Cav > Books: ai‎ (19)

"...Today, we are constantly contending with algorithms of all kinds, each one attempting to guess what we are thinking of, seeking, and desiring before we may even be aware of the answers. When I write an email, my Gmail app predicts which words and phrases I am trying to type and fills them in for me, as if reading my mind. Spotify stocks its screen with the musicians and albums it predicts that I am likely to listen to, which I often end up selecting simply out of habit. When I unlock my phone, photos from the past I may want to see—labeled “memories,” as if they existed in my subconscious—are preloaded, as are suggestions for apps I may want to open and friends I may want to text. Instagram offers a mood board of what its algorithm perceives as my interests: top-down photos of food, architecture snapshots, looping clips of prestige television shows. TikTok serves me an inexplicable avalanche of videos of people retiling their showers, and I inexplicably keep watching them, compelled in spite of myself. Surely there is more to my identity as a consumer of culture?"

"Filterworld, the title of this book, is my word for the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed. Though Filterworld has also changed politics, education, and interpersonal relationships, among many other facets of society, my focus is on culture. Whether visual art, music, film, literature, or choreography, algorithmic recommendations and the feeds that they populate mediate our relationship to culture, guiding our attention toward the things that fit best within the structures of digital platforms. The automated recommendations are filters that both sift what gets attention from what is ignored and subtly warp the appearance of these things, like a photo filter on Instagram, exaggerating some qualities and downplaying others. The cultural successes of Filterworld are obvious. They include phenomena like the countrified TikTok dance that propelled Lil Nas X’s 2018 song “Old Town Road” to global fame; the cliché design trends that plague Instagram, like minimalist interiors and the monotonous sans serif logos that fashion brands have adopted in recent years; and the rage-triggering deluge of meaningless Twitter controversies."

"...In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data.
Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations."

"...Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you’ve been.
Your brain is a relentless shapeshifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry – and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast, detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint..."

"The cybersurveillance system the company created and continually updates and upgrades for its sixty-plus clients in more than forty different countries has made the world a much safer place, says NSO. Tens of thousands of lives have been saved, they say, because terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles (pedophiles is a big company talking point the last few years) can be spied on and stopped before they act. The numbers are impossible to verify, but the way NSO describes it, the upsides of Pegasus, used within legal and ethical boundaries, are pretty much inarguable. Who doesn’t want to stop pedophiles? Or terrorists? Who could be against it?"

"THIS BOOK IS the behind-the-scenes story of the Pegasus Project, the investigation into the meaning of the leaked data, as told by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of Forbidden Stories, the two journalists who got access to the list of fifty thousand phones. With the list in hand, they gathered and coordinated an international collaboration of more than eighty investigative journalists from seventeen media organizations across four continents, eleven time zones, and about eight separate languages. “They held this thing together miraculously,” says an editor from the Guardian, one of the partners in the Pegasus Project. “We’ve got, like, maybe six hundred journalists. The Washington Post is maybe twice the size. And to think that a small nonprofit in Paris, with just a handful of people working for it, managed to convene a global alliance of media organizations and take on not just one of the most powerful cybersurveillance companies in the world but some of the most repressive and authoritarian governments in the world, that is impressive.''”
"...In the daily back-and-forth of American news and politics—my wheelhouse—it is rare indeed to come across a news story that is both a thriller and of real catastrophic importance. Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons—against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse—is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it. The Pegasus Project saga not only shows us how to stop it; it’s an edge-of-your seat procedural about the heroes who found this dragon and then set out to slay it."

"WHERE’S YOUR PHONE right now? That little device in your pocket likely operates as your personal calendar, your map and atlas, your post office, your telephone, your scratchpad, your camera—basically as your trusted confidant. Matthew Noah Smith, a professor of moral and political nphilosophy, wrote in 2016 that a mobile phone “is an extension of the mind.… There is simply no principled distinction between the processes occurring in the meaty glob in your cranium and the processes occurring in the little silicon, metal, and glass block that is your iPhone. The solid-state drive storing photos in the phone are your memories in the same way that certain groups of neurons storing images in your brain are memories. Our minds extend beyond our heads and into our phones.”
Professor Smith was making the case back then for a zone of privacy that extended to our mobile phone. If the state has no right to access the thoughts in our head, why should it have the right to access the pieces of our thoughts that we keep in our mobile phone? We tell our cell phones almost anything these days, even things we aren’t cognizant of telling it,b and use it as the conduit to offer the most intimate glimpses of ourselves. (See sexting.) If you believe your privacy is being secured by encryption, please read this book, and consider the fifty thousand people on that horror show list, who unbeknownst to them were targeted to unwillingly share every single thing that passed through their phones with people who only had to pay for the privilege.
That list of fifty thousand was just our first keyhole view of the crime scene. If they could do it for fifty thousand, doesn’t that mean they could do it for five hundred thousand? Five million? Fifty million? Where is the limit, and who is going to draw that line? Who is going to deliver us from this worldwide Orwellian nightmare? Because it turns out you don’t have to be married to the emir of anything to find your every thought, every footstep, every word recorded and tracked from afar. Turns out you just need to have a phone, and a powerful enemy somewhere. Who among us is exempt from those conditions?
Where did you say your phone is right now?"

"Hello; my name is Alice, and I can live forever. It helps that I am one part human and one part AI. When anyone meets me for the first time, they always ask me: How do you live so long?"

"Some of these new drugs draw on one of the oldest tools in the book: caloric restriction, or CR. In recent years, scientists have discovered that we have nutrient sensors in our cells that determine food availability, and these sensors regulate large gene programs that, in turn, regulate how fast we age. Studies have shown CR to be effective in extending life span and deflecting age-related chronic diseases in a variety of species, including mice, fish, flies, worms, and yeast.
Rodent studies conducted over the past twenty years have demonstrated up to a 40 percent increase in maximum life span through lifelong CR. The mechanisms through which this occurs are still not validated in humans, for many reasons—like, who wants to starve for twenty years?—but CR has reduced metabolic rate and oxidative stress, improved insulin sensitivity, and altered neuroendocrine and sympathetic nervous system function in animals. Most important, these studies demonstrate how it changes genes..."

"How did companies like Facebook and Google become so important? How did they acquire so much power that even other tech giants, like Twitter, seem small and unthreatening? Wasn’t it less than a decade ago that the mantra of the internet was freedom of speech, freedom of information, and open access for all? Where did those lofty principles go? Are Facebook and Google the whole internet now? And if so, how did it happen?"

"Of the 120 million votes cast in 2016, it was just over one hundred thousand votes in three key swing states that carried the election for Trump. Having read this book, do you really think that Big Tech, with its vast deposits of information on all of us, can’t identify exactly who those voters are, what they care about, and how to make them go blue in 2020? The Big Tech companies were caught napping in 2016... They won’t be caught napping again. Nothing less than a titanic, on-the-ground effort from Republican activists will stop them from stealing the election this time. And even that may not be enough..."

"...Kurzweil, after Moravec,Moore's Law to describe exponential growth of diverse forms of technological progress. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history." He believes the Law of Accelerating Returns implies that a technological singularity will occur before the end of the 21st century, around 2045."

"Kurzweil describes a series of thought experiments which suggest to him that the brain contains a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. Based on this he introduces his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM). He says the neocortex contains 300 million very general pattern recognition circuits and argues that they are responsible for most aspects of human thought. He also suggests that the brain is a "recursive probabilistic fractal" whose line of code is represented within the 30-100 million bytes of compressed code in the genome.
Kurzweil then explains that a computer version of this design could be used to create an artificial intelligence more capable than the human brain. It would employ techniques such as hidden Markov models and genetic algorithms, strategies Kurzweil used successfully in his years as a commercial developer of speech recognition software. Artificial brains will require massive computational power, so Kurzweil reviews his law of accelerating returns which explains how the compounding effects of exponential growth will deliver the necessary hardware in only a few decades."

"After lossless compression, due to massive redundancy in the genome, the amount of design information in the human genome is about 50 million bytes, roughly half of which (around 25 million bytes) pertains to the brain.
That's not simple, but it's a level of complexity we can deal with.
It represents less complexity than many software systems in the modern world."