Gold - Fred Rosen

 Sub-title: - The Story of the 1848 Gold Rush and How It Shaped a Nation

This book gave me new perspectives on the impact of the gold rush on the migration across America.  According to the author more than 300,000 people had trekked across the plains, rounded South America, crossed Panama and Mexico and traveled from Australia to the California gold fields.  It was a scramble for riches and upward mobility, a chance for a better life for men and their families.  He covers the treaty with Mexico to add California to the U.S. and how the Native Americans were driven off into reservations. 

I was fascinated by the personalities in the story, Sutter the merchant, Marshall, the builder.  The generals who oversaw the war with Mexico, the diplomats sent by the government to negotiate an agreement and the hundreds of unnamed men who swarmed the area, establishing gold rush towns that disappeared when the gold ran out and they moved on.  One story was about A.D. Hobson, a man from Yadkin County on the Yadkin River in East Bend, North Carolina, born in 1825 and of English and Welsh ancestors. He and his brother traveled through Salt Lake City to Shaw Flat on the Tuolumne River "where they did very well in mining".

An in-depth read of the 1840 to 1870 period of a mass migration that populated the West.

Published: 2005  Read: May 2024  Genre: History

Co-Intelligence - Ethan Mollick

 Sub-title: Living and Working with AI

I've been pursuing learning about artificial intelligence since August of 2023, have taken classes and listened to webinars and watched dozens of YouTube videos.  ChatGPT is now part of my daily work, answering questions, explaining concepts, and assisting in all sorts of tasks.  I pre-ordered this book when I discovered the author's newsletter One Useful Thing.  There is so much to digest and ponder in this new field.  Highly recommended.

p. 35 skewed view of the world because data is chosen by mostly male computer scientists

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) the concept of humans reviewing and adjusting AI output; not foolproof.  Can use "prompt injection" i.e., giving the AI instructions via prompts and "jailbreak" AIs i.e., having it go against its set limits.

In 1966 a program called ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist.  It showed that creating an illusion of intelligence was possible by using simple tricks and exploiting the human tendency to project meaning and emotions onto machines.

The ability to predict what others are thinking is called theory of mind, thought to be exclusive to humans.

AI relies on patterns for answers, from learned data, not memory.  Anything that requires exact recall is likely to create a hallucination.

LLMs are connection machines.  They can connect seemingly disparate items in novel and creative ways. A test for creativity is called the Alternative Use Test (AUT). AIs excel at this.

"Sparks of AI General Intelligence" March 2023 - Eric Horvitz

Published: 2024  Read: April 2024  Genre: Science