1. Wealth does not correlate well with intelligence.
2. But also, intelligence does not correlate well with intelligence.
3. Hence we are moving intelligence outside the human.
4. We fail to recognise that we aren’t actually moving intelligence but rather a conglomerate of words and phrases of varying consequence and validity. (see point 2)
5. We trust this disembodied word jumble to solve our most pressing problems and really, really hope it won’t realise that we need to stop making and selling stuff from limited resources, and stop burning stuff. (see point 1)
6. The diembodied word jumble won’t ”realise” this because it turns out it’s actually not intelligent – in spite of us literally naming it intelligence! Go figure.
7. The cockroaches take over.
When Bill Gates writes:
”The world needs to make sure that everyone—and not just people who are well-off—benefits from artificial intelligence. Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it.”
I wonder what precedent makes him believe that the world, and governments, will be successful in this endeavor? What must governments do today to mitigate the potential harm? This is conveniently omitted.
Two more omissions in his piece that feel substantial to me:
- He does not in any way mention involving the people he intends to help, much comes across as a need for the ”brightest minds” in North America and Europe to make these decisions (history repeating itself).
- There is no acknowledgement of the energy required for all these applications, and by extension climate impact.
His book recommendations at the end give a clue as to what type of voices he values in this space.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun
While we’re on the topic of Bill Gates’ predictions, this is a favorite page of mine that lists all the times since 1997 that Bill predicted that voice input will become the primary input mode of all computers, consistently ”within the next 2 to 5 years”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090319032547/http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/12/30/gates
On the new Lensa app that generates avatars from your photos. Men get avatars in the way they see themselves (Rock Star, Superhero, Cyborg, Astronaut) and women get... hmm, let's just say it's still the male perspective.
"'Ultimately the answer is that AI is built by humans… the reality is, as of now, a majority of these AI developers are white men who play a lot of Settlers of Katan and live in fantasy sci-fi worlds. You can say I am generalizing, but IT IS A FACT so do with it as you will.'"
https://theriveter.co/voice/whos-training-the-ai-apps-of-the-future/
@fyrfli Exactly. 💚
Many problems we solve are actually harmful effects of really bad historical decisions.
So rather than "solving problems" we are alleviating symptoms of bad decisions. Some harm keeps leaking through with each "solution" and we can make more stuff to patch those leaks.
What this means is that we can continue to make bad decisions. They will create problems that can be solved and this will lead to profit. Harm must be alleviated and people will pay for that.
Over time this creates the illusion of progress.
There are a lot of things we should probably just stop doing right now, instead of building more stuff to solve the harm of that thing.
But it's not always obvious what those things are because we have over many decades done a decent job of making the harm in each previous step invisible.
We've done this with "solutions" that address the second and third and nth order effects of those things.
And obviously: if we remove the solutions a lot of people may lose their jobs.
In case you were wondering why so many people appear to be spending a lot of time not producing anything of value. They're actually quite busy making solutions to address harm that keeps leaking from some long-forgotten historical choice.
And nobody wants to bear the responsibility of that choice.
At some point in time I suppose this patchwork of solutions will come tumbling down. Until then we will be busy creating new and shiny problems for tomorrow.
Jag har alltid älskat att ta stöd av digitala verktyg för att nå ut med budskap och kommunikation på nya sätt och till fler människor. Det går fortfarande fint utan AI, även om det känns snudd på medeltida. Jag provade att slänga ihop den här filmen som exempel.
Jag använder en online-tjänst med färdiga 'scener' och första utkastet var klart på mindre än en timme. Men då återanvände jag också en punktlista från ett av mina blogginlägg. Sedan la jag lite mycket tid på att hitta passande ljudeffekter, eftersom jag alltid tycker att de förgyller animationer, och var redo att publicera efter en timme till.
Nåväl, jag gillar att makten fortfarande ligger hos mig som kreatör när det gäller manus, röstläge och tempoväxling. Men säkert finns det snart verktyg som kan göra en så'n här film åt mig bara baserat på punktlistan. Jag har inte landat i vad det skulle betyda för mig och hur jag bör förhålla mig till det.
När jag hjälper kunder med förklarande filmer är en stor del av arbetet den konversation som vi har runt manus, hur innehållet tas emot och hur vi säkerställer att göra förändringar baserat på återkoppling. Det är min uppfattning att vissa saker måste få ta tid för att skapa värde.
Det är inte det tekniska hantverket i filmskapandet som gör skillnad. Det som gör skillnad är den omsorg som ägnas åt att hantverket på riktigt ska hjälpa någon och bidra till ökat välbefinnande. Och att så många som möjligt ska få ta del av denna hjälp, och i bästa fall själva vara delaktiga i att resultatet blir bra.
Att människor bryr sig om andra människor.
Jag tror min oro bottnar i denna farhåga: kommer vi hinna med omtanken när vi går från idé till att publicera på några minuter?
Och visst finns det en gnagande känsla av att vi kanske redan passerat en viktig gräns… en gräns som är svår att sätta fingret på eftersom det var så länge sedan vi lämnade den bakom oss.
World Down Syndrome Day is celebrated on March 21 in recognition of the uniqueness of the triplication of the 21st chromosome.
The theme this year is “With Us, Not For Us”. Many organisations exclude people with Down syndrome from taking part in their work. They take decisions For them not With them.
Here are some links that I appreciate:
# Official site:
https://www.worlddownsyndromeday.org
# A short film by actors with Down Syndrome on how Trisomy 21 occurs:
# Actor and Mencap ambassador George Webster dispels five myths about Down’s Syndrome:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09kyydg
# Frank Stephens’ speech at the UN in 2018 – I am a man with Down Syndrome and my life is worth living:
# The last children of Down Syndrome (very powerful and emotional long read)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/
And today is the day to wear socks that get people talking:
World Down Syndrome Day is celebrated on March 21 in recognition of the uniqueness of the triplication of the 21st chromosome.
The theme this year is “With Us, Not For Us”. Many organisations exclude people with Down syndrome from taking part in their work. They take decisions For them not With them.
Here are some links that I appreciate:
- A short film by actors with Down Syndrome on how Trisomy 21 occurs.
- Actor and Mencap ambassador George Webster dispels five myths about Down’s Syndrome
- Frank Stephens’ speech at the UN in 2018: I am a man with Down Syndrome and my life is worth living
- The last children of Down Syndrome (very powerful and emotional long read)
And today is the day to wear socks that get people talking.
To share this with people who are not on Mastodon or social media you can link to my blog post: https://axbom.com/wdsd-2023/
@EndlessMason Haha, that would be the dream. 😂
Humanity will never again get back the time spent on reading posts entirely made up by language models, much of it with fabulated content that is just not based in any fact or reason.
Time spent consuming concocted content will amount to hundreds of thousands of centuries of human time in the next few years. And we will continue to use huge amounts of energy to produce enormous amounts of incomprehension to keep us occupied.
We don’t have to wait for technological singularity to morph our reality. We just need enough futile content to dilute all knowledge and decision-making ability.
I added this text to my blog as well… for posterity. And for the chatbots.
https://axbom.com/chatbot-pollution/
AI responsibility in a hyped-up world
I’ve translated my long text about AI into English and just published it.
I go into
* The dangers of calling it AI
* How manufacturers deliberately mislead
* Design decisions that reveal intent
* Lack of accountability
* Inadequate consumer protection
Also, there’s a clip from Frankenstein (1931), an Anakin/Padmé 4-panel meme, a snake-oil salesman ad, a mention of the new TV-series Hello Tomorrow and an abacus next to Deep Thought (yes, the computer).
This is a 20-minute read. Unless you subscribe to my podcast, Carefully with Per Axbom, and listen to me read it – out by the end of the week.
Article: https://axbom.com/ai-responsibility/
Podcast: https://carefully.axbom.com
#ai #consumerprotection #design
AI responsibility in a hyped-up world
I’ve translated my long text about AI into English and just published it.
I go into
- The dangers of calling it AI
- How manufacturers deliberately mislead
- Design decisions that reveal intent
- Lack of accountability
- Inadequate consumer protection
Also, there’s a clip from Frankenstein (1931), an Anakin/Padmé 4-panel meme, a snake-oil salesman ad, a mention of the new TV-series Hello Tomorrow and an abacus next to Deep Thought (yes, the computer).
This is a 20-minute read. Unless you subscribe to my podcast Carefully and listen to me read it, out by the end of the week.
@JackDeeth
Fair point 😁 But I do see people post valuable reflections there in article format. I just wish they realised how sad that makes me 😅
A moment of silence for all the LinkedIn "blog posts" that will inevitably disappear into the void at some future point in time.
@jt_rebelo
I use maildrop.cc for many of these situations :)
"You need to register to keep reading.
It’s still free to read – this is not a paywall"
I'm growing tired of this wording. Yes, it is a paywall - the only difference is the type of currency you are paying with. If it wasn't a paywall there would be no wall at all.
You are paying with cognitive effort, time and often a very obscure management of personal information.
@kev
Akkoma. I find it superior to Mastodon in ease of use and responsiveness. One thing is how it shows threads as hiearchical (who responds to who) but also loads and shows all replies. Mastodon does a really poor job of loading replies when there are several from different people, or even indicating that there are more replies you may want to see.
I can make lists without necessarily following the people on the list (don’t think Mastodon can do this).
Fun fact: it has “quote posts” but I never use them.
It also has a built-in search that actually works quite well to find stuff that has passed through my server. I’ve sometimes used it to find posts that I know I’ve seen but forgotten to bookmark,
I left Mastodon because it was becoming too bloated and memory-heavy but stayed with Akkoma because it is clean and fun to use.
@m was the one who pointed me to it and perhaps has more to say. Sometimes I forget about benefits I’ve become accustomed to.
oh yeah, I’ve escaped the Mastodon character limit and this didn’t have to be a clunky reply in the form of 2-3 posts.
@Ibex Haha, it did occur to me to build something like that, but of course there are already several plugins that can do it for you.
Such as this one:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/word-changer/jjaeodeafkbbimejiboehejbdgpebjcd?hl=en
@mjjzf
So true! 😂
gAMeChaNgeR
I don’t know if it will help you, but my day got a bit better every time I was able to replace ChatGPT with Bumfuzzle and AI with Argle-bargle.
In today’s headlines:
- Voice system used to verify identity by Centrelink can be fooled by Argle-bargle
- Microsoft details how Argle-bargle will change its Office apps
- Chinese tech firm Baidu unveils Argle-bargle chatbot to rival Bumfuzzle
- In January, Bumfuzzle failed the bar. In March Bumfuzzle-4 exceeds the nationwide student average
- New Open Argle-bargle and Google platforms up the ante on race for supremacy in Argle-bargle.
- UK to invest £900m in supercomputer in bid to build Brit-Bumfuzzle.