Category: AI &c.

Geoffrey Hinton’s (very dark) Nobel Speech …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f5WQAk3dYo

Might he (Hinton) become a modern Midgley? A pioneer who turns away from his key work. He developed one technology only to be depressed about tis effects and then developed another, which in the end proved to be equally flawed After all he is one of the great pioneers of the technology he is warning us about.

Or he is more like Oppenheimer – swept up into creating an invention that he realised was too dangerous to exist and spent the remainder of his life resisting it … (unsuccessfully)?

Thomas Midgley discovered the usefulness of lead in petrol engines. Great!

But, the story goes, the serious harm to public health caused by lead additives (to himself and widely) shocked him. To do better he went on to develop improved refrigeration methods using CFCs …

…he didn’t live long enough to see how well that turned out!

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

https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/ai-a-means-to-an-end-or-a-means-to

A transcript of a very good speech that Stephen Fry gave recently. It’s about AI (or Ai as he prefers to call it …) and the very serious problem of understanding the future we face in its presence.

He reminds us that a car is not a horse, that a plane is not a bird, that technology does not imitate. By the same reasoning, AI is neither a brain nor is it intelligent. AI does not imitate.

Let’s get over it.

The next time I read that AI endows computers with the ability to do things that an intelligent human can do I will rip up the book, article or delete the podcast.

A car is not a horse and does not do horse things. AI is not intelligent and does not do intelligent things.