First off, although this posting is not overall political... I will offer a warning to you activists out there.
While I think protest marches are among the least effective kinds of resistance - (especially since MAGAs live for one thing: to drink the tears of every smartypants professional/scienctist/civil-servant etc.) -- I still praise you active folks who are fighting however you can for the Great (now endangered) Exxperiment. Still may I point out how deeply stupid the organizers of this 50 501 Movement are?
There’s always more about AI – and hence a collection of links to…
== The AI dilemmas and myriad-lemmas continue ==
I’ve been collecting so much material on the topic… and more keeps pouring in. Though (alas!) so little of it enlightening about how to turn this tech revolution into a positive sum outcome for all.
Still, let’s start with a potpourri…
1. A new study by Caltech and UC Riverside uncovers the hidden toll that AI exacts on human health, from chip manufacturing to data center operation.
2. And also this re: my alma mater: Caltech researchers have developed brain–machine interfaces that can interpret data from neural activity even after the signal from an implant has become less clear.
3. Swinging from process to implications… my friend from the UK (via Panama) Calum Chace (author of Surviving AI: The Promise & Peril of Artificial Intelligence) sent me this one from his Conscium Project re: “Principles for Responsible AI Consciousness Research”. While detailed and illuminating, the work is vague about the most important things, like how to tell ‘consciousness’ from a system that feigns it… and whether that even matters.
Moreover, none of the authors cited here refers to how the topic was pre-explored in science fiction. Take the dive into “what is consciousness?” that you’ll find in Peter Watts’s novel “Blindsight.”
…wherein Watts makes the case that a sense of self is not even necessary in order for a being to behave in ways that are actively intelligent, communicative and even ferociously self-interested.
All you need is evolution. And an overall system in which evolution remains (as in nature) zero-sum. Which – I keep trying to tell folks – is not necessarily fore-ordained.
== And yet more AI related Miscellany ==
4. Augmented reality glasses with face-recognition and access to world databases… now where have we seen this before? How about in great detail in Existence?
5. On the MINDPLEX Podcast with AI pioneers Ben Goertzel and Lisa Rein covering – among many topics - training AGI's to hold each other accountable, pingable IDs (using cryptographic hashes to secure agent identity), AGI rights & much, much more! (Sept 2024). And yeah, I am there, too.
6. An article by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei makes points similar to Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreeson, that the upsides of AI are potentially spectacular, as also portrayed in a small but influential number of science fiction tales. Alas, his list of potential benefits, while extensive re ways AI could be "Machines of Loving Grace,"* is also long in the tooth and almost hoary-clichéd. We need to recall that in any ecosystem - including the new cyber one - entities without feedback constraints soon evolve into whatever form best proliferates quickly. That is, unless feedback loops take shape.
7. This article in FORTUNE makes a case similar to my own... that AIs will improve best, in accuracy and sagacity and even wisdom, if accountability is applied by AI upon other AIs. Positive feedback can be a dangerous cycle, while some kinds of negative feedback loops can lead to incrementally increased correlation with the real world.
8. Again, my featured WIRED article about this - Give Every AI a soul... or else.
My related Newsweek op-ed (June'22) dealt with 'empathy bots'' that feign sapience and personhood.
== AI generated visual lies – we can deal with this! ==
9. A new AI algorithm flags deepfakes with 98% accuracy — better than any other tool out there right now. And it is essential that we keep developing such systems, in order to stand a chance of keeping up in an arms race against those who would foist on us lies, scams and misinformation...
... pretty much exactly as I described back in 1997, this reposted chapter from The Transparent Society - "The End of Photography as Proof."
Two problems. First, scammers will use programs like this one to help perfect their scam algorithms. Second, it would be foolish to rely upon any one such system, or just a few. A diversity of highly competitive tattle-tale lie-denouncing systems is the only thing that can work, as I discuss here.
Oh, and third. It is inherent – (as I show in that chapter of The Transparent Society) – that lies are more easily detected, denounced and incinerated in a general environment of transparency, wherein the greatest number can step away from their screens and algorithms and compare them to actual, physically-witnessed reality.
For more on this, here’s my related Newsweek op-ed (June'22) dealt with 'empathy bots' that feign sapience. Plus a YouTube pod where I give an expanded version.
== Generalizing to innovation, in general ==
10. Traditional approaches to innovation emphasize ideas and inventions, often leading to a losing confrontation with the mysterious “Valley of Death.” My colleague Peter Denning and his co-author Todd Lyons upend this paradigm in Navigating a Restless Sea, offering eight mutually reinforcing practices that power skillful navigation toward adoption, mobilizing people to try something new.
=== Some tacked-on tech miscellany ==
11. Sure, it goes back to neolithic "Venus figurines" and Playboy and per-minute phone comfort lines and Eliza - and the movie "Her." And bot factories are hard at work. At my 2017 World of Watson keynote, I predicted persuasive 'empathy bots' would arrive in 2022 (they did.) And soon, Kremlin 'honeypot-lure babes" should become ineffective! Because this deep weakness of male humans will have an outlet that's... more than human?
Could that lead to those men calming down, prioritizing the more important aspects of life?)
12. And hence, we will soon see...AI girlfriends and companions. And this from Vox: People are falling in love with -- and getting addicted to -- AI voices.
13. Kewl! “This tiny 3D-printed Apple IIe is powered by a $2 microcontroller .” With a teensy working screen taken from an Apple watch. Can run your old IIe programs. Size of an old mouse.
14. Paragraphica by Bjørn Karmann is a camera that has no lens, but instead generates a text description of when & where it is, then generates an image via a text-to-image model.
15. Daisy is an AI cellphone application that wastes scammers’ time so that they don’t have time to target real victims. Daisy has "told frustrated scammers meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting, and provided exasperated callers with false personal information including made-up bank details."
And finally...
== NOT directly AI… but for sure implications! ==
And… only slightly off-topic: If you feel a need for an inspiring tale about a modern hero, intellect and deeply-wise public figure, try Judge David Tatel’s VISION: A memoir and Blindness and Justice. I’ll vouch that he’s one of the wisest wise-guys I know. "Vision is charming, wise, and completely engaging. This memoir of a judge of the country’s second highest court, who has been without sight for decades, goes down like a cool drink on a hot day." —Scott Turow. https://www.davidtatel.com/
And Maynard Moore - of the Institute for the Study of Religion in the Age of Science - will be holding a pertinent event online in mid January: “Human-Machine Fusion: Our Destiny, or Might We Do Better?” The IRAS webinar is free, but registration is required.
== a lagniappe (puns intended) ==
In the 1980s this supposedly “AI”- generated sonnet emerged from the following prompt, "Buzz Off, Banana Nose."
Well… real or not, here’s my haiku response.
In lunar orchards
A pissed apiary signs:
"Bee gone, Cyrano!"
Count the layers, oh cybernetic padiwans! I’m not obsolete… yet.