Abstractions Turned Obfuscations

There is an old saying in Silicon Valley, “There is the first 80% and the second 80%.” While it is really hard to create new technologies, it is also really hard to implement them for any measurable advantage. This has always been true: The steam engine didn’t matter until it was put into a ship and locomotive; the Wright brothers’ flight didn’t matter until it moved people; electricity needed to be delivered to the home; and telephony didn’t matter un...

 What Will be Left After the AI Bubble Pops?

Every bubble pops eventually. When this one goes, what will be left behind? Well, there will be little models – Hugging Face, Llama, etc – that run on commodity hardware. The people who are learning to “prompt engineer” these “toy models” have gotten far more out of them than even their makers imagined possible. They will continue to eke out new marginal gains from these little models, possibly enough to satisfy most of those low-stakes, low-dollar ap­...

 The AI Business Model is Wrong

AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool’s ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI’s guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs’ tendency to “hallucinate” and confabulate, there’s an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a “human in the loop” to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist...

 What Tech Bubbles Leave Behind

Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way. When the dotcom bubble burst, it left a lot behind. Walking through San Francisco’s Mission District one day in 2001, I happened upon a startup founder who was standing on the sidewalk, selling off a fleet of factory-wrapped Steelcase ...

 Luddite Club

“Lots of us have read this book called ‘Into the Wild,’” said Lola Shub, a senior at Essex Street Academy, referring to Jon Krakauer’s 1996 nonfiction book about the nomad Chris McCandless, who died while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. “We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.” “When I got my flip phone, things ...

 The Pattern of Decentralization-Centralization

There are two categories of true believers, in my mind. There are those who, for example, are building a new decentralized user-empowering financial system. And to them, history teaches us that there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized. In fact, the entire history of the computer industry was radical openness, which led to a lot of innovation, which later led to closing it down. For example, IBM released the PC specs. Everybody could build a PC. Michael Dell was a col...

 The Ultraintelligent Machine will be Civilization's Last ...

The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine. Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a. machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left fa.r behind see for example refs...

 Recursive Self-Improvement in Human Civilization

Let’s consider Arabic numerals as compared with Roman numerals. With a positional notation system, such as the one created by Arabic numerals, it’s easier to perform multiplication and division; if you’re competing in a multiplication contest, Arabic numerals provide you with an advantage. But I wouldn’t say that someone using Arabic numerals is smarter than someone using Roman numerals. By analogy, if you’re trying to tighten a bolt and use a wrench, you’ll do better than someone...

 Cultural Change in Technology

As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation. Trump and the populism that’s rampaging around the world today, marked by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and rising inequality, is greatly amplified by the forces the GDE has unleashed. For someone like me who saw the power of connection build a vibrant, technologically meshed ecosystem distinguished by peace, love, and understanding, the polarization and h...

 New Kind of Memory for AI

AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the a...