Having long ago dabbled in the area of experimental psychology (and specifically concepts of brain interfaces) then I'm impressed by 1024 channels of #Neuralink, the use of industrialised components, the durability, the size, the signal analysis ... but ...
... even at mass produced scales, at a cost of a few thousand $ then this opens up a whole new world of inequality. Some tough questions for society going forward.
X : You seem negative?
Me : The opposite. I just want us to think beyond the benefits to how rewards are distributed. Imagine a world with no books or universities where one could download the knowledge of a lawyer if you could afford it ... what happens if you can't?
X : If you could afford it?
Me : The device might be a few thousands $ (a barrier for many) but the lifetime legal knowledge of an expert must be worth a few million $ (a barrier to most). Cross generational inheritance of knowledge and skills through electronic means ...
... ok, that may be far away (30 to 50 years or so) but eventually we will have to face that question or we could do what we normally do which is discount the future and let them work out the problems we create - see environment etc.
X : No books or universities?
Me : These are not needed for the purposes of training if you can download the experiences of a professional - a lawyer - from a market of content.
X : What if I can't afford the content?
Me : You could buy cheaper content, a cleaner for example.
X : Embedding social inequality?
Me : Permanently. These are amazing advances in technology but we have to think beyond the benefit to an individual and look at how the rewards are shared within society. We need to have that "We" vs "Me" conversation that the pandemic points to.
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Those born in the 1890s experienced electrification, telephone, radio, television, nuclear age, penicillin, two world wars, commercial flight, computer age and a moon landing. By the 60s we had AI, VR and 3D printing.
Today, we have the internet / www and have improved stuff.
Is it me, or is human progress slowing down? Great breakthroughs, moments of change, and radical transformations seem like a thing of the past. What we call "revolutions" in industry today seems mostly a marketing slogan.
If you think back to 1957 and the Mark I Perceptron machine that was built at Cornell, then consider the changes in the previous 60 years ... you can't help but think they would be bitterly disappointed with how slow we have progressed in the following 60 years.
We will be entering a phase in which the US high-tech industry (including the military complex) is highly dependent upon China, whilst China is not dependent upon the US.
For those who doubt how clear the intentions were ... go read Made in China, 2025.
China's government made its intentions evident in 2015. The US sabre rattling of sanctions reinforced that purpose whilst the US essentially continued with a misguided "market knows best" policy.
A couple of prompts with Claude 3 creates a Wardley Map for economic sovereignty in the defence space.
Not bad at all -
On par with political, military and defence folk I've spoken to. I'm also finding I can have a reasonable discussion about mapping with Claude 3.onlinewardleymaps.com/#clone:XvHskIi…
It's not perfect but it's not bad. There's more I want to interrogate Claude over ... i.e. the link to secure sourcing, the positioning of some components etc. But it's almost good enough that I can start a discussion over strategy and investment.
Anyway, upshot is that Claude 3, from my perspective, has left ChatGPT4 in the dust. Of course, I'll use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to cross-compare for now but if I do start building anything more complex then the obvious path is AWS Bedrock which gives me Mistral etc.
dX: What is the single most significant problem facing AI today? Safety? Lack of skills? Inertia?
Me: Overinflated expectations by the business.
dX: You don't think AI will become widespread?
Me: Of course, it will; industrialised components are rapidly becoming cost of doing business. Don't confuse that with expectations. There will be an awful lot of disappointed businesses hoping it would create some advantage.
dX: I don't understand.
Me: Imagine you're just finishing off your plan for how AI will revolutionise your business. Six months for budget approval, one year to build team, 18 months to deliver something ... that's 3 years from now. Any advantage you thought of is long gone.
For those who don't know, I'm working increasingly on and with Glamorous Toolkit - ... I have become fascinated by our willingness to blame humans for problems that are created by our toolsets ...gtoolkit.com
... I saw this last night at Cloud Camp. Apparently, the issues with understanding, explainability and observability in AI are down to humans' inability to deal with complex environments... no, they're not. The problem is with the tools and the type of tools we are creating ...
... we've imported concepts from a physical world where tools are constrained by physics - hence a hammer is a hammer, a drill is a drill - into a world without such constraints. Rather than building contextual tools, we've built constrained tools.