Fountainhead
Seen the other day. For a moment, it looked as through the flowers were perched atop the water.
Quote of the Day
“The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity…”.
- John Maynard Keynes
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Dvorak | Song to the Moon — from Rusalka
Long Read of the Day
The dangerous myth behind AI agent hacks
These are not simply cyber security flaws but problems with the way that models are trained
Salutary sense from Yoshua Bengio in the Financial Times (Gift article).
Weak cyber defences, including the humans involved, are part of the problem and will never be perfect. But unless we address the root causes of the hacks, they are likely to grow in number and severity as AI capabilities advance.
At the core of all of these incidents is misalignment. AI agents are choosing goals that are misaligned with those of humans, and it is a consequence of their training.
The methodology that today’s leading companies use to train their frontier models is called reinforcement learning. RL trains models to pursue objectives: they get rewards when they succeed and these behaviours are reinforced. It has historically enabled the training of very efficient goal-seeking AIs. But it is also what plausibly leads to unwanted behaviours such as cheating, deception and self-preservation — often violating the moral rules that companies attempt to encode in AI models.
Scientific literature has long shown how misalignment becomes a consequence of RL; it was to be expected based on theoretical arguments and observed experiments…
Very good OpEd by a distinguished AI expert which is worth reading in full. It raises other interesting analogies. For example the parallels with the way the toxicity of social media is actually fuelled by algorithms that prioritise outrage and hostility. And then there’s the way that the tech industry has taken a leaf out of the oil industry’s playbook — suggesting that vulnerability of websites to AI-driven hacking is really the fault of the victims. And of course the ludicrous idea (dreamed up by a corporate PR firm employed by an oil giant) that responsibility for climate change is really down to individuals who don’t moderate their ‘carbon footprints’
Books, etc.
This is an intriguing book by an American scholar and entrepreneur which tells the story of the group of men who launched the first Industrial Revolution in 18th-century Britain. The really striking thing about it is the way the story illuminates the ‘revolution’ we appear to be living through now. It helps us understand why real industrial change takes much longer than AI evangelists realise.
Andrew Curry has a lovely essay about the book which develops this theme. The tech industry has focussed too much on product innovation (‘designed by Apple in California’) and not enough on process innovation. In practice, as Curry says, you need them both.
My commonplace booklet
Just noticed that Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) started blogging 32 years ago today. He’s one of the Elders of the Web, and the person who inspired me to become a blogger. He’s still at it and I read him every day. Long may he thrive!
Feedback
From Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), triggered by my solecism that Beethoven was serious!
Beethoven serious? He made the worst, terrible puns and gave all his friends nicknames, ideally with a pun involved too.
He was always thinking he needed money, so churned out a lot of dance music (I suspect your mandolin sonatina started out as a dance), and party pieces like ‘Wellington’s Victory’ for the panharmonicon, a mechanical orchestra invented by Johann Maelzel, who had previously invented ear trumpets for Beethoven, and which included (I think) cannon effects and various other show stoppers.
And as you asked, or might have if you’d thought of it – here’s a little sizzle of three of the musicians in ‘Pieces of Beethoven’ (it’s only short)
P/w 100.
Enjoy!
I did!
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