AI and the vagaries of language

A recent article took a detailed looked into the dramatic and rapid sequence of events involving the firing of Sam Altman as the head of OpenAI by its board of directors, the subsequent resignations of much of the top talent, the immediate hiring of them by Microsoft (which was an investor in OpenAI), and the resignation of the Open AI board and the return of Altman and others to the company, all within the space of less that a week.

It is not the corporate maneuvering that I want to write about but the potential and dangers of AI. There has been a great deal written about the new generation of AI software and whether it stays at the level of being large language models that seem to mimic intelligence but still require constant interaction, direction, and supervision by humans or whether they achieve the more advanced level of artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is close to human intelligence and can function much more autonomously, and where that could lead.

Some employees at OpenAI and Microsoft, and elsewhere in the tech world, had expressed worries about A.I. companies moving forward recklessly. Even Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and a board member, had spoken publicly about the dangers of an unconstrained A.I. “superintelligence.”

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Why do we still have smoking in films?

There is a lot of smoking in films that are set back in the days before smoking became well known as a serious health hazard. For example, in the film Maestro that I reviewed a few days ago, Bradly Cooper who plays Leonard Bernstein has a cigarette in his mouth pretty much all the time. This caused me to wonder if those were real cigarettes, because it did not seem right to have actors risk their lives with cigarette smoke just to play a role. Films now routinely carry a disclaimer that no animals were harmed in the making of the film, which is a welcome development, but why do we not carry that over to the actors?

This article explains that film makers often use prop cigarettes instead of tobacco-based ones.
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Using OLC coordinates as addresses

Carmel-by-the-Sea (usually just called Carmel) is a small, upscale, touristy town of boutique shops and restaurants that is adjacent to Monterey where I live. It received a lot of publicity for a short time when Clint Eastwood, one of its residents, was elected mayor from 1986 to 1988. I do not know if his campaign slogan was “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?”

It is a town that eschews the usual system of identifying houses, since none of the houses have a street number. This causes all manner of problems (not the least being the inability of emergency vehicles to find their destinations in a hurry) as I discussed in a post last year. But efforts to bring the town in line with the standard system arouses fierce opposition from some residents. “In 1953, the city even threatened to secede from California when the state considered making it mandatory to have house numbers.” This was of course a ridiculous threat since there is no way that a tiny town could practically function on its own, even if it was allowed to secede. But threats to secede are often brought up in the US by those who feel aggrieved for one reason or another, even over absurdly trivial issues like this.
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Was Y2K an overhyped threat?

Remember the Y2K panic? There were fears that computers that came into widespread use in the mid-twentieth century, when the year 2000 seemed very far away, had been programmed with internal clocks that assumed that the first two digits of the year was 19. There was concern that when the year 2000 rolled around, many systems would crash because the computers might think the year had suddenly reverted to 1900 and thereby go awry. There were fears of planes crashing, power systems going down, the banking and financial sectors going haywire, and so on.

There was a lot of activity among computer professionals to take steps to solve the problem before the end of 1999. I personally did not do anything since I am not a computer professional. I also tend not to wait up on December 31 until the New Year rolls around but on that day I did decide to stay up until midnight to see what might happen. And there was … nothing. Everything was just as before.
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What would a criminal justice system in the absence of free will look like?

I read the new book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky where he outlines the biological basis for why we have no free will. I will discuss the main arguments of the book in a later post but here I want to outline what he says about an objection that believers in free will often raise, and that is that if we say that all our actions are determined by our genes, history, environment, and random factors, and that we did not freely choose to do them, then people who commit crimes should not be blamed and punished. He agrees that such people should not be blamed for what is after all outside their control and that retributive and punitive punishments, that form such a large part of our criminal justice system, have no place. But that does not mean that we simply do nothing.

He sets up his argument by recalling how things have changed so dramatically over time in the way that we respond to people with illnesses like epilepsy or schizophrenia that cause them to act in ways that are dangerous to themselves and to others. (Chapter 13, pages 300-340) In the past, it used to be thought that their actions were freely chosen ones and they were punished accordingly, often in horrendous ways. Not anymore. Now we realize that they are victims of illnesses that cause them to behave in those ways, and we have changed our response accordingly. As he says: “Once, having a seizure was steeped in the perceptions of agency, autonomy, and freely choosing to join Satan’s army. Now we effortlessly accept that none of those terms make sense. And the sky hasn’t fallen. I believe that most of us would agree that the world is a better place because sufferers of this disease are not burned at the stake.” (p. 316)
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What AI systems know about me

I saw a couple of recent posts by people who had asked AI systems for information about themselves. Asking these system to tell you information about yourself is a good way to see if they are making up stuff because presumably you know your own life better than anyone or anything else. They reported that after giving out information that was correct, it suddenly seemed to veer off and simply make up stuff about them.

Curious, I decided to try this for myself. I asked ChatGPT “What can you tell me about Mano Singham?” and got back this response.

Mano Singham is a theoretical physicist, author, and retired professor. As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, he is known for his contributions to the field of physics and for his writings on science, education, and atheism. Mano Singham has held the position of Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) at Case Western Reserve University.

In addition to his academic work, Singham has been an active writer and blogger. He has written extensively on topics related to science, secularism, and rational thinking. One of his notable works is the book “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets,” where he explores the mathematical references and jokes hidden in the popular animated TV show “The Simpsons.”

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How safe are self-driving cars?

I for one would really like to see self-driving cars become an everyday reality, as common as cars are now. It may surprise people that many such cars are already widely used in several cities as taxis. But there are key questions concerning safety and one would hope that the companies marketing these cars would be transparent about the ability of their cars to detect pedestrians and obstacles. But Sam Biddle writes that one major company is putting its cars out on the streets even though it seems to have two key vulnerabilities: an inability to see small children and large holes in the ground.
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How dangerous are deepfakes?

We have got used to the existence of ‘deepfakes’, computer generated images and videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This has caused some serious concerns about the possibility of deepfakes becoming a powerful tool for disinformation and mischief, especially in the political arena, since it is possible to have people seem to say and do things that are damaging to themselves with the viewer being none the wiser that they have been conned.

But how dangerous is this?

In the November 20, 2023 issue ofThe New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews some recent books that look at the dangers posed by deepfakes and concludes that the fears may be overblown, and that even when deepfakes are explicitly political, most of it is used for parody and otherwise humorous purposes, and not meant to convince us that we are watching the real thing,

Fakery in the visual realm goes back to the earliest days of photography, where a lot of editing was done in darkroooms to get the effect sought.

In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location).
…

From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.

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On free will

There are few things that arouse stronger reactions in people than the claim that free will is an illusion. When I used to run workshops for graduate students on how to critically read research papers, I would hand out a paper that discussed experiments that had evidence that seemed to show support for the idea that we did not have free will. (More on the nature of this evidence later.) The students would get into this exercise with gusto, as I knew they would, poring over the paper and analyzing the data and the reasoning to try to find flaws so that they could hold on to the idea that they had free will.

Why do we cling so tenaciously to the idea that we have free will? To even discus the idea we need to be clearer about what we even mean by the term ‘free will’, since there is some ambiguity there and many different definitions floating around. The usual free will model is that ‘I’ consciously make a decision to take some action (get up, pick up a pen, say something, etc.) and then carry it out. The word ‘will’ is not that problematic. We can assign it to the decision-making process that results in the command to be executed. It is the word ‘free’ that causes problems. Free of what, exactly? A belief in ‘free’ will says that the ‘I’ is not purely biologically driven and is in control of that part of the process and could just as easily have made a different decision (keep sitting, not pick up the pen, stay silent, etc.) and carried that out.

But who is this ‘I’ that initiates the process?
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