A Dozen Articles about AI & Coding

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Normal had Shifted

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Regression to the mean is most slavishly followed on the stock market. Wall Street folklore is full of such catch phrases as “Buy low and sell high,” “You never get poor taking a profit.” All are variations on a simple theme: if you bet that today’s normality will extend indefinitely into the future, you will get rich sooner and face a smaller risk of going broke than if you run with the crowd. Yet many investors violate this advice or selling high. Impelled by greed and fear, they run with the crowd instead of thinking of themselves.

Since we never know exactly what is going to happen tomorrow, it is easier to assume that the future will resemble the present than to admit that it may bring some unknown change. A stock that has been going up for a while somehow seems a better buy than a stock that has been heading for the cellar. We assume that a rising price signifies that the company is flourishing and that a falling price signifies that the company is in trouble. Why stick your neck out?

Consider those investors who had the temerity to buy stocks in early 1930, right after the Great Crash, when prices had fallen about 50% from their previous highs. Prices proceeded to fall another 80% before they finally hit bottom in the fall of 1932. Of consider the cautious investors who sold out in early 1955, when the Down Jones Industries had finally regained their old 1929 highs and had tripled over the preceding six years. Just nine years later, prices were double both their 1929 and their 1955 highs. In both cases, the anticipated return to “normal” failed to take place: normal had shifted to a new location.

Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods

12 Articles about Running an AI Company

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Engineering Spiritual Growth

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One of the problems people encounter when they discover "spiritual growth," and first fully realize they are on a spiritual journey (is that) they start to think that they can direct it. They think if they go off to a monastery for a weekend retreat or take some classes in Zen meditation, or take up some Sufi dancing, or attend an EST workshop, then they’ll reach nirvana. Unfortunately, that is not the way it works. It works only when God is doing the directing. And people can get into a certain kind of trouble if they think they can do it on their own.

If you think you can plan your spiritual growth, it ain’t going to happen. I don’t mean to discount workshops or other forms of self-inquiry – they can be valuable. Do what you feel called to do, but also be prepared to accept that you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to learn. Be willing to be surprised by forces beyond your control, and realize that a major learning on the journey is the art of surrender.

M Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less Traveled

The loyal opposition

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One very outspoken, controversial minister was finally able to reduce his own anxiety when he began to think of his detractors as the “loyal opposition.”  As pompous as the phrase sounds, it helped him stay out of a polarizing position with other members of the congregation who in the past got “togetherness” with him by “loyally” attacking the attackers. By conveying that he thought their attacks on him or a sign of duty rather than subversion, he eliminated almost completely from his own behavior the anxious feedback that is necessary to sustain chronic conditions. 

 One important distinction must be made, however, between family systems and work systems. In a family system, efforts to reduce anxiety by dealing only with process and totally avoiding content issues, even if it makes others more upset for a while, generally will lead to fundamental change in the long run. A work system, however, can kick us out before change comes about. in a work family, therefore, it is sometimes necessary to touch upon content to some extent so as not to create so much havoc that we lose our jobs. 

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

Bumper Sticker Catch Phrases

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We need to be careful about staking the important ethical decisions in our lives on bumper sticker catch phrases. The problem is that the ideas expressed in these bite-sized pronouncements have broader implications.

While the ethical aspect that is explicit in the bumper sticker may look good at first glance, other ideas that follow from it may not be so attractive. Most of us have heard or used the cliché “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and it can sound like worthwhile advice. But what if the standard practices of the “Romans” stand in direct conflict with your moral or religious convictions? The is why we need to get behind the cliché’ itself.

Before we commit ourselves to any bumper sticker, we want to make certain that we can accept all that is implied in the slogan.

Steve Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics

The Impact of AI on Creativity in 9 Articles

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Get in a creative mood by visiting large spaces

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If you’re in a cramped space, say your office is a little cubicle, your visual attention can’t spread out. It’s focused in this narrow space. Just as your visual attention is constricted, your conceptual attention becomes narrow and focused, and your thinking is more likely to be analytical.

But if you’re in a large space – a big office, with high ceilings, or outside — your visual attention expands to fill the space, and your conceptual attention expands.

That’s why a lot of creative figures like to be outdoors, to take long walks in nature, and they get their inspiration from being in the wide, open spaces. If you can see far and wide, then you can think far and wide.

Brigid Schulte writing in the Washington Post

18 articles about AI Fakes    

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These ISIS news anchors are AI fakes. Their propaganda is real. – Washington Post

Generative AI poses Threat to election security, intelligence agencies warn – CBS News

Bank of Italy warns against AI-powered fake videos – Reuters

Google's AI Watermarks Will Identify Deepfakes – Dark Reading

In novel case, U.S. charges man with making child sex abuse images with AI – Washington Post

Voice-cloning technology bringing a key Supreme Court moment to 'life' – Associated Press

Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures – Wall Street Journal

New UK law targets “despicable individuals” who create AI sex deepfakes - Ars Technica 

She was accused of faking an incriminating video but nothing was fake after all  - The Guardian

TikTok’s AI watermarks could help curb deepfakes, but it’s no panacea – Semafor

OpenAI Releases ‘Deepfake’ Detector to Disinformation Researchers – New York Times 

Microsoft and OpenAI launch $2M fund to counter election deepfakes – Tech Crunch  

OpenAI Says It Can Now Detect Images Spawned by Its Software—Most of the Time – Wall Street Journal

How AI-generated disinformation might impact this year’s elections and how journalists should report on it – Reuters Institute  

How Generative AI Is Helping Fact-Checkers Flag Election Disinformation, But Is Less Useful in the Global South – Global Investigative Journalism Network  

In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024 – Washington Post

Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies - EL PAÍS English

Fooled by AI? These firms sell deepfake detection - Washington Post

Tech created a global village — and puts us at each other’s throats

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As we get additional information about others, we place greater stress on the ways those people differ from us than on the ways they resemble us, and this inclination to emphasize dissimilarities over similarities strengthens as the amount of information accumulates. On average, we like strangers best when we know the least about them.

The effect intensifies in the virtual world, where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Social networks like Facebook and messaging apps like Snapchat encourage constant self-disclosure. Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. One study found that people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person.

Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.

Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst.

Nicholas Carr writing in the Boston Globe

Technology that makes us less human

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Like an episode out of Black Mirror, the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” AI expert Leif Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships.” What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. - Tyler Austin Harper writing in The Atlantic

14 Articles about AI & Health Care

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