TheGoodFuture Blog (Futurist Gerd Leonhard)

“There is also near-unanimity, I find, that the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end. The systems must be made more transparent. We need to get better at saying what is going on inside them and why. This won’t be easy. The problem is that the large-model A.I. systems we are talking about aren’t made of explicit ideas. There is no definite representation of what the system “wants,” no label for when it is doing a particular thing, like manipulating a person. There is only a giant ocean of jello—a vast mathematical mixing. A writers’-rights group has proposed that real human authors be paid in full when tools like GPT are used in the scriptwriting process; after all, the system is drawing on scripts that real people have made. But when we use A.I. to produce film clips, and potentially whole movies, there won’t necessarily be a screenwriting phase. A movie might be produced that appears to have a script, soundtrack, and so on, but it will have been calculated into existence as a whole.”

There Is No A.I.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai
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“Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, publicly claimed that the AI chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become sentient. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. Rather, it was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the sake of the AI chatbot. If AI can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to do?”

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/04/28/yuval-noah-harari-argues-that-ai-has-hacked-the-operating-system-of-human-civilisation
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“Be smart: AI's hunger for training data casts the entire 30-year history of the popular internet in a new light.

Today's AI breakthroughs couldn't happen without the availability of the digital stockpiles and landfills of info, ideas and feelings that the internet prompted people to produce.
But we produced all that stuff for one another, not for AI.”

Everything we all wrote for the web is now being used to train AI
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/24/ai-chatgpt-blogs-web-writing-training-data
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“The capacity to translate from one language to another includes, in principle and increasingly in practice, the ability to translate from language to code. A prompt written in English can in principle spur the production of a program that fulfils its requirements. Where browsers detached the user interface from the software application, LLMs are likely to dissolve both categories. This could mark a fundamental shift in both the way people use computers and the business models within which they do so.”

How AI could change computing, culture and the course of history
https://www.economist.com/essay/2023/04/20/how-ai-could-change-computing-culture-and-the-course-of-history
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“Dreams of war between Google and government, however, obscure a much different relationship that may emerge between them — particularly between Google and progressive government. For eight years, Google and the Obama administration forged a uniquely close relationship. Their special bond is best ascribed not to the revolving door, although hundreds of meetings were held between the two; nor to crony capitalism, although hundreds of people have switched jobs from Google to the Obama administration or vice versa; nor to lobbying prowess, although Google is one of the top corporate lobbyists.

Rather, the ultimate source of the special bond between Google and the Obama White House — and modern progressive government more broadly — has been their common ethos. Both view society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems, whose resolutions depend mainly on facts and objective reasoning”

Google.gov — The New Atlantis
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/googlegov
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“The “creator economy” is currently valued at around $14 billion per year. Enabled by new digital channels, independent writers, podcasters, artists, and musicians can connect with audiences directly to make their own incomes. Internet platforms such as Substack, Flipboard, and Steemit enable individuals not only to create content, but also become independent producers and brand managers of their work. While many kinds of work were being disrupted by new technologies, these platforms offered people new ways to make a living through human creativity.”

How Generative AI Could Disrupt Creative Work
https://hbr.org/2023/04/how-generative-ai-could-disrupt-creative-work
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“What are the best- and worst-case scenarios for generative AI’s integration in everyday life?

“The most optimistic scenarios are that AI is like the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution,” Reich said, creating “exponential increases in productivity in the economy. It accelerates scientific breakthroughs, medical breakthroughs. It frees up human beings from having to do drudgery work, liberates people from unpleasant tasks and massively increases the size of the economy.””

How AI like ChatGPT could change the future of work, education and our minds
https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/ai-chatgpt-education-work-17846358.php
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“The rapid advances in generative AI may prove dangerous in an era when social media has been weaponized and deepfakes are propagandists' playthings. As Jason Parham wrote for WIRED this week, we also need to seriously consider how generative AI can recapture and repurpose ugly stereotypes”

AI Video Generators Are Nearing a Crucial Tipping Point
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-video-generators-are-nearing-a-crucial-tipping-point/
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“Such considerations have led many scholars to acknowledge that, as Stephen Hawking wrote in The Guardian in 2016, ‘we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity.’ . And Max Tegmark contends that ‘it’s probably going to be within our lifetimes … that we’re either going to self-destruct or get our act together.’ Consistent with these dismal declarations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2020 set its iconic Doomsday Clock to a mere 100 seconds before midnight (or doom), the closest it’s been since the clock was created in 1947, and more than 11,000 scientists from around the world signed an article in 2020 stating ‘clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency’, and without ‘an immense increase of scale in endeavours to conserve our biosphere [we risk] untold suffering due to the climate crisis.’ As the young climate activist Xiye Bastida summed up this existential mood in a Teen Vogue interview in 2019, the aim is to ‘make sure that we’re not the last generation’, because this now appears to be a very real possibility.”

Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
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