"What they have in common is that they believe technology — and particularly AI — should be open, diverse, inclusive, responsible, and accessible for the benefit of humanity."
Jennifer Doudna takes the same attitude towards her work on CRISPR (genetic engineering). She calls it "democratizing" CRISPR.
While this approach sounds very noble and politically correct, and is sincerely well intended, it can also be viewed as recklessly spreading very powerful technologies to anybody and everybody who wishes to leverage these tools to advance their own goals, no matter what those goals might be.
The underlying problem with this approach is that as the scale of powers available to us grows, the room for error shrinks. Thus, even though most people will probably use these tools for good, those using these tools for harm are increasingly being put in a situation where they can bring down the entire system.
If that sounds like hysterical wild speculation, please consider the current reality TODAY is that a single human being can, in just a few minutes, start a process which ends this civilization. Yep, nuclear weapons. We absolutely refuse to learn the lessons they can teach us. Not a good sign.
Hi Phil, this is a reasonable concern. I think between total privacy/control and careless openness there's room for better solutions. Open source is good. Mindless open source isn't.
You can always set up requirements to access some data or research. That'd be a better solution.
Also, I understand your example but making a nuclear bomb is much more difficult than you suggest here. Definitely, a single human can't, within minutes, start to make one.
The single human being I had in mind regarding nukes would be people like Putin or Kim Jong-un. They can't make'em, but they can launch'em. This illustrates how powers of vast scale have the potential to empower individuals to take down everything. Nukes are the easiest example, but the principle applies to any technology once it reaches a sufficient scale of power. AI and genetic engineering aren't there yet. But they're headed in that direction. And...
Once we understand that knowledge feeds back upon itself leading to the accelerating development of new knowledge and power, we can reasonably state that AI and genetic engineering are only the beginning of what the 21st century has in store for us. The real problem is not just this or that technology so much, but the knowledge explosion assembly line which is creating all the new powers.
I'm sorry to be "The End Is Near" guy :-) but I just don't share your confidence in governance mechanisms. How's that working out with nukes?
I base my future speculation on what we know about the past. Human behavior doesn't change that much.
When it comes to future powers of vast scale we can examine what we already know to be fact about our relationship with nuclear weapons. Once this technology was invented it almost immediately slipped from our control, and today we have no clue how to end this threat. In fact, we've become bored with the whole subject to an incredible degree. This is the species which is now adding more powers of vast scale to our toolbox, at an ever accelerating rate.
To get back on topic, this is where AI comes in. AI is not just another power of vast scale, but something more dangerous. AI is an accelerant to the knowledge explosion, just like computers and the Internet are. So AI is not just a potential problem in itself, but is also further fuel to the process generating all the technology based threats.
So, this is the worst Christmas season comment ever posted on the Internet. My apologies! If you wouldn't mind dumping some coal in my stocking before you go, that seems appropriate. :-)
I don't think this headline can be qualified as correct or incorrect without explaining why.
Most people reading it would think I'm referring to bloom's performance in the title. In that sense, it's more to grab attention than anything.
However, my argument for bloom was a sociopolitical one, not technical. In that sense, all I said remains true today.
Bloom was underwhelming performance-wise except for its multilingual capabilities (when I wrote it the model had just been trained, no results were available). Still, that's a proof of how hard it is to make an initiative like BigScience work well.
That said, I'd use the headline again, making the same argument. I can't say whether the headline is correct or not because the question needs more context!
> This isn’t the first time open-source has won over privacy and control. We have examples in computers, operating systems, browsers, and search engines.
Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA architectures are all closed.
Most used OSes, namely Windows, macOS, and iOS are all closed.
Opera, Safari and Google Chrome are all closed.
Google, Bing, Baidu are all closed.
What examples do you have in mind really? Linux & Firefox?
Jun 29, 2022·edited Jun 29, 2022Liked by Alberto Romero
Well, no.
Intel/AMD are essentially open because the x86 architecture was clones, creating a competitive marketplace that delivers for users. That's WHY PCs are so popular. ARM is licensed, yes, but a very competitive marketplace with multiple manufacturers, all competing to deliver the best products to you.
OpenCores has plenty of alternative, completely open chip designs available, and you CAN buy off the shelf open CPU architectures (such as RISC-V) and entire system boards for them, that will run open operating systems, such as Linux. Open BIOSes are available. Furthermore, you're free to emulate something like x86 (or your old mainframe, or whatever) on those open chips (albeit slowly), using open source code, and even to extend those open CPU instruction sets with additional instructions to improve HARDWARE emulation performance, and so on.
The most used OS is Linux: it's used on supercomputers, on most of the servers on the internet, a lot of the servers in corporations, a lot of engineering and science desktops, and a lot of devices like phones, IoT, etc. Linux, like other unixes including BSD (which itself includes MacOS's XNU/Darwin) are Open Source, and all Unices worth talking about are based on open standards: POSIX, etc.
Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Edge are all based on Webkit, which is open source (it came from KHTML, out of the KDE project). Chrome itself is essentially Open Source, as "Chromium". The main competitor to those browsers, Firefox, is also open source. The standards that browsers, and the internet itself are based on, are also open standards.
Google is closed source, yes, but it's JUST a search engine. There are lots of competitors, should you choose to use them, including open source competitors.
Even in "closed" operating systems such as Windows, there are open source clones like WINE and ReactOS, and Windows itself is dependent on open source components like ssh, and includes Linux because Windows is essentially dying (albeit very very slowly).
No point complaining about lack of open source options, if you fail to research and actually CHOOSE Open Source.
You write...
"What they have in common is that they believe technology — and particularly AI — should be open, diverse, inclusive, responsible, and accessible for the benefit of humanity."
Jennifer Doudna takes the same attitude towards her work on CRISPR (genetic engineering). She calls it "democratizing" CRISPR.
While this approach sounds very noble and politically correct, and is sincerely well intended, it can also be viewed as recklessly spreading very powerful technologies to anybody and everybody who wishes to leverage these tools to advance their own goals, no matter what those goals might be.
The underlying problem with this approach is that as the scale of powers available to us grows, the room for error shrinks. Thus, even though most people will probably use these tools for good, those using these tools for harm are increasingly being put in a situation where they can bring down the entire system.
If that sounds like hysterical wild speculation, please consider the current reality TODAY is that a single human being can, in just a few minutes, start a process which ends this civilization. Yep, nuclear weapons. We absolutely refuse to learn the lessons they can teach us. Not a good sign.
Hi Phil, this is a reasonable concern. I think between total privacy/control and careless openness there's room for better solutions. Open source is good. Mindless open source isn't.
You can always set up requirements to access some data or research. That'd be a better solution.
Also, I understand your example but making a nuclear bomb is much more difficult than you suggest here. Definitely, a single human can't, within minutes, start to make one.
Hi Alberto, happy holiday of your choice. :-)
The single human being I had in mind regarding nukes would be people like Putin or Kim Jong-un. They can't make'em, but they can launch'em. This illustrates how powers of vast scale have the potential to empower individuals to take down everything. Nukes are the easiest example, but the principle applies to any technology once it reaches a sufficient scale of power. AI and genetic engineering aren't there yet. But they're headed in that direction. And...
Once we understand that knowledge feeds back upon itself leading to the accelerating development of new knowledge and power, we can reasonably state that AI and genetic engineering are only the beginning of what the 21st century has in store for us. The real problem is not just this or that technology so much, but the knowledge explosion assembly line which is creating all the new powers.
https://www.tannytalk.com/p/our-relationship-with-knowledge
I'm sorry to be "The End Is Near" guy :-) but I just don't share your confidence in governance mechanisms. How's that working out with nukes?
I base my future speculation on what we know about the past. Human behavior doesn't change that much.
When it comes to future powers of vast scale we can examine what we already know to be fact about our relationship with nuclear weapons. Once this technology was invented it almost immediately slipped from our control, and today we have no clue how to end this threat. In fact, we've become bored with the whole subject to an incredible degree. This is the species which is now adding more powers of vast scale to our toolbox, at an ever accelerating rate.
To get back on topic, this is where AI comes in. AI is not just another power of vast scale, but something more dangerous. AI is an accelerant to the knowledge explosion, just like computers and the Internet are. So AI is not just a potential problem in itself, but is also further fuel to the process generating all the technology based threats.
So, this is the worst Christmas season comment ever posted on the Internet. My apologies! If you wouldn't mind dumping some coal in my stocking before you go, that seems appropriate. :-)
Do you still feel the title of this article is correct, Alberto?
Great question Bart,
I don't think this headline can be qualified as correct or incorrect without explaining why.
Most people reading it would think I'm referring to bloom's performance in the title. In that sense, it's more to grab attention than anything.
However, my argument for bloom was a sociopolitical one, not technical. In that sense, all I said remains true today.
Bloom was underwhelming performance-wise except for its multilingual capabilities (when I wrote it the model had just been trained, no results were available). Still, that's a proof of how hard it is to make an initiative like BigScience work well.
That said, I'd use the headline again, making the same argument. I can't say whether the headline is correct or not because the question needs more context!
> This isn’t the first time open-source has won over privacy and control. We have examples in computers, operating systems, browsers, and search engines.
Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA architectures are all closed.
Most used OSes, namely Windows, macOS, and iOS are all closed.
Opera, Safari and Google Chrome are all closed.
Google, Bing, Baidu are all closed.
What examples do you have in mind really? Linux & Firefox?
Well, no.
Intel/AMD are essentially open because the x86 architecture was clones, creating a competitive marketplace that delivers for users. That's WHY PCs are so popular. ARM is licensed, yes, but a very competitive marketplace with multiple manufacturers, all competing to deliver the best products to you.
OpenCores has plenty of alternative, completely open chip designs available, and you CAN buy off the shelf open CPU architectures (such as RISC-V) and entire system boards for them, that will run open operating systems, such as Linux. Open BIOSes are available. Furthermore, you're free to emulate something like x86 (or your old mainframe, or whatever) on those open chips (albeit slowly), using open source code, and even to extend those open CPU instruction sets with additional instructions to improve HARDWARE emulation performance, and so on.
The most used OS is Linux: it's used on supercomputers, on most of the servers on the internet, a lot of the servers in corporations, a lot of engineering and science desktops, and a lot of devices like phones, IoT, etc. Linux, like other unixes including BSD (which itself includes MacOS's XNU/Darwin) are Open Source, and all Unices worth talking about are based on open standards: POSIX, etc.
Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Edge are all based on Webkit, which is open source (it came from KHTML, out of the KDE project). Chrome itself is essentially Open Source, as "Chromium". The main competitor to those browsers, Firefox, is also open source. The standards that browsers, and the internet itself are based on, are also open standards.
Google is closed source, yes, but it's JUST a search engine. There are lots of competitors, should you choose to use them, including open source competitors.
Even in "closed" operating systems such as Windows, there are open source clones like WINE and ReactOS, and Windows itself is dependent on open source components like ssh, and includes Linux because Windows is essentially dying (albeit very very slowly).
No point complaining about lack of open source options, if you fail to research and actually CHOOSE Open Source.
...or rather, Free Software.