Robot Committing Suicide

From South Korea

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13571283/South-Korean-civil-servant-robot-commits-suicide-mysteriously-circling-one-spot-there.html

Against AI

Please check the articles in the June-July issue of Harper's Magazine on AI, especially on ChatGPT.

The relevant issue is the one below:

 

You should be able to get hold of a physical copy in your local library.

 

The articles are online as well; please find one here: Metal Machine Music, by Laurent Dubreuil (harpers.org)

 

Metal Machine Music, by Laurent Dubreuil (harpers.org)

 

I think that ChatGPT, Anthropic (please see here: Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class | TechCrunch) and other such large-language model-based tools eventually converge to a sort of acceptable mediocrity; still useful in the sense of providing one with meaningful and useful information but not at the level of transformational, insightful, creative output one expects from a human being.

 

For example, this Dutch Philosophy Professor asked his students to draw pictures that described different philosophical ideas and topics and he was favorably impressed by the human output.

 

Can ChatGPT or Anthropic even take a sentence like “I think, therefore I am.” And turn it into a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture; in effect generating new content?

 

I think not.

 

They are beneficiaries of millennia of human-generated content, so it is easy to take bits and pieces from here and there and create an Ode for OnStar.

 

In a language such as Chinese, whose literature is devoid of Epic Poetry forms, can an LLM write an Epic Poem about Shi Hwang Ti?

 

Alternatively, can a Shakespearean Tragedy be written by these models on the life of Yang, Go-Bi?

 

I think not.

 

But, I think, just like the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web 30 years ago, these LLMs will have an impact on Business, Government, and Culture.

 

I expect them to become auxiliaries to human cognition but not a replacement.

 

In the meantime, I expect all these AI/ML specialists to continue to chase after “Artificial Intelligence” that surpasses that of man as well as continuing to denigrate real intelligence among even such creatures as earth worms!

The Gods of Logic

 https://harpers.org/archive/2024/07/the-gods-of-logic-benjamin-labatut-ai/

Metal Machine Music

 https://harpers.org/archive/2024/07/metal-machine-music/

Gleam

A new programming language for concurrency control...

Erlang redux, likely with the same outcome, which is obscurity...

https://thenewstack.io/introduction-to-gleam-a-new-functional-programming-language/

AI against Programmers

AI measuring programmer productivity

https://the-stack-overflow-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/kirimgeray-kirimli-flatiron-software-snapshot-reviews

No mention of the need to calibrate any measurements.  

Nor the inevitable reaction of human beings to any such system by gaming it.

OpenAI vs. Anthropic

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/20/anthropic-claims-its-latest-model-is-best-in-class/

C++ and AI

https://analyticsindiamag.com/why-is-c-not-used-in-ai-research/

Revenge of the Nerd

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/disgruntled-ex-employee-costs-company-over-dollar600000-after-he-deletes-all-180-of-its-test-servers-found-server-deletion-scripts-on-google

AI - Hot & Steamy

From the BBC

We want feminist, inclusive AI-powered sex dolls! 

Inevitably, artificial intelligence (AI) is already moving into the field of sexual services. 

The academic, below, is worried about the 'training' of 'sex chatbots': his concern doesn't seem to be that they exist, but that they may hold views that are sexist and not politically correct. 

As for the future of Sex AI, to call it that, trust the likes of Mr Hamburger (his name) of Lovehoney (his company's name). If there are cyber-prostitutes, one will need cyber-pimps running cyber-brothels... 

We read:

"There is a risk that retrograde gender stereotypes about sex and pleasure get encoded into sex chatbots, says Dr Kerry McInerney, senior research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, at the University of Cambridge.

“It's crucial that we understand what kinds of data sets are used to train sex chatbots, otherwise we risk replicating ideas about sex that demean female pleasure and ignore sex that exists outside of heterosexual intercourse.”

[...] Philipp Hamburger, head of AI at Lovehoney, says the company is aiming “to enhance the sexual experience of its customers, rather than replace it, which is an important line to draw"."

 _____________

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2qqxqgp9yno

MS Windows Total Recall

This very simple tool extracts and displays data from the Recall feature in Windows 11, providing an easy way to access information about your PC's activity snapshots.

GitHub - xaitax/TotalRecall: This tool extracts and displays data from the Recall feature in Windows 11, providing an easy way to access information about your PC's activity snapshots.

Dogs of War

The Chinese military have taken a robot dog and stuck an automatic rifle on its back.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/30/chinese-armys-latest-weapon-gun-toting-dog

Biological Computing

Steps toward hybrid Biological-Electronic Technology of Star Trek TV series

Frontiers | Open and remotely accessible Neuroplatform for research in wetware computing (frontiersin.org)

Architecture of ChatGPT-Like AI

 The key paper is here https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Tutorial Book on AI

This is the first-edition of a hands-on machine learning book:

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems: Géron, Aurélien: 9781491962299: Amazon.com: Books

with its Jupyter Notebooks here at GitHub:

ageron (Aurélien Geron) · GitHub

There is a second edition as well.  (Neither edition uses PyTorch.)

Analysis of AI Productivity Gains

 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-productivity-boom-forecasts-countered-by-theory-and-data-by-daron-acemoglu-2024-05?

به یاد شهیدان خدمت - ۳۰ اردیبهشت ۱۴۰۳

 دلم گرفته‌است

دلم گرفته‌است

به ایوان می‌روم و انگشتانم را
بر پوست کشیده‌ی شب می‌کشم
چراغ‌های رابطه تاریک‌اند
چراغ‌های رابطه تاریک‌اند

کسی مرا به آفتاب
معرّفی نخواهدکرد
کسی مرا به میهمانیِ گنجشک‌ها نخواهدبرد
پرواز را به‌خاطر بسپار
پرنده مُردنی‌ست

General Motors and AI

 FYI - apologies if already seen:
 
AI is helping drive motorsports teams for General Motors - Fast Company

Spinach

Spinach is an AI tool for meetings. Looks very promising as it had integrations with Jira/Confluence/Teams.

https://www.spinach.io/

Spinach gives project teams instant meeting notes with key decisions, action items and ticket suggestions based on what you discuss. With dozens of integrations, Spinach keeps track of your projec...

Currently MS Teams has a record feature and can transcribe and take notes. I am sure MS will extend that into a tool that can create work items in ADO or Jira etc. 

Please see: Jira Integration | Spinach.io Help Center (intercom.help)

Here is a screenshot from settings showing you can connect to Jira and create tickets. You might have to configure that to create your stories...

Species as Grammars

In my own thinking, under the influence of Monistic views of Spinoza, I have come the conclusion that we cannot define “Though” or “Intelligence” or “Life” or “Matter” (“Extension” in Medieval Philosophy.)

That is, I do not think it is scientifically productive to try to explain the origin of Life or Intellect; that search for an explanation (in terms of Matter – in the contemporary Scientistic Philosophy) is as barren as the Medieval Philosophers search for the origin of Motion (empirical sciences started when the focus went into the (quantitative) description of Motion – be it a ball rolling down an inclined plain or a planet orbiting a celestial body).

So, here, I think, the key observation is to take “Intelligence” or “Thought” as a qualitatively irreducible feature of the Universe and stop wasting all that effort in trying to explain it within a reductionist paradigm.

One implication of that perspective would be to introduce the notions of “Language” and “Grammar” into Biology at all its levels – from DNA/RNA to Species.

For example, this article argues that Fungi have a language for communication and the authors have discovered 5 words of that language –

Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity | Royal Society Open Science (royalsocietypublishing.org)

and in this book, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life 2nd ed., Yockey, Hubert P. - Amazon.com, we see how information theory is applied to molecular biology.  That, in turn, makes possible the application of ideas in this paper: Frontiers | Information Theory as a Bridge Between Language Function and Language Form (frontiersin.org), to molecular biology; viz. how information-theoretic characterizations of functional complexity lead directly to mathematical descriptions of the forms of possible languages, in terms of solutions to constrained optimization problems.

But what is a Language?  For human beings, we use Language to think about the world, make judgements about the world, and to communicate those judgements to others (brief example).

Can we think without our Language – I think not but others have disagreed with me on this point.

But if you entertain that notion, then Thought and Language and Intellect will become coterminous or at at least will have overlaps (in the sense of Venn’s Diagrams).

Since our Verbal Language is a social construct, that means some of our intelligence is due to us being members of a species that interacts with one another.

This is reminiscent of an idea in Physics which a particle experiences an effective force on it which is due to the collective effect of all other particles in that physical system.

On the other hand, with this approach, we can try to assess and distinguish among various human/animal societies’ Cognitive Abilities; “Was Rome more “Intelligent” than Samoa Tribes?” – we can talk about this in an intelligent way and devise a scientific program to answer such questions.

I would take, for the sake of continuing with my discourse here, that Though and Language are the same.

(Our Verbal Language is complemented with other Languages – such as smell, touch, gesture, music, and many more.)

Assuming that the proponents of Epigenetics are correct, some or many of those languages could have been acquired and then passed on….

I think Aristotle defined Man as the Talking Animal.

But we are also defined, as a species, by the our genomic, genetic, and epigenetic structures and processes (transformations).

I want to be very clear about Grammar; which is a set of rules for producing syntactically correct sentences.

A language is a set of symbols.

A Theorem in Category Theory states that a Grammar can be expressed as an infinite Power Series (Analytical Functor0 of  a Language:

               G = L + L x L + L x L x L + L x L x L x L + …

Which leads me to this:

For a species, it is defined by its own species-specific Language – a Dog is His Language, a Man is His Language and so on and so forth.

Per the Theorem above, Dog and Man, each possess their own Grammar. 

But since we can communicate with Dog in a partial way, that means that there are areas of overlaps between Man's Grammar & Dog's Grammar.  And the physiological similarities confirm the existence of overlap in the physical plain.

Which in turn, implies (IMHO) that we can infer the existence of a Universal Grammar for all Life on this Planet which encompasses Species Construction, Intra-Species Communication, and Inter-Species Communication as well.

The Process of Evolution itself may be part of a more general and abstract Grammar at a higher level but one can view it as a process in which New Grammars are created from some basic blocks.

But my interest is not here to try to come up with ideas about Evolution….my purpose here is to communicate the basic idea of Species-as-Grammars (Languages) – it gives a different perspective of how to think about the world.

(I would like to state that Physics may be viewed as a Grammar but I do not have the depth to develop that idea…)

In Computer Science there is a very general Theorem that states:

“Unrestricted Grammars are equivalent to Turing Machines used as Language Acceptors”.

Turing Machines are the theoretical basis of Computer Science – they are basic universal “problem solvers”.

Since a species (Life) is constantly Solving the problem of survival, it follows that it has a Grammar and Language, that it is reminiscent of a Turing Machine (this is my speculation).

I am motivated to support my speculations by observing how a single-cell organism – viewed as a “Natural Automaton” – can sense its environment and respond to stimuli without one being able to point to a decision-making center that - like a computer with a CPU - would be executing some instructions.

Spinoza, whose ideas have influenced me, posits that Thought and Extension (Intelligence and Matter) are inseparably intertwined in the Universe without one being reducible to the other.

Here, I am going a step further and suggest methods of Linguistics, Semiotics, and Formal Language Theory to the Study of Life (in all its aspects).

I recently came across this book "The Language of Living Matter" (please see here for its "Introduction") by Professor Bernd-Olaf Kupers that also discusses similar ideas.

And the book:

The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life