On not choosing nice versions of AI – This day’s portion
Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.
Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace? - Charlie’s Diary
I am not a believer in the AI singularity — the rapture of the nerds — that is, in the possibility of building a brain-in-a-box that will self-improve its own capabilities until it outstrips our ability to keep up. What CS professor and fellow SF author Vernor Vinge described as “the last invention humans will ever need to make”. But I do think we’re going to keep building more and more complicated, systems that are opaque rather than transparent, and that launder our unspoken prejudices and encode them in our social environment. As our widely-deployed neural processors get more powerful, the decisions they take will become harder and harder to question or oppose. And that’s the real threat of AI — not killer robots, but “computer says no” without recourse to appeal.
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The line and the stream. — Ethan Marcotte
I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes
somethingto you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that thissomethingwill be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?
The sound of inevitability | My place to put things
People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.
This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.
In new AI hype frenzy, tech is applying the label to everything now
Today’s AI promoters are trying to have it both ways: They insist that AI is crossing a profound boundary into untrodden territory with unfathomable risks. But they also define AI so broadly as to include almost any large-scale, statistically-driven computer program.
Under this definition, everything from the Google search engine to the iPhone’s face-recognition unlocking tool to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is already “AI-driven” — and has been for years.
[Essay] Known Unknowns | New Dark Age by James Bridle | Harper’s Magazine
A terrific cautionary look at the history of machine learning and artificial intelligence from the new laugh-a-minute book by James.