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

The World I See - Dr. Fei-Fei Li

 Sub-title: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

This was a wonderful read that sheds a bright light on the early innovations in AI and one of its fascinating developers.  Dr Li weaves the story of her immigration and experiences in the US with the evolution of the technology.  She beautifully illustrates the power of family, mentors, and self-determination on realizing the intellect of a brilliant woman.  Highly recommended.

Quotes/Notes:

[on her mentor helping her and learning about her culture]..he read Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.

"But the failures are not in vain.  Mistakes trigger corrective signals, rippling across the network's tens of millions of constituent parts, each assessed for its contribution to the results and pushed, proportionately, to behave differently next time.  It's the simplest form of learning--to do less of whatever failed, and more of whatever didn't."

[on psychologist Eleanor Rosch and categorization and creating a vocabulary for understanding hierarchy - made me think of looking at DNA this way] "..superordinates and subordinate categories ..when taken as a whole, such hierarchies look like trees.  Moving toward the root means less specificity and differentiation, while moving toward the leaves, the farthest ends of each branch means more. "

[Anatol Holt] "AI was a technology that can make the perfect chess move while the room is on fire".

[on Jeremy Wolfe, cognitive scientist - made me think of doing a study on how blind and deaf perceive the world] "...concept of 'gist' ...directly confronted the question of what, exactly, humans perceive when they glance at the real world"  

"adversarial attacks" -  feeding information to directly confuse the AI

"explainability" or "explainable AI" - reducing neural networks' almost magical deliberations into a form humans can understand.

Published: 2023 Read: January 2024 Genre: Science

The Maniac - Benjamin Labatut

 

What a great start to the new year!  This book weaves the facts of John Von Neumann, an Hungarian polymath who "transformed every field he touched", including game theory, the first programmable computer and pioneering AI.  Reading of his accomplishments and defeats and their impact on humanity is a fascinating travel through science and its giants.  Additionally, the story is told by his family, friends and colleagues, a different way of creating a biography that I enjoyed.  The story provided a humanized picture of a brilliant man and the people in his world.  

At the end, the book describes the use of the AI ideas Von Neumann engendered to create machines that could beat Karpov at Chess and the Le Sedol, the best player at Go - a harbinger of the future.  

Quotes:

[an explanation of how a chess engine works that could be applied to genealogy tree-building] 

" it simply uses its power to calculate and then makes a decision following a complex set of hand-crafted rules laid down by its programmers. Each time its opponent places a piece on a black or white the computer constructs a search tree consisting of every possible future arising from that particular configuration of the board; the tree keeps on growing and branching out till it reaches the end of the game and the computer simply selects between its many limbs the outcomes that it considers most advantageous. With each new move comes a different tree, as the game changes and evolves constantly, but with enough power, the computer can look so far into the future as to remain a step, if not several thousand steps, ahead of any human opponent."

Published: 2023  Read: January 2024  Genre: Historical Fiction

God, Human, Animal, Machine - Meghan O'Gieblyn

 This was a deeply philosophical read, a book created from a series of essays and new material. The author was raised a fundamentalist Christian and in college began questioning the teachings and now considers herself a humanist. However, her background allows her to draw parallels to humankind's creation of an omnipotent being and our speculation about the evolution of machines into sentient beings.  

I found in interesting how her spiritual beliefs evolved and as she left her fundamentalist roots brought a unique perspective to humanism. The book exposed me to many philosophers old and new and provided a context for their writings. I also learned about several technology contributors. The author wove both into a view of where we are going from where we have been.

Quotes:

"I can trace my interest in technology to Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines"

"...belief in an immanent transformation (resurrection) persisted, improbably, century after century... Dante in the Divine Comedy makes up an entirely new word [translated as] transhuman. It was the first time the word was used in the human language." 

"In addition to our physical bodies their exists -- somewhere in the ether -- a second self that is purely informational and immaterial...that lingers in the shadowy dossier of third party aggregators. It is they, not we that are the most valuable and real,"

[Poem by Swinburne] 

From too much love of living,

    From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

    Whatever gods may be.

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

    Winds somewhere safe to sea.

"Technology companies learned long ago that their products ar for more appealing -- and more profitable -- when humans manage to bond with them."

"reality is "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Philip K Dick sci-fi writer.

"...how much of our science and philosophy has been colored by the justifications of shitty men?"

"people become trapped within the mirror of their digital reflection, a process that Google researcher Vyacheslav Polonski calls 'algorithmic determinism'."

"Elon Musk - a man who once referred to humanity as the biological bootloaders for AI.  'Bootloader' is a computational term that refers to the minimal line of code that is used to start up a computer.  It is a tiny, insignificant program whose sole purpose is to initiate larger, more complex program."

Published: 2021 Read: September 2023 Genre: Philosophy