On the recommendation of Elon Musk no less, I picked up a copy of Life 3.0, by Max Tegmark, first published in 2017. Tegmark is Professor at MIT and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. Whilst this book is primarily about AI, Tegmark is a cosmologist by trade, an interest which is apparent throughout […]
This week was the start of the UK Labour Party conference 2023. To coincide a deepfake audio recording of Labour leader Keir Starmer was released with the purpose of discrediting and embarrasing. Last year, deepfake videos of Zelensky and Putin were released claiming to carry political messages. There have also been recent online scams involving […]
Here’s a wide ranging interview with philosopher Daniel C Dennett. In discussing his memoir, the interview takes a detour to talk AI. Dennett freely admits he is an alarmist, but worries there are plenty of causes for alarm: The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going […]
Marks and Clerk, the intellectual property specialists have just released their 2023 AI Report. It contains some fascinating stats around patent filing for AI projects around the world: But alongside the stats they begin to wrestle with some deeper questions: The ethics around generative AI, particularly in the creation of music and images is likely […]
Brian J. A. Boyd writing in The New Atlantic asks some thoughtful questions about the effect of AI on society and especially the work place: “B.S. Jobs and the Coming Crisis of Meaning” He writes around the area of Autonomous AI – the kind of systems that take the human operator / decision maker out […]
In their ‘AI Pause‘ discussion, Tegmark, Russell and Dempsey are all clear on the need for red lines in AI. It might sound prudish, but perhaps one of the first red lines should be the creation of nudity images. I dare say you might think differently on this topic if you were the parent of […]
In March 2023 an open letter was written, now signed by over 30,000 people, calling on all AI labs to pause the training of AI systems (more powerful than GPT-4) for 6 months. The rationale was to use this time to develop a set of shared safety protocols. You can read the open letter here […]
As we know any new technology has the power to do good, whilst at the same time will inevtiably used for the creation of p*rn and the exploitation of women. AI it seems is no exception. Some have argued that AI could create “victimless” p*rn, though I strongly suspect that ignores the impact on the […]
In his second Reith Lecture in 2021, Stuart Russell addresses the theme of AI in warfare. The first thought is this is a red-line not to cross, of course we wouldn’t want to create a robot army… but of course ethical dilemmas aren’t easy. Aside from these one can also imagine humanitarian and defensive usage […]
That’s the refrain of Prof. John Wyatt – he argues that the emergence of AI is a revolution event which requires us to ask some fundamental questions about humanity. This wide ranging discussion with Glen Scrivener, of Speak Life podcast considers some of the following topics: I love Wyatt’s thought on the future… if for […]