What You May Have Missed #35
Top 5 picks: AI, Ozymandias / OpenAI Code Interpreter / Stanford has an AI apocalypse fixation / Transformative AI is hard to achieve / Hofstadter's mixed comments on ChatGPT and GPT-4
Top 5 Picks
AI, Ozymandias (Freddie deBoer): “That, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the AI debate—the tacit but intense desire to escape now. What both those predicting utopia and those predicting apocalypse are absolutely certain of is that the arrival of these systems, what they take to be the dawn of the AI era, means now is over. They are, above and beyond all things, millenarians. In common with all millenarians they yearn for a future in which some vast force sweeps away the ordinary and frees them from the dreadful accumulation of minutes that constitutes human life.”
OpenAI Code Interpreter (OpenAI): “Code Interpreter will be available to all ChatGPT Plus users over the next week. It lets ChatGPT run code, optionally with access to files you've uploaded. You can ask ChatGPT to analyze data, create charts, edit files, perform math, etc. Plus users can opt in via settings.” Ethan Mollick’s thorough review on Substack.
How elite schools like Stanford became fixated on the AI apocalypse (Nitasha Tiku on the Washington Post): “Over the past year and a half, AI safety groups have cropped up on about 20 campuses in the United States and Europe—including Harvard, Georgia Tech, MIT, Columbia and New York University … The clubs train students in machine learning and help them find jobs in AI start-ups or one of the many nonprofit groups dedicated to AI safety. Many of these newly minted student leaders view rogue AI as an urgent and neglected threat, potentially rivaling climate change in its ability to end human life. Many see advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of their generation.”
Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve (Arjun Ramani and Zhengdong Wang on The Gradient): “Should AI be set apart from other great inventions in history? Could it, as the great academics John Von Neumann and I.J. Good speculated, one day self-improve, cause an intelligence explosion, and lead to an economic growth singularity? Neither this essay nor the economic growth literature rules out this possibility. Instead, our aim is to simply temper your expectations. We think AI can be “transformative” in the same way the internet was, raising productivity and changing habits. But many daunting hurdles lie on the way to the accelerating growth rates predicted by some.”
Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has been giving apparently mixed comments about modern AI systems like ChatGPT:
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI (Douglas Hofstadter on The Atlantic): “I frankly am baffled by the allure, for so many unquestionably insightful people (including many friends of mine), of letting opaque computational systems perform intellectual tasks for them. Of course it makes sense to let a computer do obviously mechanical tasks, such as computations, but when it comes to using language in a sensitive manner and talking about real-life situations where the distinction between truth and falsity and between genuineness and fakeness is absolutely crucial, to me it makes no sense whatsoever to let the artificial voice of a chatbot, chatting randomly away at dazzling speed, replace the far slower but authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being.”
A few days before the above article, he disclosed publicly how depressing and terrifying it was for him to witness a bunch of stacked soulless techniques threatening to dethrone and eclipse us in every ability, endeavor, and craft: “[I]t makes me feel diminished. It makes me feel, in some sense, like a very imperfect, flawed structure compared with these computational systems that have, you know, a million times or a billion times more knowledge than I have and are a billion times faster. It makes me feel extremely inferior. And I don't want to say deserving of being eclipsed, but it almost feels that way, as if we, all we humans, unbeknownst to us, are soon going to be eclipsed, and rightly so, because we're so imperfect and so fallible.”