Mind Expanding 25 Aug 2023: don’t delegate understanding🚫capitalism’s willing executioner?💸the future of documents📄a new normal♻️sponge cities not sponging🧽your face belongs to us🫣

Do LLMs understand the world?

Memia Mind Expanding is my ~fortnightly curation of links to deeper dives, bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter. Thanks for subscribing!

In today’s post:

• 🚫Don't delegate understanding avoiding ignorance

• 🧠More thinking about AI the pitfalls of AI hype and the philosophy of AI dreaming and understanding

• 📄The future of documents? how might AI transform information encapsulation?

• 🌍☔🌡️On climate change climate modelling and the limits to growth

• 🏙️♻️On urban design fresh regenerative urban strategies from Australia and the latest on sponge cities

• 💭Miscellany everything else: never ending stories, China convergence, representation theory, industrial pop culture, quantum neuromorphism and the power of fungi🍄

• ⚫🔭Space stories How Voyager 2 was rescued and early black holes spotted by JWST

• 📚Reading list even more books which I will be asking GPT-4 to summarise in bullet points🤫

Enjoy!

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🚫Don’t delegate understanding

An impassioned post from Obsidian CEO Stephan Ango (@kepano on Twitter): Don’t delegate understanding. This aligns with a lot of my thinking these days as I continue to “try to make sense of it all”…

“Don't delegate understanding.

There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it.

The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better. Instead of understanding it yourself, you choose to give the parasite control over your health, education, money, housing, business, identity, data, infrastructure, climate, justice. Even your beliefs.

The parasite has three stages: acceptance, extraction, intervention. …

…The three stages of the parasite are interdependent. Every stage benefits someone who is not you. Everyone tells you this is just the way it is. Never mind that the parasite is living large.

Why? Extraction and intervention pay well. Education and prevention do not. The incentives are aligned to make the parasite persuasive. You are alone against a coordinated system that is exceedingly effective at packaging problems you should never have with solutions you should never need. A symbiotic loop.

You must recognize the parasite in its earliest form. To inoculate yourself don’t delegate understanding.

If you build your own understanding you will be the one who earns the dividends.”

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🧠More thinking about AI

Some more long-form thinking about AI in amongst the torrent of new models and use cases:

Capitalism’s willing executioner?

Ted Chiang in The New Yorker asks: Will AI become the new McKinsey?

“I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you.”

The Generative AI Trap

Insightful from Alberto Romero: The LK-99 Superconductor Buzz Has Exposed the Trap of the Generative AI Revolution:

I found the buzz around RTSC (room temperature semiconductors) uniquely valuable to illustrate how AI plays tricks in our minds—not the systems but the concept. Until now, I didn’t have a clear contemporary example to get the point across but the circumstances have changed: even if the LK-99 ends up being nothing, it’s a contender to lead the global conversation on which new tech will disrupt the world the fastest. As such, it can provide insights about generative AI unavailable otherwise.

I don’t think anyone expected generative AI to face a competitor for the title of “most revolutionary technology of the century” so soon (or never). The LK-99 and its hypothetical RTSC properties—whether real or not—give us a serendipitously unique opportunity to see what is and isn’t reasonable in the discourse around the supposedly inevitable AI revolution…

It took a possibly greater tech discovery to evidence that we're collectively living inside the febrile dream that is the generative AI hype bubble. As an AI lover, I don't mean it to disregard the ability of ChatGPT and the like, which is undeniable, but to underscore how people’s response to AI progress—and the predictions that stem from that response—are disproportionate.”

AI is dreaming