Tags: humanity

Hot on the heels of reading and enjoying The Mountain In The Sea, I picked up Ray Nayler’s next work, this tightly constructed novella.

Once again it deals with inter-species communication. This time it’s de-extincted mammoths. Once again, it’s set in the relatively near future. Many of the same gadgets reappear in this book. It may well be set in the same world.

There’s a tangible atmosphere to this story. But despite it’s high-tech premise, it’s not escapist. The narrative is driven by the all-too-real issues of ivory poaching and big-game hunting.

And this is where I start to get a nagging feeling about Ray Nayler’s work. At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy. If you yourself are misanthropic, it will just come across as realism. But it feels a bit too easy, a bit too cheap.

I remember this happening with Paolo Bacigalupi’s books. I enjoyed The Wind-up Girl, but by the time I read The Water Knife, his misanthropy (and misogyny) had become self-parody:

Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.

The book takes a similar tack with its characters. It assumes everyone’s terrible and will do terrible things. It’s lazy.

So you’ve got an unrelenting series of people behaving terribly in a horrific setting. It gets boring.

The Tusks Of Extinction isn’t that. It manages to maintain a balance. But I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species.

I’ll find out soon enough. I’ve already got Palaces Of The Crow on loan from the library.

Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around | Aeon Essays

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted.

From human hands. · Mass-Driver

This is beautifully written.

Flood fill vs. the magic circle

Eleven years ago, I wrote:

Sometimes I consider the explosive growth of computation and think that strong AI is a near-term inevitability.

Then I remember printers.

That was just a brainfart, but Robin tackles it seriously in his thoughtful essay.

A pleasing image: if indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.

Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; more than anything, distract us from it. But the real physical world is indigestible.

I am in an abusive relationship with the technology industry

The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.

LLMs Are Antithetical to Writing and Humanity

If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.

But if, say, you’re a “writer” and you’re using an LLM to “help you” “write” or “think” because it’s easier and takes less time and thought, then I stand my ground; I can and do fault you.

The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

So much truth in one story:

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.

Alchemy - Josh Collinsworth blog

I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools.

In the way

This sums up my experience of companies and products trying to inject AI in to the products I use to communicate with other people. It’s always just in the way, making stupid suggestions.

I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes.

When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregman, Rebecca Solnit, and Hans Rosling, pointing to all the evidence that people are, by and large, decent. I should really just read the room and shut up.

I opened my talk Of Time And The Web with a whole spiel about how we seem to be hard-wired to pay more attention to bad news than good (perhaps for valid evolutionary reasons).

I like to think that my optimism is rational, backed up by data. But if I’m going to be rational, then I also can’t become too attached to any particualar position (like, say, optimism). I should be willing to change my mind when I’m confronted with new evidence.

A truckload of new evidence got dumped on my psyche this week. The United States of America elected Donald Trump as president. Again.

Even here I found a small glimmer of a bright side: at least the result was clear cut. I was dreading weeks or even months of drawn-out ballot counting, lawsuits and uncertainty. At least the band-aid was decisively ripped away.

Back in 2016, I could tell myself all sorts of reasons why this might have happened. Why people might have been naïve or misled into voting a dangerous idiot into power. But the naïveté was all mine. The majority of America really is that sexist.

This feels very different to 2016. And hey, remember when we woke up to that election result and one of the first things we did was take out subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post to “support real journalism”? Yeah, that worked out just great, didn’t it?

My faith in human nature is taking quite a hit. An electoral experiment has been run three times now—having this mysogistic racist narcissistic idiot run for the highest office in the land—and the same result came up twice.

I naïvely thought that the more people saw of his true nature, the less chance he would have. When he kept going off-script at his rallies, spouting the vilest of threats, I thought there was an upside. At least now people would see for themselves what he’s really like.

But in the end it didn’t matter one whit. Like I said in a different context:

To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”

I never liked talking about “faith” in human nature. To me, it wasn’t faith. It was just a rational assessment. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need some faith after all.

I wonder if my optimism will return. It probably will (see? I’m such an optimist). But if it does, perhaps it will have to be an optimism that exists despite the data, not because of it.

The Value Of Science by Richard P. Feynman [PDF]

This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning

Aboard Newsletter: Why So Bad, AI Ads?

The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.

On being human and “creative”

Now we have this collision of those who, with the specific intent of creative expression, make things that are wholly the product of their unique experience and skills and offer them in the marketplace. Then there are those who use machines to produce derivatives of other’s creative work to offer as products in the marketplace. Both are seeking an audience and financial benefit for their offering.

Those who wholly manufacture creative works are asking the same value be put on their imitation of creative expression as the value inherent with sentient creation. They are saying they deserve the same recognition—be that in respect, attention, acknowledgement or compensation—that works created by a person might receive. But they haven’t earned it.

Using generative AI is to ask What If but then hand off not only the responsibility and effort of answering the question but also accountability for the answer. When the machine creates something pleasing or marketable, it’s “look at what I did”. When the machine creates something terrible or wrong, it’s “not my fault, the machine did it”. The claim of ownership is conditional and only maintained if the output can generate value.

There’s so much to love here, like this:

My art is the story of how I have spent the time in my life.

And this:

The value of an idea comes from the execution of the idea.

AI Safety for Fleshy Humans: a whirlwind tour

This is a terrificly entertaining level-headed in-depth explanation of AI safety. By the end of this year, all three parts will be published; right now the first part is ready for you to read and enjoy.

This 3-part series is your one-stop-shop to understand the core ideas of AI & AI Safety — explained in a friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated way!

( Related phrases: AI Risk, AI X-Risk, AI Alignment, AI Ethics, AI Not-Kill-Everyone-ism. There is no consensus on what these phrases do & don’t mean, so I’m just using “AI Safety” as a catch-all.)

AI is not like you and me

AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human.

But ascribing human qualities to AI is not serving us well. Anthropomorphizing statistical models leads to confusion about what AI does well, what it does poorly, what form it should take, and our agency over all of the above.

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology?

Meanwhile, we are under-investing in more precise, high-value applications of LLMs that treat generative A.I. models not as people but as tools.

Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“‘AI’ is pretty much just shorthand for mediocre” — Piper Haywood

Continuous partial ick …or perhaps continuous partial cringe.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

Can Apple Win Back Music | Vulf Opinion | Brad Frost

There’s no AI substitute for a human-produced drawing of someone on the subway, even if a similar-or-even-better result could be produced in seconds by AI. The artifact is often less important than the process — the human process — that made it. That’s why I suspect videos of creative processes are so attractive; we are captivated by seeing humans doing human things.

Emily F. Gorcenski: How I Read 40 Books and Extinguished the World on Fire

I’ve found that there’s way more good people than bad. There’s way more people willing to help than willing to hurt. Some things are really scary but there’s way more people out there willing to guide us through the darkness than we think. The cynic in me wants to say that the “powers that be” want us to be endlessly doomscrolling and losing hope and snuffing out optimism. We shouldn’t give them what they want. There’s a lot of beauty in the world still within our grasp. We’re better when we’re poets, when we’re learners and listeners, when we’re builders and not breakers.

“Artificial Intelligence & Humanity,” an article by Dan Mall

AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related.

Sensible thinking from Dan here, that mirrors what we’re thinking at Clearleft.

In other words, it leans heavily on averages; the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable.

The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest.