from Seth’s Blog Particularly when it comes to the future. And perhaps about the past. More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know. Where we can’t know. That’s a given. More here.
Continue readingWhat Happens When A Metaverse Disappears?
from Fast Company A bugle played Taps. The crowd fell silent. Then, a coffin began floating down the aisle, as if carried by invisible pallbearers, until coming to a stop at a makeshift altar adorned with candles and flowers. The coffin was propped up, revealing under its transparent lid the iconic AltspaceVR robot avatar, and a short ceremony began. This scene unfolded on the social VR platform AltspaceVR last weekend, where roughly 40 users and creators had come together to mourn its impending demise. Microsoft, which had acquired the VR platform in 2017, shut down AltspaceVR on Friday, March 10. […]
Continue readingDeepmind’s New Model Gato Is Amazing!
from Louis Bouchard Gato from DeepMind was just published! It is a single transformer that can play Atari games, caption images, chat with people, control a real robotic arm, and more! Indeed, it is trained once and uses the same weights to achieve all those tasks. And as per Deepmind, this is not only a transformer but also an agent. This is what happens when you mix Transformers with progress on multi-task reinforcement learning agents. As we said, Gato is a multi-modal agent. Meaning that it can create captions for images or answer questions as a chatbot. You’d say that […]
Continue readingThe Key to Success in College Is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned
from NYTs For Emily Zurek Small, college did what it’s supposed to do. Growing up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, she had career and intellectual ambitions for which college is the clearest pathway. “I just kind of always wanted to learn,” she told me recently. “I wanted to be able to have intelligent conversations with people and know about the world.” She enrolled at a small nearby Catholic college, majored in neuroscience and in 2016 became the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree — and later, a master’s. She now works as a school […]
Continue readingHappy Pi Day!
Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant pi. Pi Day is observed on March 14 (3/14 in the month/day format) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant figures of ?. It was founded in 1988 by Larry Shaw, an employee of the Exploratorium. Celebrations often involve eating pie or holding pi recitation competitions. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day. Visit here if you are interested in different ways to use Pi.
Continue readingWhy ‘I Don’t Know’ Can Be The Smartest Answer
from Fast Company Ignorance may be bliss, but saying “I don’t know” out loud is often hard to do. It can be especially difficult if you’re in a position of leadership and your team comes to you for answers. However, saying “I don’t know” can actually be empowering if you reframe the concept, says Lizette Warner, author of Power, Poise, and Presence: A New Approach to Authentic Leadership. “Any statement that starts with ‘I don’t know’ means that you’re open to knowing and it leads to discovery,” she says. “‘I don’t know’ is the first path to wisdom. It’s what […]
Continue readingNew Zealand Faces a Future of Flood and Fire
from Wired NEW ZEALAND IS grappling with two consecutive extreme weather events—massive flooding followed by a cyclone—that have claimed at least 12 lives and left hundreds of thousands of people without power. The high winds and waters of Cyclone Gabrielle have washed away coastal roads on the north island and left bridges splintered and broken. Landslides have covered tarmac with slick mud, and houses and streets across have been left under feet of water, only weeks after heavy rain also caused widespread floods. The country has declared a national state of emergency for just the third time in its history. New Zealand’s […]
Continue readingAre You Listening To Understand, Or To Rebut?
from Forbes Have you noticed? Much of the programming on cable TV is little more than various “experts” trying to out shout each other. The scene is no better among our elected “leaders.” It’s as though people have no sense of curiosity. Or manners. There are many excellent resources that can help us with our listening skills. One of the best is Stephen R. Covey’s classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. You might think that such a classic could not be improved. That was my assumption. Then I carefully explored the 30th anniversary edition that includes bonus […]
Continue readingIntroducing The Ai Mirror Test, Which Very Smart People Keep Failing
from The Verge In behavioral psychology, the mirror test is designed to discover animals’ capacity for self-awareness. There are a few variations of the test, but the essence is always the same: do animals recognize themselves in the mirror or think it’s another being altogether? Right now, humanity is being presented with its own mirror test thanks to the expanding capabilities of AI — and a lot of otherwise smart people are failing it. The mirror is the latest breed of AI chatbots, of which Microsoft’s Bing is the most prominent example. The reflection is humanity’s wealth of language and […]
Continue readingFrom Bing to Sydney
from Stratechery Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today. One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet […]
Continue readingProposals But No Consensus On Curbing Water Shortages In Colorado River Basin
from ars technica In 2007, the seven states that rely on the Colorado River for water reached an agreement on a plan to minimize the water shortages plaguing the basin. Drought had gripped the region since 1999 and could soon threaten Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the largest reservoirs in the nation. Now, that future has come to pass and the states are again attempting to reach an agreement. The Colorado River faces a crisis brought on by more than 20 years of drought, decades of overallocation and the increasing challenge of climate change, and Lake Mead and Lake Powell, […]
Continue readingA Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled
from NYTs Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine. But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities. It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons […]
Continue readingFour Ways To Find More Focus In Your Writing
from Forbes From emails to instant messages, not to mention reports and presentations, writing is an essential skill for pretty much anyone with a job. But how many missed opportunities or bad business decisions have you seen happen due to poor written communication? It’s an all-too-common problem that Mark Rennella, author of The One Idea Rule, wants to solve. In addition to being an author, Rennella is a writing advisor to Harvard Business School MBAs. The number one thing he identified holding back their writing: Focus. “I realized that a lot of smart people who wrote poorly, it was not […]
Continue readingAs Camps Open, the Mets Understand Their Assignment
from NYTs Nothing matches baseball for reassuring signs of renewal. The first smashing of shoulder pads on a steamy summer day? The first squeaking of sneakers on hardwood in a gym? Nope. There’s baseball, and there’s everything else. And there they were Tuesday morning, a prospect and a coach behind the batting cages and bullpen mounds, on a diamond with no outfield at the Mets’ training complex. The half field, as it is called, is like a luxury home with a soaring entryway but no rooms — capable of facilitating just infield practice, nothing else. Joey Cora, 57, a former […]
Continue readingChatgpt Is A Data Privacy Nightmare, And We Ought To Be Concerned
from ars technica ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities—and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A much less discussed implication is the privacy risks ChatGPT poses to each and every one of us. Just yesterday, Google unveiled its own conversational AI called Bard, and others will surely follow. Technology companies working on AI have well and truly entered an arms race. More here.
Continue readingWell, I Never: AI Is Very Proficient At Designing Nerve Agents
from The Guardian Here’s a story that evangelists for so-called AI (artificial intelligence) – or machine-learning (ML) – might prefer you didn’t dwell upon. It comes from the pages of Nature Machine Intelligence, as sober a journal as you could wish to find in a scholarly library. It stars four research scientists – Fabio Urbina, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi and Sean Ekins – who work for a pharmaceutical company building machine-learning systems for finding “new therapeutic inhibitors” – substances that interfere with a chemical reaction, growth or other biological activity involved in human diseases. The essence of pharmaceutical research is […]
Continue readingHow to Detect AI-Generated Text, According to Researchers
from Wired AI-GENERATED TEXT, FROM tools like ChatGPT, is starting to impact daily life. Teachers are testing it out as part of classroom lessons. Marketers are champing at the bit to replace their interns. Memers are going buck wild. Me? It would be a lie to say I’m not a little anxious about the robots coming for my writing gig. (ChatGPT, luckily, can’t hop on Zoom calls and conduct interviews just yet.) With generative AI tools now publicly accessible, you’ll likely encounter more synthetic content while surfing the web. Some instances might be benign, like an auto-generated BuzzFeed quiz about which deep-fried dessert matches your […]
Continue readingLove And Loathing In The Time Of ChatGPT
from 3 Quarks Daily Recently, I asked the students in my class whether they had used ChatGPT, the artificially intelligent chatbot recently loosed upon the world by OpenAI. My question was motivated by a vague thought that I might ask them to use the system as a whimsical diversion within an assignment. Somewhat to my surprise, every student had used the system. Perhaps I should not have been surprised given the volume of chatter about ChatGPT on my social media feeds and my own obsessive “playing” with it for some time after being introduced to it. There is clearly something […]
Continue readingCringeworthy in the Future
from The Technium The New York Times asked me (and others) to suggest some things our descendants might be embarrassed about in the future. Things we do now, that might make future generations cringe. Good question! My reply is this short list, which I may add to later as I think of them. Their full list was published here as Future Cringe on Jan 27, 2023. More here.
Continue readingProject Texas: The Details of TikTok’s Plan to Remain Operational in the United States
from Lawfare Since 2019, TikTok has been negotiating with the U.S. government to address concerns about potential national security risks posed by the platform. Failure to reach an agreement that satisfies the U.S. government’s concerns could have severe consequences for TikTok’s ability to continue operating in the United States: TikTok would likely be banned or required to sell off a majority stake in the company. In the past several months, rumors have swirled about what the contours of such an agreement might be and when it might be announced. While some details have emerged about Project Texas, the code name […]
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