18 Recent Articles about AI’s future

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14 Articles about AI & Data Privacy

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Unrolling a Person

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Development is an interesting word derived from a linguistic root meaning “rolled” or “folded.” An envelope is a folded sheet of paper, and to develop is to “unroll” something that has been heretofore so tightly rolled that we could not see what it really was. After the child has grown up, we can say that she was that way from the very start. But when she was a child, it was anyone’s guess how she would turn out.

The particular individual is an entity that is both utterly unique and profoundly like others. In this paradox of sameness and difference, we are like leaves on a tree or waves on the ocean.

The path of development is the fishtailing course we follow as we let go of what we have been and then discover a new thing to become—only to let go of that in time and become something new. This is the Way of Transition, the way or path of life itself, the alternating current of embodiment and disengagement, expansion and contractions.

William Bridges, The Way of Transitions

AI Definitions: Test-time training

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Test-time training (TTT) - An alternative to transformers (which have high energy demands), TTTs theoretically do not grow when processing additional data, as transformers do. TTTs encode the data into representations called weights, so that additional data does not increase the size of the model. In effect, it is nestling a neural network inside another neural network. This type of machine learning model is in its early development stages and is only now being tested.

More AI definitions here.

19 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World - 404Media

Meta forms product group to build AI tools for businesses - Axios 

OpenAI Is Paying Dotdash Meredith At Least $16 Million to License Its Content – Ad Week 

AI Investments Are Booming, but Venture-Firm Profits Are at a Historic Low – Wall Street Journal

There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI – The Atlantic 

Researchers have invented a new system of logic that could boost critical thinking and AI – The Conversation 

AI Companies Are Trying to Get MIT Press Books – 404Media  

Liquid foundation models promise competition for LLMs - here's how - Diginomica 

Google preps ‘Jarvis’ AI agent that works in Chrome – 9to5Google 

AI firms need media more than they admit – Axios

Agentic AI: How Large Language Models Are Shaping the Future of Autonomous Agents – Unite AI 

Wall Street Giants to Make $50 Billion Bet on AI and Power Projects – Wall Street Journal

Meta strikes multi-year AI deal with Reuters – Axios

Apple releases new preview of its AI, including ChatGPT integration – CNBC

One of the Biggest AI Boomtowns Is Rising in a Tech-Industry Backwater - Wall Street Journal

OpenAI is looking beyond Microsoft for its cloud computing needs. – The Decoder

Microsoft Has an OpenAI Problem – New York Mag

AI firms need to address security, open-source concerns: G42 exec – Semafor  

HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors' Work to AI Company - 404Media

Blame is contagious

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Blame is contagious, according to UCLA researchers. Even when we observe a public display of blame, we are likelier to do the same.

Volunteers were asked to read about a governor blaming others for a problem, while a different group read how the governor accepted personal responsibility for the crisis. Both groups then wrote about a failure in their own lives. Those who saw blame modeled for them were almost a third more likely to join the blame game and put the fault for their failure on someone else. However, the number of blamers dropped when volunteers first wrote down their core values.

The researchers theorized that a reminder of how to make wise choices made it less likely for individuals to feel the need to defend themselves by blaming others and more willing to take responsibility.  

A USC professor conducted similar experiences and concluded that publicly blaming of others dramatically increases the likelihood that the practice will become viral.

When leaders, parents, or even friends make a practice of blaming others for their failures, they are encouraging people in their circle of influence to do the same. People then become less willing to take risks, less innovative and less creative—and less likely to learn from their mistakes.

Blame creates a culture of fear.

Stephen Goforth

 

A Guide to Success

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Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that much of our behaviour is based on deceptively sophisticated rules-of-thumb, or “heuristics”. A robot programmed to chase and catch a ball would need to compute a series of complex differential equations to track the ball’s trajectory. But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.

To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says, you have to be skilled at ignoring information. He found that a portfolio of stocks picked by people he interviewed in the street did better than those chosen by experts. The pedestrians were using the “recognition heuristic”: they picked companies they’d heard of, which was a better guide to future success than any analysis of price-earning ratios.

Ian Leslie writing in The Economist

AI Definitions: SQL

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SQL - Structured Query Language (SQL pronounced ess-kew-ell or sequel) is the most widely used method of accessing databases. This programming language can be used to create tables, change data, find particular data, and create relationships among different tables. For data scientists, it is second in importance after Python. Similar in structure and function to Excel, SQL can work with Excel and is able to handle billions of rows in multiple tables and thousands of users can access this data securely at the same time.

More AI definitions here

Diagnosis: AI v Doctors

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“A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories.” In fact, “Doctors often were not persuaded by the chatbot when it pointed out something that was at odds with their diagnoses. Instead, they tended to be wedded to their own idea of the correct diagnosis. They didn’t listen to AI when told things they didn’t agree with … But there was another issue: Only a fraction of the doctors realized they could literally paste the entire case into the chatbot and just ask it to give a comprehensive answer." -New York Times

The Purpose of a Spouse

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Not too long ago in a couples group I heard one of the members state that the "purpose and function" of his wife was to keep their house neat and him well fed. I was aghast at what seemed to me his painfully blatant male chauvinism. I thought I might demonstrate this to him by asking the other members of the group to state how they perceived the purpose and function of their spouses. To my horror the six others, male and female alike, gave very similar answers. All of them defined the purpose and function of their husbands or wives in reference to themselves; all of them failed to perceive that their mates might have an existence basically separate from their own or any kind of destiny apart from their marriage. "Good grief," I exclaimed, "it's no wonder that you are all having difficulties in your marriages, and you'll continue to have difficulties until you come to recognize that each of you has your own separate destiny to fulfill." The group felt not only chastised but profoundly confused by my pronouncement. Somewhat belligerently they asked me to define the purpose and function of my wife. "The purpose and function of Lily," I responded, "is to grow to be the most of which she is capable, not for my benefit but for her own and to the glory of God."

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Other People are Responsible for the Way I Feel

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A consistent characteristic of imperative people is the desire to persuade others to be just like them. When encouraged to look back to their childhoods, most imperative people can recall a history of strong persuasion. The parents have been so intent on keeping order that their behavior said, “If I can get you to behave in my world, there will be order.” Developmental years were full of relationships that featured arm-twisting, intimidation, or threats.

Jack told me that he had learned early on that it was not safe to be vulnerable. He told me, “I remember a scene when I was only five or six years old. I had just stepped onto the back porch of our home to set something outside when a very loud clap of thunder sounded. Scared to death, I ran indoors, where my father grabbed me and told me to quit acting so ridiculous. Then my mother scolded me for upsetting my father. I was immediately defensive and told them they were both mean. The next thing I knew, I was smarting from a spanking.”

“In a sense you were in school at times like that.” I said, “You witnessed how effectively they persuaded you to be what they wanted, so you eventually learned to do likewise with your family.”

While it is a good thing to express opinions (as opposed to repressing them), it is not healthy for us to become bossy or condescending or explosive in order to get our way.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

AI Poems—better than the real thing?

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A new study in the journal Scientific Reports finds that non-expert readers can’t reliably distinguish between poems penned by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath and ChatGPT-3.5 doing its best impression of each of them. More surprising, readers preferred the AI-generated poems — and were more likely to guess those were written by humans than real works by famous poets. -Washington Post

Winners are more likely to Cheat

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When people succeed in competition against others, it seems to compromise their ethics. It makes them more likely to cheat afterwards," (said Amos Schurr, a professor of psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel).

The problem, he says, seems to be a very specific type of success: the kind that involves social comparison, the sort that means doing better than others, instead of just doing well. And he believes it all boils down to a sense of entitlement that beating others in sports, business, politics, or any other form of head-to-head competition seems to foster in victors.

"Dishonesty is a pretty complex phenomenon — there are all sorts of mechanisms behind it," said Schurr. "But people who win competitions feel more entitled, and that feeling of entitlement is what predicts dishonesty."

In other words, when people win against others, they tend to think they're better, or more deserving. And that thinking helps them justify cheating, since, after all, they're the rightful heir to whatever throne is next — "If I'm better than you, I might as well make sure I win, because I deserve to anyway."

Roberto A. Ferdman writing in the Washington Post