PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!
Screenshot
As the front page of British tabloids used to put it.
Quote of the Day
”When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Cavatina (from The Deer Hunter)
Long Read of the Day
We’re using the wrong pronouns for AI
Interesting essay by Matt Ridley
Most people who talk about artificial intelligence reach, sooner or later, for the singular. There is the AI, the machine, the mind we are about to build, and the only argument left is whether it saves us or finishes us off. Matt Ridley thinks that whole habit of speech is a category error, and at ARC in London this week, the annual gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the science writer offered something cheerier and more curious instead: stop saying it, and start saying them.
His line was almost a grammar lesson. “We’re using the wrong pronoun,” he told the room, before landing it plainly: “It’s not it. It’s them.” From most speakers that might pass as a debating trick, but Ridley has spent forty years studying how living systems arrange themselves, and he means it as biology rather than wordplay. What is arriving, on his account, is not a single intelligence on a single timeline but a teeming population of them, and once you see the technology that way, almost every fear attached to it changes shape.
That instinct is what makes Ridley such a refreshing voice in a conversation otherwise run by computer scientists and philosophers. Where most of the AI debate borrows its metaphors from software and science fiction, the runaway program, the bottled genie, the god in the machine, he reaches instead for the living world. He looks at the field the way a zoologist looks at a coral reef, and what he sees is not one emerging titan but a habitat beginning to fill up with competitors.
The difference is anything but cosmetic.
It is.
The six principles of AI – a king’s speech for Andy Burnham
My recent Observer column
ow that we’re into regime change in the UK, I began to wonder whether Andy Burnham had done much thinking about AI. If he has, he’s been keeping it to himself. But then he has a lot on his plate just now. So I thought it might be helpful if I came up with a king’s speech for him on the matter. After all, he’s already “king of the north”. So this can be used to inspire his new southern subjects after his impending “coronation”. Here’s how it goes.
“My government will be committed to building a vibrant AI-using democracy based on six principles:
1 Reclaiming democratic sovereignty
We must ensure that the democratic process remains more powerful than the corporations now owning and controlling the technology.
Unlike other jurisdictions where technology leaders have used their unconscionable wealth to crush state regulation, the UK will establish binding national guardrails that require companies to disclose alarming incidents and prohibit the release of models that pose an “unreasonable risk of critical harm”. We will vigorously reject any new “aristocracy” of techno oligarchs who seek to determine how we live and work. Instead of direct action and violence becoming the only way for the public to find leverage, we will create institutional channels for meaningful community input on – and response to – the technology’s trajectory.
2 Rebuilding state capacity
My government will use AI primarily to augment state capacity and improve the provision of public services. We will do this by prioritising the use of the technology to assist human decision-making by providing officials with better and more timely information.
pdf download here
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- UK could run out of air-con units
I’m surprised it hasn’t already!
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