Work is learning. Learning is the work.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Grand Theft Autocomplete is my new favourite term for LLMs.” —@ben
Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of AI, was quoted in Life magazine — in 1970, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” —AIWS.net
Following up from yesterday’s post — fix the networks — this presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, by Ed Yong tells the story about how the pandemic defeated him. Yong wrote many articles focused on making sense of the pandemic for The Atlantic from 2020. In 2021 Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His first premise is that succeeding or failing to deal with a pandemic is a choice.
For me, just the fact that Yong wears a N95 respirator mask while presenting, makes this worth watching. It’s real leadership by example. With no previous journalistic experience, Yong set some rules for himself, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.
Erin Kissane, in a presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, discusses how Twitter was instrumental in crowd-sourcing a wide variety of experts to understand what was happening early in the Covid pandemic. Twitter enabled many ‘rando’, or loose social connections which resulted in the Covid Tracking Project that was ahead of the CDC and other official sources of public health information. But as Kissane states, “It’s a mark of institutional failure to leave your public health crisis data in the hands of amateurs and volunteers.” That has been the ongoing state of affairs in most Western countries, Canada included.
Why should we help those we compete with? Because we want to live in a resilient society and have a thriving economy.
“There was a farmer who grew excellent quality corn. Every year he won the award for the best grown corn. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about now he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbours. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbours when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.
“Why sir” said the farmer, “Didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.” —Author unknown — see below*
Jon Naughton in The Guardian — The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted — notes that Dave Winer’s blog is now 30 years old. Winer invented RSS which easily syndicates blogs and ensures that podcasts can be played on your application of choice. Like Winer, when I started I also thought that blogging was for everyone. It’s not.
“I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” —Dave Winer
I have talked about the topic of owning your data in 2004, 2007, 2009, 2014, & 2017. In summary, I have promoted having a personal blog or website to initially publish any work, and then share it on various social media channels (controlled by someone else) as these come and go.
In 2014 I wrote a post sponsored by Cisco, on the ‘internet of everything’ (IoE) and owning our data. I said that the danger is that a few companies will have control of data factories and freelancers will become the product. As they say with social media, if you are not paying for the service, then you are the product. The IoE may increase the speed of automation, making more human jobs obsolete, as data become a capital resource. Will data factories become the new breed of middle-men while freelancers lose control? This could be a growing area of social and economic tension in the near future.
That future is here.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Listen, generative LLMs and art imaging tools will get better and better over time. If your opposition is based on crappy outputs, that problem will get solved.
Problems such as unsustainable resource consumption, unfair labour practices, accelerating wealth inequity and the absolute death of joyful creativity, however, will not be fixed.” —@barsoomcore
In an article on the impact of AI on computer science education, the general conclusion is that all jobs will have a generative AI component and it will be necessary in most jobs to understand computer science. The piece opens with an experiment conducted by a professor with one of his computer science classes.
One group was allowed to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, the second group was told to use Meta’s Code Llama large language model (LLM), and the third group could only use Google. The group that used ChatGPT, predictably, solved the problem quickest, while it took the second group longer to solve it. It took the group using Google even longer, because they had to break the task down into components.
Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem from memory, and the tables turned. The ChatGPT group “remembered nothing, and they all failed,” recalled Klopfer, a professor and director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade.
Meanwhile, half of the Code Llama group passed the test. The group that used Google? Every student passed.
The current hype around ‘artificial intelligence’ in the form of generative pre-trained transformers and large language models is impossible to avoid. However, I have yet to try any of these out other than two questions posed to Sanctum.ai — auto-marketing — on my computer and not on some cloud. So far, these are my reasons for not jumping on this bandwagon.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
I was in Long Beach in 2012 when Nick Hanauer gave his, “It’s absolute bullshit that the rich are job creators” TED talk. I was so eager to share it with co-workers and friends, I checked the TED site every day waiting for them to post it. I gave up after six months
It eventually showed up on YouTube but I don’t think TED ever put it on their site or even linked to it. I’m surprised they welcomed him back to the main stage just a couple years later. —@kims