Picture at an exhibition
At the terrific Paris 1924 exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
And Moussorgsky was nowhere to be seen.
Quote of the Day
“In a nutshell: companies are artificial social constructs that offload all their externalities onto the state they are embedded in.”
- Charlie Stross (Whom God Preserve)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mike Oldfield | She Moved Through the Fair
Interesting take on a venerable Irish tune.
Long Read of the Day
The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think
Perceptive and thought-provoking Noema essay by Shannon Vallor.
Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.
Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…
This is a refreshing perspective on the current ballyhoo about ‘super intelligence’. Shannon is pointing out that the tech industry’s conception of a’ human’ — as in ‘superhuman’ — is basically that of a faceless operative who is currently a sub-optimal performer in the ‘efficiency’ stakes. The goal of the AGI evangelists is simply to build machines that match or outperform us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks.
Books, etc.
Further to the above… Shannon Valor has an interesting new book out — which I’m currently reading.
My commonplace booklet
Many years ago, when the only computer to which I had access was a DEC Vax (of beloved memory) I thought that I would know that ‘AI’ had really arrived when a machine could write plausible excuses. Little did I know that one of Alan Turing’s colleagues, Christopher Strachey, had long ago written a program that wrote love-letters. The code is still on Github, but you can try it out here. So I did.
Hmmm… Room for improvement, as my headmaster would have said. But apparently Turing and Strachey would print these out and leave them around the Lab just to see what would happen.
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