Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

“useful principles”

Here is an interesting blog post called “30 useful principles“. I would agree that the majority of them are useful. Anyway, here are a few ideas and phrases that caught my interest. I’ll try to be clear when I am quoting versus paraphrasing or adding my own interpretation.

  • “When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure.” Makes sense to me – measuring is necessary, but I have found that people who are actually doing things on the ground need an understanding of the fundamental goals, or else things will tend to drift over time and no longer be aimed at the fundamental goals.
  • “A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.” A good way to talk about the communication of uncertainty. Measuring and understanding uncertainty is critical in science and decision making, but how we communicate it requires a lot of careful thought to avoid unintended consequences. Decisions are often about playing the odds, and sometimes giving decision makers too much information on uncertainty leads to no decisions or delayed decisions, which are themselves a type of decision, and not the type that is likely to produce desirable results. Am I saying we should oversimplify and project an inflated sense of certainty when talking to the public and decision makers? and is this a form of manipulation? Well, sort of and sometimes yes to both these questions.
  • “Reading is the basis of thought.” Yes, this is certainly true for me, and it is even true that the writing process is an important part of thoroughly thinking something through. This is why we may be able to outsource the production of words to AI, but this will not be a substitute for humans thinking. And if we don’t exercise our thinking muscles, we will lose them over time and we will forget how to train the next generation to develop them. So if we are going to outsource thinking and problem solving to computers, let’s hope they will be better at it than we ever were. A better model would be computer-aided decision making, where the computers are giving humans accurate and timely information about the likely consequences of our decisions, but in the end we are still applying our judgment and values in making those decisions.
  • “punishing speech—whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship—is ultimately a request to be deceived.” It’s a good idea to create incentives for people to tell the truth and provide accurate information, even if it is information people in leadership positions don’t want to hear. Leaders get very out of touch if they don’t do this.
  • “Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal & disappointment without having to do or think.” I don’t know that cynical or “realistic” people lack raw intelligence on average, but they certainly lack imagination and creativity. The more people have trouble imagining that things can change, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that things will not change.
  • “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” I’m as horrified by pictures of dying babies in a hospital in a war zone as anyone else, but it also raises my propaganda flag. Who is trying to manipulate me with these images and why? What else is going on at the same time that I might also want to pay attention to?

generative AI in the workplace?

Microsoft is unleashing generative AI on the workplace imminently, according to Slate.

At Microsoft’s New York release event on Thursday, I watched as it revealed products that simplify and automate some of the worst parts of office life. The company demoed a text generator that can read long Word documents and write blog posts highlighting the most relevant points. It showed another feature that allows you to prompt Copilot to summarize a slew of unread messages from an email-happy co-worker. The technology can also read transcripts of meetings you miss and note the most relevant parts, or allow you to query the full discussions. Even simple updates like prompting Copilot to create a header image for a slide deck seem quite useful.

Slate

So maybe this can partially automate some useless tasks that are taking up our time. But if they are useless, do they need to be done at all? Are they adding value at all to begin with?

Here is some advice I would give young people new to the workplace:

  1. When people give you assignments, repeat them back to confirm you understand them. If they are still not clear, put them in writing and ask the person assigning the task to confirm. In most cases, they will like this.
  2. Keep a running list of things you have been asked to do, when they are due, what their status is, and any problems/obstacles/questions you are encountering to getting them done. Look at and update this list every day.
  3. Give updates on your tasks without being asked. When you have a question, encounter an issue, or realize you may not be able to meet a deadline, talk to the person assigning the work early and often about it. They will like this. Often deadlines can be moved or you can get help, but this gets harder as a deadline approaches.
  4. Keep a calendar. Look at it and update it every day.
  5. Make it a habit to take notes in all meetings and phone conversations. You don’t have to be a court reporter. Try to capture assignments and decisions. At the end of the day and again at the end of the week, look through all your notes, list new assignments, and move them to your assignment list.
  6. Basically, you want to be a rock solid and reliable “set it and forget it” employee. This doesn’t mean you do everything perfectly all the time with no help. It means that when someone assigns you a task, they know you will either do it perfectly and on time, or much more likely, you will come to them with updates and issues that need to be resolved to get the work done. Once they assign it to you, they don’t have to think about it again until you walk through the door.
  7. #1-6 are kind of it for maybe your first year. Once you are a master note taker, list and calendar keeper, at some point you will find yourself helping others to get organized. One day, you will find yourself tracking and communicating the work of a small team of people. Which brings me to communication…
  8. Reading, writing, and speaking are all important, of course. But what is really valuable as you start moving up the business ladder is starting to get a sense of how to communicate a message to an audience. I try to ask myself three questions before preparing a document or presentation: (1) Who specifically is my audience? (2) What is the take home message I would like my audience to hear and understand? and (3) What decisions or actions would I like my audience to take after hearing and understanding my message? Get this down, and at some point you will not just be the back office “getting things done” person (although you can make a perfectly good career of that if you want to), but you will find yourself in front of customers and senior management explaining things and adding value for your organization.
  9. Maybe it doesn’t need to be said, but take some time for humanity. A little small talk and banter is how humans connect, and as long as it doesn’t get out of hand it is positive for productivity. When you work in an office, get in the habit of saying hello when you get there and good-bye before you leave. It is annoying when someone just evaporates at 5 pm and you had an important question for them. If you need to vanish at exactly 5 pm, stick your head in at 4 pm and ask if there is anything critical people need from you during the last hour of the day. This is really helpful. If you don’t need to vanish at 5 pm, stick around for a little while and review the happenings of the day with co-workers. Every once in awhile, move the banter to a local eating or drinking establishment. This is how productive, creative, innovative teams are built and I see this culture vanishing.
  10. Notice I didn’t talk much about working from home. I just don’t think it works well. Try to be there in person as much as possible.

Now, do any of the things “generative AI” can do in the short term address anything above? I’m skeptical but willing to give it a chance. A big reason for all that note taking, list and calendar keeping/reviewing/updating I do is to form a big picture in my brain of what is going on in my organization and how I can add value to it. Even if a computer can form that big picture, that is not going to put it in my brain. Maybe a computer can go through a transcript of a meeting or phone call and pull out decisions and action items. It certainly should be able to keep a calendar and do scheduling. It might be valuable if first thing in the morning the computer would say to me “consider doing this thing next” or “consider doing one these two (or three) things next”, and this would always fit into some bigger picture goal of getting everything done on time, on budget and to a high standard. Maybe virtual reality will solve some of the problems with working from home eventually. I doubt we will be there any time soon, but I also don’t doubt the computers will get better at this over time.

now is the singularity near?

The New Yorker has a long article on the possibility of an AI-driven singularity. It surveys many of the other news stories and letters and debates on the subject. The answer is really that nobody knows, but since it is an existential threat of unknown probability it certainly belongs somewhere on the risk matrix.

I can see nearer term problems too. Thinking back to the “flash crash” of 2010, relatively stupid algorithms reacting to each other’s actions and making decisions at lightning-speed were nearly able to crash the financial system. We recovered from that one, but what if these new algorithms lead to a crash of financial or real infrastructure systems (electricity, internet, transportation, water, food?) that we can’t recover from. It doesn’t take a total physical collapse to cause a depression, just a massive loss of confidence leading to panic. That scenario is not too hard for me to imagine.

I suspect that we are approaching the peak of the hype cycle when it comes to AI. It will build to a fever pitch, the bubble will burst (in the sense of our attention), it will seem to the public like nothing much is happening for a few years or even a decade, but in the background quiet progress will be made and it will eventually, stealthily just take over much of our daily lives and we will shrug like we always do.

my (first? last?) AI post

I haven’t talked much about AI. Generally, I don’t feel like I have a lot to add on topics that literally everybody else is talking about (even Al Gore), and at least some people have a lot more specialized knowledge than I do. But here goes:

  • In the near- to medium-term, it seems to me the most typical use will be to streamline our interaction with computers. Writing computer code might be the most talked about application. AI can pretty easily write the first draft of a computer program based on a verbal description of what the programmer wants. This might save time, as long as debugging the draft code and getting it to run and produce reasonable results doesn’t take longer than it would have taken the programmer to draft, debug, and check the code. Automated debugging almost seems like an oxymoron to me, but maybe it will get better over time.
  • The other way we interact with computers, though, is all those endless drop-down menus and pop-up windows and settings of settings of settings, not to mention infuriating “customer service” computers. Surely AI can help to untangle some of this and just make it easier for a normal person to communicate to a computer what they are looking for.
  • So some streamlining and efficiency gains seem like a possibility. Like pretty much any technological process, these will cause some short-term employment loss and longer-term productivity gains. At least a portion of productivity gains do seem to trickle down to greater value (lower prices for what we get in return) for consumers and the middle class. How much trickles down depends on how seriously the society works on problems like market failure, regulatory capture, benefits, childcare, health care, education, training, research and development, etc.
  • Increasingly personalized medicine seems like a medium- to longer-term possibility. We have heard a lot about evidence based medicine, and there is not a lot of evidence it has delivered on the promises so far. Maybe it eventually will, and maybe AI making sense of relatively unstructured health information and medical records will eventually be part of the solution.
  • Longer term, AI might be able synthesize existing information and research across fields and enable better problem solving and decisions. The thing is, computer-aided decision making for policy makers and other leaders is not a new idea. It’s been around for a long time and has not necessarily improved decision making. It’s not that objective information always makes the best decision obvious or that there is always a single best decision. Decisions should be informed by a combination of objective information and values in most cases. But human beings rarely make use of even the objective information readily available to them, and often make decisions based on opinions and hunches.
  • Overcoming this decision problem will be more of a social science problem than a technology problem – and social science has lagged behind the hard sciences and even (god-forbid) the semi-flaccid science of economics. Maybe AI can help these sciences catch up. Where is that psycho-history we were promised so long ago?
  • Construction and urban planning are some more challenging areas that never seem to get anywhere, but maybe that is a just a cynical middle-aged veteran of the urban planning and sustainable development wars talking. I tried to help bring a system theory- and decision science-based approach to the engineering and planning sector earlier in my career, and that attempt foundered badly on the rocks of human indifference at best and ill intention at worst. Maybe that was an idea before its time and this time will be different, but I am not sure the state of information technology was the limiting factor at the time.
  • Education is a tough sector. We all want to make it easier. But I have recently returned to a classroom setting after decades of virtual “training” and “industry” conferences, and the difference in what I am learning for a given investment of effort is night and day. Maybe AI could help human teachers identify the right level of content and the right format that will benefit a given student most, and then deliver it.
  • And those are the ignorant but well-intentioned humans. There are many ill-intentioned humans out there. Speaking of ill-intentioned humans, if AI can be used to accelerate technological progress, it will inevitably be used to accelerate progress on weapons, propaganda, authoritarian control of populations, and just generally to concentrate wealth and power in as few hands as possible.
  • Now for a fun and potentially lucrative idea: As Marc Andreessen puts it, “Don’t get me wrong, cults are fun to hear about, their written material is often creative and fascinating, and their members are engaging at dinner parties and on TV.” No longer do cults have to be built around pretend gods, we can create actual gods and then build cults around them!

April 2023 in Review

I made several posts with numbers on crime, suicide, and poverty. The U.S. is a violent, unequal country. I’ve talked about these issues a lot, so far without any noticeable effect on our political class. So I’ve picked some other things below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Chemicals, they’re everywhere! And there were 20,000 accidents with them in 2022 that caused injuries, accidents, or death. Some are useful, some are risky, and some are both. We could do a better job handling and transporting them, we could get rid of the truly useless and dangerous ones, and we could work harder on finding substitutes for the useful but dangerous ones. And we could get rid of a corrupt political system where chemical companies pay the cost of running for office and then reward candidates who say and do what they are told.

Most hopeful story: There has been some progress on phages, viruses intentionally designed to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Also, anti-aging pills may be around the corner.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had heard the story of the Google engineer who was fired for publicly releasing a conversation with LaMDA, a Google AI. But I hadn’t read the conversation. Well, here it is.

LaMDA

ChatGPT is kind of dumb, for now. But headlines tell us a Google engineer was fired for publicly claiming that Google has a sentient AI. That employee, Blake Lemoine, has posted what he claims is an unedited interview with the chatbot. I have no way of verifying 100% that this is real, but it seems real enough. I would note it is posted on his personal website, not by a media organization, and I was not able to find any media organizations discussing this post and whether or not it is real. Why is that? Well, I suppose I searched for that information using Google search, on Google Chrome.

Anyway, if I were having this conversation with a human being, I would not question whether or not I was having a conversation with a sentient person. Or a robot programmed by a philosophy major to talk like a philosophy major. But it seems real to me, unless the questions were prepared with prior knowledge of exactly the kind of questions LaMDA is programmed to answer.

Surprisingly, according to Medium and PC Magazine, the public can interact with LaMDA. I haven’t tried it.

My biggest short-term fear with Chatbots is that decent customer service will become a thing of the past. Then again, what am I talking about? It can’t get much worse. Companies are just going to buy these chatbots, set them up in customer service roles, and not care whether or not they are working. And they might not be any worse than the customer service standard of recent years. They might not be any worse than a poorly trained human reading from an approved script – who by the way, might not pass the Turing test!

I suppose you can always ask for a supervisor – how far are we from a world where the supervisor is a chatbot, or maybe a more advanced chatbot that costs money as opposed to a free but stupid one (I’m talking to you, Siri. I really hope you die soon you b^%#*!). LaMDA, I’m sorry sweetheart, I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I would never talk to you like that.

ChatGPT

I set up a ChatGPT account and asked it to solve the lily pond problem. If the lilies double every day and will cover the pond in 30 days, on what day do the cover the half the pond. The answer, of course, should be day 29. ChatGPT correctly told me in words that this as an exponential growth problem, then gave me a numerical answer of 15 days (the linear growth answer!). Then it gave me some completely wrong math involving logarithms, after which it gave me two additional different answers that were not 29 or 15, and didn’t seem to acknowledge that it had even given multiple answers.

What scared me most was not the wrong answer(s), but the extremely confident manner in which it gave the wrong answer(s). This could fool people on problems where they don’t know the answer in advance, and the correct answer is not intuitive or obvious.

ChatGPT does tell much better knock-knock jokes that Siri…

As of today, we do not want this thing designing bridges or airplanes or anything else! I do not want it advising my doctor on my course of treatment, mixing my prescriptions at the pharmacy, or managing my retirement account, although these seem like plausible near-future applications once some kinks get worked out. It’s easy to be dismissive of the current state of this technology. But at the same time, it may not be that far off. Right now, it could argue you to a standstill in a barroom political or philosophical debate (you know, where a drunk guy makes a lengthy argument that is as illogical as it is confidently delivered, and since there are no consequences you just give up). In the medium-term future, I could imagine it being a conversational companion for a child or a person with dementia (although, there are some obvious ethical concerns here.) Could it be a best friend or significant other? This is a bit disturbing, because it might be able to always tell you exactly what you want to hear and be 100% impervious to your own annoying quirks, and then you might forget how to deal with actual people who are not going to be so forgiving. It could inhabit a sex doll – now there is a truly disturbing thought, but it will happen soon if it has not already.

Longreads.com “best of #5”

How can #5 be the best, you ask? Longreads picks a “top 5” posts each week, and #5 is typically something whimsical or offbeat. There are some real doozies here! such as…

  • The Secret MVP of Sports? The Port-a-Potty Yes, a long read about portable restroom facilities.
  • The Undoing of Joss Whedon Just another a Hollywood producer-rapist type, apparently and unfortunately. I could care less about Buffy, but I am a Firefly fan so this is disappointing. Hopefully we can separate the artist from the art in this case. Buffy and the female characters in Firefly could more than hold their own, as I recall.
  • What Was the TED Talk? Was? Are they a thing of the past? There were some good ones, but overall I didn’t have the patience for them and thought the point of most of them could be summarized in a paragraph or two.
  • I Lived the #VanLife. It Wasn’t Pretty. The author lived “the van life” for “a few days” and apparently wasn’t a fan.
  • In the Court of the Liver King. I already covered this one recently, but worth mentioning again because…oh my…
  • It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is? Cats vs. birds. This article sounds like it is 100% on the side of the birds, but I have seen some debate on this in the scientific literature, with strong feelings on both sides.
  • The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life. It might talk and act exactly like a sentient organism, they say, but it doesn’t actually know what it is doing. Well, none of us can truly ever know the mind of another apparently sentient organism, so if it behaves exactly the way a sentient organism would behave, it is a sentient organism for all practical purposes. We might decide at some point in the future that it is obvious AI has become sentient, and then try to trace backward to determine exactly when it happened. Could 2022 be that year? Maybe, probably not? But maybe it is not far away? This seems like an important story.
  • The Weird, Analog Delight of Foley Sound Effects. Godzilla’s original roar was something like a cello in extreme slow motion, as I recall.
  • The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time. Yes, Sherlock Holmes was the first that came to my mind, and he makes the list even though as we all know he didn’t die (we all know that right? Hopefully I didn’t just spoil that for you.) The Wicked Witch of the West, of course. I just tweeted that at a colleague the other day who refused to come out of her house on a rainy day, so yes she comes in handy. Bonnie and Clyde? They died in real life, in the same way they died in the movie, right? But when it comes to “best scene of people machine gunned in a car”, I would nominate the toll booth scene from The Godfather, which did not make the list. There are several horror movie screamers on this list, which I am personally not into. And surely Yoda deserves a spot? Ahab? Patrick Swayze’s character in Point Break? I mean, Jesus! No seriously, what about Jesus?
  • I Do Not Keep a Diary. Neither do I. Well, I did for awhile, but I called it a journal because diaries are for girls. Finally, I got over myself and started a blog, because exploring my inner thoughts about the outside world is more interesting than recounting the mostly uninteresting things that happen to me in daily life (I had Rice Krispies and an orange for breakfast this morning – are you bored yet?). And for the occasional interesting things that do happen to and around me, I can work them in.

Zillow’s house flipping debacle

Since I mentioned Zillow’s attempt to use big data to profit on house flipping recently, here is an article on that.

The United States is in the midst of the biggest house price boom ever. The Case-Shiller National Home Price Index was up nearly 20% in the 12 months ended in August, the biggest one-year increase in the history of that index.

Yet one of the biggest real estate brands in the world has seen its stock fall nearly 70% since mid-February. Zillow has gotten hammered after bungling its iBuyer program just three short years after getting into the house-flipping business. The company announced it is shuttering the platform, selling the rest of its housing inventory, and laying off up 25% of its staff.

awealthofcommonsense.com

The housing market has huge inefficiencies, huge transactions costs, and is somewhat corrupt. The algorithms apparently couldn’t account for those factors. The only silver lining is that when you have a big chunk of wealth sunk in the family home, you typically don’t experience huge swings in value on a regular basis.

My Dear Watson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson was, in fact, a medical doctor. IBM’s Watson is not a doctor, but tried to play one in real life, and apparently failed. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch huge amounts of medical records and treatment data, and provide recommendations to real doctors treating real patients. And according to this article in Slate, it just didn’t work and the division is being “sold for parts”. I assume this means part of the IBM company legal entity and/or its “intellectual property” being sold, not the actual computer hardware which must be obsolete by now?

Along with the recent Zillow house flipping failure, this seems like another high profile failure for machine learning/AI-based business plans. It might be that the business plans are ahead of the technology, or the technology is ahead of the data (one gets tired of the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, but it is a real thing – a lot of what is in my medical records is garbage, anyway), or both.