šø Rolling Stone does a
BEAUTIFUL intro to AI and robots: āFor better or worse, whatever future we create, it will be the one we design and build for ourselves. To paraphrase an old adage about the structure of the universe: Itās humans all the way down.ā Not much new here, but a well written seven-minute read.
On the subject of the future, we design and build ourselves,
here is a video of a Boston Dynamics robot dog playing with a real dog. Spot the section where the young man operating the robot jokes that he is moving it into ābattle modeā. And I guess this is the problem, the future we design and build ourselves, would we prefer if the people coding our robots instinctively reached for 'co-operation modeā rather than 'battle modeā? Iād love to speak to the guy in the video - there is a good discussion to be had about ethical frameworks in AI design.Ā
But semantic relationships can only be learnt from the data that goes into the system. (Remember
word2vecās crazy abstractions? Or the Google photosā gorillas catastrophe?) Ā This cross-section of old British and American literature reflects the politics, power dynamics and beliefs of the time. Kiplingās
Jungle BookĀ is amongst this canon: a book which has a well-identified and troubling relationship with colonial prejudices and racist undertones. As a parent taking a child through the Jungle Book, we can make the child aware of those dimensions and put it, and Kipling himself, in a wider context. (See also last weekās EV
on Priors & Prejudice.)Ā
It would be comforting to know a cultural anthropologist or a critical theorist was embedded with the team providing some kind of lens into the perspectives embedded in those texts. Has Facebook done this? I donāt know but itās unsettling.Ā
Elsewhere: