Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius. By th’ mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius. It is back’d like a weasel.
Hamlet. Or like a whale.
Polonius. Very like a whale.
Seems Shakespeare was indirectly channeling AI, news and social media where people talk to their choir, believing almost anything as long as it aligns with one’s world view ... which brings up the notion of Deepfakes as they’re Everywhere. Just go to almost any site and see nonsense, usually in full color, residing on the right hand side or on the bottom of the web page, saying something patently ridiculous regarding a celebrity, news event or “scientific” fact, accompanied with a clickable AI graphic showing said tidbit to be “true”. One of the usuals is a huge beast found on a beach near you.
The Idea Dynamo
Prescient to a fault, Webster’s Idea Dynamo presages the emergence of AI, the open-ended tech able to generate virtually anything of note by simply inputting, text, sound or visual prompts as needs warrant. From "writing" research papers magically dealing with quantum mechanics to effortlessly generating detailed 3D photo-realistic art depicting something like the work seen below, AI’s changing reality 24/7 whether we like or not.
The Intelligence Equation
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Jumping spiders plan ahead to catch prey, octopuses, masters of camouflage and escape, not only use shells as houses but also as blinds to get close to their quarry, crabs. Crows solve puzzles like 7 year olds and monkeys use rocks to crack nuts but the real avatars of intelligence are the whales with the sperm whale having the largest brain on the planet, configured like ours but only bigger.
Melville’s Moby Dick, besides being existential, is also scientific as Melville was an acute observer trying to understand how reality works or ... “Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Melville tried to answer these questions but failed because in 1851, the notion of sound, let alone, sonar, was not part of the equation nor did whalers even conceptualize why spermaceti, used to enhance echo location, existed in the sperm whale’s head in the first place.
Difficulties learning whale ...
Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles.
The Gift of Prometheus
When reading MIT’s Technology Review's article discussing the possible emergence of super intelligent AI’s going rogue, the notion of Prometheus' gift of fire to man and Phillip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? resonate.
lya Sutskever/OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist
Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.
Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.
60 Minutes | Geoffrey Hinton/Godfather of AI & former Google Fellow
Let’s think probabilities because reality, as defined by Quantum Mechanics, is probabilistic so the concept of AI going rogue becomes a distinct possibility as we don’t know how AI works due to the fact code has to write code to enable neural nets, the analog front end of AI, to interact with the real world in real time as human programmers cannot write software in real-time to do the task at hand, an inconvenient fact the so called AI experts seem to ignore at our peril.
In essence, we don’t know where AI ‘s headed as guesstimates about predicting the future remains but a crapshoot thanks to the vagaries of reality. :)
Houston, we have a problem
Why is this so? Well, the smart phone, the additive love child of tech, is one reason why because its so easy to get “information” just fast enough to avoid boredom as instant gratification isn’t fast enough.
Not Thinking Things Through
Consider the exhausted Odysseus, slowly sailing toward the coast of Ithaca while sleeping next to a bag carrying all the winds save the favorable west, a gift generously given to the weary travelers by Aeolis, god of the winds. The crew, also tired from the 10 year Trojan War but all too greedy for their own good, decide to open the bag thinking there was treasure to be had, thus consigning themselves to death or enslavement when their ship is driven back into the Mediterranean when all the winds escaped from the bag, forcing Odysseus to wander the sea for another 10 years before reaching Ithaca yet again.
Copyright & Public Domain
Yours truly has often talked about the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) with emphasis on intellectual property rights vis a vis copyright, the disaster perpetrated on the US by the late Sonny Bono (The Mickey Mouse Act) who, as California congressman, extended the length of copyright from the Founders 14 years plus one allowed extension of 14 years (if the cr holder was still alive) to life plus 70, which means Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, written in 1905, could theoretically remain outside of public domain until 2025 as Einstein died in 1955. Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, debuted in 1928. Disney died in 1966, ergo, Steamboat would not enter the PD until 2036.
Question, how many chimps does it take to write Hamlet?
As we all know, in order for AI to advance, it needs to hoover up our data, lots and lots of data. What’s better is the fact the tech giants categorically state the content acquired is theirs, not ours, thus potentially able to be copyrighted, which means, our content’s not ours.
A Wicked Problem
In conclusion, the abuse of copyright created by Bono and the courts, combined with the abuses of the tech giants regarding who owns what when feeding their AI’s our online content means we have lost ownership of our data but more importantly, the tech giants have lost control of AI because if one doesn’t know how said tech works, then controlling same is impossible.
Lest we forget, it’s all about the money ... yet again.
The Future of AI is Analog
With the advent of digital, single purpose analog systems, like Lord Kelvin’s, (inventor of the analog computer) withered away but no longer as AI needs to handle the vagaries of the real world in real-time using neural nets, the analog construct required by AI in order to function. Digital can do the job but only at enormous cost in terms of efficiency and power, something becoming increasingly problematic as society moves further into the 21st century.
Digital counts, Analog measures.
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When analog computing's in place, AI will be EVERYWHERE.
Postscript ...
The World of Pretend
A good friend of mine wrote an incredible piece of music titled The World of Pretend detailing the career of Veronica Lake, an extremely talented women who decided to go off grid, only to be seen in the various film noir flicks she did in the 1940's. To this writer, the age we are living in indirectly relates to hers as the emergence of AI is creating an alternative reality in which we all live 24/7. With this being said, there is no morality in tech, it all depends on who's creating said tech, something we should all recognize as we move further into the twenty first century.
Same as it ever was. - Talking Heads
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