The Creative Act/ Mother Nature Has the Best Climate-Fixing Technology/What is ChatGPT Doing… and Why Does It Work?
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
The Creative Act. As the world continues to engage and debate on the impact of ChatGPT and generative AI more in general, two independent sources of inspiration reminded me this week of the importance of creativity, whose role is going to become even more central in the thinking process, and mastering it even more crucial, given the impact of generative AI, which can massively boost (but not replace) our creativity.
The first source of inspiration this week has been the book The Creative Act by Rick Rubin , one of the greatest contemporary music producers, who has worked with some of the most iconic artists I can think of. Admittedly, I am a big fan of his work, but I was quite surprised by the book. Similarly to many, I was expecting a retrospective book, full of juicy behind the scenes episodes, looking back at a stunning career.
Instead, I have been confronted with an almost philosophical book, centered on the creative act and on the role of the creator as translator. There is much more to the book than that, and if you want to hear from Rick Rubin directly, I can only recommend those two podcasts, one by Ezra Klein and one by Ryan Holliday , in which Rubin provides some fascinating context to the book.
For me, the core reflection that surfaced after engaging with it, was that, with generative AI, we all have to become artists, or at least craftsmen, as we have to play the role of translators (mostly, but not only through prompts), in a somehow creative act, to really be on top of the stochastic machine behind LLMs. Those who will not manage this transition will struggle in the word which is about to come…
The second moment of inspiration this week came when I stumbled into the letter to the next generation of artists , written by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter back on 2016 (courtesy of Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker ).
Till this week I didn’t know the late Wayne Shorter, and I was quite touched/inspired by the letter, which might have been written for the next generation of artists, but is, in a context of generative AI, something that each of us needs to make their own and practice.
In fact, the authors where completely right, when they wrote, back in 2016, “We’d like to be clear that while this letter is written with an artistic audience in mind, these thoughts transcend professional boundaries and apply to all people, regardless of profession.“
Here are the core six messages in it:
From their closing paragraph “As we accumulate years, parts of our imagination tend to dull. Whether from sadness, prolonged struggle, or social conditioning, somewhere along the way people forget how to tap into the inherent magic that exists within our minds. Don’t let that part of your imagination fade away… …treasure and nurture yours and you’ll always find yourself on the precipice of discovery.“
It is time for all of us to engage with the creative act and nurture our imagination.
The development of generative AI is set to transform the way humans think and process information in a way that has not been seen since the invention of the printing press . Unlike the printing press, which enabled rapid communication of abstract thought, generative AI distills and elaborates on human knowledge, creating a gap between what we know and what we understand. To successfully navigate this transformation, we will need to develop new ways of thinking and interacting with machines.
One possible way to look at it, is to consider the machines like saxophones and apply the mantras of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Rick Rubin to it. The creative act: a way of being.
A new report on The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal concludes that even if we achieve a “100% zero-carbon economy tomorrow,” the CO2 already baked into the atmosphere will still push global temperatures up past 1.5°C. The study’s authors call for an “aggressive ramp up of ‘novel’ CO2 removal strategies,” including bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and even mechanical trees and, estimate “CO2 removal from new technology must increase by 30x by 2030 and by 1300x - 4900x by 2050.”
Amanda Little , Bloomberg climate columnist and journalism professor at Vanderbilt, disagrees. “Climate-smart tech” like direct air capture (DAC) is getting billions of dollars in funding, “[but] we’re still years if not decades away from developing machines that can perform CO2 removal on a scale even close to what nature can do.” The IPCC estimates that “terrestrial ecosystems” could remove 5B to 8B tons of CO2 annually by 2050, “simply with improved land stewardship practices.”
If the climate crisis “has taught us anything,” Little says, “it’s that nature is a whole lot smarter and more powerful than we are. It’s time we acknowledge that the killer app of carbon dioxide removal is Mother Nature. Let’s invest in her.”
I agree 100%. My only addition is that with should not only invest in her, but also invest with her. As I mentioned multiple times in the Antidisciplinarian, Nature Co-Design is a very important dimension needed to fully harness to potential of many technologies. We need to learn to design with Nature instead of trying to engineer it.
News items:
In a landmark climate achievement that “seemed unimaginable” prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, wind and solar power combined to overtake natural gas in European electricity generation in 2022. Solar adoption in Europe now seems “unstoppable,” and EU solar capacity “could triple by 2026.”
A deep dive from author and scientist Steven Wolfram into what’s going on under the hood of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. How can ChatGPT generate such impressive output by “just adding one word at a time” to produce “a ‘reasonable continuation’ of whatever text it’s got so far?”
Perhaps the most “scientifically very important” thing about ChatGPT is that it reveals “that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more “law like” in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it with semantic grammar, computational language, etc.”
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News items:
Nvidia’s $10,000 A100 chip is “one of the most critical tools in the AI industry,” helping to fuel the generative “AI gold rush” kicked off by startups like OpenAI and Stable Diffusion. Nvidia owns a dominant 95% market share of the GPUs used for machine learning applications, and its shares are up by 65% so far in 2023.
Legendary sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson “created the metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash and “has predicted (and inspired) innovations from cryptocurrency to Alexa.” In this interview with FT, Stephenson discusses his current definition of the metaverse: “There’s lots of people in it. You can interact with them in real time, no matter where they are. They’re represented by audiovisual bodies called avatars, and they’re having shared experiences that are fictional in nature. They’re in fictional spaces, doing fictional things.”
Stephenson also discusses Lamina1 - the blockchain-powered startup he recently co-founded with Peter Vessenes to build an ”open and expansive [metaverse platform] that I think is consistent with the vision in my book.”
When asked if he would consider ChatGPT as a “co-pilot” for writing his next novel, Stephenson demurred. "My theory is that when we experience art - whether it’s a video game, or a Da Vinci painting, or a movie - you’re communing with the creator. Something generated by AI might seem comparable to something produced by a human. But remove that [communion], and it’s hollow and uninteresting.”
News items:
An interview with Cameron Chell , Co-founder and CEO of DraganFly , looks at the impact drones are already having on modern warfare and the clean energy landscape. Chell calls the role of drones in the conflict in Ukraine the most significant development in “the war theater” since “the introduction of tanks in WW1.” Drones are also used extensively in inspecting wind turbines and agrivoltaic solar panel arrays. “Nothing collects data better than a drone,” said Chell.
Killer robots like The Terminator and malevolent AI like 2001’s eerily calm HAL 9000 have long been a staple of sci-fi films and novels. Susan Sontag observed that in sci-fi films, humans live under constant threat “of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” NY Times film critic A.O. Scott argues that “the smart money was always on banality.”
“The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs, seem to confirm that hunch,” Scott says. “In the real world, the bots aren’t our overlords so much as the enablers of our boredom. Our shared future - our singularity - is an endless scroll, just for the lulz.” Or so he thought until his colleague Kevin Roose’s recent encounter with Bing’s chatbot and its “volatile alter ego” - Sydney . Having been trained on the internet, “a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness,” should we be shocked when Sydney and her chatbot relatives display “our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality, and plain old meanness?”
News items:
Thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Bing’s chatbot, the next hot job in tech may be “prompt engineer.” Instead of interacting with computers through code, “prompt engineers program in prose,” hoping to coax optimal results from text-to-language generative AI models. As Tesla’s former chief of AI, Andrej Karpathy , recently tweeted , “The hottest new programming language is English.”
Despite Google and Microsoft’s dueling search chatbots still being prone to mistakes and “hallucinating untrue information ,” the hype around LLMs that power tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard shows little sign of abating.
Former senior research scientist at Google Ethical AI Alex Hanna , now Director at DAIR , sees a “familiar” and disturbing pattern at work. “Financial incentives to rapidly commercialize AI [are] outweighing concerns about safety or ethics. There isn’t much money in responsibility or safety, but there’s plenty in overhyping the technology,” says Hanna.
News items:
In a survey of the decarbonization plans of 50 major US cities, researchers found that only 8 of them - including NYC , Sacramento , and Denver - met the funding and financing criteria set out by Brookings . “Sound funding and financing strategies are the exception when it comes to decarbonization planning in American cities.”
Electrical Instrumentation and Remediation Consultant & Bikes Not Bombs 30+ years Volunteer (current).
1 年Nature in the form of coral reefs can capture more CO2 than tropical rain forests, but global warming is killing them where they live. The Global Coral Reef Alliance is growing reefs in cooler waters, but having an impossible job keeping up with the thermal die off. They need every nation's support in order to keep up with the current global situation.
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful article with us. I believe, many people will find it as interesting as I do.