History – Page 2 – Theoreti.ca

AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation

If corporations were in fact real persons, they would be sociopaths, completely lacking the ability for empathy that is a crucial element of normal human behavior. Unlike humans, however, corporations are theoretically immortal, cannot be put in prison, and the larger multinationals are not constrained by the laws of any individual country.

Jeremy Lent has an essay arguing that AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation. He isn’t the only one making this point. Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva has a Medium essay on Corporations Are Already AI that corporations are legally artificial people with many of the rights of people. They can own property (including people), they have agency, they communicate, and they have intelligence. Just because they aren’t software running on a computer doesn’t make them artificial intelligences.

As Samarajiva points out, it would be interesting to review the history of the corporation looking at examples like the Dutch East India Company to see if we can understand how AGIs might also emerge and interact with us. He feels that Corporate AIs hate us or at least are indifferent.

Another essay that also touches on this is a diary entry by David Runciman on AI in the London Review of Books. His reflections on how our fears about AI mirror earlier fears about corporations are worth quoting in full,

Just as adult human beings are not the only model for natural intelligence – along with children, we heard about the intelligence of plants and animals – computers are not the only model for intelligence of the artificial kind. Corporations are another form of artificial thinking machine, in that they are designed to be capable of taking decisions for themselves. Information goes in and decisions come out that cannot be reduced to the input of individual human beings. The corporation speaks and acts for itself. Many of the fears that people now have about the coming age of intelligent robots are the same ones they have had about corporations for hundreds of years. If these artificial creatures are taking decisions for us, how can we hold them to account for what they do? In the words of the 18th-century jurist Edward Thurlow, ‘corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned; they may therefore do as they like.’ We have always been fearful of mechanisms that ape the mechanical side of human intelligence without the natural side. We fear that they lack a conscience. They can think for themselves, but they don’t really understand what it is that they are doing.

40 years of the Nintendo Famicom – the console that changed the games industry

Entering a crowded field, the Nintendo Famicom came to dominate the market in the 1980s, leaving a family orientated legacy that continues to be felt today

The Guardian has a good story on the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Famicom, 40 years of the Nintendo Famicom – the console that changed the games industry The story quotes James Newman and also mentions Masayuki Uemura who Newman and I knew through the Replaying Japan conferences. Alas, Uemura, who was at Ritsumeikan after he retired from Nintendo, passed in 2021.

The story points out how Nintendo deliberately promoted the Famicom as a family machine that could be hooked up to the family TV (hence “Fami – com.) In various ways they wanted to legitimize gaming as a family experience. By contrast, when Nintendo brought the machine to North America it was remodelled to look like a VCR and called the Nintendo Entertainment System.

How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation

A technological whodunit—featuring Parliament, computer scientists, and a tipsy plane flight

Arun sent me a link to a neat story about How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation. The story is by Christine Mitchell and is in the Walrus (June 2023). It describes how IBM got ahold of a magnetic reel tape with 14 years of the Hansard – the translated transcripts of the Canadian Parliament. IBM went on to use this data trove to make advances in automatic translation.

The story mentions the politics of automated translation research in Canada. I have previously blogged about the Booths who were recruited by the NRC to Saskatchewan to work on automated translation. They were apparently pursuing a statistical approach like that IBM took later on, but their funding was cut.

Speaking of automatic translation, Canada had a computerized system, METEO for translating daily weather forecasts from Environment Canada. This ran from 1981 to 2001 and was an early successful implementation of automatic translation in the real world. It came out of work at the TAUM (Traduction Automatique à l’Université de Montréal) research group at the Université de Montréal that was set up in the late 1960s.

The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity

From the Open Philanthropy site I came across this older (2020) Vox article, The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity by Kelsey Piper. The article nicely summarizes some of the history of concerns around AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as people tend to call an AI so advanced it might be comparable to human intelligence. This history goes back to Turing’s colleague I.J. Good who speculated in 1965 that,

An ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

Such an explosion has been called the Singularity by Vernor Vinge and was popularized by Ray Kurzweil.

I came across this following threads on the whole issue of whether AI would soon become an existential threat. The question of the dangers of AI (whether AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or just narrow AI) has gotten a lot of attention especially since Geoffrey Hinton ended his relationship with Google so he could speak about it. He and other signed a short statement published on the site of the Center for AI Safety,

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

The existential question only become relevant if one believes, as many do, that there is considerable risk that AI research and development is moving so fast that it may soon achieve some level of generality at which point such an AGI could begin act in unpredictable and dangerous ways. Alternatively people could misuse such powerful AGIs to harm us. Open Philanthropy is one group that is focused on Potential Risks form Advanced AI. They could be classed as an organization with a longtermism view, a view that it is important to ethics (and philanthropy) to consider long-term issues.

Advances in AI could lead to extremely positive developments, but could also potentially pose risks from intentional misuse or catastrophic accidents.

Others have called for a Manhattan Project for AI Safety. There are, of course, those (including me) that feel that this is distracting from the immediate unintended effects of AI and/or that there is little existential danger for the moment as AGI is decades off. The cynic in my also wonders how much the distraction is intentional as it both hypes the technology (its dangerous therefore it must be important) or justifies ignoring the stubborn immediate problems like racist bias in the training data.

Kelsey Piper has in the meantime published A Field Guide to AI Safety.

The question still remains whether AI is dangerous enough to merit the sort of ethical attention that nuclear power, for example, has recieved.

Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial

Who remembers the Lisa? The Verge has a nice short documentary on the Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial. The Lisa, named after Jobs’ daughter and released in 1983, was the first Apple with a graphical user interface. Alas it was too expensive (almost $10K USD at the time) and was eventually superseded by the Macintosh that came out in 1994 despite being technically superior.

The documentary is less about the Lisa than the end of the Lisa including an interview with Bob Cook who sold remaindered and used Lisa’s after they were discontinued thanks to a deal with Apple until Apple decided to bury them all in a landfill in Utah. (Which reminds me of the Atari video game cartridge burial of 1983.) The documentary is also, as every Apple story is, about Steve Jobs and his return to Apple in the late 1990s which led to its turnaround into the successful company it is now. Was it Jobs who wanted to bury the Lisa?

Destroy All Monsters

There has recently been some fuss around the change in the Open Gaming License of Dungeons & Dragons. So here is a nice story about D&D and its history, Destroy All Monsters.

D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions, which cover everything from “Adjusting Ability Scores” (“Magic-users and clerics can reduce their strength scores by 3 points and add 1 to their prime requisite”) to “Who Gets the First Blow?” (“The character with the highest dexterity strikes first”). In fact, as I wandered farther into the cave, and acquired the rulebooks for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I found that there were rules for everything: … It would be a mistake to think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true whether you play by them or not. The rules induct you into the world of D&D; they are the long, difficult scramble from the mouth of the cave to the first point where you can stand up and look around.

Germany lifts ban on Nazi symbols in computer games | CNN

Computer and video games featuring Nazi symbols such as the swastika can now be sold in Germany uncensored after a regulatory body lifted the longstanding ban.

CNN reported back in 2018 that Germany lifts ban on Nazi symbols in computer games. The game that prompted this was the counterfactual Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that imagines the Nazis won WW II. To sell the game in Germany they had to change the symbols like the swastika as it is forbidden to display such symbols of “unconstitutional organizations.” Anyway, Germany has changed its interpretation of the law so that games are now treated as works of art like movies where it is legal to show the symbols.

This shows how difficult it can be to ban hate speech while not censoring the arts. For that matter, how does one deal with ironic hate speech – hate speech masquerading as irony?

Ken Kesey and the Rush to Deinstitutionalization

Jack Nicholson and director Milos Foreman on set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Whatever the literary strengths of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book has done much to harm both the mentally ill and their communities.

This May the Kule Institute is organizing a hybrid exhibit/symposium on the Institution of Knowledge. We are bringing together a group of artists and thinkers to raise and address questions about institutional structures and knowledge. One question that the small group I’m part of discussed this week as the question of deinstitutionalization and the view, best captured by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that asylums as institutions were sites that did more harm than good. Stephen Eide has a nice article about this, Ken Kesey and the Rush to Deinstitutionalization (Quilette, Nov. 14, 2022).

There are a number of aspects to the issue. The first thing to note is that the deinstitutionalization of people with serious mental health issues didn’t work as imagined. It was not the freeing of an oppressed constituency back to the community where the new drugs could help them integrate and get on with their lives. There wasn’t really a community that wanted them other than the street and many ended up in the very institutions asylums were meant to replace – prisons. Stephen Eide’s book Homelessness in America traces the effects of deinstitutionalization, changes in vagrancy laws, and the “cleaning” up of slums on homelessness leading to the problem as we see it today.

But what about the idea of deinstitutionalization? Important to this idea would be Foucault, changes in psychiatry and how the discipline conceives of the role of medicine (and its institutions), and changes in public policy and what jurisdictions try to do with institutions.

One aspect of the issues that we forget if we think of institutions as bureaucracy is the built presence of institutions. From Jefferson’s design of the campus of the University of Virginia to Olmstead’s asylum landscapes, architects have shaped our imagination and the literal structures of certain types of institutions. This raises the question of what new types of institutions might be in being designed?

The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record – The New York Times

For 4,600 years, a mysterious game slept in the dust of southern Iraq, largely forgotten. The passion of a museum curator and the hunger of young Iraqis for their cultural history may bring it back.

The New York Times has a story on The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record. A curator at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, connected the translation of a tablet with the rules with an ancient board game of which there were copies in museums (see picture above). More recently the game has been reintroduced into Iraq so that people can rediscover their ludic heritage.

The nice thing about the NYTimes article, beside the video of Finkel who has an amazing beard, is that they include a PDF that you can download and print to learn to play the game.

The article and Finkel’s video talk highlight how influential a game can be – how a set of rules can be a meme that helps rediscover a game.

From Bitcoin to Stablecoin: Crypto’s history is a house of cards

The wild beginnings, crazy turns, colorful characters and multiple comebacks of the crypto world

The Washington Post has a nice illustrated history of crypto, From Bitcoin to Stablecoin: Crypto’s history is a house of cards. They use a deck of cards as a visual metaphor and a graph of the ups and downs of crypto. I can’t help thinking that crypto is going to go up again, but when and in what form?

For that matter, where is Ruja Ignatova?