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The AI trust deficit predates AI
There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily. But AI systems have…
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AI v. our ability to build AI
A lot of this article, by Sean Ekins, Filippa Lentzos, Max Brackmann, and Cédric Invernizzi, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 24, makes good sense – except the following two sentences: Nature took millions of years to design proteins. AI can generate meaningful protein sequences in seconds. The bigger question to ask…
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Who are you, chatbot AI?
In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet to be convinced that ChatGPT, Sydney, etc. are anything more than sophisticated word-counters and that…
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Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however incremental, as the dawn of a new revolution – but in this case, their cries of wolf may…
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Hiding from the machine
From ‘A Single Laser Fired Through a Keyhole Can Expose Everything Inside a Room’, published by Gizmodo on September 8, 2021: The keyhole imaging technique, developed by researchers at Stanford University’s Computational Imaging Lab, is so named because all that’s needed to see what’s inside a closed room is a tiny hole (such as a…
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Injustice ex machina
There are some things I think about but struggle to articulate, especially in the heat of an argument with a friend. Cory Doctorow succinctly captures one such idea here: Empiricism-washing is the top ideological dirty trick of technocrats everywhere: they assert that the data “doesn’t lie,” and thus all policy prescriptions based on data can…
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The climate and the A.I.
A few days ago, the New York Times and other major international publications sounded the alarm over a new study that claimed various coastal cities around the world would be underwater to different degrees by 2050. However, something seemed off; it couldn’t have been straightforward for the authors of the study to plot how much…
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If AI is among us, would we know?
Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness. … an actual AI might be so alien that it would not see us at all. What we regard as its inputs and outputs might not map neatly to the system’s own sensory modalities. Its…
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The Sea
Big Fish walked into a wall. His large nose tried to penetrate the digital concrete first. Of course, it went in for a second, but Marcus recomputed the algorithm, and it jumped back out. The impact of its return threw Big Fish’s head back, and with it, his body stumbled back, too. The wall hadn’t…