History of Computing and Multimedia

AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job

The Atlantic has a thoughtful article titled, AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job. The article points out that player pianos automated the playing of pianos in the early 1900s and could even play things humans didn’t have enough fingers for, but that didn’t put piano players out of work.

How could humans possibly compete? Yet today you are more likely to encounter a piano player than a player piano, despite the job being successfully automated a very long time ago. The automatons have been relegated to museums and the rare curiosity. Pianists can be found any night of the week in hotel lobbies, Italian restaurants, and concert halls.

The article goes on to talk about how live music is still appreciated even though many musicians can’t play as well as what you can get on recorded (or automated) music. People like to see, hear, and interact with other people.

It also mentions how people fought back. Above you see an image from an ad in 1930. Earlier John Philip Sousa coined the phrase “canned music” in 1906 to mock the automated sound. (At the time the cylindrical records came in can shaped containers.) According to the Wikipedia article, he testified to Congress,

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy… in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Sounds like some of the concerns we have about AI today, but again, I suspect live music will survive.

The problem is more likely to be arts where there isn’t a live person performing or interacting with you. Does it really matter if illustrations in magazines are made by humans, AIs or hybrids as long as they catch the eye and illustrate the topic? Perhaps the visual arts will shift to live performance art or those online performances like those for YouTube by Bob Ross.

Calculating Empires

The creative team of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler who brought us the Anatomy of an AI System have created a much more ambitious long wall sized infographic called Calculating Empires: https://calculatingempires.net.

I saw this at the Jeau de Paume exhibit on The World Through AI. I feel it is the sort of thing I would like a large poster of so I could carefully read it, but … no luck … no posters.

Anyway, it is a fascinating map of communications technology.

Trump eliminates Biden AI policies

Trump has signed an Executive Order “eliminating harmful Biden Administration AI policies and enhancing America’s global AI dominance.” (Fact Sheet) In a Fact Sheet he calls Biden’s order(s) dangerous and onerous using the usual stifling innovation argument:

The Biden AI Executive Order established unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership.

There are, however, other components to the rhetoric:

It “established the commitment … to sustain and enhance America’s dominance to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” The human flourishing seems to be
It directs the creation of an “AI Action Plan” within 180 days to sustain dominance. Nothing is mentioned about flourishing in regards to the plan. Presumably dominance is flourishing. This plan and review of policies will presumably where we will see the details of implementation. It sounds like the Trump administration may keep some of the infrastructure and policies. Will they, for example, keep the AI Safety Institute in NIST?
There is an interesting historic section reflecting back to activities of the first Trump administration noting that “President Trump also took executive action in 2020 to establish the first-ever guidance for Federal agency adoption of AI to more effectively deliver services to the American people and foster public trust in this critical technology.” Note the use of the word “trust”. I wonder if they will return to trustworthy AI language.
There is language about how “development of AI systems must be free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” My guess is that the target is AIs that don’t have “woke” guardrails.

It will be interesting to track what parts of the Biden orders are eliminated and what parts are kept.

Do we really know how to build AGI?

Sam Altman in a blog post titled Reflections looks back at what OpenAI has done and then predicts that they know how to build AGI,

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

It is worth noting that the definition of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is sufficiently vague that meeting this target could become a matter of semantics. None the less, here are some definitions of AGI from OpenAI or others about OpenAI,

“OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.” – Note the “economically valuable work”. I wonder if philosophizing or making art is valuable? Is intelligence being limited here to economics?
“AI systems that are generally smarter than humans” – This is somewhat circular as brings us back to defining “smartness”, another work for “intelligence”.
“any system that can outperform humans at most tasks” – This could be timed to the quote above and the idea of AI agents that can work for companies outperforming humans. It seems to me we are nowhere near this if you include physical tasks.
“an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits” – This is the definition used by OpenAI and Microsoft to help identify when OpenAI doesn’t have to share technology with Microsoft any more.

Decker – A HyperCard for the Web

I’m at the CSDH-SCHN conference which is in Montreal. We have relocated to U de Montreal from McGill where Congress is taking place. Jason Boyd gave a paper about the Centre for Digital Humanities at TMU that he directs. He mentioned an authoring environment called Decker that recreates a deck/card based environment similar to what HyperCard was like.

Decker can be used to create visual novels, interactive texts, hypertexts, educational apps, and small games. It has a programming language related to Lua. It has simple graphics tools.

Decker looks really neat and seems to work within a browser as a HTML page. This mean that you can Save As a page and get the development environment locally. All the code and data in a page that can be forked or passed around.

As a lover of HyperCard I am thrilled to see something that replicates its spirit!

Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill | Siva Vaidhyanathan | The Guardian

In many ways, the long 21st century began when Apple launched the Macintosh with its ‘1984’ Super Bowl ad

The Guardian has a story about the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill. The famous 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad by Ridley Scott was aired on January 22nd, 1984 and announced that on January 24th, the Macintosh would be introduced.

What made the Mac so revolutionary? To be honest, the Mac wasn’t really that innovative. Apple had tried to sell a GUI (Graphical User Interface) computer before in the Lisa, but it was too expensive. The Lisa in turn had be developed using ideas from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that were marketed in the Xerox Star of 1981, which was again too expensive to be influential. What the Mac got right was the price making it affordable. And the rest was history.

The author of the Guardian article, Siva Vaidhyanathan, argues that the Mac and later the iPhone hid the realities of their manufacture and innards. This was a common critique of the GUI, that it hid the way the operating system “really” worked, which was shown presumably by MS Dos.

This move to magic through design has blinded us to the real conditions of most people working and living in the world. A gated device is similar to a gated community. Beyond that, the sealed boxes, once they included ubiquitous cameras and location devices and were connected through invisible radio signals, operate as a global surveillance system that Soviet dictators could never have dreamed of. We bought into a world of soft control beyond Orwell’s imagination as well.

Frankly, I think the argument is exaggerated. Consumer products like cars had been hiding their workings under a trunk long before the Macintosh. For that matter the IBM PCs running MS Dos of that time were really not more open. The command line is an interface as much as a graphical one, it is just a different paradigm, a dialogue interface where you order the machine around instead of a desktop where you manipulate files. The argument seems to be one of association – associating the Mac with a broad generalization about capitalism and then hinting that everything after can be blamed on us wanting what Apple offered. What I remember was struggling to learn the commands of an IBM and then being offered a better designed computer. Sometimes better design isn’t a surveillance plot.

Huminfra: The Imitation Game: Artificial Intelligence and Dialogue

Today I gave a talk online for an event organized by Huminfra, a Swedish national infrastructure project. The title of the talk was “The Imitation Game: Artificial Intelligence and Dialogue” and it was part of an event online on “Research in the Humanities in the wake of ChatGPT.” I drew on Turing’s name for the Turing Test, the “imitation game.” Here is the abstract,

The release of ChatGPT has provoked an explosion of interest in the conversational opportunities of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In this presentation Dr. Rockwell will look at how dialogue has been presented as a paradigm for thinking machines starting with Alan Turing’s proposal to test machine intelligence with an “imitation game” now known as the Turing Test. In this context Rockwell will show Veliza a tool developed as part of Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org) that lets you play and script a simple chatbot based on ELIZA which was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. ELIZA was one of the first chatbots with which you could have a conversation. It responded as if a psychotherapist, turning whatever you said back into a question. While it was simple, it could be quite entertaining and thus provides a useful way to understanding chatbots.

The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023

Today and tomorrow representatives from a number of countries have gathered at Bletchley Park to discuss AI safety. Close to 30 countries, including Canada were represented and they issued The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023. This declaration starts with,

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents enormous global opportunities: it has the potential to transform and enhance human wellbeing, peace and prosperity. To realise this, we affirm that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.

The declaration discusses opportunities and the need to support innovation, but also mentions that “AI also poses significant risks” and mentions the usual suspects, especially “capable, general-purpose models” that could be repurposed for misuse.

What stands out is the commitment to international collaboration among the major players, including China. This is a good sign.

Many risks arising from AI are inherently international in nature, and so are best addressed through international cooperation. We resolve to work together in an inclusive manner to ensure human-centric, trustworthy and responsible AI that is safe, and supports the good of all through existing international fora and other relevant initiatives, to promote cooperation to address the broad range of risks posed by AI.

Bletchley Park is becoming a UK symbol of computing. It was, of course, where the Allied code-breaking centre was set up. It is where Turing worked on the Colossus, an important early computer used to decode the German ciphers and give the Allies a crucial advantage. It is appropriate that UK Prime Minister Sunak has used this site to gather representatives. Unfortunately few leaders joined him there, sending representatives instead, though Trudeau may show up on the 2nd.

Alas, the Declaration is short on specifics though individual countries like the United States and Canada are securing voluntary commitments from players to abide by codes of conduct. China and the EU are also passing laws regulating artificial intelligence.

One thing not mentioned at all are the dangers of military uses of AI. It is as if warbots are off the table in AI safety discussions.

The good news is that there will be follow up meetings at which we can hope that concrete agreements might be worked out.

Lit sounds: U of A experts help rescue treasure trove of audio cultural history

A U of A professor is helping to rescue tens of thousands of lost audio and video recordings — on tape, film, vinyl or any other bygone media — across North America.

The Folio has a nice story about the SpokenWeb project that I am part of, Lit sounds: U of A experts help rescue treasure trove of audio cultural history. The article discusses the collaboration and importance of archiving to scholarship.

History of Information Timeline

An interactive, illustrated timeline of historic moments in humankind’s quest for information. With annotations by Jeremy Norman.

History of Information is a searchable database of events in information. The link will show you the digital humanities category and what the creator thought were important events. I must say that it looks rather biased towards the interventions of white men.