Mind Expanding 6 Oct 2023: Understanding entropy?🌡️📉AI is the new OS💻anti-apple🍎 the origin of conscious awareness👶AI, doubt thyself❓3 body bot💫

If you can’t tell does it matter?🤖

Mind Expanding is Memia’s ~fortnightly¹ curation of links to deeper dives, bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter.

In today’s post:

• 🌡️📉Understanding Entropy?

  • The Second Law Stephen Wolfram's new book and podcast interview

• 💭Philosophy and Psychology of AI

  • ⚖️🤖If you can’t tell does it matter?Do we need new laws for human-Like AI?

  • 👀It's in the eyes AI will be able to sense what we’re thinking before we know ourselves

  • ❓AI, doubt thyself how Google taught Bard to doubt itself

  • 💻AI is the new OS? Some profound insights from Andrej Karpathy

  • 🗜️Language modeling is compression new research looking at LLMs in the abstract

• 🍎Anti-Apple groundbreaking research from CERN's antimatter factory

• 🌍Keeping on overshooting a new paper from Kiwi conservationists identifies the “behavioural crisis” driving anthropogenic ecological overshoot.

  • ⌛Get Prepping …so what to do about that?

• 📚Reading List A couple more books on AI to ask Anthropic Claude to summarise in bullet points

• 🗂️Miscellany Everything else

  • 🛰️📍The Story of GPS Hurray for Ronald Reagan

    • 👶The origin of conscious awareness new research on babies’ motor skills

    • 🌌Galactic Colonisation sim I could watch for hours

    • 🏢21st Century Architecture in the 20th Century - the original plans for the still-incredible Habitat67 in Vancouver have been rendered in VR

    • 💫3 Body Bot hypnotic physics sims

Thanks for reading, enjoy!

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🌡️📉Understanding entropy?

Stephen Wolfram’s work on computation continues to evolve… his new book The Second Law discusses The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Eg: heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or 'downhill' in terms of the temperature gradient).

David Galbraith discusses: Wolfram’s Computational Interpretation of the Second Law and a Physics Based View of Evolution:

“Wolfram suggests that the 2nd Law is the result of the interplay between observers with limited computational ability and systems which cannot be quickly computed by such observers (CI), where a theory of observers is needed to define things more rigorously.”

Here’s the man himself in a 100-minute interview on the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast… get your mental chops around this:

(I use Summarize.tech to help me understand 10% of what he’s talking about…).

(His theory of a “Ruliad” of computational rules underpinning the physics of the Universe is not uncontroversial).

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💭Philosophy and psychology of AI

⚖️🤖If you can’t tell does it matter?

With ever-more convincing AI chatbots, avatars and robots arriving ever day, Colin Gavaghan of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (previously with Otago University) asks: Do we need new law for human-like AI?:

“Are mandatory disclosure laws the answer?

AI agents are certainly being optimized to pass for human, with a view to sell, persuade, seduce and nudge us into parting with our attention, our money, our data, our votes. What’s less obvious is how much mandatory disclosure will insulate us against that. Will knowing that we’re interacting with an AI protect us against its superhuman persuasive power?

There is some reason to think it might play a role...[but also a] ... reason to be somewhat sceptical of mandatory disclosure solutions is that telling me whether something was generated by AI tells me little or nothing about whether it’s true, or about whether the person I’m talking to is who they claim to be...

...What about emotional manipulation? Will knowing that I’m talking to an AI help us resist the sort of emotional investment that will help the AI lead me into bad decisions?

My answer for now is: I just don’t know. What I do know, from many hours of personal experience, is that I am by no means immune to emotional investment even in the very weak AI we have now. They don’t even need to look remotely human. I’m even a sucker for the blatant emotional nudges from the little green owl if I don’t do my DuoLingo practice!

Vulnerable and lonely people are going to be even easier prey. Phishing and catfishing are likely still to be problems, whether the fisher is a human or an AI. Imagine trying to resist that AI Abraham Lincoln (or Taylor Swift or Ryan Gosling), when it’s been optimized to hit all the right sweet-talking notes.

👀It’s in the eyes

We don’t really stand a chance against AIs equipped with cameras: Our Eyes Give Away Our Decisions Before We Can Express Them and our internal cognitive decision-making process isn't as covert as we imagine it to be:

“A recent study demonstrated that our eyes can reveal decisions we’re making, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. This eye-brain connection, especially the subtle eye movements known as saccades, gives away clues about our cognitive processes.

The intricate dance of our eye movements offers more than just a passive view of the world. Rather, our eyes are predictive indicators of our impending decisions. As technological advancements like eye-tracking continue to evolve, potential applications in market research, product design and behavioral studies become increasingly profound. Recognizing this untapped power of our gaze can provide valuable insights into understanding consumer behavior and decision-making processes.”

❓AI, doubt thyself

How Google taught Bard to doubt itself: