MIT predicts 12 Plausible Endings to the AI Story (Spoiler Alert: Not a fairy story ending)

It does make me wonder. Don't the happy people at MIT have something better to be doing instead of re-running variants of "The Matrix" in their academic papers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLcrvMfHUJM

Other AI YouTube Memes: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9werF1SR3Ag

AI - An Inside Take (AI Developer Interview)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf2KFVcKQdQ

A self confessed nerdy AI enthusiast (saying which, I have a lot of empathy and respect for) who I would call at teh top of his games was at the leading edge, being completely honest about the hype and dangers of AI. Also being very honest about how little we know about their workings. Computer Science knowledge of ANN makes Physicists look good (as they guess about Dark Matter and Dark Energy). 

Google Deep Mind - Demis Hassabis (Noble Prize Winner) - Lex Fridman Podcast

Keeping up with the world is hard .. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HzgcbRXUK8

Lex Fridman seemed genuinely in awe of this guy!

The Singularity is Near (2005) and The Singularity Is Nearer (2024)

There is someone shouting a message. "The Singularity is Nearer" (2024). he being - an old [Strong] AI proponent and technology futurist called Ray Kurzwell and he is shouting louder than ever. Seeing as the book was only available in hardback I decided Audible was the best way to get my hands on it and also head round it. I was intrigued that this is a follow on book from his (2005) The Singularity is Near, so at the same time I picked it up cheap in a paperback format (see below, the new - a message of hope, ambition in the technology convergence of AI and perhaps a naïve sense "That it will all right on the night" - something that Geoff Hinton would totally disagree with): 

The old (The Singularity is Near) is a very chunky book too - so reading it in 2025 to see how close he was to getting predictions right in 2025 will be interesting (see below - shiny black and with clichéd graphics, but packed with information and speculations):

You will only appreciate it's size/thickness when you see it end on (see below, one thing a book gives that Audible cannot, is lovely diagrams - so sigh, sometimes you need both, well that's my excuse): 

Part II of my study is to be  time travelling back and forth to 2005 and 2025. Watch this space! I suspect a but of confusion and wry humour .. be careful what you wish for.

The Worse Case Scenario for Gen AI - "Vegetive Electron Microscopy" - Eh?

Spoiler alert .. this post highlights a silly episode in Gen AI (see below, the construction of a bogus term, "vegetive electron microscopy" by AI automated consumption on mass of thousands of documents, because the input process did not expect the document to be formatted in columns): 

Column one is about biology, column two is about physics, by parsing convention the AI sees "a thing/entity" called "vegetive electron microscopy" and pumps it into the LLM and from there is gets used and recommended. Read full article below:  

https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scientific-papers-and-we-traced-it-back-to-a-glitch-in-ai-training-data-254463

Funny after you spot it, serious when you don't!

The Man From The Future - John von Neumann (Audible Books)

I thought I knew something about John von Neumann, but this book amazed my by revealing how little I really knew about him at all. He was the definition of a Polymath .. and  a Nobel one at that, in many fields! So, hand on heart, I can thoroughly recommend this title (see below, I listened too it via Audible, but intend to buy the book too, so I can skim through the chapters again .. I cannot give a higher recommendation than that): 

A tantalising peek at its contents reveals: 

"The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.

Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome."

It is also pitched at the general reader (so I didn't have that Stephen Hawkins Brief History of Time, "What does that mean?" - effect here on me).

Cool Maths Lecture on Games - Professor Sarah Hart

Well worth registering and logging in to see this (and best of all it is free). Mathematics for Board Games - a very interesting topic and non-trivial but presented in a easy to digest way (see below, and tell me why was Maths not this interesting at school for me?): 

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/maths-games

Lots more interesting stuff on the site too!

PS: Hope for humans playing Go against AI too:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-beats-machine-at-go-in-human-victory-over-ai/

Audible Book Completed: The Creativity Code by Marcus du Sautoy

Full title - The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think, by Marcus di Sautoy (see below, for the sexy artwork that hints at robot domination, without having to show a robot. I listened to it via Audible rather than reading it, but in the end I bought a copy of the book as well, as there were sections in it you really needed to read IMHO - yes, like the ones that mentioned sums I could not do in my head!): 

So, now I have finished listening to this .. it seems to be pointing out that we’ve done lots of quirky things, some of which look and feel impressive .. but we seem to be back in a loop, back to 1990 when Expert Systems (symbolic logic machines) were going to going to transform the world. Deep Learning is now the new flavour of the revolution (Artificial Neural Nets that are trained to be clever) .. but back in 1990 it was not Expert Systems that shaped the Commercial World for teh next twenty plus years. No that was the dirty old Database and Networks which transformed into a brand the new thing called the Internet .. the "What Net" are you going fishing somewhere strange? Yet it dictated the course of computing for the next 20+ years by reinventing the Network to be used by everybody and therefore everybody's concern . My personal opinion of course .. which like most things these days seems to be in the Cloud, running better on someone else's piece of tin. 

Audible: Deep Thinking by Gary Kasparov - Chess

This has been on the wish list to read for a while and as my Audible listening habits have improved (nay become addictive) as of late I managed to sneak it in. It harkens back to the Gary Kasparov experience of Man v Computer in chess competitions that started in the 1980's. It eventually saw a specialist machine called Deep Blue defeat the then World Champion Gary Kasparov in a match of six chess games. A competition of grey matter versus silicon logic circuits (see below, the Audible listing a fascinating and revealing read): 

I certainly discovered some "new things" from it and I don't pretend to be any sort of real Chess aficionado, other than knowing the base rules. Fascinating motivational factors were at play for IBM then went from Chess Experiment (in a sort of partnership with Kasparov to understand teh Chess Problem) to an "out and out" campaign focus to "win at all costs" (as in secretly hiring Grand Masters on NDA agreement [allegedly] for prestige and correlated stock-price benefit. From my programming background I know my Min-Max and Alpha-Beta Pruning - but the constructed "Opening Book" strategy was new (and this is where the Grand Masters really helped Deep Blue) used at the start of the game to gain a strong "middle game" baseline (starting position) .. where the silicon computation attack of the ply (pushing the "horizon effect" as long away as possible) was computed in earnest .. the ne the computational threads of Deep Blue tries to reach out to the end game database. Fascinating that Deep Blue beat Kasparov and then was put out to rest, rather than lead an Artificial Intelligence revolution. Crazy to also think that now, Deep Blue [with all its dedicated Chess hardware] is no longer thought of as impressive Chess Machine, its capacity is now well passed and outplayed by algorithms running on general purpose computers and smart phones.

If anything I earned a greater sense of respect for Gary Kasparov and what he went through. I found it a revealing, frank and humbling read. 

Inspirational Stuff - Richard Feynman: Computer Science Lecture - Hardware, Software and Heuristics .. and some other stuff

Listen to Feynman on Computer Science: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

Trillion Credit Squadron: Lenat Traveller Competition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_Adventure_5:_Trillion_Credit_Squadron

https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own

Malcolm Gladwell: How David beats Goliath

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beats-goliath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell

Things everyone should know about AI

https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-malicious-uses-and-abuses-of-artificial-intelligence.pdf

https://u2b.com/2020/01/27/social_intelligence-ai-uniarizona/

https://www.lexalytics.com/lexablog/bias-in-ai-machine-learning

https://news.mit.edu/2016/ai-system-predicts-85-percent-cyber-attacks-using-input-human-experts-0418

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2016/08/08/machine-learning-goes-dark-and-deep-to-find-zero-day-exploits-before-day-zero/?sh=87a781a417b1

https://www.informationweek.com/ai-or-machine-learning/the-role-of-ai-in-the-race-for-a-coronavirus-vaccine

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/india-police-missing-children-facial-recognition-tech-trace-find-reunite-a8320406.html

https://www.maketecheasier.com/smokebot-robot-fight-fires-firefighters/

New Terms (for me): 

Autonomic Computing - The capacity of a system for adaptive self-management of its own resources, for high level computing functions without user input

SCRUM Books: Guide and Handbooks

Quite possibly my most favourite pair of books of all time in the world (see below, these two books make sense from a software development perspective, a project management sense and also a "life adventure sense" - but they also describe the evolution of adaptive complex systems - aka intelligent behaviour *see below, if that seems too academic or vague replace it with "it just makes stuff happen quickly without the bull!"): 

As always I listened to the Audible versions first, then my itchy fingers just had to get a paper copy (this happened in both cases) - "to flip through", as one has the want to do! 

Note to Self: The Art of Coding (You Tube Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U

One to watch to remember why we code and not just program ;) 

Holiday Reading Books: "The Demon in the Machine" and "Upheaval"

Despite my family trying to convert me to the Kindle I still manage to slip in "the hard stuff" trying my best to get the best of both worlds (see below): 

I think there is a tenuous common thread of simulation between the two, one is about hidden connections between information and complex systems and the other is weaving a comparison between personal and national moments of crisis ;) 

Designed Experiments: Set in a General Lecture Course

Extracting Value from Variables:

https://youtu.be/bTmBy5nvHVY

Variable at a time versus Designed Experiments: 

https://youtu.be/-fnI21N7Sx8

Response Surface Method: 

https://youtu.be/kuiTCzOhh6c

Latin Squares: 

https://youtu.be/7DsnV4F_xRQ

Neural Networks: 

https://youtu.be/Tl3YolpO1g0

AI in the News - Good News: Explainable AI

Google admits the Black Box problem of AI: 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50506431

Google's answer eXplainable AI (XAI): 

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/google-cloud-ai-explanations-to-increase-fairness-responsibility-and-trust

Shapely Values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_value

When you think you are an expert you are not, when you have doubts then you know you are on the way to becoming an expert:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Oh dear this does not sound good at all: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/50225315/artificial-intelligence-machines-given-power-to-kill

AI in "playing" Games better than humans: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50212841

Lets see what happens in 2020!