Pandora's Box ...

 

Executives from three of the leading A.I. companies, including Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, have signed the open letter.Credit...Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Pandora's Box applies as AI, the open-ended tech, is loose and the entities creating it have no idea how to control it as we will never know how AI works due to the fact software has to design software in order to interact, in real time, to the vagaries of the world. As often stated in BRT, we have four existential issues facing mankind, global warming, nuclear war, AI and environmental degradation as the current way man produces food and pollutes the environment is not sustainable in any way, shape or fashion. 

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's water-colour of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881

A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement  released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.

The letter ...

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI
should be a global priority alongside
other societal-scale risks such
as pandemics and nuclear war.

Pandora's Box indeed.

"a continuous surface connection" ...

The question for the justices was how to determine which wetlands qualify as such waters.
Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times.

The fascist court strikes yet again. It's all about the money according to the worst SC in history.

The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution.

Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters.

The decision was a second major blow to the E.P.A.’s authority and to the power of administrative agencies generally. Last year, the court limited the E.P.A.’s power to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

Experts in environmental law said the decision would leave many wetlands subject to pollution without penalty, sharply undercutting the E.P.A.’s authority to protect them under the Clean Water Act.

“This is a really disastrous outcome for wetlands, which have become absolutely vital for biodiversity preservation and flood control,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School.

Question, what does "a continuous surface connection" to those waters mean as wetlands are 3 dimensional entities, not two but to Alito, scientific accuracy matters not, right?

Nixon must be rolling over in his grave.

For the public good :)

Illustration: Michael Haddad

Yours truly cherishes Wikipedia, an invaluable resource able to keep this writer honest when discussing the vagaries of reality from the perspective of an ordinary American under the auspices of BRT, the "wonderful" blog started in the year of our lord 2007. :) Why you might ask? Because Wikipedia's self-correcting. If someone writes about something incorrectly, another fixes the mistake, a process akin to how science works as science is a discipline designed to be disproved, a quality held most dear by this rube without question. :)

Interesting enough, Wikopedia was founded the same year as BRT so perhaps fate played a hand in the creation of both enterprises. :)

In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. The Office's Michael Scott called it “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Praising Wikipedia, by restating its mission, meant self-identifying as an idiot.

That was in 2007. Today, Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. The English-language version recently surpassed 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words; edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia's success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and now makes its final ascent to … muted criticism. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative.

Why Wikipedia matters.

Yet in an era when Silicon Valley's promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10, and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?
 

How cool is that? :)

Addendum: Click here to learn how Wikipedia came to be. :)

Blood & Sex :)

Parantica cleona, an Indonesian butterfly, contemplates its next meal. (Image credit: Yi-Kai Tea)

The notion of vampire survival always involving blood and sex is apt because the vampire, as depicted by Bram Stroker's Dracula, must be physically alluring to enable the bloodsucker to get close enough to its intended victim in order to feed, something akin to what male milkweed butterflies do in drinking milkweed toxins in order to attract females, actions depicted in great detail in a Live Science article deliciously titled Milkweed butterflies tear open caterpillars and drink them alive.

Not all caterpillars grow up to be beautiful butterflies. Some become living milkshakes for their dads, who guzzle caterpillar body fluids to attract the ladies.

Recently, scientists reported the first evidence of butterflies sipping from the bodies of caterpillars — dead and alive. They observed adult milkweed butterflies in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, using tiny claws on their feet to scratch wounds in caterpillars' bodies so they could lap the liquid that oozed out. 

Male butterflies seek certain compounds produced by milkweed (flowering plants in the family Apocynaceae), which repel predators and help the butterflies produce pheromones that attract females. Since caterpillars are stuffed with juices from chewed-up plants, they make an easy target for butterflies looking to chemically boost their attractiveness to females. 

Blood and sex applies, does it not? :)

Stroker 1906

Vlad the Impaler: The Inspiration for Stroker's Dracula

Zeno's Paradox

Tracy Ma

Yours truly has written copiously about quality and how its intimately connected to morals even if the quality attained in the creation of something is intended for a purpose not aligned with morality. Think Bernays and Goebbels to see why this take rings true. With this being said, an excellent NYTimes article titled Tyranny of 'the Best' describes Skinner box tendencies many people exhibit when obsessing about finding the best of any given thing while totally missing out on what it means to be truly alive. As one fairly cognizant about how data is packaged and dissiminated, I can honestly say I'm not a chipmunk spinning in a wheel driven to find out what 'the best' actually means, something most comforting while others continue their endless pursuit of what's 'the Best' is in a fashion similar to Zeno's Paradox where Achilles never wins.

Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BCE) is credited with creating several famous paradoxes, and perhaps the best known is the paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. (Achilles was the great Greek hero of Homer’s The Iliad.) It has inspired many writers and thinkers through the ages, notably Lewis Carroll (see Carroll’s Paradox) and Douglas Hofstadter, both of whom wrote expository dialogues involving the Tortoise and Achilles.

Without 0, the Tortoise always wins. :)

Rankings, of course, are nothing new. Sight and Sound has put out a list of greatest films every 10 years since 1952. The U.S. News & World Report college rankings were first published in 1983. (It will probably surprise nobody that this year’s top three are Princeton, M.I.T. and Harvard.) Rolling Stone released its first list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003. Some version of the “hottest new restaurants of the year” could be found in local newspapers and magazines for decades — not to mention the best dentists, doctors, schools. These have always provoked conversation, backlash, letters to the editor.

Maybe. But to me, anyway, the experience of shopping for a hair dryer online feels less like being a pawn in a Matrix-esque mind-control operation and more like being trapped inside a box of plastic toys that have all been wound up so they constantly chatter and clatter against one another. The reality is I just want to spend as little time as possible in that box, while also hopefully buying something that won’t break the second time I use it. Best-of lists and rankings can seem like a simple solution to this problem.

There are a lot of areas where people don’t feel as if they have expertise, and ratings “get rid of that feeling of not being competent,” Rick Larrick, a professor of management and organization at Duke University, told me.

Zeno's Paradox rules as does the Skinner Box. :)

Skinner Box

Joe B's The Redding Express :)

 It's all about trains and the enthusiasm and care it takes to keep the trains running on time. Brings back a lot of memories yours truly had as a kid. Thanks to Bert and Joe in making this video a lot of fun to do. :)

Yes ... and pigs fly

Yes ... and pigs fly. 

Let there be light/rev II

Let there be light/rev II

Using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth.

“In these images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” says Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the new study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This will allow us to understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars.”

Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity, but the details of how this happens are not fully understood. How many stars are born out of a cloud? How massive are they? How many stars will also have planets?

Questions, questions, never-ending in a reality we will never fully understand. 

This image shows the IRAS 11051-7706 object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying the image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions. Credit: ESO/Meingast et al.

This image shows the HH 909 A object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying this image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions.

Credit: ESO/Meingast et al.

Gotta do one more. :)

A dark cloud of cosmic dust snakes across this spectacular image, illuminated by the brilliant light of new stars. This dense cloud is a star-forming region called Lupus 3, where dazzlingly hot stars are born from collapsing masses of gas and dust. This image was created from images taken using the VLT Survey Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope.  Credit: ESO/R. Colombari

As stated before, we are but a dust mote in god's eye.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Image by Google

And so it goes., the famous quote by the esteemed K. Vonnegut, applies when looking at this AI generated "Hopper," created by one connecting to Creative Fabrica and typing in the immortal sentence "a woman looking outside the window by Edward Hopper." to produce the work in seconds, a timeframe altogether different from when I painted Angle Line in the year of our lord 1977.

Angle Line - 1977 Acrylic 60" X 48"

As stated in a BRT piece titled The tool becoming the master, it's evident AI's becoming the irresistible low hanging fruit whereby the ceding of the ability to do anything of value is better left to a machine because it's just so easy to do unless the power goes off, right?

Now you can create any image you can imagine and use it for your crafting projects," reads the website. "These creations are generated using Artificial Intelligence and are all one-of-a-kind."

All to say, you don't need to be an AI expert or internet sleuth extraordinaire to confirm that this painting isn't the real deal. But while that may have been simple enough for a human to decipher, the reality — and the concern — still stands that Google's algorithms weren't able to bridge the same divide, not just allowing the image to show up on the second or third page of search results but featuring the AI-generated art in the search engine's algorithm-determined overview of the artist's work. In other words, one algorithm's fake painting fooled Google's algorithm. The snake has officially started to eat its tail.

An ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract[1]

With profound regret ...

Hate to say it but yours truly has been talking about the potential dangers of AI for years with nary a positive response regarding my take until now. The problem with this well-intention plea to do a 6-month hiatus on said tech is, IMHO, moot as the horse is out of the barn, never to return as we move further into the 21st century. As Fats Waller said, No one knows, do one ...

Kevin Baragona of DeepAI (Image credit: DeepAI)

"Someone should stop the AI industry," Baragona says during our interview, which is a surprising comment from the founder of a company in the field. He launched DeepAI (opens in new tab) back in 2016, initially as an AI news portal. It now has its own text-to-image AI art generator and a bunch of AI chatbots that can respond to questions in different styles, from that of a 'drunk friend' to a 'motivational coach'. 

Baragona also joined the likes of Elon Musk in signing the recent letter that urged a pause in AI development. Asked whether this is not a little contradictory, he exclaims that DeepAI is "my only livelihood", but that he now thinks AI is developing too fast and will become "smarter than us".

"I wasn't worried about AI at all until a year ago when we started seeing exponential progress," he says. "Now I think AI is pretty scary. This is what keeps me up at night. What are we building here? Why do we need this stuff? It's really fun, it's cool, people love it. but it's almost too good, it's too disruptive."

Exactly

DeepAI's AI image generator (Image credit: DeepAI)

Like the look of DeepAI's front end. :)

Recycling ...

Recycling, this time relating to creativity and imagination, is key because if one cannot forget, the ability to create becomes impossible, something beautifully expressed by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer able to write about dreams, information and creativity in ways most powerful and eloquent without question.

I GO BACK: Jorge Luis Borges, the celebrated Argentine novelist, cultivated a powerful memory from a young age to compensate for a condition that caused him to lose his sight later in life. He memorized many of his favorite texts. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1942, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called “Funes the Memorious.” The unnamed narrator recounts a story from his memory, which centers on a Uruguayan man named Ireneo Funes. The narrator learns Funes has fallen off his horse, hitting his head and leaving him housebound. Not long after, Funes contacts the narrator, asking to borrow some of his books in Latin, which is the narrator’s specialty. He gives Funes a selection of his most difficult Latin texts, ones that he has trouble making sense of himself.

A few days later, when the narrator goes to collect his books, he finds that Funes has memorized, in just a matter of days, long and complicated passages in Latin, despite no prior knowledge of the language. Funes tells the narrator that, ever since the accident, his memory has changed. He no longer can forget. As Funes describes it, his experience is now of one “intolerable richness and sharpness.” Whereas the rest of us look out and see a tree here, a group of people there, Funes sees the pixel-level information, frame by frame. Because he retains the full clarity of these scenes in memory, his memories have indistinguishable precision when compared to his present reality.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory) are senseless, but they betray a certain

stammering grandeur. They permit us to glimpse or infer the nature of Funes' vertiginous world. He was, let us not forget,  an almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the word dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. 

With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

"In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” In the morning, the narrator leaves for Buenos Aires. He never sees Funes again

1 point perspective ... 2020

The act of memory is an act of imagination.

Memory provides the building blocks for mental time travel.

I wish I had penned these. :)

Channeling Theseus

Yours truly is a nut job about physics. Mathematically challenged to the max, I do have the ability to visualize so, in an indirect way, physics makes sense if one is willing to learn the arcane vocabulary said discipline requires in order to learn aspects about a reality we will never fully understand. In this case, the weak force becomes interesting as without it, life, as we know it, could not exist as it's all about radioactivity and how it gives rise for the creation of the heavier elements . The video above delves into the electroweak force in a way a layperson such as myself can understand but just barely.  :) Watch the clip in its entirety as one finds researchers to be like Sherlock Holmes, or better yet, Theseus, forever using the string as a guide to discover yet another hidden truth about existence if one has the persistence and intellect to make it so.

Theseus and the Minotaur. Detail from an Attic black-figure amphora, c. 575 BC–550 BC.

The radioactive beta decay is due to the weak interaction, which transforms a neutron into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino.

The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces that govern all matter in the universe (the other three are gravity, electromagnetism and the strong force). While the other forces hold things together, the weak force plays a greater role in things falling apart, or decaying. 

The weak force, or weak interaction, is stronger than gravity, but it is only effective at very short distances. It acts on the subatomic level and plays a crucial role in powering stars and creating elements. It is also responsible for much of the natural radiation present in the universe, according to the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab). 

In nuclear fusion, radioactive decay converts hydrogen into helium and powers the sun.
(Image credit: Designua | Shutterstock)

Why unification is such a big deal.

A fundamental force representing unification of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions. Until the early 1970s, the four fundamental forces — strong nuclear, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and gravity — could only be described as distinct entities. The work of U.S. particle physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow, U.S. theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, and Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam showed that the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear forces can be unified and understood as a single interaction, called the electroweak interaction. This unification was a major step in understanding nature, similar to the achievement of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and others a century earlier in unifying the electric forces and magnetic forces into the electromagnetic interactions. A goal of theoretical physics is to achieve a further simplification in understanding nature by describing the presently known basic interactions in a unified way. Attempts to unify the strong force with the electroweak interaction are usually referred to as grand unified theories (GUTs). Various frameworks that seek to further unify with the fourth fundamental interaction, gravity, are known as M-theory, superstring theory, or a "theory of everything." Physicists broadly theorize that initially, all forces were united in the extreme energy and temperature at the beginning of the universe in the big bang. 

A graphic of the separation of the fundamental interactions as the temperature of the universe decreased in the initial fractions of a second after the big bang. The electromagnetic and weak interactions, unifiable as the electroweak interactions, were the last interactions to separate.

Channeling Theseus indeed.

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when ...

Emergence/Luna Style

Why this pix? Well, one could easily see this as a sunset and not as a full moon revealing itself thru the cloud layer, something akin to how we perceive the emergence of AI, the open-ended tech, able to become the stuff of nightmares if we let it. Yours truly has been writing about AI for years, not fear mongering or fan boying but rather preferring to take a cautious approach to this astounding technology as we will never know how it works, ever, a condition most disquieting to this writer. With this in mind, Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, has similar misgivings because there is no certitude, a fact proven to be true time and time again by Quantum Mechanics, the start point for all things related to computation and reality.

To whit ...

According to Hinton, he told Google he was leaving last month, which wouldn't have been long after his interview with CBS in which he warned that we were at a "pivotal moment" for AI.

For the most part, Hinton considered Google a "proper steward" of AI until last year. Things took a turn for the worse when Microsoft, which has invested billions into OpenAI, released its Bing AI search engine powered by GPT-4, a potential direct threat to Google's dominance in search technology. Google, in turn, is now rushing to develop an AI integrated search of its own.

In addition to its threat to people's jobs, Hinton worries that this heating up AI arms race will lead to an internet so flooded by fake images and text that no one will "be able to know what is true anymore" — a threat that he considers immediate.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

The real clincher, though, is that Hinton thinks that the day that AI gets smarter than humans and starts augmenting itself may dawn on us sooner than we think.

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that," Hinton remarked.

"But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off," he continued. "I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when ...

To be continued ... 

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is leaving Google so that he can freely share his concern that artificial intelligence could cause the world serious harm.Credit...Chloe Ellingson for The New York Times

Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.

Channeling Tesla

Channeling Tesla, DARPA goes big time on developing wireless power transfer to military hardware. The question to ask here, why not for civilian use? Methinks it will happen if the military initiative proves to be successful. 

DARPA plans to create wireless energy transfer infrastructure to supply near-uninterruptable power to U.S. military bases worldwide. The plan, as reported by Popular Mechanics, is to use laser technology to beam electricity around the planet. Famously a dream of Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago, if successful, this technology, called fittingly enough POWER ("Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay"), would make the U.S. military less reliant on liquid fuel like diesel and vulnerable power lines, which can be intercepted or sabotaged by enemy forces.

www_slon_pics/Pixabay

Nikola Tesla was one of the first minds to envision a wireless future. In the year 1900, he claimed that there would be precise wireless transmission of signals that would be received by devices no larger than a watch. He's of course describing what we now know as radiowaves, the foundation of how our modern connected electronics work.

Tesla, in fact, believed in this idea of wireless communication and energy transfer so much that he started constructing a transmitting station in New York to prove his point. Called Teslas' 'World System of Wireless', it was unfortunately never completed due to Tesla running out of money. 

Tesla's Wardenclyffe wireless station, located in Shoreham, New York, seen in 1904. The test facility was intended to be a transatlantic radiotelegraphy station and wireless power transmitter, 

but was never completed due to funding drying up. Source: Wikimedia

Tesla's concept ...

It was during the development of these transformers and alternators that he realized alternating current circuits can still function if they aren't fully 'complete'. Rather, that the current can still flow along just one wire from one grounded terminal to a second grounded terminal and the circuit would still work. Tesla discovered that when the source of the current was of high enough frequency, he could essentially use the ground as a part of the circuit.

If the grounded terminal had a high enough voltage grounded, and a wire was connected to the other terminal, the current could be drawn along the wire by the capacitance of a conducting body connected to the other end of it.

The capacitance of say, a light bulb, was enough to draw current from the circuit to light it up, which is similar to how radio transmitters work.

120 years later, by replacing radio waves with lasers/microwaves, Tesla's dream will become reality.