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"History is just people doing things" THE ABQ
CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302
Online Edition Number 325......January 2023 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts
of of The ABQ Correspondent is "the
impact of new ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ARTISTS ARE REVOLTING…um no, don’t mean that that exactly… The internet is awash in outraged
commentary about the heartless, soulless, artificial, wholly derivative product
of image and text generators that have become good enough, fast enough,
and cheap enough to be genuinely useful. One article getting much attention is
Artists Are Revolting Against AI Art on
ArtStation in which Author Chloe Xiang explains
the issues. ArtStation is a site on which commercial artists can present their portfolios
to prospective clients. Some of those artists are the ones protesting the
inclusion of AI generated art on the site in competition, one supposes, with
theirs. It's easy now, using several
sources, to describe a picture in words so that machine intelligence can
render images that match the description…often in various styles, in no
time flat. Similarly, people are worrying
loudly about the ethics of using text generators like chatGPT, which can compose astonishingly
good articles/stories/ explanations, etc…following
suggestions or questions the user
provides. Among the many commentaries online, it’s worth taking a look
at this one by Tegan Jones. Even if you just skim it, go all the way to the end. And there are the deepfakes
the Correspo has touched on more than once: synthetically generated
video and audio simulating the sound and look of real people persuasively.
Intel* has now announced development of a highly reliable system for detecting
fakes…which would probably have to be
embedded in your glasses and ear buds to keep you aware of transient fake
sounds and images around you. The upside is that people are
using these tools to produce better work faster. One of my excellent
granddaughters has recently joined a writers group, some of whose members
tell her they are running copy through chatGPT to
see if it contains unintended implications or the system suggests any angles
that hadn’t occurred to them. It’s like bouncing ideas off another
person, very useful. Presumably artists are using DALL-E2 to suggest ideas for work using their own insights. It helps them to make a living. For centuries people have been intrigued
by the possibility of machine intelligence, developing systems (maybe
even self-aware) that are capable of “thinking” the way people do, hoping to
simulate the performance of people. The early systems we’ve been talking
about sometimes get things wrong, show poor taste, use foul language, are
bigoted, and not trustworthy. Gee, sounds just like people. *Back when Earth was still cooling we often drove to our
studio/lab in Mountain View CA, past a
just-opened business in a single bay in one
of the million office/ warehouse buildings
that sprang up like mushrooms as
Silicon Valley was forming. Their name
was puzzling. Was it pronounced INtel or InTEL? Still not sure. MAYBE IMPROVEMENTS
ARE POSSIBLE Bruce Schneier is best known as a cybersecurity expert
who offers practical observations about inhibiting hacking and which
widely used systems seem likely to cause us regret, but he thinks more
broadly about society. As a figure at Harvard’s Kennedy School among other
institutions he, has a number of bully pulpits from which to speak. He recently
hosted
a two-day workshop on “reimagining democracy,” pointing out that the circumstances…
travel …communication, etc… under which the fellows
set up the U.S. government in the 1700s were different from those of the 2000s.
We might helpfully tweak some organizational features of our system,
enabling the spirit of the thing to flourish more satisfactorily. This recalls
a slightly more ill-tempered proposal of Iben Browning’s back in the
1970s. Iben observed that to nobody’s surprise the massive bureaucracy of
government centered on the District of Columbia has assumed an
identity of its own. It has been proposed that the residents of D.C.
should have the right to vote in national elections, even that it should become
a state with senators and a least one congressional district. Some worry that
those legislators might have disproportionate influence in the operations of
the bureaucracy they represent. Iben’s suggestion was to alter the
constitution to require the national capital to be mobile, moving every
five years to a different place in the U.S. chosen by lot. That would
bring the harrowing realities of operating a big organization right into the neighborhoods
of the voters who are paying for it, remove any complacency of the
bureaucrats, and reduce the insulation between legislators and the folks back
home. The mutual pain could be instructive for all. At any
rate, there’s a whole lot of entertaining speculation and one hopes
that Mr. Schneier’s efforts are productive. A couple of
fellows who call themselves The Slo-Mo Guys have
a YouTube channel on which they show movies of fast action events …from
“normal” stuff like hitting a pane of glass with a bullet to crazy stuff like firing a cue ball from a cannon to break a triangle of balls
on a pool table...taken with cameras operating at hundreds to
hundreds of thousands of frames a second. Beware! This is addictive, and
you’ll find it hard to get back to work. In one episode they visit Cal Tech
to watch a camera operating at ten trillion
frames a second. Wow. Item: Some of the best
fun we ever had was watching automated systems in food and pharmaceutical
factories. These are all sorts of machines doing what
machines do in various pursuits. Have fun. Item: A common
sentiment in reaction to last month’s discussion of synthetic biological
products is best expressed by the phrase “Lab grown meat creeps me out.” Maybe
we’ll get used to it. There’s at least one other practical concern; those
cells are grown with nutrients selected (empirically, one hopes, not theoretically)
by experts who pretty well know what they’re doing. Are they missing
anything? Critters that wander around field, forest, stream, and sea, eating
what’s available, inevitably ingest and assimilate all sorts of things
they’re not really thinking about. Plants don’t wander much, but they also ingest
whatever is available. Nature is not tidy, and mixes things quite carelessly
in her effort to keep the world running. What is missing from the diet of the
cells that produce synthetic foods? Maybe it’s not only identifiable physical
stuff, but also the experience that comes of scuffling through life filled
with random helpful and unhelpful features. Is that important? We shall
see. Item: …and when the exterminator came on his monthly visit to discourage vermin from infesting the house, he was late, and driving a beat-up old truck instead of his nice new one. He hadn’t been able to start the new truck that morning. The mechanic told him that mice had been chewing the insulation on wiring in the engine. Turnabout is fair play. ITEM
FROM THE PAST This item from
June 1998 comes to mind just because we’re well into
the third decade since the piece was first
published, and the world is full of decision-making people who have
no recollection of what Y2K was about. CHAIRMAN BILL IN THE MYTHIC BIGTIME
The current difference
of opinion between the U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft Corporation over
the propriety of Microsoft’s grip on the computer industry suggests that
reason has little to do with the matter. While the company’s hubris insulates it from understanding the complaints
of the people it frightens and overwhelms, the DOJ’s insistence on certain measures (dis-integrating internet
functions from the operating system, for example) flies in the face of reality. It’s like legislating a value of
3.0 for Pi, to make all that bothersome arithmetic unnecessary. If you’re waiting for the public to
express itself helpfully, don’t hold your breath. Consider that a well educated,
technically competent geologist with decades of practical experience,
inquired recently what all the fuss was about the Year 2000 Problem.
After listening to the explanation (including the observation that it’s more
complicated than anybody is likely to think, owing to thousands of arbitrary
decisions made in ignorance over the years), he asked: “Does Bill Gates know about this?” He was assured that
Bill has heard about Y2K. “Well,” he
said, “why doesn’t he just fix the problem?” This was a serious question
from an otherwise relatively sane man. Somehow, the Bill we knew slightly as a disheveled, driven young computer geek
has not only become startlingly rich, but has acquired an aura of absolute
invincibility with respect to computers. The mind boggles. I recall as a
child being told that Horowitz was the
world’s greatest pianist... and I
believed that was an objective fact; the title was real, and had been
established by some authority. A chap
who was raised in Russia in the Stalin era observed that he believed
without question that the Generalissimo was the best hand at everything, and if he wasn’t performing miracles of brain surgery every
day, it was only because he was too busy with pressing matters of state. The
chap was astonished to learn otherwise in his later years. Bill Gates is achieving the same
superhuman status in the eyes of the general populace...not because he is
striving for that, one supposes, but because he is a symbol of his time. Then again, maybe he really could haul
off and solve the Y2K problem, if he weren’t too busy with brain surgery and
pressing visionary matters. Perhaps we should ask. Indeed, we got
through the Y2K turnover without major problems,
aided probably by a massive review of installed
software that not only reduced the chances of turning into
a pumpkin as the calendar passed the magic date, but
doubtless cleaned up a lot of other problems, and
increased the efficiency of our systems significantly.
Apparently, Bill didn’t achieve that single- handed.
Meanwhile the hassle between the DOJ and Microsoft has
quieted somewhat while that between Microsoft and
the EU regulators has escalated. Mr. Gates’ image
has morphed from that of an untidy geek to that of
a major philanthropist with a geeky history. Not
all bad, probably. For those who don’t remember, the Y2K problem arose from the fact that to many people writing inventory management software, for example, in the 1970s and ‘80s the year 2000 seemed like the irrelevantly distant future. If one of their systems detected that a batch of perishable product was approaching its expiration date, typically represented by the digits of the year and month… e.g. 198212, it might automatically discard the product. To save limited memory space, it was typical to drop the first couple of digits, making 198212 into 8212, which was OK until the turn of the century came around, making 20012 into 0012. The system would assume that “00” meant 1900…unless the ambiguity was fixed. (One retailer reportedly noticed in the late ‘90s that they weren’t selling more dogfood than usual, but they were buying vast amounts of it. When a shipment came in with a 2000 expiration date, the system would automatically discard it and order more.) There were bigger, more complicated potential problems… submarines not working, people stuck in elevators all over the world, air traffic control paralyzed, etc… In recent times, what with one thing and another, Bill’s magical aura has dimmed a bit, but he and a few others enabled a spectacular revolution in how society operates That’s notable, probably laudable. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everybody is a Somebody --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’ll figure out a practical alternative one of these
times, and post the information when I have it. Meanwhile, the picture of the cover makes a sort of
graphically useful anchor at the bottom of this page, so it will stay while I
fumble. Bah. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright © 2023 ABQ Communications Corporation All Rights Reserved |
