"Today you hear people talking about 'AN #AI' or 'THE AI.' Even 15 years ago we would not have heard this; we just heard 'AI.'" @AlisonGopnik on the history of thought on the #intelligence (or lack thereof) of #simulacra, linked to the convincing foolery of "double-talk artists":
"We should think about these large #AI models as cultural technologies: tools that allow one generation of humans to learn from another & do this repeatedly over a long period of time. What are some examples?"
@AlisonGopnik "It's a category error to think these systems are intelligent agents. But the very thing that makes human beings distinct is this capacity to take information from other people...collective intelligence over history. It makes more sense to think of [AI] this way."
"From the very beginning, you get a series of norms, rules, & later laws about new cultural technologies. As each new cultural technology emerges you get new kinds of norms."
"Yes. That's not a joke. That's what I'm saying."
- Gopnik
Testing causal inference in children, @AlisonGopnik notes that "Four-year-olds are very good at over-riding a likely assumption with new evidence. Adults are not."
"What's the thing that #AI [researchers] think is the best system for #inference?" And how does it stack up against kids?
#ReinforcementLearning takes 100Ks of iterations to find optimal policies — they're searching a noisier possibility space than kids:
"Which one of these things should you choose if your hair is a mess? We asked children this question and we asked @OpenAI's #GPT3 [via] #DaVinci. Children were quite good at figuring out to use the fork. [#AI] 'failed significantly.'"
- @AlisonGopnik
"The puzzle of #innovation is the real tension between how much is [it] the result of generating new possibilities, and how much is the result of constraining the space of possibilities?"
- @AlisonGopnik (@UCBerkeley, SFI)
"The key question around the #GreenEnergy transition is technological progress, and which technologies would improve..."
- SFI Prof J. Doyne Farmer (@INETOxford)
Follow this 🧵 for insights from today's seminar, streaming now on our YouTube channel:
"We're tracking the evolution of the global #energy landscape over about 140 years: which source is providing our energy, and how much is it providing us with?"
- SFI Prof J. Doyne Farmer (@INETOxford)
"#FossilFuels cost about the same now as they did a century ago. #Renewables have been dropping in price at rates of about 10% a year and deployment has been shooting up at about 30% a year, and this has been continuing for several decades."
"What's the motivation of this paper? We've seen in most of these locations that there was an #emergence of some form of hierarchical #government [correlated with] a monopoly of #violence and increased #inequality [and] most people lost."
Citing work led by SFI's Tim Kohler in 2017 showing the increase in #inequality (as measured by #GINIcoefficient) as society evolves greater political #scale and more complex/abstract means of production:
"A man who was so restless he said he was chased by 10,000 pigs... He spent his entire inheritance on a five-year voyage of South America. They called him 'The Shakespeare of the Sciences.'"
- @andrea_wulf
🧵@UpshotNYT on new research in @Nature, co-authored by SFI External Professor @JacksonmMatt, on what @facebook data reveals about class, friendship, and economic mobility: