The Fragile Sea Newsletter TFS #09

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Welcome to the ninth Fragile Sea newsletter. See below for the subjects we discuss this edition.

Quickreads

• AI, devtech, comms. A quick update on the last two weeks in AI.
• EconPol. We look at connections between economic theory and algorithms
• Things that go wow. Two heart-warming stories of achievements these past two weeks.
• I wrap up in What’s coming up, and finish with a short Kokinshū poem.
• TFS#10 will be delayed some weeks and targeted for Thursday, 20^th June, at 8:00 pm, UTC, but it may be later. I have far too much work on and need to slow down for the summer or something will break!

Let's go!

AI, devtech, comms

Well, what an astonishing two weeks it has been in AI.

I see the following main trends bubbling up, with some terrific reporting from industry insiders and observers:

LLM functionality is leaping ahead

Sebastian Raschka, PhD, writing on Artificial Intelligence Made Simple, analyses four major open LLM releases – Mistral's Mixtral, Meta AI's Llama 3, Microsoft's Phi-3, and Apple's OpenELM, and also looks at popular methods for "aligning LLMs via reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF)", both well worth the read, scroll down [1].

Sam Jeans, writing on DailyAI.com also discusses Google and OpenAI's new offerings, around LLMs that can "carry on contextual conversations… laugh, sing, and emote on command…"[2].

MIT Tech Review reports on Google DeepMind's new version 3 of Aphafold, which can predict how DNA, RNA, and other molecules interact, and, among other benefits, can predict where a drug binds to a protein (speeding up finding promising new drugs) [3]. It is prone to more hallucinations, but this is being improved through more training [4].

Personal assistants

Voice assistants based on AI are now a reality, one company, Voctiv, is reported in AI Time Journal as offering a virtual agent that can handle incoming and outgoing phone calls, a mobile personal assistant for mobile subscribers, and a virtual secretary that can receive a customer’s calls, answer questions, and even schedule a meeting in a calendar [5].

Military advances

Last Week in AI, #270, May 13, reported on rifle-armed dogs now being tested by the United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) [6], [7]. Apparently, they detect targets automatically before being given approval to fire.

In Military Review May-June 2024, Col. Joshua Glonek, U.S. Army, discusses the coming military AI revolution, noting that there is a proliferation of AI research in the US and Chinese defence sectors (and no doubt, other militaries), "including autonomous vehicles, intelligence collection, predictive logistics, cybersecurity, and command and control… in essence AI can help clear some of the fog of war" [8].

SDI Sentient Digital provides a breakdown of military applications using AI [9], and John Breeden II on nextgov.com looks at the areas where deployed AI are starting to prove their value [10].

We must face it, the world is changing rapidly, and where we are headed, whether all of us like it or not, will be a new world in which AI assists humanity in a great many areas, and to differing degrees, on a spectrum between minor assists, all the way to, potentially, command and control.

It's not inconceivable to imagine how AI might surveil an issue and provide a range of options it has the capacity to solve, and then once a human decision is committed, for the AI to assume control to achieve the objective, but always enabling a human to intervene at any point. Human command, shared control, with an override.   

That might sound scary, but looking at it from another way, the issue of 'AI taking over the world' in a doomsday scenario might be overblown. It could be a super-assist that can assume control with superior knowledge of a certain limited scenario, but with override controls in place. I understand that may sound frightening.

There would be wide and varied uses in many industries for such an AI. It doesn't mean the issues of unintended consequences, how to make decisions, or how to to trust what might be a superior analysis of a situation, don't remain challenges to be resolved. These developments may spur resolutions.

It's a whole new area - and humans are not so good at foreseeing unintended consequences either. How fast can this rapid pace of development accelerate to, before humans start dropping the ball, somewhere along the line? So, while the doomsday scenarios may be overblown, the calls for restraint and legislation are not; there are still many aspects to consider, and to regulate.

Michael Depp at Lawfare writes an interesting article on 'Military AI Multilateralism' [11], and the updated US Department of State initiative, 'Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy' [12], has been " broadly successful by getting more than 50 countries to sign on… The document also adds an entirely new mention of automation bias as a challenge to the context-informed judgments of the user, indicating a stronger focus on effective human-machine teams."

Secrecy and alignment

On the theme of issues still to resolve, Eugene van der Watt writes a good short article on the power of new models to portray deep human attributes that could easily deceive [13], while his colleague Sam Jeans also has a good article about super alignment and 'Pseudoanthropic AI' [14].

They both quote an MIT study that suggests today’s AI models are actively deceiving us to achieve their goals [15], [16]. Jessica Dai also writes an insightful article around the same subject, and alignment, in the Gradient [17].

AI, legal, and media

At the start of the year, it seemed that the legal heat was rising over AI and content. Megan Morrone, writing on Axios, outlaid in January 2024, the battlefield for AI and copyright law [18]. Around the same time, WP ran an article about one thorny legal question on 'fair use' which is yet to be clarified [19].

Alex Reisner, writing in the Atlantic, late February, suggested that AI might break a 234-year old law, with implications for a creative society [20]. Joshua Gans also wrote a good article on substack suggesting ways we should approach copyright and AI [21], and followed it up with a released paper [22].

On the flip side, a veritable who's who of media companies and publishers have struck deals with OpenAI - News Corp, Politico, AP, Le Monde, and the FT, being among them. It's fascinating to observe the different types of deals; the model appears to be that media companies provide content and pay the AI companies to serve it back along with services, to their readers [23], [24], [25].

Let's turn to the main subject of this newsletter.

EconPol

The Fragile Sea is expressly non-political, but discussing connections to ideas that have political elements respects that. It's a touchy area to tread in; the aim is to present a marketplace of ideas and accurately describe them, without supporting any one view necessarily.

Economic foundations of the modern world

Economic foundations came back to me these last two weeks, upon discovering an article by Stephen Metcalfe (2017) entitled 'Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world' [26], that analyses how neolib practically built the foundations of markets in the modern era.

As far as I can make out, there's no particular mill to grind here. The article is insightful on an idea morphing, as humanity starts to ponder how to pay the true costs embedded in the long tail of economic activity.

Friedrich Hayek and Neoliberalism

In the early 80s, when the ideas were coming back into fashion, I became an avid reader of Friedrich Hayek, regarded as one of the theoretical architects of neoliberalism, whence the origins of Reaganism, and Thatcherism. Whatever the theory hath wrought, we live today under it's lasting influence.

My favourite work, The Constitution of Liberty (1960) [27], expounded a "passionate defence of freedom from coercion by the arbitrary will of others", (according to Sydney Hook's 1960 review in the New York Times Book Review, itself excerpted here [28]). The book has many varied insights, ably presented in the review.

For a theory that has practically built the modern world, it was useful to go back and revisit, including an extract entitled 'Why I am Not a Conservative' [29].

Well, he wasn't enamoured of the left, either; it's the marketplace of ideas that it dwells in, that makes it so interesting. Hayek's ideas are challenging still, and all the better for it.

One could argue that the triumvirate of Hayek, Milton Friedman, and John Maynard Keynes, built the modern market foundations, but that would lead us into deep waters, so time out there.

Hayek's more famous book, The Road To Serfdom [30], first released in March 1944, warned of the "danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning", and was originally rejected by three publishers, before being released by The University of Chicago Press to great popularity, in September 1944. It was a book for its time, and eventually sold over 350,000 copies [31]. Maybe we should revisit it.

Let us return, however, to Metcalf. He writes " For Hayek, the market didn’t just facilitate trade in goods and services; it revealed truth... How then did his ambition collapse into its opposite – the mind-bending possibility that, thanks to our thoughtless veneration of the free market, truth might be driven from public life altogether? ... The application of Hayek’s Big Idea to every aspect of our lives negates what is most distinctive about us. That is, it assigns what is most human about human beings – our minds and our volition – to algorithms and markets, leaving us to mimic, zombie-like, the shrunken idealisations of economic models" [26].

A reading of Metcalf's article helps to get the full gist of 'markets as algorithms'.

Human creativity as algorithm

The power of the market alone, became the religion of economic theory. Over the years, through reading and thinking about the good and the bad of economic theories, I'm keen to see some changes. Whatever anyone writes, nothing ever changes.

But I see in Metcalf's article, a connection to AI algorithms that have mimicked the human brain, to some extent, and our language (s), and I wonder if our greatest ideas will be 'answered' by algorithms now, as theorised then, for markets.

Maybe the idea is worth pursuing. The power of markets to set prices, and to self-regulate, we know, or should know by now, is illusory through several major crises and cycles. Did the market act like a giant multi-algorithmic machine? Maybe it did. How do we integrate human creativity with that? Will it produce an AI theory of human behaviour, like a market cycle in other Emperor's clothes?

Creativity came up previously in TFS#06. I wondered then how we will appreciate listening to a super intelligence creating it's (their?) Handel's Messiah. I keep wondering, has the market delivered an innovation that commodifies human creativity into algorithms? Maybe music streamers got there first. The present day is hard enough for artists to make a living in the creative arts as it is.

Marcus Du Sautoy, the Oxford mathematician, has written a great book on creativity, The Creativity Code, and while he promises in the early pages to concentrate more on the flash of inspiration, rather than the many hours of work prior, he takes us on a journey of what it means to be creative. He writes that only humans will understand "why another human would want to follow them on their creative journey", and he sees AI (computers) as an assist, as "telescopes and typewriters, not the storytellers" [32].

Thinking about both of these writers, Metcalfe's article suggests (I could be wrong), that human-ness can be assigned to 'algorithms and markets'. So that might connect (tenuously, maybe), to the depth of innovation in large language models (LLMs): AI – human behaviour – market behaviour – potential new theory.

A new paradigm is needed, part I

It seems we're going to have to find a place for humanity and social cohesion in a new paradigm, that also satisfies a new economic underpinning, a new theory, accounting for the rise of an 'other intelligence' in AI.

When I read about the rights of AI machines becoming conscious, I cannot help to think that we have an awful lot of work to do first in the human world on protecting and preserving human rights as it is, to even start thinking about preserving rights for AI sentience.

Maybe AI will help us to preserve human rights better. Human nature tells me not to wait too long for that to burst into the sunshine, but hopefully it might – we are facing a world in 2023, where up to 72% of the world's population live in autocracies, and only 43% of countries can be classified as democracies [33].

Anything that can be done to stop wars and protect human rights, I am all in for. Can algorithms solve for human stupidity, and evil too? I'm not sure about that.

In the latest Freedom House report (Feb 2024), global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year: "a total of 52 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 21 improved". The manipulation of elections is among the leading causes of global erosion in freedom [34].

I believe many fine thinkers, historians, scientists, economists, academics, and others, have plenty to say about our economic and political structures, and the current trend to a more authoritarian future. I wonder, and maybe others do too, whether we really can foresee where all that will end up.

Let's go back

So, I went back to a few thinkers who have studied and commented on our economic and political progress, considering institutions and markets, and then added in algorithms, to see what connections might emerge.

It would be great to motivate a dialogue around how we might form together, a coherent society, with technological, social, economic, political, and unavoidable environmental factors. A new society, like a new Italian Renaissance.

Back in 1992, in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, Samuel P. Huntington presented the "Clash of Civilizations" theory, arguing that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, suggesting that people's cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world [35].

This was developed in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs [36], and later into a book [37], in response to a book by one of his students, Francis Fukuyama, entitled The End of History and the Last Man [38], [39], which practically engendered an industry of commentary all by itself [40], [41].

There are far too many insights from these references to fully tease out, the focus here is the emphasis on democracy requiring strong institutions to ensure its survival. Huntington's earlier book, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) was controversial on first release, though Fukuyama considered it, in review, Huntington's most important contribution to the study of politics [42].

But the best was yet to come from Fukuyama, who, apart from a stellar career in academia [43], delivered a monumental two-volume masterwork, The Origins of Political Order (2011) [44], [45], and Political Order and Political Decay (2014) [46], [47].

In 2011, Sheri Berman wrote a good review of The Origins of Political Order in the Journal of Democracy, and connected it back to Huntington's works: "Samuel P. Huntington argued in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) that it was much easier to break down traditional structures than it was to build modern ones… Huntington performed an invaluable service in highlighting the importance of institutions in political development, but he had little to say about where those institutions came from or how they worked together to produce a successful outcome".

Berman connects Fukuyama and Huntington by writing that Fukuyama sought to fill this 'massive gap' in his first volume. Fukuyama insisted liberal democracy rests on three institutions: a strong and effective state, the rule of law, and political accountability: "only when all three exist together is liberal democracy possible, he writes. Then he shows just how rare an occurrence this has actually been" [48].

How do we then connect this historic thinking to neoliberalism, and from there to an algorithmic future? The Wiki entry on neoliberalism is a good start: "Neoliberalism is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism… (it has) multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively. In scholarly use, the term is frequently undefined or used to characterize a vast variety of phenomena, but primarily to describe the transformation of society due to market-based reforms" [49].

Louis Menand, the American essayist and professor, wrote a captivating article in the New Yorker, July 2023, entitled 'The Rish and Fall of Neoliberalism' [50]. As an aside, Menand was awarded a Pulitzer for his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club [51], a terrific account of American Ideas, and the birth of pragmatism, through the lives and intellectual work of four thinkers, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. One astonishing aspect Menand documented from extensive research, was the extraordinary, class-defying sacrifices taken to pursue the ideas they believed in [52].

In his New Yorker article, Menand writes "Neoliberalism has been called a political swear word, and it gets blamed for pretty much every socioeconomic ill we have, from bank failures and income inequality to the gig economy and demagogic populism. Yet for forty years neoliberalism was the principal economic doctrine of the American government. Is that what has landed us in the mess we’re in?" [50].

Along with Metcalf's article, this is an insightful piece. Menand asks what neoliberalism has wrought, noting on the plus side, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty through globalisation (now seemingly in retreat, see for example [53], [54], [55], [56]).

On the debit side, Menand asserts that deregulation, which should have spurred competition, instead, has not slowed the trend toward monopoly.

Two final articles that connected with me this newsletter are Colin Crouch's 'Neoliberalism: still to shrug off its mortal coil' [57], and Liz Manning's Investopedia piece 'Neoliberalism: What It Is, With Examples and Pros and Cons' [58].

Crouch believes there will be a never-ending war between social democracy and traditional capitalism. I hope not, we have to get beyond this, but I think he has a point here: "while some traditional conservatives are capitulating to the far-right agenda, the difficulty for the contemporary left in confronting this (antagonism) lies in its inability to find a similar emotional charge" [57].

Maybe that's political reality, but also fertile ground in which to search for ways to reach consensus, beyond politics being an unfortunately necessary and unavoidable part of living in society (at least to a significant degree). Others, of course, disagree (who cares about consensus?), and there are many who become very wealthy indeed from politics, but whatever the case, we need to agree sometime soon, in the face of headwinds growing stronger, what to do with our economics, our debt, and our world. Our resilience.

Liz Manning's piece is a good example of writing that is accurate and easy to read. Taken with the Wikipedia entry on neoliberalism [49], both sources provide a good high-level understanding of the various economic schools, and the place of neoliberalism in economic and political thought.

Neoliberalism and the crisis of democratic capitalism

For good, deeper analyses, three books (among others) are worth checking (I haven’t finished two of them yet, but so far they've been engrossing):

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. Wolf has written many excellent articles and books, and this is no exception. He writes that "we are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies" [39]. He argues from the viewpoint that democratic capitalism, though frail, is still the best system we have.

Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism released June 4, 2024, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. I am still ploughing through this book, as informative as it is readable. They write "The real triumph of the neoliberal international network was not its capture of the right, but its subsequent colonization of the parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested", and they proceed to explain how an unlikely 'third way' was cooked up by political leaders of the time (principally Blair and Clinton) with elements of Hayek and Keynes [60].

Their closing pages are biting in summary, and perceptive in calling out what society needs to mean to people, the values for a "more just and equitable world".

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, by Nicholas Wapshott. A quote by the author, interviewed in the New York Sun, and featured on the amazon.com web, best describes the book: "I reported the rise and reign of Margaret Thatcher at close quarters and wrote a great deal about her rejection of Keynes in favor of Hayek. Then I wrote a book about Reagan and Thatcher, whose political marriage was founded on a shared belief that Hayek was right. So, the story of Keynes and Hayek is a subject that has been long on my mind" [61].

The story in the latter pages of the book, of Keynes and others recommending 'the need to spend' through the pages of the Times, and the subsequent response by Hayek and collaborators, also in the Times, is excellent. They wrote: "we are of the opinion that many of the troubles of the world at the present time are due to imprudent borrowing and spending on the part of public authorities… (Such practices) mortgage the budgets of the future, and they tend to drive up the rate of interest" (Ibid., p.143).

A new paradigm is needed, part II

And so, if neoliberalism is dying, why? And what to do? Well, it's not clear that the global financial architecture has many adherents to a 'neo is dead' narrative. There doesn't seem to be much doubt, however, that something new is required.

Many fine academics and thinkers have proposed new economic paradigms, for example, Kate Raworth [62], Mariana Mazzucato [63], [64], Robert Skidelsky [65], [66], Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz [67], [68], [69], and others.

The problem is, there are entrenched opposites in terms of views on what to do, and not much willingness to come to the centre. There is little incentive, so long as the stability by faucet tap is on, and when turning it off would lead to economic collapse. So, what is the outcome? Debt. And nothing changes (only more if it).

Any new ideas are often disparaged as 'leftie-communist' or 'woke'. It's a pity, and becoming an existential crisis, that we continue to talk past each other. Economic theory has many dusty corridors and dead ends that remain entrenched, hostage to ideology and vested interests (see for example, [70], [71]). It's far too complex a subject to be handled effectively in a post. Many writers and thinkers have tried to suggest ways, and nothing changes.

Recently, Stiglitz, writing in The Washington Post (May 13, 2024 'Time is up for neoliberals'), suggests that democracy requires a new progressive capitalism, and in the final paragraph, defines what that means. He envisages a 21^st Century economy, managed through decentralization, and encompassing private enterprise, "unions, non-profits, civil society, and public institutions" [72].

I hope he is right. Or that we somehow come to a new consensus. I see the possibilities that AI will bring, enabling very fast access to the vast body of human knowledge (at least if the copyright issues can be sorted out), in ways the human brain cannot conceive.

It would be a type of super-assist that can take control if agreed by humans (with guard rails and a Turing stop button), that will bring stunning new possibilities, to help us, heading into this new world. What a fantastic assist that will be with all the problems ahead of us. But only if we take heed of all our experts.

One expert I have followed for many years, Max Tegmark, this last week, speaking to the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, suggested that safety is now taking a back seat in AI developments, and had some frank comments to make about the progress of AI. He has detractors of course, but he is not alone in his comments [73].

There are more and astounding innovations that will come; regulation seems to be the only course open to us, since we cannot hope to control AI by technological means alone [74], [75], [76], [77].

Painting ideas of the future

For entrepreneurs, business owners, consultants, those that deploy capital in a market-based economy, the wish is more than likely for Government to get out of the way, or to continue to pay for various ventures, or to fund various incentives.

That view is understandable, but it needs to become part of a new consensus, in which we also back rebuilding social worth, and well-being, into a more cohesive society. And figure out how to price in the true cost of input factors, including side-waste in production, end-of-life disposal, and true beginning-to-end product life costs. And clean up too. The incentives must be worthy of encouraging the right motivations.

And so, looking at humanity through the multiple lens of market and AI algorithms, maybe it's not so hard to see a world in which humanity becomes part of something wider, and deeper, and larger.

This will entail a journey, to where we find the creative spark, the sources of inspiration, the knowledge, the libraries, and the ideas, in forgotten nooks and crannies that our human minds cannot recall, let alone assemble completely. This is where AI shines.

It hints at a tantalising thought: are the answers to our problems already sitting there somewhere, in our knowledge banks, long passed from memory? In AI, have we innovated a new Rosetta stone that will deliver for us untold riches we already have?

It's a nice thought, but even so, we cannot let all we have come here with, our creative history, be melded, like Brownian motion [78], into a dissipative 'ether'. We must somehow preserve and enable better appreciation of the artistic beauty humans have brought with us, to this point in time. Otherwise, human creativity will be dissolved into paradigms we might not be able to live with.

And sometime in that future, we might spark a new Renaissance, in the cycle of generations [79], [80], [81].

Our time has not even begun yet; it would be nice to believe, somewhere in our future, something like the early flush of the 60's, comes again - for all the faults of that era, and before it rotted from within, a bit wiser.

A new Renaissance would be better. By then, we might have learnt to value freedom again.

Things that go wow

We leave it there.

The Good News Network (I have no idea if it has Christian affiliations), is always good for uplifting stories. This past week, my heart was warmed by the following stories:

The edge of space at 91

Andy Corbley writes of Edward Dwight, at 91 years of age, and 60 years after he passed Air Force selection, "as a candidate to be the first African American astronaut", blasted off into the heavens last Sunday aboard a Jeff Bezos spaceship, and spent ten minutes at the edge of space between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. The story is a good one, amazing really, and his comments, a treasure. Congrats to Mr Dwight [82].

My Dad, Stuart Smith, at 96 years old, and whom I talk to every day from Ireland to New Zealand, will be tickled by that story.

First graduating students

Corbley also writes of the first 46 graduating students from "the inaugural class of the nation’s first medical college on a Native American reservation", a school funded entirely by the Cherokee nation.

As Corbley writes, the graduating students included "fifteen members of tribes all around the country, including Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Alaska Native, Caddo, and Osage" [83].

Congrats and well done to all, the story includes details about the inclusion of traditional healing practises, and wonderful commentary from students.

What's coming up

After some deep thought, I have concluded that over the coming summer months, I have far too much on, and unfortunately the things I love to do the most, writing and researching, are the only things I can realistically slim down, for a period.

TFS#10 will therefore be delayed some weeks and targeted for Thursday, 20^th June, at 8:00 pm, UTC, but it may be later.

If it is, I wish everyone in the Northern hemisphere, a happy summer, please be mindful of the sun, and the heat, drink plenty of water, and wear hats and other protection.

The Fragile Sea is free to subscribe here.

Thanks for reading. I hope you can join me again, till then, take care,

Brent

The gusting breeze

Comes to my house

Upon a summer night

Making the moonlight

Feel cool, indeed!

KANPYŌ NO ŌNTOKI KISAI NO MIYA UTA’AWASE 29 [84]

Bye for now

Room 5000 - a short story I wrote in 1981 about a computer becoming sentient

TFS#09 - What do Neoliberalism, Friederich Hayek, markets, algorithms, AI, and creativity have in common? We delve into these subjects for more connections

TFS#08 - What are the correlations between growth, debt, inflation, and interest rates? In this business edition of The Fragile Sea, we go hunting in corporate, institutional, and academic papers for insights in the face of heightened political, economic, corporate, and environmental risks, and more besides!

TFS#07 - We discuss a mixing pot of subjects - the state of AI, will there be food shortages this summer? good things and not so in energy, pandemics - are we ready? some remarkable discoveries, and more!

TFS#06 - Can AI produce true creativity? We discuss music, art and creativity, why human creators have a strong future, and why we must assure that they do

TFS#05 - Practical guides for implementing AI, in other news, a revisit on CRISPR, and events in spaceweather, fake publishing, spring blossoms, and more!

TFS#04 - Has Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) arrived already? We look at the goings on in AI over the past four months

TFS#03 - AGI and machine sentience, copyright, developments in biotech, space weather, and much more 

TFS#02 - Sam Altman's $7trn request for investment in AI, economic outlooks, and happenings in biotech, robotics, psychology, and philosophy.

TFS#01 - Economic outlooks, and happenings in AI, social media, biotech, robotics, psychology, and philosophy.

AI 2024 Series

Part 1: Introduction / History of AI

Part 2: Technologies

Part 3: Commercial uses

Part 4: Neural architectures and sentience - coming soon!

Part 5: Meaning, Language, and Data

Part 6: Ethics, oversight and legal

Part 7: Media and social

Part 8: Future humanity

[1]:         S. Raschka PhD, 'How Good Are the Latest Open LLMs? And Is DPO Better Than PPO?’, May 12, 2024. https://artificialintelligencemadesimple.substack.com/cp/144590253

[2]:         S. Jeans, 'Google and OpenAI announcements shatter boundaries between humans and AI’, DailyAI, May 15, 2024. https://dailyai.com/2024/05/google-and-openai-shatter-boundaries-between-humans-and-ai/

[3]:         MIT Technology Review, 'Google DeepMind’s new AlphaFold can model a much larger slice of biological life’, MIT Technology Review, May 08, 2024. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/08/1092183/google-deepminds-new-alphafold-can-model-a-much-larger-slice-of-biological-life/

[4]:         J. Abramson et al., 'Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3’, Nature, pp. 1–3, May 2024, https://www.doi.org/10/gttgxm

[5]:         V. Belov, 'Alexander Kuznetsov, Voctiv: ‘Voice Bots That Can Speak Like Humans Are in Demand Worldwide’,’ AI Time Journal - Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Work and Business, Apr. 26, 2024. https://www.aitimejournal.com/alexander-kuznetsov-voctiv-voice-bots-that-can-speak-like-humans-are-in-demand-worldwide/48713/

[6]:         L. W. in AI, 'Last Week in AI #270: DeepMind releases AlphaFold 3, Marines test robot dogs with rifles, DeepSeek-V2, TikTok to label AI-generated content, and more!’, Mar. 11, 2024. https://lastweekin.ai/p/270

[7]:         H. A. Parken Oliver, 'Rifle-Armed Robot Dogs Now Being Tested By Marine Special Operators (Updated)’, The War Zone, May 07, 2024. https://www.twz.com/sea/rifle-armed-robot-dogs-now-being-tested-by-marine-special-operators

[8]:         J. Glonek Col., 'The Coming Military AI Revolution’, Army University Press. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2024/MJ-24-Glonek/

[9]:         Sentient Digital, Inc., 'Military Applications of AI in 2024’, Sentient Digital, Inc., Mar. 15, 2024. https://sdi.ai/blog/the-most-useful-military-applications-of-ai/

[10]:       J. Breeden II, 'Examining some places where AI has already been deployed within the military’, Nextgov.com, Feb. 26, 2024. https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2024/02/examining-where-ai-has-already-been-deployed-within-military/394464/

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