Media credulity and AI hype

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This morning’s Observer column:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term that is now widely used (and abused), loosely defined and mostly misunderstood. Much the same might be said of, say, quantum physics. But there is one important difference, for whereas quantum phenomena are not likely to have much of a direct impact on the lives of most people, one particular manifestation of AI – machine-learning – is already having a measurable impact on most of us.

The tech giants that own and control the technology have plans to exponentially increase that impact and to that end have crafted a distinctive narrative. Crudely summarised, it goes like this: “While there may be odd glitches and the occasional regrettable downside on the way to a glorious future, on balance AI will be good for humanity. Oh – and by the way – its progress is unstoppable, so don’t worry your silly little heads fretting about it because we take ethics very seriously.”

Critical analysis of this narrative suggests that the formula for creating it involves mixing one part fact with three parts self-serving corporate cant and one part tech-fantasy emitted by geeks who regularly inhale their own exhaust…

Read on

The smartphone plateau

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As the Economist notes “the recent slowing of smartphone sales is bad news for the industry, obviously. But for the rest of humanity it is a welcome sign that a transformative technology has become almost universal”.

Er, up to a point, Lord Copper.

Superiority personified

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One of our cats, who persists in taking up a step midway down the stairs, and is resolutely unmoved by warnings of the attendant dangers thus posed to descending persons. Her obduracy reminds me of PG Wodehouse’s explanation of the superior attitude manifested by cats: they know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods.

Quote of the Day

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“What can convey the veritable brain-washing, the total preoccupation, the drugged and haunted condition which this new poet induced in some of us? We were like new-born goslings forever imprinted with the image of an alien and indifferent foster parent, infatuated with his erudition, his sophistication, yet sapped and ruined by the contagion of his despair.”

Cyril Connolly on the impact of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land on his generation.

Links for today

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Four remarkable articles.

  • Ron Deibert: “Three Painful Truths About Social Media”, Journal of Democracy, Volume 30, Number 1, January 2019. link – lovely, synoptic summary of our current reality, by a scholar who seem more of the dark underbelly of our networked world than most of us.

  • Paul Nemitz, “Constitutional democracy and technology in the age of artificial intelligence”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 15 October 2018, p376. link. Magnificent essay by the Principal Adviser to the European Commission on why judgements about ethical AI cannot be left to the tech companies.

  • David Silver et al, “A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play”, Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6419, pp. 1140-1144, 07 Dec 2018 link. The full scientific report by DeepMind researchers on their ALphaZero machine, which taught itself to acquire superhuman capabilities in playing certain games.

  • Gary Kasparov, “Chess, a Drosophila of reasoning”, Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6419, pp. 1087, 07 Dec 2018. Lovely commentary by a former Grandmaster on AlphaZero’s accomplishments.

A Green New Deal?

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Interesting NYT column by Tom Friedman:

Clean energy is a problem of scale. If you don’t have scale, you have a hobby. I like hobbies. I used to build model airplanes. But you can’t mitigate climate change as a hobby. The reason I called for a Green New Deal was first and foremost to convey that this undertaking required a massive, urgent response commensurate with the scale and time frame posed by accelerating disruptive climate.

For too long, he continues, “green” was viewed as a synonym for a project that was “boutique, uneconomical, liberal, sissy and vaguely French”.

I wanted to recast green as geostrategic, capitalistic, economical, innovative and patriotic. My motto was, “Green is the new red, white and blue.” I did not believe in being a “nice” green. I believed in being a mean green. I believed greens should be as brassy, bold, big sky and in-your-face as any oil and gas executive.

Corbyn parts company with his own party

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Splendid Observer column by Andrew Rawnsley:

What would Mr Corbyn do when he and his members desired something contradictory? How would he act when they had fundamentally different worldviews? Would he put aside his own preferences in deference to the sovereignty of the Labour people? Or would he behave just like the “establishment” politicians he has spent a lifetime condemning and seek to subordinate the will of the members to his own opinions?

We now know. The Brexit blowtorch has burnt away many fantasises. One of the items on the bonfire of illusions is the notion that the Labour leader is in some way a special one, so different to all other politicians as to be almost not a politician at all. It turns out that he is just another manoeuvring, equivocating hack when he wants one thing and his members want the opposite.

This split is not a slight difference of opinion on a low-order issue. We are talking about something a bit more important than how to regulate the provision of manhole covers. This is about the most significant question to face Britain for decades. Some 73% of people currently identifying as Labour supporters think that the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU. That rises to a whopping 89% among Labour members. As you might expect to follow, most Labour members and most Labour voters want the party to come out in full support of another referendum on Brexit, a move that would transform the chances of the country being given a fresh choice.

The bottom line, as Rawnsley observes, is that sometimes, the simplest explanations for human behaviour are the best ones. The Labour leader is not making any effort to prevent Brexit because he doesn’t want to prevent Brexit. So if Labour supporters want another referendum (and we now know, courtesy of Tim Bales’s research that they do), they will have to learn from their leader’s time-honoured practice and rebel against him.