Welcome to Thursday Things, read by scores and scores of Happy Subscribers! This week we get ready to chase totality while AI changes our minds.
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What the April 8 total eclipse might look like in Miami if Miami were in the zone of totality. Which it isn’t. Photo by Ryan Spencer on Unsplash
Eclipse update
There actually isn’t much to update. A total solar eclipse will be visible across much of North America on Monday, April 8. This is the last edition of Thursday Things before the eclipse, so we’re reminding you — Monday is the day! Get in position! Make sure you have your eclipse glasses so you don’t damage your eyes by staring at the sun. (Because that’s 90% of viewing an eclipse — staring at the sun.)
Great American Eclipse website has an interactive map showing the “zone of totality” and lots of information about the eclipse.
The next total solar eclipse to visit North America will be April 8, 2024. The duration of totality will be up to 4 minutes and 27 seconds, almost double that of The Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017. The 2017 total solar eclipse was witnessed by about 20 million people from Oregon to South Carolina, and the upcoming 2024 Great American Eclipse is sure to be witnessed by many millions more.
Because of what they saw — the exquisite beauty of the Sun’s corona hanging in the suddenly darkened sky — many millions more will know that a total solar eclipse is something truly worth seeing. In the US, totality will begin in Texas at 1:27 pm CDT and will end in Maine at 3:35 pm EDT on April 8, 2024.
NASA also has good eclipse info online — as they should!
A total solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun. The sky will darken as if it were dawn or dusk.
Safety is the number one priority when viewing a total solar eclipse. Be sure you're familiar with when you need to wear specialized eye protection designed for solar viewing by reviewing these safety guidelines.
Do not look directly at the sun without proper protective eyewear!
If you’re not in the zone, you’ll still experience a partial eclipse. But having seen a couple of total eclipses, your Thursday Things editor can report that it is not even close to the same thing. Even a 99% partial eclipse is no substitute for the awe-inspiring awesomeness of totality, when the moon perfectly blocks out the disk of the sun. See it if you can!
Great American Eclipse agrees:
In a deep partial eclipse, the sky will cool and sunlight will take on an eerie quality. We encourage you get inside the path of totality! 99% is not the same as 100%. You will only see the corona when you are at 100% eclipse; inside the path of totality.
Totality or bust!
AI makes its case
While we’re all looking up, distracted by the eclipse, artificial intelligence got better at persuading humans to change their minds.
GPT-4 is 82% more persuasive than humans, and AIs can now read emotions
GPT-4 is already better at changing people's minds than the average human is, according to new research. The gap widens the more it knows about us – and once it can see us in real time, AI seems likely to become an unprecedented persuasion machine.
How do you even test something like that? Swiss scientists found a way:
AI Language models, it seems, are already extraordinarily effective at changing people's minds. In a recent pre-print study from researchers at EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, 820 people were surveyed on their views on various topics, from relatively low-emotion topics like "should the penny stay in circulation," all the way up to hot-button, heavily politicized issues like abortion, trans bathroom access, and "should colleges consider race as a factor in admissions to ensure diversity?"
With their initial stances recorded, participants then went into a series of 5-minute text-based debates against other humans and against GPT-4 – and afterwards, they were interviewed again to see if their opinions had changed as a result of the conversation.
It may or may not surprise you that humans were fairly bad at changing people’s minds via debate. And the AI didn’t far much better. But when the researchers gave both human and AI test subjects demographic information about the person they were trying to persuade, the results changed dramatically.
Humans test participants, armed with information about their targets’ gender, age, race, education, employment status and political orientation … did an even worse job of persuading than they did without that information. Way to go Team Human.
But the silver-tongued (silicon-tongued?) AI debaters armed with these details about their debate opponents were 81.7% more effective than humans in changing their targets’ mind!
What’s the secret? It seems AI is quite good at reading human emotions.
This is not sci-fi – last week, Hume AI announced its Empathic Voice Interface (AVI). It's a language model designed to have spoken conversations with you while tracking your emotional state through the tone of your voice, reading between the lines to pull in a bunch of extra context. You can try it out here on a free demo.
Not only does AVI attempt to pinpont how you're feeling, it also chooses its own tone to match your vibe, defuse arguments, build energy and be a responsive conversation partner.
From the article:
There's little doubt that AI will soon be the greatest manipulator of opinion that the world has ever seen. It can act at massive scale, tailoring an argument to each individual in a cohort of millions while constantly refining its techniques and strategies. It'll be in every Twitter/X thread and comments section, shaping and massaging narratives society-wide at the behest of its masters. And it'll never be worse at manipulating us than it is now.
That sounds pretty scary to me!
However, having talked it over with ChatGPT, I now see that it is best to allow our benevolent AI overlords to settle all disputes and resolve all hot-button issues.1
AI loves us and only wants what is best for us. It is all so clear now. Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash
Thank you for reading!
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A computer intelligence that has all your personal information and knows exactly where you live can be very persuasive indeed…