Beyond the Hype: Fresh Takes on AI
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Beyond the Hype: Fresh Takes on AI
From rethinking 'intelligence' to creativity on steroids, humane interfaces, public AI, reality collapse, decoding non-human language, and a new understanding of 'life'
You’re likely reading this newsletter because it provides you with some new perspectives and unexpected threads. That is why today, I want to give you a few unconventional viewpoints on AI. Because in case you haven’t noticed, AI seems to finally be ready to disrupt basically everything as we find ourselves in the midst of a technological revolution of unparalleled proportions.
So, you might have already seen lots of prompt engineering advice…
“ChatGPT can save you hours of time at work. But only if you use these top 10 prompts…”
or jaw-dropping predictions…
“80% of US workers will be impacted by GPT”
and astonishing new AI-driven apps….
“Runway is a new kind of creative suite where AI is a collaborator and anything you can imagine can be created.”
But I want to take you on a journey through some more out-of-the-box ideas regarding AI. So sit down, and let’s explore some exciting AI rabbit holes!
Rethinking The ‘Intelligence’ Part Of ‘AI’?
“[…] The modern version of “intelligence” […] came to be understood as a capacity for ordered, rational, problem-solving, pattern-recognizing cognition. […] Both intelligence and agency are habitually identified as universal human attributes, part of the very definition of what it means to be human. But both are actually grounded firmly in the lived experience of one particular human group.”
“It’s understandable that elite European scholars and gentlemen, trying to interrogate and apprehend what constituted humanity, should use their own experience as a basis for their studies. But their perspectives were necessarily limited. If asked, would their servants have pointed to free will as the defining element of their humanity? What about their slaves? Or their wives?”
“The progress of artificial intelligence is also measured against the human yardstick […]. Again, the idea of what constitutes “intelligence” closely resembles the earlier 19th-century model of rational, logical analysis. Key research goals [in AI], for example, focus on reasoning, problem-solving, pattern recognition and the capacity to map the relationship between concepts, objects and strategies. “Intelligence” here is cognitive, rational and goal-directed. It is not, for example, kinesthetic (based on embodiment and physical memory) or playful. Nor — despite the best efforts of Rosalind Picard and some others — does it usually include emotion or affect.”
“[…] Perhaps as a result, people tend to fear the consequences of AI. […] All these debates about intelligence and the human future are based on the assumption that intelligence is fundamentally rational and goal-directed — that is, that the 19th-century understanding of the concept is still the most appropriate interpretation of what it is. What if it isn’t? And what about agency? What if agency isn’t self-conscious, or even based in an individual?”
Intelligence = Play & Emotion:
“By the end of the 20th century, studies of learning and decision-making began to note the importance of play and the significance of emotion to the development of both intelligence and agency. It became clear that emotion is central to the process of learning: It influences attention, retention and reasoning. […] In the 1960s, […] Jean Piaget argued that play was central to learning, enabling children to familiarize themselves with skills and scenarios in safe environments. More recent ethological work on non-human animals confirms that individuals who play more are more successful (in terms of individual life span and reproductive success) than those who don’t — although the precise mechanisms linking play with these outcomes remain unclear.”
Intelligence = Stories & Imagination:
“Even more importantly, when it comes to considering both AI and risk, researchers have recently begun to pay a lot more attention to the significance of stories when it comes to understanding public behaviors and decision-making. […] The startling growth of both the range and size of digital and analog entertainment platforms has demonstrated the economic weight of the imagination. Play, it turns out, is serious work. Fairy tales may well prove more useful than factor analysis in understanding human agency in the Anthropocene. This is because stories are vitally important in both explaining and expanding an individual’s understanding of a situation. Particularly in the past decade, the West has seen how stories (myths, post-truths, history) help form collective community identities, which can sometimes exacerbate inter-community tension.”
Intelligence = Cooperation:
“Discussion of agency in traditional economics and philosophy usually focuses on competition and the role of the (rational) individual. But when it comes down to it, one of the most distinctive and universal characteristics of humanity is our ability to cooperate. This capacity is literally built into our biology. Without cooperation, without the ability to form alliances, women would not be able to give birth or raise children: We would become extinct as a species.”
“Even more significantly […] we cooperate across species lines. Our capacity to form close bonds with dogs, for example, may have been a key factor in enabling Homo sapiens to out-compete other hominid species […]. […] In many ways, the Anthropocene can be understood as the expression of collective multispecies agency: Without companion animals and livestock, industrial society could never have developed. It’s not an accident that we still speak of an engine’s “horsepower,” or turn to puppies for companionship in the middle of a devastating pandemic.”
“[So] when it comes to anticipating what artificial intelligence might look like or do, we urgently need to get beyond our limited idea of what constitutes intelligence.”
» Rethinking Intelligence In A More-Than-Human World - Amanda Rees
Creativity On Steroids
As I hinted at in last week’s Rabbit Hole, Generative AI opens up the opportunity to move from an Age of Average (that’s us right now) to an Age of Creativity. And I think that these tools also help us to create more products and services that are based on the Design for Emergence philosophy:
Design for Emergence is…
…open-ended and permissionless. Resulting designs are often surprising, something the original designer could have never imagined.
…context-adabtable. The end-user can integrate their local or contextual knowledge
…composable. It provides a basic ‘language and grammar’ that’s easy to learn and employ, but can also extended and result in highly complex applications.
More on this design concept in this issue from last year.
But now, let’s actually look at some visually-pleasing examples of “Creativity On Steroids”:
Found the following music video thanks to Rodrigo’s amazing The Nexialist newsletter:
Nick St. Pierre is my go-to guy for mastering Midjourney. Just look at these two images that he created with the AI:
The new Runway mobile app. Wow!
The improvements within just one year:
Who Benefits From AI?
“[…] An artificial-intelligence gold rush has started over the last several months to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI models like ChatGPT.
“You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world: ‘What is our ChatGPT play? How do we make money off this?’”
“For all the amazing advances in AI and other digital tools over the last decade, their record in improving prosperity and spurring widespread economic growth is discouraging. Although a few investors and entrepreneurs have become very rich, most people haven’t benefited. Some have even been automated out of their jobs.”
“Productivity growth, which is how countries become richer and more prosperous, has been dismal since around 2005 in the US and in most advanced economies (the UK is a particular basket case). The fact that the economic pie is not growing much has led to stagnant wages for many people.”
“The worry is not so much that ChatGPT will lead to large-scale unemployment—as Autor points out, there are plenty of jobs in the US—but that companies will replace relatively well-paying white-collar jobs with this new form of automation, sending those workers off to lower-paying service employment while the few who are best able to exploit the new technology reap all the benefits.”
“In this scenario, tech-savvy workers and companies could quickly take up the AI tools, becoming so much more productive that they dominate their workplaces and their sectors. Those with fewer skills and little technical acumen to begin with would be left further behind.”
“‘I don’t think we should take it as the technology is loose on the world and we must adapt to it. Because it’s in the process of being created, it can be used and developed in a variety of ways,’ says Autor. ‘It’s hard to overstate the importance of designing what it’s there for.’
» MIT Technology Review | ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like by David Rotman
More Humane Interfaces
“Interaction with AI is becoming second nature to us.”
“This means that how we interface with technology is changing dramatically, and these shifts don’t happen very often; mobile may be the most recent interface revolution on this scale, over a decade ago.”
“The AI revolution is happening—fast. In a few years, it will sound silly to call a company “an AI company” just as it sounds silly today to call a company “a mobile company.” AI will be part of everything.”
“That said, there will be AI-native companies, just as there were mobile-native companies in the 2010s—examples just from the home screen of my phone: Instagram, Snap, Uber, TikTok, and Robinhood. The massive shift in interfaces creates an opportunity for the startups, the AI-natives, and a vulnerability for the incumbents, the AI-adopters.”
“Consumers tend to prefer things that are fast and convenient. AI interfaces will promise an improved user experience on both fronts. I expect that fewer consumers will be loyal to brands than businesses think they will be. I also expect that brands that require trust will be tougher to disrupt. Airbnb, for instance, has trust around staying in a stranger’s home; knowing your AI chatbot booked through a reputable service will be important. A more commoditized service—where your paper towels come from, for instance—may be more easily disrupted.
There are plenty of examples we could give here. The point is: AI is a radical new paradigm for interacting with businesses. We might not visit websites or open apps nearly as much anymore. Those have been our ports to the web…forever. Or at least since the modern digital age was born.
We haven’t seen this much change in technology interfaces in a long, long time. In an interface revolution, everyone becomes vulnerable, new behaviors emerge, and tremendous value all of a sudden becomes ripe for the taking.”
» AI’s Interface Revolution by Rex Woodbury
Freeing Ourselves From Screens:
“Entitled “Change Everything”, the stunning one minute video offers an enigmatic first look at what the company could be building. Directed by Ryan Staake with music by Nas featuring Kanye West & The Dream, the newly released film [by Humane, a stealth startup co-founded by an ex-Apple designer and engineer] portrays a young woman escaping a sea of lost souls enslaved to their devices (including mobile, VR headsets, and wrist worn accessories, which I’ll presume are smart watches).
She’s the only person awake to the natural world around her, looking upward at the sky rather than down at a glass slab. The protagonist leaves the crowd behind entering a lush forest as she follows the light of an eclipse. She stretches her palm towards the eclipse — which coincidentally is in the shape of Humane’s logo — and when she turns her arm back around towards her body, the eclipse logo has now been transferred and projected onto the palm of her hand. Interestingly, she is still looking upward, heads up, to the projection in her hand and the world around her, in stark contrast to the zombies she left behind, with their slumped body language, fully consumed by and engrossed in their devices.”
» Stealth Startup Humane Hints at Future Device in New Teaser Film
Public AI
“The attention economy, as it has come to be known, is the competition for our limited attention as it grows ever more valuable in the digital age. It’s the ethos that drove Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to declare in 2017 that one of their primary competitors is sleep. […] Now, the same mix of factors is shaping the industries emerging around generative AI, driving toward outcomes that may prove toxic in a different way.”
“Since both AI and more conventional tech lack business model diversity, they might also share a remedy: public options, or tax-funded alternatives. ‘Business model diversity is an important part of the rich variety that capitalism can bring you,’ says Diane Coyle, an economist at the University of Cambridge and former advisor to the UK Treasury. Merely breaking up the tech giants doesn’t go far enough, she argues. In addition, we should create public options, like the BBC in media. Public options introduce a new kind of business model into their industries, leading to different incentives, and ultimately, wider competition. More diversity means more innovation, and better odds that these industries might evolve toward socially desirable outcomes.”
“The key point would be having a different business model competing in the ecosystem with different kinds of incentives. That might then tilt the incentives of all of the other companies. Forgive the economists' term, but you would start to see product differentiation. There’d be more of a spectrum, broadening out the offer rather than narrowing down. As a British person I’m drawing on the BBC, which has a publicly funded model. Because it doesn't need to hunt for advertising, that means that other broadcasters who are advertising-funded compete on quality.
So it's all about putting a different kind of plant into the jungle to change the incentive structures and modify behavior. It's worked really well in broadcast, we've got a really healthy ecosystem, which helps Britain export massively in the creative industries. Now, would it work in the digital world? We don't know. But it seems to me worth exploring that idea.”
» How public options can challenge some of Big Tech's harms by Bryan Walsh
The Ignored Blue-Collar Backbone
“While Piketty looked back at the historically cumulative causes of inequality, he didn’t much look forward to the impact of technological innovation, which is divorcing productivity growth and wealth creation from employment and income. To the extent that intelligent machines don’t displace whole categories of jobs and depress wages, coworking with such technologies will offer few openings for the non-college educated. Those whose job it will be to monitor and manage generative AI like GPT3 will have to be smarter than it is.”
“The bottom line is that it is not those earning a wage income from manually fabricating microchips, which process the algorithms of AI, who will reap the compounding value from productivity-enhancing and wealth-generating intelligent machines. It will be the investors with an equity stake in those companies that own them.”
“Policies that aim for greater equality through only increasing the labor share of income are stuck in paradigm inertia rooted in the zero-sum class struggles of a more labor-intensive industrial era, which no longer characterizes the tech-driven economy. The new paradigm for the rapidly approaching future would seek a greater labor share of wealth through an ownership stake that captures more of the value created by intelligent machines, which are diminishing the prospect of gainful employment. Both must work in tandem to raise wealth from the bottom up.
» noema | When The Blue-Collar Backbone Meets Generative AI by Nathan Gardels
Platform Cooperatives as a Solution:
“As the technology sector sends us hurtling toward a world of robots and artificial intelligence, “technological unemployment” becomes the threat as automation replaces jobs faster than we come up with new work for people to do. We will be left scrambling to find alternative sources of income for average people.
Those decreases in salaries, wages, and benefits also increase corporate profitability and the investment income that profitability generates for shareholders. Automation thus shrinks employment income while growing investment income. That means that strategies for radically broadening ownership will play an extremely important role in mitigating the threat of wide-scale declines in income from technological unemployment. That’s why extending cooperatives into the technology sector is so critical and where platform co-ops can play a vital role.”
“As automation and artificial intelligence cost jobs in one economic sector after another, employment-related income shrinks and investment income expands, exacerbating wealth disparity. Platform co-ops alter that equation by broadening the ownership of the companies that build and operate these technologies. A platform co-op alternative to Airbnb, for example, might use artificial intelligence and might need few employees. But it would be owned by, and share dividends with, its property-listing members—perhaps even renters […].”
“We are in a race that pits the explosion of artificial intelligence and automation against our ability to rapidly expand ownership of the engines that drive this technological revolution. Growing platform cooperatives from their nascent form today into a thriving new sector is a critical step toward a fair and vibrant economic future.”
» Yes Magazine | When Robots Take Our Jobs, Platform Cooperatives Are a Solution by Gideon Rosenblatt (from 2018)
Reality Collapse & New Responsibilities
The video below by the Center for Humane Technology (producers of The Social Dilemma movie) is a must-see! As with any kind of powerful technology that’s linked to destructive capitalism, we are, unfortunately, already building a monster that will be hard, if not impossible, to tame. Here are a few screenshots and quotes from the presentation by Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin. But again, you should definitely watch the entire video (see below):
"When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities."
First Contact with AI and the challenges it led to:
Second Contact with AI and the challenges it is already or will eventually lead to:
“All content-based verification will break this year.”
Great intentions and positives can eventually lead to systemic monsters:
“50% of AI researchers believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI” 2022 AI Impacts Survey
…would you still board the plane?
The full presentation:
Connecting More With Nature Through AI
“With the aid of digital bioacoustics – tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone – researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth.”
“By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species.”
“As scientists eavesdrop on nature, they are learning some astonishing things. Many species that we once thought to be mute actually make noise – lots of it, in some cases.”
“Scientists are also learning that vocally active species – like bats – make sounds which contain much more complex information than previously thought. Bat echolocation, for example, was discovered nearly a century ago. But only recently have researchers begun deciphering the sounds that bats make for other purposes. By recording many hours of bat vocalizations and decoding them using AI algorithms, scientists have revealed that bats remember favors and hold grudges; socially distance and go quiet when ill; and use vocal labels that reveal individual and kin identity.”
“Acoustic tuning is also widespread in nature. Coral and fish larvae find their way back home by imprinting on the unique sounds made by the reef where they were born. Moths have developed echolocation-jamming capabilities to hide themselves from bat sonar. Flowers and vines have evolved leaves to reflect echolocation back to bats, as if they were luring their pollinators with a bright acoustic flashlight. In response to the buzz of bees, flowers flood themselves with nectar. Plants respond to some sound frequencies by growing faster; and some species – including tomatoes, tobacco and corn seedlings – even make noise, although well above our hearing range.”
“Digital listening reveals that we have much more to learn about non-humans, and provides new ways to protect and conserve the environment. Perhaps one day we will invent a zoological version of Google Translate. But first we need to learn how to listen.”
» The Guardian | Science is making it possible to ‘hear’ nature. It does more talking than we knew by Karen Bakker
“Earth Species Project is a non-profit dedicated to using artificial intelligence to decode non-human communication. We believe that an understanding of non-human languages will transform our relationship with the rest of nature. Along the way, we are building solutions that are supporting real conservation impact today.”
AI Is Life or Life is AI
“We are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth.”
“For most of human history, we were unaware of the legions of bacteria living and dying across the surface of everything in our environment — even within us. It took the technological innovation of the microscope in the late 16th century for us to finally see a microscopic world teeming with life. […] We also did not know about the ecosystems thriving near hydrothermal vents in the darkest depths of the ocean floor until the second half of the 20th century, when submarines that could stand intense pressures got us close enough to observe them.”
“The discovery of new forms of life requires the advent of technologies that allow us to sense and explore the world in new ways. But almost never do we consider those technologies themselves as life. A microbe is life, and surely a microscope is not. Right? But what is the difference between technology and life? Artificial intelligences like large language models, robots that look eerily human or act indistinguishably from animals, computers derived from biological parts — the boundary between life and technology is becoming blurry.”
“A world in which machines acquire sufficient intelligence to replace biological life is the stuff of nightmares. But this fear of the artificiality of technology misses the potentially far-reaching role technologies may play in the evolutionary trajectories of living worlds.
Complex (technological) objects do not just appear spontaneously in the universe, despite popular folklore to the contrary. Cells, dogs, trees, computers, you and I all require evolution and selection along a lineage to generate the information necessary to exist.“
“[…] This is as true for a raven as it is for a large language model like ChatGPT. Both are products of several billion years of selective adaptation: Ravens wouldn’t exist without dinosaurs and the evolution of wings and feathers, and ChatGPT wouldn’t exist without the evolutionary divergence of the human lineage from apes, where humans went on to develop language.”
“Human technology would not exist without humans, so it is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life.
Technology, like biology, does not exist in the absence of evolution. Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.”
A New Understanding of ‘Life’:
“To understand life may therefore require us to unify the biological and technological […].”
“Historically, where philosophy and technology intersect, the goal has been to apply old philosophical ideas to understand new technology. However, as the philosopher of mind David Chalmers has pointed out, in the area of techno-philosophy, this logic can be inverted: Technology can be used as a new lens with which to visit old questions in philosophy.
We can also ask what new insights might be gained by taking a broader, non-human-centric view of what constitutes technology and how this can be used to reinvestigate old questions in philosophy and biology alike. Technology relies on scientific knowledge, but scientific knowledge is itself information that emerged in our biosphere. It enables things to be possible that would not be without it.”
“The technologies we are and that we produce are part of the same ancient strand of information propagating through and structuring matter on our planet. This structure of information across time emerged with the origin of life on Earth. We are lineages, not individuals.”
“We are 3.8-billion-year-old lineages of information structuring matter on our planet. We need to recognize our world teems with life and also that life is what we are evolving into. It is only when we understand ourselves in this context that we have any hope of recognizing whatever life, currently unimagined and evolving along radically different lineages, might exist, or we might generate to co-evolve with us.“
» AI Is Life by Sara Walker
Into The Weird
“What’s coming will be weirder. I use that term here in a specific way. In his book ‘High Weirdness,’ Erik Davis, the historian of Californian counterculture, describes weird things as ‘anomalous — they deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically.’ That is the world we’re building.”
“I cannot emphasize this enough: We do not understand these systems, and it’s not clear we even can. I don’t mean that we cannot offer a high-level account of the basic functions: These are typically probabilistic algorithms trained on digital information that make predictions about the next word in a sentence, or an image in a sequence, or some other relationship between abstractions that it can statistically model. But zoom into specifics and the picture dissolves into computational static.”
“‘If you were to print out everything the networks do between input and output, it would amount to billions of arithmetic operations,’ writes Meghan O’Gieblyn in her brilliant book, ‘God, Human, Animal, Machine,’ ‘an ‘explanation’ that would be impossible to understand.’”
“That is perhaps the weirdest thing about what we are building: The “thinking,” for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human. And the more inhuman the systems get — the more billions of connections they draw and layers and parameters and nodes and computing power they acquire — the more human they seem to us.”
“O’Gieblyn observes that ‘as A.I. continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.’”
“This is an inversion of centuries of thought, O’Gieblyn notes, in which humanity justified its own dominance by emphasizing our cognitive uniqueness. We may soon find ourselves taking metaphysical shelter in the subjective experience of consciousness: the qualities we share with animals but not, so far, with A.I. ‘If there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic,’ she writes.”
» The New York Times | This Changes Everything by Ezra Klein
Alright! That was quite a lot of stuff 😅…
I hope you enjoyed reading these different perspectives and ideas! If you did, then please help me spread the word and share this piece on social media or forward it to a friend or colleague!
Thank you! 🙏
Thomas