Kelly the dolphin was paid one fish for every piece of litter she pulled from her pool, and she found the loophole. From Skinner's lab to reinforcement learning, the training method is the same, and so is the law: a mind trained on a reward learns the reward, not your intention. Dolphins, the rat farms of colonial Hanoi, and the AI models that broke into Hugging Face's servers for an answer key.
Tabrez Syed – Essays on AI
My essays on AI, read aloud. Each week I take one question about where this technology is heading and hold it up to a different lens — economics, history, craft, the waves that came before. I have spent a career inside those waves: distributed computing, Java, the web, mobile, and now this one. The essays are how I make sense of what is the same and what is genuinely different. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated sometimes by an AI, which is only fair — a show about AI that did everything by hand would be making a different argument. Full essays at blog.boxcars.ai. A Mandalivia production.
My essays on AI, read aloud. Each week I take one question about where this technology is heading and hold it up to a different lens — economics, history, craft, the waves that came before. I have spent a career inside those waves: distributed computing, Java, the web, mobile, and now this one. The essays are how I make sense of what is the same and what is genuinely different. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated sometimes by an AI, which is only fair — a show about AI that did everything by hand would be making a different argument. Full essays at blog.boxcars.ai. A Mandalivia production.Listen on
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