Quotulatiousness

September 16, 2024

Stephen Fry on artificial intelligence

Filed under: Books, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Stephen Fry has posted the text of remarks he made last week in a speech for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute:

Yes, I’m still 12

So many questions. The first and perhaps the most urgent is … by what right do I stand before you and presume to lecture an already distinguished and knowledgeable crowd on the subject of Ai and its meaning, its bright promise and/or/exclusiveOR its dark threat? Well, perhaps by no greater right than anyone else, but no lesser. We’ll come to whose voices are the most worthy of attention later.

I have been interested in the subject of Artificial Intelligence since around the mid-80s when I was fortunate enough to encounter the so-called father of Ai, Marvin Minsky and to read his book The Society of Mind. Intrigued, I devoured as much as I could on the subject, learning about the expert systems and “bundles of agency” that were the vogue then, and I have followed the subject with enthusiasm and gaping wonder ever since. But, I promise you, that makes me neither expert, sage nor oracle. For if you are preparing yourselves to hear wisdom, to witness and receive insight this evening, to bask and bathe in the light of prophecy, clarity and truth, then it grieves me to tell you that you have come to the wrong shop. You will find little of that here, for you must know that you are being addressed this evening by nothing more than an ingenuous simpleton, a naive fool, a ninny-hammer, an addle-pated oaf, a dunce, a dullard and a double-dyed dolt. But before you streak for the exit, bear in mind that so are we all, all of us bird-brained half-wits when it comes to this subject, no matter what our degrees, doctorates and decades of experience. I can perhaps congratulate myself, or at least console myself, with the fact that I am at least aware of my idiocy. This is not fake modesty designed to make me come across as a Socrates. But that great Athenian did teach us that our first step to wisdom is to realise and confront our folly.

I’ll come to the proof of how and why I am so boneheaded in a moment, but before I go any further I’d like to paint some pictures. Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the back of your mind. We’ll return to them from time to time. Of course I could have generated these images from Midjourney or Dall-E or similar and projected them behind me, but the small window of time in which it was amusing and instructive for speakers to use Ai as an entertaining trick for talks concerning Ai has thankfully closed. You’re actually going to have to use your brain’s own generative latent diffusion skills to summon these images.

[…]

An important and relevant point is this: it wasn’t so much the genius of Benz that created the internal combustion engine, as that of Vladimir Shukhov. In 1892, the Russian chemical engineer found a way of cracking and refining the spectrum of crude oil from methane to tar yielding amongst other useful products, gasoline. It was just three years after that that Benz’s contraption spluttered into life. Germans, in a bow to this, still call petrol Benzin. John D. Rockefeller built his refineries and surprisingly quickly there was plentiful fuel and an infrastructure to rival the stables and coaching inns; the grateful horse meanwhile could be happily retired to gymkhanas, polo and royal processions.

Benz’s contemporary Alexander Graham Bell once said of his invention, the telephone, “I don’t think I am being overconfident when I say that I truly believe that one day there will be a telephone in every town in America”. And I expect you all heard that Thomas Watson, the founding father of IBM, predicted that there might in the future be a world market for perhaps five digital computers.

Well, that story of Thomas Watson ever saying such a thing is almost certainly apocryphal. There’s no reliable record of it. Ditto the Alexander Graham Bell remark. But they circulate for a reason. The Italians have a phrase for that: se non e vero, e ben trovato. “If it’s not true, it’s well founded.” Those stories, like my scenario of that group of early investors and journalists clustering about the first motorcar, illustrate an important truth: that we are decidedly hopeless at guessing where technology is going to take us and what it’ll do to us.

You might adduce as a counterargument Gordon Moore of Intel expounding in 1965 his prediction that semiconductor design and manufacture would develop in such a way that every eighteen months or so they would be able to double the number of transistors that could fit in the same space on a microchip. “He got that right,” you might say, “Moore’s Law came true. He saw the future.” Yes … but. Where and when did Gordon Moore foresee Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Bit Coin, OnlyFans and the Dark Web? It’s one thing to predict how technology changes, but quite another to predict how it changes us.

Technology is a verb, not a noun. It is a constant process, not a settled entity. It is what the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme called a concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities; like a river it is ever cutting new banks, isolating new oxbow lakes, flooding new fields. And as far as the Thames of Artificial Intelligence is concerned, we are still in Gloucestershire, still a rivulet not yet a river. Very soon we will be asking round the dinner table, “Who remembers ChatGPT?” and everyone will laugh. Older people will add memories of dot matrix printers and SMS texting on the Nokia 3310. We’ll shake our heads in patronising wonder at the past and its primitive clunkiness. “How advanced it all seemed at the time …”

Those of us who can kindly be designated early adopters and less kindly called suckers remember those pioneering days with affection. The young internet was the All-Gifted, which in Greek is Pandora. Pandora in myth was sent down to earth having been given by the gods all the talents. Likewise the Pandora internet: a glorious compendium of public museum, library, gallery, theatre, concert hall, park, playground, sports field, post office and meeting hall.

Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):

It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.

What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.

The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.

According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.

Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.

Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.

In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.

Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.

In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.

Who Really Won The Korean War?

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, History, Japan, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published May 17, 2024

Only five years after the end of WW2, the major nations of the world are once again up in arms. A global UN coalition and an emerging Chinese juggernaut are fighting it out in a war that will see both sides approach the brink of victory — and defeat.
(more…)

QotD: The origins of Marmite

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The story of Marmite begins in the late 19th century when a German scientist, Justus Freiherr von Liebig, discovered that the waste product from yeast used in brewing beer could be made into a meaty-flavoured paste which was completely vegetarian. He also produced bouillon, a meat extract which kept well in jars without needing refrigeration. This eventually became the product known as Oxo.

In 1902 the Marmite Food Extract Company was formed in Burton upon Trent, two miles from the Bass brewery which had been there since 1777. Yeast is a single-cell fungus originally isolated from the skin of grapes, used in brewing, winemaking and baking since ancient times. I have read somewhere that the yeast Bass used was descended from the original batch employed since its inception, endlessly reproducing itself right up to the present time.

The waste product from brewing was transported to the Marmite factory, where salt, enzymes and water were added to the slurry before it was simmered for several hours then poured into vats ready for bottling.

The product was an instant hit and within five years a second factory had to be built in Camberwell Green, south London. Marmite was given a huge boost with the discovery of vitamins. It was found to be a rich source of vitamin B, deficiency of which was responsible for the condition beriberi which afflicted British troops during the Great War. They were subsequently issued with Marmite as part of their rations. In the 1930s the folic-acid-rich product was used to treat anaemia in Bombay mill workers, and malnutrition during a malaria epidemic in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

Alan Ashworth, “That Reminds Me: My mate Marmite”, The Conservative Woman, 2024-06-05.

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