History – Theoreti.ca

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.

Declaration of Independence – First E-Text

Project Gutenberg and the Declaration of Independence

I came across a blog post about how Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg started in 1971 by typing the Declaration of Independence into the ARPANET and sending it to others. See 50 Years at Project Gutenberg.

Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg’s Practices by Gregory B. Newby is a longer thing on the history of Project Gutenberg’s processes.

Hart passed in 2011. Gregory B. Newby just passed away this October. The Project, however seems to be in good hands with a foundation and board.

We’re Norman Rockwell’s family. Trump’s DHS has shamefully misused his work. | Opinion

The Problem We All Live With, Norman Rockwell, 1964

As Norman Rockwell’s family, we know he’d be devastated to see the Department of Homeland Security’s unauthorized misuse of his work.

Members of my family noticed over the last weeks that the DHS is using Norman Rockwell’s works without permission. We got together to write this opinion peice, We’re Norman Rockwell’s family. Trump’s DHS has shamefully misused his work. | Opinion.

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.

ArtNet now has a story about our Opinion as does the New York Times.

Life, Liberty, and Superintelligence

Are American institutions ready for the AI age?

3QuarksDaily pointed me to an essay in Arena on Life, Liberty, and Superintelligence. The essay starts with the question that Dario Amodei tackled in Machines of Loving Grace, namely, what might be the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI). It then questions whether we could actually achieve the potential benefits without the political will and changes needed to nimbly pivot.

Benefits: Amodei outlined a set of domains where intelligence could make a real difference, including:

Biology and health,
Neuroscience and mind,
Economic development and poverty, and
Peace and governance.

Amodei concluded with some thoughts on Work and meaning, though the loss of work and meaning may not be a benefit.

It is important that we talk about the benefits as massive investments are made in infrastructure for AI. We should discuss what we think we are going to get other than some very rich people and yet more powerful companies. Discussion of benefits can also balance the extensive documentation of risks.

Institutions: The essay then focuses on whether we could actually see the benefits Amodei outlines even if we get powerful AI. Ball points out that everyone (like JD Vance) believes the USA should lead in AI, but questions if we have the political will and appropriate institutions,

Viewed in this light, the better purpose of “AI policy” is not to create guardrails for AI — though most people agree some guardrails will be needed. Instead, our task is to create the institutions we will need for a world transformed by AI—the mechanisms required to make the most of a novus ordo seclorum. America leads the world in AI development; she must also lead the world in the governance of AI, just as our constitution has lit the Earth for two-and-a-half centuries. To describe this undertaking in shrill and quarrelsome terms like “AI policy” or, worse yet, “AI regulation,” falls far short of the job that is before us.

There could be other countries (read China) who may lag when it comes to innovation, but are better able to deploy and implement the innovations. What sort of institutions and politics does one need to be able to flexibly and ethically redesign civil institutions?

IIT Delhi DH 2025 Winter School

Arjun Ghosh invited me to contribute to the DH 2025 Winter School at IIT Delhi. I’m teaching a 6-day workshop on Voyant as part of this Winter School. You can see my outline here (note that I am still finishing the individual pages.) Some thoughts:

There is a real interest in DH in India. Arjun had over 500 applications for 25 places. I doubt we would have that many in Canada.
As can be expected, there is a lot of interest handling Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil.
There are a number of social scientists at the School. The humanities and social sciences may not be as clearly distinguished here.
There was an interesting session on digital libraries given by a data librarian at UPenn.

How safe is AI safety?

Today I gave a plenary talk on “How Safe is AI Safety?” to open a Workshop on AI and DH (Part 1) organized by the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN) at the Université de Montréal.

In the paper I looked at how AI safety is being implemented in Canada and what is the scope of the idea. I talked about the shift from Responsible AI to AI Safety in the Canadian government’s rhetoric.

I’m trying to figure out what to call the methodology I have developed for this and other research excursions. It has elements of Foucault’s geneaology of ideas – trying to follow ideas that are obvious through the ways the ideas are structured in institutions. Or, it is an extension of Ian Hacking’s idea of historical ontology where we try to understand ideas about things through their history.

Metaculus on AGI Outcomes

Listening to Jacob Steinhardt on The Hinton Lectures™ I learned about Metaculus, which is a forecasting service which is a public benefit company. It has a focus area on AI Progress with lots of AI related forecasts, (which seems to be a huge area of interest.) This service coordinates human forecasts and builds infrastructure to facilitate others in forecasting.

Neat!

Replaying Japan 2024

I just got back from Replaying Japan 2024 which was at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Taro Yoko was one of the keynotes and he was quite interesting on developing games like Nier Automata that are partly about AI in this age of AI. I was a coauthor of two papers:

A paper on “Parachuting over the Angel: Nintendo in Mexico” presented by Victor Fernandez. This paper looked at the development of a newsletter and then magazine about Nintendo in Mexico that then spread around Spanish South America.
A second paper on “The Slogan Game: Missions, Visions and Values in Japanese Game Companies” presented by Keiji Amano. This paper built on work documented in this Spyral notebook, Japanese Game Company Slogans, Missions, Visions, and Values. We gathered various promotional statements of Japanese game companies and analyzed them.

The conference was one of the best Replaying Japan conferences thanks to Mimi Okabe’s hard work. There were lots of participants, including virtual ones, and great papers.

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!