4 takes on AI ...

Dina Litovsky/Redux

4 takes on AI shows just how powerful this tech has become in just a few years, a fact showing just how open ended this software truly is. To whit.

In the NYTimes piece titled Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip, the article starts with why Trump keeps his voters enthralled but quickly segues to AI and what it will mean to work in America.

By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.

Galston has grasped a genuine phenomenon. But white men are not the only victims of deindustrialization. We are now entering upon an era in which vast swaths of the population are potentially vulnerable to the threat — or promise — of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This revolution is driven by unprecedented levels of technological innovation as artificial intelligence joins forces with automation and takes aim not only at employment in what remains of the nation’s manufacturing heartland, but also increasingly at the white-collar managerial and professional occupational structure.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., described in an email the most likely trends as companies increasingly adopt A.I. technologies.

A.I. is in its infancy. It can be used for many things, some of them very complementary to humans. But right now it is going more and more in the direction of displacing humans, like a classic automation technology. Put differently, the current business model of leading tech companies is pushing A.I. in a predominantly automation direction.

As a result, Acemoglu continued, “we are at a tipping point, and we are likely to see much more of the same types of disruptions we have seen over the last decades.”

Take 2. The dark side ...

Courtesy of AI Dungeon

In a popular game, when AI is brought into the equation, the dark side emerges ...

IN DECEMBER 2019, Utah startup Latitude launched a pioneering online game called AI Dungeon that demonstrated a new form of human-machine collaboration. The company used text-generation technology from artificial intelligence company OpenAI to create a choose-your-own adventure game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. When a player typed out the action or dialog they wanted their character to perform, algorithms would craft the next phase of their personalized, unpredictable adventure.

Last summer, OpenAI gave Latitude early access to a more powerful, commercial version of its technology. In marketing materials, OpenAI touted AI Dungeon as an example of the commercial and creative potential of writing algorithms.

Then, last month, OpenAI says, it discovered AI Dungeon also showed a dark side to human-AI collaboration. A new monitoring system revealed that some players were typing words that caused the game to generate stories depicting sexual encounters involving children. OpenAI asked Latitude to take immediate action. "Content moderation decisions are difficult in some cases, but not this one,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “This is not the future for AI that any of us want."

Take 3, Aggression 2Step ...

Google’s AI got aggressive over apple picking.

When resources get scarce, AI bots become all too human.

In a study published online (but not yet in a peer-reviewed journal), Deep Mind researchers had AI “agents” compete against each other in 40 million rounds of a fruit-gathering computer game. In the game, each agent had to collect as many apples as possible. They also could temporarily knock an opponent out of the game by hitting them with a laser beam.

When apples were abundant, the two agents were happy to collect their fruit without targeting each other. But in more scarce scenarios with fewer apples around, the agents became more aggressive. The researchers also found that the greater the “cognitive capacity” of the agent, the more frequently they attacked their opponent. This makes sense, as in this scenario attacking an opponent is more complex behavior and so requires greater intelligence.

Take 4, Dreaming of Shakespeare ...

Illustration by Charlotte Fu

Writing is hard. One has to practice at it for a long time before it becomes instinctive, something this writer has learned about the hard way as practice doesn't make perfect, it makes better.

Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In July of 2019, Microsoft invested a billion dollars, which allowed OpenAI to create a supercomputer with two hundred and eighty-five thousand C.P.U. cores, ten thousand G.P.U.s, and four hundred gigabits per second of network connectivity per server. Microsoft claims that it ranks in the top five supercomputers in the world, processing more than twenty-three thousand teraflops per second. The power of the supercomputer has been transformative. GPT-2, which John Seabrook took for a test drive in 2019, asking it to write an article for The New Yorker, had 1.5 billion parameters. GPT-3 has a hundred and seventy-five billion. (A parameter is a configuration variable required to make a prediction in machine learning.) Brute computational power is why Sudowrite can write like Kafka.

GPT-3 hints at a world in which machines can generate language. The consequences are vertiginous. To spend ten minutes with Sudowrite is to recognize that the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure. Take an A paper, change a few words in the first paragraph, push buttons three times, and you have an essay that fits the assignment. Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed. The changes that are coming are fundamental to every method of speaking and writing that presently exists.

Any questions?