The Weekly Flail — January 19, 2024
The Future
The disparity between the American mainstream media and reality is increasing from my perspective. Tremendous effort is being made to justify that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. The consistently low opinion of the American population is a mystery that our official commentators cannot understand. What’s wrong with us?
We will soon be told that the daily beatings will continue until morale improves.
Why do I get the feeling that those who rule are keeping Trump alive as a threat to deliver the daily beatings? It doesn’t take much to see that he is disintegrating before our eyes. Will he last the summer?
Just a couple of points of disparity as examples:
- Quartz announced that America is drowning OPEC in oil: The US is producing more oil than any country in history, some 13 million barrels per day… [c]ombined with record production in Brazil and Guyana (whose oil resources are the key to an escalating diplomatic row with Venezuela). . . So much for saving the planet and ‘moving away from fossil fuels’ (COP28 last month).
- The Economist explained that Israel’s efforts at the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, which they refuse to stop, are NOT genocide because Hamas attacked Israel. Israel is committing mass murder and ethnic cleansing to eliminate all Palestinians from their land who are, per Israel, all Hamas. Hopefully, the Economist feels better now.
Gaza/Middle East War
As the header in this section indicates, the Israel/Gaza war has expanded. We might as well accept it. Missiles and drones are flying between Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria while the American Empire forces are bombing Yemen.
The Houthis are tough, and American bombs are not going to intimidate them. Biden has admitted that the bombing isn’t stopping anything but destroying the homes of some of the poorest people on the planet, but that is no reason to stop.
The Houthis have made it clear that their attacks on shipping are strictly to limit supplies to Israel to stop support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. I don’t appreciate being on the side that supports genocide (ok, mass murder and war crimes) against an impoverished country attempting to save people.
On another brutal note, Israel has now destroyed all universities in Gaza.
Nicola Perugini, an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh, shared the video and said: “The Israeli military just blew up the University of Palestine in Gaza City with 315 mines. All the universities in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. We need a full academic boycott.” Source. The National Scotland
AI/AGI
The debate continues on the rapid expansion of language models powering AI; the question is how close we are to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The following is from an article that is well worth reading.
“decades from now, [these models] will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI, just as the 1945 ENIAC is now recognized as the first true general-purpose electronic computer.” The overriding point here is that, though there are clear limits, frontier models demonstrate the core property of generality through a command of a large number of topics, tasks, languages, and modalities. They are also capable of ‘instructability,’ which refers to the idea that frontier models are capable of learning from real-world interaction after they have already been trained.
As for defining AGI, an interesting effort came from Google DeepMind at the end of the year, where researchers proposed a framework for classifying the capabilities and behaviours of AGI systems and their precursors. The work is based on six principles that categorising AGI ought to follow, including: focusing on capabilities over mechanisms; separately evaluating generality and performance; and defining stages along the path to AGI rather than just the endpoint.
The researchers introduced a levelled taxonomy with two key dimensions: performance (the depth of capabilities compared to humans) and generality (the breadth of capabilities of a given model). Within this framework, the group introduces five levels of performance that they categorise as emerging, competent, expert, virtuoso, superhuman.
If you have read any of my work, AGI is the only route to save us from self-destruction. We are in a race to the end.
The Winter Consumer Electronics Show is always fun. I attended both winter and summer shows over my years in cable television with Time Warner. The question is, what new product will make it?
The hottest product this year was Rabbit’s new pocket AI system. Below is the keynote address by Rabbit’s president.
Spoiler: A version of Rabbit’s service will likely be available on your smartphone shortly. But that raises a bigger question: what is our smartphone becoming?
Managing and regulating AI in all its evolving forms is critical.
Below is a good analysis of the problem.
Hopefully, next week, we will see some sanity to go with the technology; that is our hope. We are all in this together.
Originally published at https://rlandok.substack.com.
