BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-03-29 We
the society of the algorithm and the spectacle; algorithmically generated distracted boyfriends; conversational-interface future a liberation or a trap; Vonnegut, Burke, McCormick, Azhar...
MUST-READ: High-Tech Modernism:
Henry Farrell & Marion Fourcade: The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism: ‘The application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life.... It weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes.… Like bureaucracies... rule-bound and secretive... like markets... empowering and manipulative... machines for making categories and applying them... and... self-adjusting allocative machines.… The absence of visible hierarchy legitimates high-tech modernism’s claim that clouds and crowds best represent people’s wishes. Its new elites echo early libertarian arguments about cyberspace, and quasi-Hayekian defenses of the market, facially justifying the notion that search engines and other algorithms are disinterested means of processing the internet’s naturally dispersed stock of knowledge.… At the end of the day, the relationship between high modernism and high-tech modernism is a struggle between two elites: a new elite of coders, who claim to mediate the wisdom of crowds, and an older elite who based their claims to legitimacy on specialized professional, scientific, or bureaucratic knowledge.32 Both elites draw on rhetorical resources to justify their positions; neither is disinterested...
ONE IMAGE: From the FT: An Infinite Number of Algorithmically Generated Distracted Boyfriends:
ONE VIDEO: Building the Conversational-Interface Future:
And I still do not know whether these things are a liberation or a trap—whether their extremely close fit with how we want to interact makes them more powerful tools of knowledge, or simply things that grift us for gullibility:
Very Briefly Noted:
Rana Faroohar: A new technology boom is at hand: ‘Consumer tech might no longer be a growth area, but the digitisation of industry has just begun…. Three-quarters of the world’s $100tn in gross domestic product is made up of traditional legacy industries — such as manufacturing, transportation, logistics and healthcare — that have yet to be deeply transformed by technology. That’s now changing…
OpenAI has a total headcount of 400: Penny Olson: Amazon, Google Scramble to Keep Pace With OpenAI Despite Huge AI Teams: ‘The five biggest tech firms have an estimated army of 33,000 people working directly on AI research and development…
Bryce Elder: Surrender your desk job to the AI productivity miracle, says Goldman Sachs: ‘Legal assistants and office administrators, prepare for displacement…
Steven Beschloss: We Can Find Talent Everywhere: ‘Increasing access to opportunity—not distracting culture war ploys—should be at the top of our education agenda…. The cynical political calculations that Republicans are employing to attack public education and undermine the value of the teaching and learning that does and should go on every day to improve students’ lives…
Logan.GPT: ‘We also made available a new plugin which allows uses to host their own data and make it accessible inside of ChatGPT…
Jay Alammar: The Illustrated GPT-2 (Visualizing Transformer Language Models)…
Andrej Karpathy: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks…
ChatPDF.com: Chat with Any PDF…
Zvi Mowshowitz: GPT-4 Plugs In: ‘We continue to build everything related to AI in Python, almost as if we want to die, get our data stolen and generally not notice that the code is bugged and full of errors. Also there’s that other little issue that happened recently. Might want to proceed with caution…
Noel Maurer: Everyone is overreacting to the Mexican president's attack on electoral institutions ... and that's a good thing: ‘Mexican democracy is not in danger, but that’s because all these people are acting like it is…
¶s:
Kurt Vonnegut: ‘True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Not bad! Rest in peace!…
Tim Burke: ‘A quick thought on democratic communities…. Two important principles…. Any time you have a vote or election that is anywhere close to 50-50, everybody needs to stop and think about it a bit—and no weighty decision should ever be forced through on that kind of margin…. The status quo has the virtue of having been around for a while…. [The] troubled half… [needs] to work to persuade more people about the need for a change, to… get… at least… 60-40 split. Anyone trying to punch something through is valuing the change they’re seeking over the health of the community and the integrity of its democracy. Which is the flip side: the one thing a democratic community has to fight above all else is someone who is threatening the democracy itself…. You have to fight a leader who is trying to push something through despite very substantial opposition. … You have to go after a leader who tried to overthrow the democracy…. And if that means one near-majority has to face off against another near-majority that no longer accepts democratic process, so be it. Privileging amity and consensus in the face of a determined threat is not preserving democracy, it is abandoning it. If you think this applies to Israel, yes. If you think this applies to France, yes. If you think this applies to criminal and civil actions against Donald Trump, yes…
Packy McCormick: Attention Is All You Need: ‘Transformers can do a lot just by paying attention to the right parts of the input. They don't need other types of neural network layers, like the ones used for convolutions or recurrent connections, to perform well. Attention is all they need…. As it stands today, if OpenAI chooses to, it can build the Apex Aggregator by building an Action Engine. The Action Engine subsumes search and any number of products that let users do things, and it does them for users with nothing more than a simple prompt. If Aggregators controlled demand and commoditized supply, the Apex Aggregator can control demand on multiple fronts, turn attention into actions, disaggregate any supplier that feeds it, and even aggregate the aggregators. It could make Apple, Google, and Facebook’s models seem soft and cuddly… until they fight back…
Azeem Azhar: ‘Wage polarisation is a more likely outcome in the next few years…. The very best human coders… will be able to charge more, while the rump (say bottom nine deciles, for sake of argument) experience downward wage pressure…. New roles… people employed to fine-tune, feedback, monitor and manage the performance of these models. From the perspective of the economy, the consequence might be to unfetter our imaginations on what could be built…. LLM-enabled services will be a paradigm shift in how we experience the web. In fact, such AI interfaces will represent the thing that follows Web 2.0…
