Can we even know?
Hmmm...
AI Bubble-burst drawing nigh?
Trump's Iran debacle certainly is not helping matters.
TWO NEW READS UNDERWAY
SEBASTIAN MALLABY
This book is about intelligence. On the one hand, it’s a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker. On the other hand, it tells the story of his quest to build remarkable machines: systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original. At some point in the not-so-distant future, artificial intelligence will beat human intelligence at almost every mental task, and to say this marks a watershed would be a parody of understatement. Artificial intelligence heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought, some seventy thousand years ago.
I first met Demis Hassabis, the remarkable human, in the mid-2010s: an elfin figure with dark hair falling forward toward angular eyebrows, his face framed by standard-issue spectacles. Already a star technologist and the possessor of a comfortable fortune, he seemed much younger than his thirty-eight years. Smooth-skinned, slight of build, he came across as a phenomenally articulate youth rather than a staid adult. He would appear onstage at conferences dressed in a boyish crewneck and loose slacks. “AI is the technology of making machines smart,” he began one typical performance in 2015, stating his premise in the plainest form possible.
What he said next was what got your attention. Hassabis embarked on an explanation of his life’s purpose: the pursuit of machine superintelligence. Growing up in North London, he had decided that two fields of inquiry stood out: physics and neuroscience. Physics explains the external world, from the behavior of particles to the functioning of the universe. Neuroscience explains the internal world—the neurons and synapses and electrical pulses that constitute intelligence. Later, at some point in his twenties, Hassabis had concluded that neuroscience was the more important of the two: The internal trumped the external. Intelligence is fundamental; it is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality.
Still speaking plainly, as though he were saying that he’d wash the dishes after lunch, Hassabis invoked the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant.
“The mind interprets the world,” Kant had declared.
“It’s the mind that creates our reality around us,” Hassabis now said, by way of emphasis.
The question was how to comprehend intelligence. Here Hassabis pivoted to a second intellectual giant, the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. “What I cannot build, I do not understand,” Feynman famously remarked, and Hassabis clicked on a controller in his hand to display a slide of the great physicist. Following Feynman’s dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog: a machine that mimicked human thinking. AI’s practical or profit-making potential was a secondary concern. The youthful figure on the stage wanted “to understand our own minds better.”…
Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. xiii-xiv). (Function). Kindle Edition.
MATT KAPLAN
Just as Galileo endured because of the kindness of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, so too did Mary because of the kindness (and ferocity) of Jack, and Carl Woese because of the support of Ralph Wolfe. Just as Lister’s students helped him to survive, so too did David help Kati when times were tough. Just as Michaelis bravely tested Semmelweis’s ideas when he was being attacked, so too has Prasenjit Dey tested Betsy’s findings in his own lab and made remarkable discoveries.
That might all sound very poetic and idealistic. To a certain extent, it is. There is no getting around the fact that the systems within science need to be altered in a manner that reduces competition and nurtures creativity. Reform must happen. With that said, we are creatures with a love of stories. Since the first tales were told around fires, we have loved our heroes and fondly dreamed of stepping into their shoes. Those instincts have not changed. This is something that we must take advantage of.
Science journalists, myself included, have a long history of reporting the latest scientific discoveries. This is important, but it is no longer enough. If we want to change the way scientists behave, we need to talk more about heroes both in the pages of books like this one and within the science sections of newspapers like The Economist. We need to be shouting the stories of scientists who are doing the right thing from the rooftops. When they call out fraud, refuse to be manipulated by perverse incentives, and support those with unorthodox ideas in their communities, we need to celebrate their actions. We have done a good job with Kati, but there are so many more people out there whose heroics remain unknown. We need to find them. We need to prioritize telling their tales. We need to do this. Now.
Kaplan, Matt. I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right (pp. 232-233). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Sebastion came to me via an Atlantic article. Matt via a new book review in Science Magazine. The Infinity Machine goes to current digitech issue, as explored by Laurie Segal above with Sam Altman.I Told You So is predominantly a work of science history focused in particular on the overlapping socioeconomic / cultural-political ramifications of the science domain across millenia.
OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM
The Paddington Road Greycare Center is fully staffed and fully attended today. Meee-mo & Pop on duty. Baltimore city schools are closed today in observance of Passover, so Calvin has an off day. He’s assisting with little brother Arlo.
apropos,
"Pop, can I use your iPhone?"—Calvin
'eh?
See Science Magazine:
Digital child safety at the frontier: From evidence to action
