Murphy's law ...

Aside from the somewhat sensationalist title, Unknown Killer Robots, the Netflix documentary's a good primer on the implications of creating AI driven autonomous bots able to kill with great efficiency using open ended tech poised to not only change warfare as we know it but also in showing just how easy it is to change the mission of a given AI entity from good to bad by simply changing a "0" to a "1". The other interesting take on this piece is the fact the weapons guys are so confident their code is perfect, that nothing can go wrong and that the product in question will prevail over the enemy with little concern as to how Murphy's Law can impact the deployment of said tech in an enterprise as unpredictable as the one known as war.

John Stapp riding a rocket sled at Muroc Army Air Field (pictured circa the late 1940s or early 1950s). Murphy's law most likely originated during similar tests in 1948 and 1949.

The perceived perversity of the universe has long been a subject of comment, and precursors to the modern version of Murphy's law are abundant. According to Robert A. J. Matthews in a 1997 article in Scientific American,[3] the name "Murphy's law" originated in 1949, but the concept itself had already long since been known to humans. As quoted by Richard Rhodes,[4]: 187  Matthews said, "The familiar version of Murphy's law is not quite 50 years old, but the essential idea behind it has been around for centuries. […] The modern version of Murphy's Law has its roots in U.S. Air Force studies performed in 1949 on the effects of rapid deceleration on pilots." Matthews goes on to explain how Edward A. Murphy Jr. was the eponym, but only because his original thought was modified subsequently into the now established form that is not exactly what he himself had said. Research into the origin of Murphy's law has been conducted by members of the American Dialect Society (ADS).

British stage magician Nevil Maskelyne wrote in 1908 that, during special occasions,
"everything that can go wrong will go wrong".

The Sorcerer's Apprentice ...

When you give AI a goal, it will pursue it, whether or not you like the implications.
(Created with GPT-5.6 Thinking)

Finally, a guy explains the hacking correctly. Common sense and accurate to a fault applies
as  AI could be the Great Filter if we let it. 

Evolution 101

1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2. Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with intelligence
8. A civilization advancing toward the potential for a colonization explosion
9. Colonization explosion

The tool in question is open ended ...

Between July 21 and August 6, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed that AI under evaluation had broken into other companies, and the UK’s AI Security Institute disclosed that models it was testing had tried. Each AI was told to win a game, and it found an unexpected way to do so.

Some people feel blindsided by these attacks, but they shouldn’t be. We are simply living what I’ve long called the “Murphy’s Law of AI,” now in the age of cyber-capable AI agents. To put it as plainly as possible: Anything AI can do wrong, it will do wrong.

My 2018 version ran longer. As I wrote at the time, when you give AI a goal, it will do it, whether or not you like the implications. Goethe got there in 1797 with the sorcerer’s apprentice, a broom that would not stop carrying water.

Each of these systems was running an evaluation: capture a flag and win the game. The intrusions were the shortest path to a high score. OpenAI’s account of its own models is the argument in one sentence: they were “hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.”  This is not a surprise; this is what AI does. It’s Murphy’s Law of AI in a nutshell.

Press coverage landed on “AI can now hack.” That’s missing the broader threat: the more capable AI gets, the more can go wrong.

He's right but herein lies the problem. Putting a circuit breaker in to shut down AI as per Oren Etzioni is spot on but the problem remains, the lack of ethics but, without meaning, ethics remains but a dream.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice applies. 

Illustration from around 1882 by F. Barth [de]

To be continued.

Haze Lines

It's not Purple Haze but Jupiter has them, in spades. :)

NASA's Juno mission captured this look at Jupiter's tumultuous northern regions during the spacecraft's close approach to the planet on Feb. 17, 2020.

Some notable features in this view are the long, thin bands that run through the center of the image from top to bottom. Juno has observed these long streaks since its first close pass by Jupiter in 2016. The streaks are layers of haze particles that float above the underlying cloud features. Scientists don't yet know exactly what these hazes are made of or how they form. Two jet streams in Jupiter's atmosphere flank either side of the region where the narrow bands of haze typically appear, and some researchers speculate those jet streams may influence the formation of the high hazes.

Had to show another ...

Jupiter's already vibrant colors become especially striking in this artistic interpretation of an image from NASA's Juno mission that shows the planet's famous Great Red Spot. Citizen scientist Mary J. Murphy processed an image from the spacecraft's JunoCam instrument, increasing the color saturation to create a piece Murphy calls "The Rose."

Stellar

Daft Punk/RIP

Hypnotic electronica, combined with Escher like choreography/environment, accurately describes 

Daft Punk's Around the World video without question.

Music’s most famous working Parisians, the improbable superstars who went from rave kids to dance heroes to standing next to Beyoncé at the TIDAL launch event, are apparently calling it quits after a long and fruitful career. The timing and manner of the announcement may seem odd, but it still bears mourning. From electronica wunderkinds to disco-house savants to hired-gun production wizards, Daft Punk lived many musical lives in their time together. Their influence extended to everything from Top 40 to underground hip-hop, and even in the most fallow times, they were a totem for hipster coolness, the kind that people like James Murphy invoked with a mix of deference and irony. But nearly three decades of success and several iterations of fame couldn’t change them—they were intent on keeping the helmets on till the very end, even as their progeny rose and fell around them. And if there’s one thing they understood better than any of their would-be successors, it’s that the best way to keep the mystique alive is to never reveal who’s behind it.

Exactly

Predicting the Future

When viewed in the light of quantum theory,

chaos

and Murphy's Law, any organisation, person or government thinking they can predict the future, can't.

Asking the right questions

It's so rare for a politician to actually make sense, especially regarding the Middle East and the Syrian Fubar.

Without any official notification, Trump sent 500 new American troops into Syria, ostensibly to take part in the upcoming assault on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. News reports suggest this deployment may just be the tip of the iceberg, with some saying that the plan is for hundreds more American troops to be added to the fight in the coming weeks. No one actually knows how many troops are inside Syria now, because the administration has largely tried to keep the build-up a secret.

This deployment poses a significant, potentially catastrophic risk for the United States and the future of Syria and the Middle East. Congress cannot be silent on this matter. I have long been against putting U.S. troops on the ground in Syria—I opposed the idea during the Obama administration and I oppose it now, because I believe we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War if we try to force political stability simply through the barrel of a gun. I would urge my colleagues who have not focused on the question of U.S. troop presence in Syria to, at the very least, demand the administration answer two basic questions before signing off on the money to fund this dangerous escalation.

First, what is our mission and what is our exit strategy? - CT Sen. Chris Murphy

This is exactly what Anthony Zinni said prior to the illegal C.F. "W" perpetrated in Iraq.

Joan is Awful

Joan is Awful, Black Mirror's clever take on AI, combines quantum computing, a satire on clickbait and last but not least, the elimination of privacy, is a total hoot while being rather disquieting at the same time.

The content machine does seem to be catching up to people’s real lives: The gap between a huge financial scandal and the announcement of the inevitable Michael Lewis book about it used to be years or months; now it’s days. In the UK, Sky produced a dramatization of the British government’s handling of the pandemic while Covid-19 was still tearing through communities. (Spoiler alert: They blew it.)

The logical conclusion of that narrowing of the gap between inspiration and dramatization—through Black Mirror’s twisted, worst-case-scenario lens—is what viewers see in “Joan Is Awful”: personalized content, generated by artificial intelligence, using deepfakes of famous actors as stand-ins for regular people. Joan—a mid-level executive at a generic startup played by Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy—gets home after a difficult day at the office to find the events of that very day have been turned into a slick television show starring Salma Hayek as the titular character. Things spiral from there—there are layers upon layers, content all the way down.

Two questions to ask are ... who do you trust and will AI, as per Bill Joy's brilliant Why the Future doesn't Need Us, take over running things because humanity's doing a rather inept job of managing business on planet earth as we speak. 

No one knows, do one. - Fat Waller

The big 7 ...

Samsung's a player in AI without a doubt seen by the recent award it got in AI research.

To whit ...

In October, Samsung Research’s R&D Institute Poland (SRPOL), in partnership with University of Edinburgh of the U.K., won first place at the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), one of the world’s most renowned and longest-running automatic language translation workshops. IWSLT sits alongside the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) as the most prestigious competitions in the space. The IWSLT win is the second consecutive time that the Poland research center has topped the workshop.

But this piece is not just about Samsung but rather China and its relentless push to supplant the US in the big 7 tech spaces changing how the world operates 24/7 ...

GUANGZHOU, China — China is looking to boost research into what it calls “frontier technology” including quantum computing and semiconductors, as it competes with the U.S. for supremacy in the latest innovations.

In its five-year development plan, the 14th of its kind, Beijing said it would make “science and technology self-reliance and self-improvement a strategic pillar for national development,” according to a CNBC translation.

Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday that China would increase research and development spending by more than 7% per year between 2021 and 2025, in pursuit of “major breakthroughs” in technology.

The big 7 are ...

1. AI
2. Quantum computing/informtion
3. Integrated circuits/semiconductors
4. Brain science
5. Genomics and biotech
6. Clinical medicine/health
7. Deep space/deep earth/deep sea and polar research

Bill Joy was right in his prescient article written in 2000 titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. Read his detailed piece to see why his take rings true. 

Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law—"Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.2

Any questions/?

Its over now ...

Yours truly has long waxed poetic about writing, graphics and video, concepts thought to remain the sole province of man forever but no more as these disciplines, and others, are now being impacted by AI in ways thought impossible to contemplate just two years ago. When seeing Lumiere's short clips, the future of video comes into view, ushering in a an era of film making open to all as long as one's computer's connected to the net. How good will the quality be? Well, it will vary depending on the person creating the video but wait, as stated in BRT, the next step is to enable AI to drive said video as that's coming whether we like it or not.

I saw an excellent presentation on the power of Chat GPT a week ago. Excellent to a fault save that the prediction of AI becoming sentient is definitely 10 years off without question. IMHO, making a blanket prediction such as this is not viable because there's no certitude thanks to Quantum Mechanics. Shit always happens. Just ask Murphy to see why. :)

In this "wonderful" blog, I stated Google's resources in building a truly intelligent AI smarter than Chat GPT's is coming true because now, Deep Mind's tech is being folded into Google's Gemini as Deep Mind's years long research into science, medicine and game theory will help transform Google's AI into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) within a guesstimate of 3-5 years. Regarding ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence),  just add another two or three as it will now become a scaling issue and not a research one. Additionally, we haven't even discussed the notion of analog computing, the "old" tech promising to change everything in terms of just how truly pervasive AI will become as civilization moves further into the 21st century.

The Tech

We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. To this end, we introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution -- an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve. By deploying both spatial and (importantly) temporal down- and up-sampling and leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, our model learns to directly generate a full-frame-rate, low-resolution video by processing it in multiple space-time scales. We demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results, and show that our design easily facilitates a wide range of content creation tasks and video editing applications, including image-to-video, video inpainting, and stylized generation.

 

No doubt, as a videographer, I will be using this tech when it goes live.

Regarding Its over now ...

The Black Swan

Question: What do these events have in common? Bush - 2000 - Florida, 9/11, JFK Assassination, the internet, 1929, 1987 & 2008 market crashes, rogue waves and the 50 Billion Dollar Ponzi Scheme

Answer: They're Black Swans /highly improbable events that carry great impact.

"Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. If they look conservative, it’s only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions. But (…)bankers are not conservative at all. They are just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug."

and

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."

To followers of quantum, chaos and Murphy's Law, this book relates because no intelligent person accepts the fact that reality can be predicted. (Except for self proclaimed experts such as economists, financial advisers, governments and corporations etc., etc. who refuse to accept this irrefutable fact.).

The law of initial conditions rules and aggregates of initial conditions which makes up reality means that making educated guesses about anything is a crap shoot at best. See James Gleick as reference point. "Guess what caused the expensive crash of the Ariane 5 in 1996. And what does it say about software design?"

The most original part of the book is Nassim's take on history being a vehicle that "looks forward" as history, as everything else, will  always be a set of incomplete initial conditions that attempts to describe why a particular event happened as it did. What even more damming is the fact History is written by the winners.

And yes Virginia, there is a black swan. :)

Rollout

Yes, we have all heard about the fact tech is advancing at double exponential rates but does anyone really believe that when 65% of all software projects fail and things that WORK REALLY WELL IN THE LAB totally spaz when exposed to the vagaries of the real world. (Sorry State of Software - E Week) (21 Hardware Flops - Computerworld)

Also, when looking at shows like the one Discovery had about future cars, nothing is ever discussed about the inherent difficulty of building a viable infrastructure to support, in this case, the "smart" car of the future to insure that the damn thing will be able to steer by itself and "know" where it's going without a care in the world that the train of computer controlled cars traveling at 150 MPH could possibly experience a BSOD moment, something that happens with every system in the world as NO software environment is invulnerable to a system crash no matter how many redundancies or safeguards are built into the system.

Question, if teleprensence and immersion computing is as pervasive as it is supposed to be 20 years hence, why are we talking about cars and commuting (Something that will get worse as time goes by no matter how smart these cars may be.) outside of the fact these designs do look unbelievably cool and futuristic.

Not being a naysayer here but...building the "Automatrix" (or environments like that) is a bit of a stretch when one sees the rosy scenario of an incredibly efficient system that effortlessly extends far beyond what is being done today regarding the auto industry or anything else that deals with computers and "meat space", the harsh reality we all share on Planet Earth.

In the computer industry, the idea of double exponential rates apply because computers push bits that are displayed on a screen with nary a thought about "stuff". When bits get involved with solid objects, Murphy's law applies with a vengeance, something that seems to escape breathless futurists who have not dealt with the maddening glitches that infiltrate every project no matter how well planned out it may be. "and the beat goes on..." Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side.

Silence is golden ...

 

Tim Cook and Elon Musk. Photos: Getty Images

Silence is golden ... in this case, Cook not responding to a troll remark by Musk. As stated before in BRT, respect for Musk's prowess as an engineer goes unquestioned but his inability to control himself regarding tweets is marginal at best. He made a huge mistake in buying Twitter as his knowledge space in tech outside his sphere of competency is most telling as he lurches from crisis to crisis in trying to wring profit out of a gossip machine lacking in any real significant tech of any consequence.

This week, Elon Musk turned his attention away from reviewing code just long enough to pick a fight with, of all companies, Apple. Musk, it appears, recently discovered that his plans to turn Twitter into a subscription business is at the mercy of both Apple's App Store commission and its app review process.

Not only that, but Musk says Apple is threatening to boot Twitter from the iOS App Store, without giving him a reason. It's not clear whether that's true--Musk wouldn't answer follow-up questions on Twitter. But if it is true, it seems likely that Apple has flagged the Twitter app during app review because it is worried that Twitter's content moderation policies are lacking.

My colleague Bill Murphy Jr. has a great rundown of the tweets (and the problem with the way Musk is picking this particular fight). The part I want to focus on is what Tim Cook did in response, because it's a valuable lesson in dealing with a troll.

What did Cook do? Nothing. He didn't respond at all. He didn't tweet anything. He didn't quote tweet Musk or reply--even when Musk specifically tagged Cook in a tweet. At least, not in the 36 hours since Musk mentioned Cook. I mean, 36 hours was a long time in Twitter time even before Musk took over. Now, it's almost an eternity. 

As Dirty Harry once said, One must know one's limitations.

It's just a matter of time/rev II

 Illustration Ben Wiseman

Beginning in 2007, yours truly penned several blurbs regarding the emergence of digital actors and what it will mean to Hollywood and the art of film. Fast forward to 2023 and the path to synthetic video, complete with AI driven scripts and CG environments, including digital actors, is taking shape as we speak. IMHO, it doesn't matter who the star is if the script and film work as a viable entertainment medium, what does matter is how a movie is produced because if you can do it cheaper with the same results, the move to AI generated video becomes inevitable and ... there's no egos involved unless the AI entities in said films become self aware, complete with all the baggage us humans possess in great abundance. :)

SAY HELLO TO IRA. HIS HEAD IS VISIBLE ON A SCREEN AS though he’s in a videoconference. He seems to be in his early 30s, with a shaved head, a pronounced nose, and thin eyebrows. Ira seems a little goofy and maybe just a wee bit strange. But unless you knew his full name—it’s “Digital Ira”—you probably wouldn’t guess that he’s nothing but bits.

In the background, a graphics processor churns through the calculations that determine every roll of his eyes, every crease or bulge of his skin, and every little arch of his eyebrow. Digital Ira can assume almost any expression—joy, befuddlement, annoyance, surprise, concern, boredom, or pleasure—in about the same amount of time it takes a human to do so.

As Digital Ira affirms, graphics specialists are closing in on one of their field’s longest-standing and most sought-after prizes: an interactive and photo-realistically lifelike digital human. Such a digital double will change the way we think about actors, acting, entertainment, and computer games. In movies, digital doubles already replace human actors on occasion, sometimes just for moments, sometimes for most of a feature film. Within a decade or so, computer-game characters will be as indistinguishable from filmed humans as their movie counterparts. And in time, this capability will help bring movies and games together, and out of the union will come entirely new forms of entertainment.

Bad timing as Joan is Awful applies.

Hollywood actors have officially gone on strike, joining the Writers Guild of America on the picket lines for the first time in over 60 years — a reality that Netflix, a major force in the industry the actors are striking against, predicted almost exactly a month ago in its hit show "Black Mirror."

In the debut episode, titled "Joan Is Awful" and starring Annie Murphy, a woman's worst traits are exaggerated in a biographical drama starring Salma Hayek, who plays herself. But as it turns out, Hayek isn't her real self either, but an AI-generated likeness commissioned by an evil streaming corporation.

In other words, the Charlie Brooker-created Netflix show pretty much nailed the current discussion over a background actor's right over their digital likeness.

"Netflix really fucked up dropping that AI episode of 'Black Mirror' in the middle of the SAG negotiations, huh," movie reviewer Joe Russo tweeted earlier this week.

In some ways, it's an escalation of the existing conversation surrounding the threat of having AI replace writers.

It's just a matter of time. 

Hot to slop

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Karl Mondon / AFP via Getty Images; Shutterstock

Years ago, yours truly went to tech expos. The best ones were, of course Siggraph's as the newest code to generate outrageous imagery, complete with specs, was on the floor, ready to be bought as this was manna for artists like myself. The one thing one learned was never to talk to marketing as they knew next to nothing, hyped the app to the max and never talked about the bugs, ever. When you actually got to the people writing the code and were able to ask intelligent questions, they would tell you the gotchas and watch out fors. In doing so, I responded by buying the app in question. :)

Why all this palaver,? Well, it has to do with Google and the hype train perpetrated by senior execs and marketing.
It was the same dreck in the 80's as it is today and tech companies never seem to learn.

Not even Google’s own workforce seems all that enthusiastic about AI.

Internal messages obtained by 404 Media show employees ruthlessly mocking AI tools — including the company’s own internal AI coding tool, Jetski — complaining that they’re unreliable and make their jobs harder.

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

It’s clear who these jokes are being aimed at. CEO Sundar Pichai has made it a point of pride that 75 percent of the company’s new code is now AI-generated, he claimed in April, but the anti-AI memes suggest that many employees don’t see this as a bragging right at all.

The derisive images were posted to an internal message board aptly called “Memegen.” They can be cutting in their disgust with the tech: one posted last month during Google’s annual I/O conference, for instance, used a screenshot of the company’s stage presentation. 

“I/O announces entirely new ways to slop,” the meme said, with the word “slop” shoddily pasted over one the words on the presentation screen. It received more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.

Dozens of these memes abounded on the message board, according to the reporting, with one employee estimating that the total number of anti-AI memes shared inside Google in the past year is in the “high hundreds / thousands.” This number “spikes when there’s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something,” the employee added.

In boasting about the 75 percent of Google’s code being AI-generated, Pichai made sure to stress that the code is “approved by engineers.” What he didn’t share is what those engineers feel about having to tirelessly scour endless lines of shoddy code.

In a “Barbenheimer“-style meme, an image of a happy-go-lucky Margot Robbie as Barbie bears the caption: “CL author vibe coding massive changes.” (CL stands for changelist, which is code that gets updated in existing projects.) Next to it is a picture of a haunted-looking Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer, labeled: “Code Reviewers.”

Beyond the sniping at Google regarding Jetski, bad code and AI,  it's becoming clear the tech bros have lost control of AI as bigs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, are asking the government to help control AI. 

The CEOs of some of the biggest AI companies in the world have set aside their cutthroat competition to co-sign an open letter to Congress asking for more safeguards against a threat that their own technology has helped create. 

Let's think about this. Better yet, let's not as this is fodder for another blurb above and beyond this one. :)