainian drone strike on the village of Korenevo.

Russian missile strike on Dnipropetrovsk Oblast city kills 5, injures 25. Governor Serhii Lysak said most of the injured were hospitalized.

At least 2 killed, 13 wounded in Russian attacks across Ukraine over past day. According to Ukraine’s Air Force, Ukrainian air defense intercepted 365 of 371 incoming Russian air weapons, including 363 Shahed-type drones, two Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, and six Kalibr cruise missiles.

Russian attack on key energy facility plunges parts of southern Ukraine ‘into darkness,’ governor says. “Russia decided to plunge Kherson Oblast into darkness,” Governor Oleksandr Prokudin wrote on Telegram. He said the attack has disrupted electricity supply to multiple settlements.

Warfare in Ukraine has changed… again.

International response

North Korea deployed 20% of Kim’s elite ‘personal reserve’ to fight against Ukraine in Russia, Umerov says. “These are soldiers specially selected based on physical, psychological, and other criteria,” Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said. “These units have already suffered significant losses.”

Ukraine to seek EU sanctions against Bangladesh over Russia-stolen grain import. “It’s a crime,” Ukraine’s ambassador to India, Oleksandr Polishchuk, told Reuters. “We will share our investigation with our European Union colleagues, and we will kindly ask them to take the appropriate measures.”

Pro-Palestinian activists destroy Ukrainian military aid worth $1.1 million, allegedly confusing it with Israeli, media reports. The activists reportedly thought the equipment would be supplied to Israel.

‘Without question’ — Trump says US would consider bombing Iran again, halts plans to ease sanctions. The United States would consider bombing Iran again if the country’s nuclear program once again became of concern, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters during a press briefing on June 27.

In other news

Anti-corruption agencies seek Ukrainian deputy prime minister’s suspension amid land grab case. Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Chernyshov was officially named a suspect on June 23 in what Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau called a “large-scale” illegal land grab case.

‘Resilience and confident actions’ — Umerov praises Ukraine’s new 18-24-year-old recruits. “We saw them on the battlefield — and it’s truly motivating,” Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said.

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