I read a lot of articles about AI, some technical, but most in the realm of commentary. I’m going to use these Round-Ups to share what I’ve been reading. I might comment. I might not. Most of the time, the bolded text is my emphasis.
A fascinating article about the role of AI in mathematics. Essentially, AI reveals that mathematicians don’t study math to find answers. They study math to find the path to those answers. An AI that gives you the answer is taking away the key component of mathematical studies.
Arguably, theorem proving and problem solving aren’t even the most important goals for mathematicians. In a famous 1994 essay, the mathematician William Thurston argued that what mathematicians are doing “is finding ways for people to understand and think about mathematics,” especially as members of a social community. Thurston gave an example from his own life. Early in his career, he quickly proved a string of “dramatic theorems” in an area of mathematics called foliations. However, because he was so successful at proving the theorems — and significantly less successful at communicating the ideas behind his proofs — other mathematicians evacuated the field. The end result was that the social structure that had supported research into foliations collapsed and the subfield died. “I had the conception that what people wanted was to know the answers,” Thurston wrote. “That’s only one part of the story. More than the knowledge, people want personal understanding.”
From a Princeton study about the “delusion-like states” facilitated by AI, quoted here by Gary Marcus:
Unlike hallucinations, which introduce false-hoods, sycophancy is a bias in the selection of the data people see. When AI systems are trained to be helpful, they may inadvertently prioritize data that validates the user’s narrative over data that gets them closer to the truth.
Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey, quoted at length here by Gary Marcus:
In this Article, we hope to convince you of one simple and urgent point: the current design of artificial intelligence systems facilitates the degradation and destruction of our critical civic institutions. Even if predictive and generative AI systems are not directly used to eradicate these institutions, AI systems by their nature weaken the institutions to the point of enfeeblement. To clarify, we are not arguing that AI is a neutral or general purpose tool that can be used to destroy these institutions. Rather, we are arguing that AI’s current core functionality—that is, if it is used according to its design—will progressively exact a toll upon the institutions that support modern democratic life. The more AI is deployed in our existing economic and social systems, the more the institutions will become ossified and delegitimized. Regardless of whether tech companies intend this destruction, the key attributes of AI systems are anathema to the kind of cooperation, transparency, accountability, and evolution that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.
Here’s Cory Doctorow on “cheap AI,” useful bits of tech that might be left after the AI bubble pops:
Here’s hardware hacker Pete Warden demoing a chatbot that you talk to and that talks back to you – and it’s running on Synaptics System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that costs “low single digit dollars”:
This is basically a little special-purpose Alexa, except it doesn’t connect to the internet at all (and therefore doesn’t leak any of your data). In Warden’s demo, the gadget is a button-sized voice assistant that is meant to be integrated into a dishwasher, which can interpret the dishwasher’s manual for you. If your dishes come out dirty or if the drain gets clogged, you press the button, describe your issue in pretty vague terms, and it instantly speaks aloud all the troubleshooting steps to deal with it. This privacy-preserving, cheap-like-borscht component adds a voice-activated, conversational assistant to a device, sipping power like the clock on your microwave, running on a processor that costs less than a pack of AA batteries. It’s seriously f****** cool. There’s going to be a lot of this AI, after the AI goes away – just like there was a lot of the web after the dotcom crash, when, overnight, San Francisco had infinity office-space, servers, and techies going begging.
