While the term “cherry picking” tends to have a negative connotation as it is often used as a metaphor for investing in only highly profitable companies or choosing only the most favorable evidence in making arguments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking) the actual activity is a lovely thing to do on a hot summer day, especially when you have a bunch of big old cherry trees on the hill just above your country house that nobody else seems to care about overflowing with fruit waiting to be picked. It brings back memories of one of the songs my mother used to sing once upon a childhood.
It’s not AI, she says. “That genie is out of the bottle: it’s here, it’s an effective tool, you can use it or not,” she says. The real problem is all the huge data centers that are being built around the world to supply AI with data (ie, human intelligence) without any kind of public assessment or regulation process and which are having a variety of disastrous effects, from enormous energy and water use to the destruction of many a natural landscape. And Erin Brocovich, the long-time environmental activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in the film about her earlier struggles against chemical pollution, is once again back in the news taking on the powers-that-be to stop the rapid expansion of data centers. Read all about it:
There are lots of good reasons to feel blue these days and there ain’t no cure, as Eddie Cochran so eloquently once put it and the Who went on to tell the world at Woodstock, but a visit to Andy’s Corner might well help, especially since we’ll be starting our summer sale tomorrow with pocket books, cds, lps, dvds, 78s, 33s, and a whole new bunch of blue-rays for 25 kr as long as the summer lasts. As in previous years we are also selling all fiction for 50 kr that is not a pocket book, hard-bound or soft-bound. So come by and get some relief!
As a lifelong fan of the New York Knicks I can’t help feeling quite excited about their recent victory in the American professional basketball championships, their first in 53 years. Here’s a film about it:
Stuart Russell is a new columnist for the Guardian and one of those rare individuals who is a highly competent scientist with a strong sense of social responsibility and to judge from wikipedia, he seems to know what he’s talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell
Let’s hope he can help us find ways to control the AI genie as it grows more dangerous every day. As he puts it in his first column:
“The kind of regulation we need is not new: a licensing regime that requires a minimum safety standard before a system can be built and released. This is how we handle nuclear power, airplanes, buildings, elevators, hairdressers and sandwich makers. Is it too much to ask of trillion-dollar AI corporations, who claim to be building the most dangerous technology in history?”
We’ll be open tomorrow but closed on Friday and Saturday and next Thursday, as well, to celebrate the coming of summer. After all it only comes once a year.
One of the real pleasures of living in Malmö has been my weekly – and sometimes more – visits to the restaurant, Davidshall, which is just down the street from our apartment and where a good beer and a good meal and a few laughs were always available, and just the right way to relax after a busy afternoon at the shop. So if you haven’t been there and even if you have you really owe yourself the chance to partake of one last dinner there before the place closes at the end of June. Thanks Sascha and Oleh for the delicious memories!
Some years back Thomas Piketty, a French economist, published a book, CapitalintheTwenty-firstCentury, which explained and documented the rise of global inequality. Unlike most academic books, it managed to reach a large audience and helped to change the way that economics was perceived in the wider world. Now he and his colleagues in Paris at the World Inequality Lab have published a report that shows what can be done about global inequality:
Pope Leo has released his first encyclical – about artificial intelligence – and let us hope that it might have some real influence in the real world. It is something that used to be common practice among governments and “think tanks” and universities, as well as churches and many other institutions both formal and informal, namely a “technology assessment”.
As a professor in technology, environment and society in Denmark, I was actively involved in many a technology assessment – it was much more common practice there than in Sweden – and part of my job was to teach engineering students about TA and help them carry out their own assessments by learning to take into account the broader contexts of their technical projects (you can read about it in my books, Hubrisand Hybrids and TheMakingofGreen Engineers). Believe it or not, there was even once an Office of Technology Assessment within the hallowed halls of the United States Congress that produced reports on information technology and biotechnology and many other so-called emerging technologies until it was shut down in the early 2000s, as were similar offices elsewhere. As technological development morphed into “Bigtech” its promoters stopped wanting to be assessed and saw to it that they weren’t.
The idea behind TA was to investigate the pros and cons of new technological developments in a comprehensive manner, with the participation of a wide range of “experts”, even the likes of me, whose expertise was mainly in criticizing and questioning the ways technology was being developed. Such technology assessments were routinely carried out in several countries and in the European Union itself as part of the official policy-making process, and they often included government-funded programs to facilitate a variety of forms of what was termed “public engagement”. Rather than jailing critics it was once common practice for policy-makers to listen to what they had to say. Oh those were the days!
Anyway, it’s good to see that technology assessment still exists, at least at the Vatican. One of the few bright spots in the world these days is the willingness of the new pope to take on the challenges that humanity faces and actually provide some leadership and moral guidance even, or perhaps especially, for us non-believers. Now let us see if all the Catholics out there will actually follow their leader’s lead and take some meaningful steps to control, regulate and further assess artificial intelligence, the new tower of Babel that the pope refers to in the encyclical.
Here’s a piece by Jill Lepore that provides a good introduction to the encyclical:
AndrewJamison 