AI, AR, Surveillance Machines and Bots
Thoughtful Net #43. Interesting links from the past few weeks.
For some reason, this publication always takes me at least two hours to write. I’m not even exaggerating. I’ve no idea why it takes so long. I need a better workflow. I do enjoy it, though.
Anyway, let’s kick off with a great quote from Ian McShane, actor in Deadwood (and Lovejoy, for the older Brits among you):
If you’re smart and you get old, all you know is that everything changes. You’re not in control of anything. If you don’t learn that early, you’re going to be fucked.
The Best
Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
The sad and infuriating inside story of Google’s quest to make every book in the world available to everyone, and its downfall in a legal battle.
It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there.
Artificial Intelligence
The Myth of a Superhuman AI
Kevin Kelly argues strongly against the narrative of the rogue super-intelligence that will dominate mankind. Very persuasive, and I completely agree.
Human intelligence is not in some central position, with other specialized intelligence revolving around it. Rather, human intelligence is a very, very specific type of intelligence that has evolved over many millions of years to enable our species to survive on this planet.
Don’t Use the Force, Luke — Use the Targeting Computer
How machine learning lets us not only see what has been done, but what could be done. By James Somers.
Where telescopes and microscopes show us the very far and the very small, the computer shows us the very much, all at once. It makes time available to the mind and eye. Computation, in that sense, is a kind of compacting of imagination
A.I. Versus M.D.
Machine learning is being applied to medical diagnosis, and already outperforming humans in some cases. Siddhartha Mukherjee explores what that means for doctors.
In medicine, there are cases where early diagnosis can save or prolong life. There are also cases where you’ll be worried longer but won’t live longer. It’s hard to know how much you want to know.
The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
The algorithms that power artificial intelligence are very powerful, and very opaque. That’s going to be a problem. By Will Knight.
We’ve never before built machines that operate in ways their creators don’t understand. How well can we expect to communicate — and get along with — intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable?
Camera-first
Here’s What Mark Zuckerberg Told Us About The Wild Things Facebook’s New Camera Will Do
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made a big deal of the phone camera at the recent F8 conference keynote. Alex Kantrowitz and Mat Honan interview him about the long-term vision.
Imagine, Zuckerberg urged, using Facebook’s camera to view pieces of digital art affixed to a wall. Or to play a digital game overlaid on a tabletop. Or to leave a digital object in a room for someone to later discover — perhaps even future generations. Imagine using your phone to take a 2D photo, and then transform that photo into a 3D space. That’s what Facebook is doing.
The first decade of augmented reality
It’s not only Facebook: all the major tech companies are showing moves towards augmented reality as the next interface. Benedict Evans provides a practical assessment of what’s required to get there.
If one recalls the Eric Raymond line that a computer should never ask you something that it should be able to work out, then a computer that can see everything you see and know what you’re looking at, and that has the next decade of development of machine learning to build on, ought to remove whole layers of questions that today we assume we have to deal with manually.
Other stuff
Build a Better Monster
How the internet became a surveillance machine, and what can be done to stop it. Basically, everything Maciej Cegłowski writes gets in here.
We built the commercial internet by mastering techniques of persuasion and surveillance that we’ve extended to billions of people, including essentially the entire population of the Western democracies. But admitting that this tool of social control might be conducive to authoritarianism is not something we’re ready to face.
These are the bots powering Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post efforts to build a modern digital newspaper; &
This is how The New York Times is using bots to create more one-to-one experiences with readers
Two articles with similar premises: major news publishers are using bots to reach their audience and connect their staff. Transcripts of talks by Joey Marburger and Andrew Phelps.
What I’ve noticed in the bot space is that there are a lot of great experiments out there where they’re either playful or useful, or sometimes both — but the bots tend to have their own personality. But I figure we have all of these great humans that you know, are expensive and emotional and really hard to maintain. So why not squeeze more out of them, right?
The Thoughtful Net is an occasional (less than weekly, more than monthly) publication collecting great writing about the internet and technology, culture, information, society, science, and philosophy. If you prefer to receive it in your inbox you can follow this publication or subscribe to the email newsletter.
