The big tech players are already switching from Supervised Learning to Reinforcement Learning, cos they are running out of human generated data to train their neural network AIs. This is already one step in the direction of trans-human intelligence, when the AI starts to teach/train itself. Now there is also Zero Shot Learning, when the AI starts to generalize on its own w/o pre-data present. AI already showing emergent properties?

Archetype AI's Newton Model Masters Physics From Raw Data
https://www.hpcwire.com/2024/10/28/archetype-ais-newton-model-masters-physics-from-raw-data/

In a world in need of water, in need of food, why the AI?

Global Water Crisis Leaves Half of World Food Production at Risk in Next 25 Years

More than half the world's food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review. From a report: Half the world's population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday. Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world's water systems are being put under "unprecedented stress," the report found. The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person's health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade -- in food, clothing and consumer goods -- to meet their needs. Some countries benefit more than others from "green water," which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to "blue water" from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in "atmospheric rivers" which transport moisture from one region to another.

Simplified...

The Boomer Generation brought us the Home Computer Revolution, one computer in every home. Think of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak), think of Microsoft (Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer).

The Generation X brought us the big Internet Platforms, as Google (Larry Page, Sergey Brin) or Amazon (Jeff Bezos) and with Meta (Mark Zuckerberg) in between.

Now the Generation Y brings us the Super AI, think of OpenAI and Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati.

Question, what is Gen Z up to? What will Gen Alpha be up to?

100 billion dollars for a data center with 5GW (nuclear) power consumption to

secure enough computing capacity to eventually power "self-improving AI" that won't rely on rapidly depleting human-generated data to train new models

OpenAI asked US to approve energy-guzzling 5GW data centers, report says
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/openai-asked-us-to-approve-energy-guzzling-5gw-data-centers-report-says/

Well, these guys know what they are up to.

Bengio flipped:

Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously
https://yoshuabengio.org/2024/07/09/reasoning-through-arguments-against-taking-ai-safety-seriously/

"I worry that with the current trajectory of public and political engagement with AI risk, we could collectively sleepwalk - even race - into a fog behind which could lie a catastrophe that many knew was possible, but whose prevention wasn't prioritized enough."

Hinton flipped:

Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He's Built
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinton-profile-ai

"People say, It's just glorified autocomplete," he told me, standing in his kitchen. (He has suffered from back pain for most of his life; it eventually grew so severe that he gave up sitting. He has not sat down for more than an hour since 2005.) "Now, let's analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what's being said. That's the only way. So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you're actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it's 'autocomplete'-but you didn't think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete." Hinton thinks that "large language models," such as GPT, which powers OpenAI's chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas.

LeCun half flipped:

Meta AI Head: ChatGPT Will Never Reach Human Intelligence
https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/meta-ai-head-chatgpt-will-never-reach-human-intelligence/

These models, LeCun told the FT, "do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot plan...hierarchically."

Bostrom was shut down:

Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/oxford-future-of-humanity-institute-closes

Nick Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute closed this week in what Swedish-born philosopher says was "death by bureaucracy"

Metzinger had a clash with political reality:

Eine Frage der Ethik
https://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2019-04/kuenstliche-intelligenz-eu-kommission-richtlinien-moral-kodex-maschinen-ethik/komplettansicht
A question of ethics (on Gooogle Translate)
https://www-zeit-de.translate.goog/digital/internet/2019-04/kuenstliche-intelligenz-eu-kommission-richtlinien-moral-kodex-maschinen-ethik/komplettansicht?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

What is artificial intelligence allowed to do? Experts commissioned by the EU have looked into this question and developed ethical guidelines. Not everyone thinks they go far enough.

Springer paper: ChatGPT is bullshit
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called 'AI hallucinations'. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

We're in the brute force phase of AI - once it ends, demand for GPUs will too
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/10/brute_force_ai_era_gartner/

Generative AI is, in short, being asked to solve problems it was not designed to solve.

I have a bad feeling on this...

Apple's Hidden AI Prompts Discovered In macOS Beta
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/08/06/2113250/apples-hidden-ai-prompts-discovered-in-macos-beta

"Do not hallucinate"; and "Do not make up factual information."

Anthropic Publishes the 'System Prompts' That Make Claude Tick
https://slashdot.org/story/24/08/27/2140245/anthropic-publishes-the-system-prompts-that-make-claude-tick

"Claude is now being connected with a human,"

AI works better if you ask it to be a Star Trek character
https://www.fudzilla.com/news/ai/59468-ai-works-better-if-you-ask-it-to-be-a-star-trek-character

"Boffins are baffled after they managed to get their AI to perform more accurate maths if they were asked to do it in the style of a Star Trek character."

Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/27/1096148/ray-kurzweil-futurist-ai-medicine-advances-freedom/

"By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect."

"As superhuman AI makes most goods and services so abundant as to be almost free, the need to structure our lives around jobs will fade away."

"And material abundance will ease economic pressures and afford families the quality time together they've long yearned for."

Haha, definitely a techno-optimist. But I still don't get this AI -> material abundance thing.

After reading about the first IBM Chinese typewriter, I discussed with a tech-buddy the advantage of the Roman alphabet vs. Chinese logographs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_typewriter#IBM_and_Kao's_electric_design

Here an interresting article about the history of Chinese typewriters and computer IO, with reference to two recent books:

Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/26/1096630/chinese-writing-technology-evolution-thomas-mullaney/

If we compare the Roman alphabet and Chinese logographs over history in context of technological development, we Romans had for a time an advantage in communication. Take the invention of book printing with movable types for example, take the 2x5-bit Baudaut code for telegrams, take the 7-bit ASCII code. But meanwhile I believe that the advantage reversed, some Chinese keyboards have four types of input, Roman alphabet and Zhuyin, Cangjie, Dayi for entering Chinese characters.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=479188

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_IT

Nowadays the Western advantage of an short alphabet in a technical context is gone, and meanwhile an advantage of thinking in different kind of language systems might prevail, think of the Saphir-Worf hypothesis with context of a keyboard with four different input methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Worf_hypothesis

I myself still count as generation X, the gen Z had a disruption with smartphones, internet and social-media, now the upcoming generation Alpha will grow up with AI agents present...

Recommended reading:

Here's how people are actually using AI
Something peculiar and slightly unexpected has happened: people have started forming relationships with AI systems.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/12/1096202/how-people-actually-using-ai/

"Mahari was part of a group of researchers that analyzed a million ChatGPT interaction logs and found that the second most popular use of AI was sexual role playing."

AI and the future of sex
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/26/1096526/ai-sex-relationships-porn/

"The rise of AI-generated porn may be a symptom of a new synthetic sexuality, not the cause. In the near future, we may find this porn arousing because of its artificiality, not in spite of it."

Considering the "Dragon AI" experiment before the ChatGPT release, this does not come as a surprise to some of us.

If we look at some recent sci-fi movies, we see a lot of human-AI relationship stories, so IMO we entered already another level, the human-AI romance level.

My recommended sci-fi movies in this regard:

Her (2013)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

Ex Machina (2014)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/

And maybe another kind of book for the deep dive, Golem XIV (1973) by Stanislaw Lem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV