No.20 — How to raise your Artificial Intelligence ? Vannevar Bush engineered the 20th Century ? Eyes on the Future
How to raise your Artificial Intelligence
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, an excellent interview with professors Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell, where they discuss the nuanced nature of intelligence in AI systems and challenge the notion of human-like intelligence in current large language models (LLMs). They propose that AI systems actively engaging with the world to develop their own mental models could be a way forward, and explore the concept of caregiving as a framework for advancing AI development, highlighting the need for humans to guide and regulate the evolution of Artificial Intelligence.
Clear language and new angles provide useful ways for thinking of AI. The most salient point for me came at the beginning, where Gopnik says that instead of seeing LLMs as intelligent agents, “a much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions.” She also believes that “we should think of them as cultural technologies, like the printing press or the internet.” I’ll mention again Herndon’s framing of AI as Collective Intelligence, both are pointing in similar directions, focusing on the idea of training data as so much knowledge that can be more easily—if currently imperfectly—accessed through LLMs, rather than on any perceived intelligence.
At the moment, AI is just generating lots of text and pictures in a pretty random way. And if we’re going to be able to use it effectively, we’re going to have to develop the kinds of norms and regulations that we developed for other technologies. […]
I think it’s fair to say that the consensus among people who study human intelligence is that there’s a much bigger gap between human and artificial intelligence, and that the real risks we should pay attention to are not the far-off existential risks of AI agents taking over but rather the more mundane risks of misinformation and other bad stuff showing up on the internet.
How Vannevar Bush engineered the 20th Century
For some reason, I don’t tire of reading about the history of computing and the various ways in which prominent figures from various fields were intertwined and influencing each other through the decades. I liked this piece because it covered more ground than just the usual memex topic.
Vannevar Bush was a key figure in the Manhattan Project, published an article that kind of anticipated the creation of hypertext, and influenced the development of the personal computer and the web. His creation of research contracts transformed relations between government, academia, and industry.
“In the 1940s, despite his busy schedule with the Manhattan Project, Bush set aside time to envision and build working models of a desktop ‘memory extender,’ or memex, to assist professionals in managing information and making decisions.” He also “believed that human consciousness could be enhanced through computational aids and that the automation of routine cognitive tasks could liberate human minds to concentrate and solve more difficult problems.”
As a professor and later dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he crafted incentives for professors to consult part time for business, setting in motion in the 1920s and 1930s practices now considered essential to science-based industry. […]
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Having done so much to enhance and solidify the role of scientists and engineers in the advancement of society, he nevertheless foresaw an uncertain world, where scientific and technological outcomes would also continue to challenge us.
Futures, Fictions & Fabulations
“This report provides a literature review of publications authored by numerous external organisations. It summarises 34 signals and trends of emerging technologies and breakthrough innovations across the 11 primary categories of a taxonomy defined by the European Innovation Council (EIC). The authors investigate not only what is deemed most novel in multiple application domains but what is worth the attention of European Union (EU) policy audiences involved with priority-setting and decision-making.”
“The aim of development is to ensure that small municipalities in rural regions have good conditions for many types of business and housing. Promotion of innovation activities requires new kinds of investments and approaches: Living Lab, co-creation and, for example, future-oriented work. The best way to innovate is for actors in different fields to meet each other.”
[Call for papers] “In anticipation of the forthcoming monograph from the?Journal of Futures Studies, ‘The Hesitant Feminist’s Guide to the Future,’ authored by Dr. Ivana Milojevi?, we are pleased to announce a symposium designed to expand and explore the themes discussed in her work.”
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