AI & neural networks

Imagine aliens observing human life today. ‘Oh, they have some shit to deal with - climate change, energy, water and food availability, terminally ageing populations etc. etc.’ ‘OK, so what are they doing?’ ‘They’re all…

One of Europe’s leading AI experts, on teaching his machine learning (ML) course. AI isn’t just parroting humans or playing with words.

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still…

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. Their projected debts were so enormous that many felt they would collapse under the weight. But now they’ve found the only bottomless pit of funding in the world - the…

Since the 1990s we’ve lived the disruption of social media to our lives. It’s been so destructive, we’re stripping away centuries of human progress in the space of a few decades. I encourage you to view the current…

Ask anybody how our democracies work and they’ll trot out the usual guff about parliaments and elections and voting etc. Since the 1990s all of that is gone. Social media algorithms govern our societies. Humans are…

Many of us lived the transition from social networking online, which was integrated with our physical communities. To social media, which ‘feeds’ you a version of social life, with no connection to your physical…

The most trivial, tiny social transactions are now processed through these platforms. The idea social media is an ‘information’ technology is nonsense. It’s a social technology, it replaces social life. How do people…

I saw this article on social media. It made me laugh. The great imitation, levelling-sameness machine in the world today is social media. That’s its actual business model. To force billions to regurgitate the same…

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the Odyssey, tells the story of our lives today. Puck’s magic causes the unleashing of uncontrolled desire, as each falls in love with the first person they see. This…

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won…

I worked with Ange at CSU, she was in marketing. Years ago now she left to create her own marketing company, which has been very successful. I saw this opinion piece from her on Linkedin, about the impact of AI on…

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those…

I feel PayPal's algorithms need some work, sending this to me.

As the pumped-up hysteria over AI data centres continues, fed by the algorithms on the socials, it’s worth looking back to the response when railroads were first built. Nothing changes.

I often say we live inside social media now, that it hijacked our entire culture. Here's what I mean, in numbers. Social media platforms are private businesses, mostly owned by American billionaires. They now own…

Amongst the hysteria about AI taking over the world, we still forget I think that a technology already did that, and in much more damaging ways. Social media is a giant machine that transforms all of human life into…

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few…

The most profound thing AI is doing is blowing apart the idea that ‘me’ is this little person up in our heads, staring out our eye sockets. The me that thinks the world is just how it is, a view from those eye sockets,…

Modern mobile phones have NPUs (neural processing units) to carry out artificial intelligence/machine learning operations, on the phones. iPhones and Android phones have had these AI chips for nearly 10 years. The…

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them.…

Neural networks have a lesson for people. When you have different things interacting, like neurons in your brain, or weighted numbers in an AI network, or even people, what will allow them to together produce…

Everything is in the framing. If we see AI as some magical black box that contains 'intelligence', or just statistical tricks, everything we think and say about it will be framed by that assumption. Every time it gets…

In a neural network, a ‘thing’ doesn’t exist in one place. It’s nothing like a database. It’s a distributed ‘weighting’ across many different network nodes, shifting all the time as the network experiences more. The…

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

‘Dynamic pricing’ is a growing rage in commerce. Meaning prices that can be changed quickly to reflect changing conditions. For example if lettuce is getting a bit old, the price quickly made cheaper to get it off the…

Social media drives families and friends apart, and splinters public life as well. When we say ‘society is divided’, it isn’t really. That’s just social media’s business model. Its algorithm.

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

Personally I think they should close all social media platforms. We’re trapped inside their bubbles, while the world crumbles around us as we play status and identity games, that drive their algorithms. Society is…

Toby Walsh in the Herald today, saying things about social media that I often say about it. That it’s hijacked our societies, we transact everything from our personal to professional to political lives inside it. That…

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived…

The kids drove back from Sydney last night. They didn't charge while down there, and when they got to Katoomba they were already below 30% charge. But the car told them they'd have 22% charge when they got home. And…

I get very tired of ‘debates’, and rarely engage with them. They define our age too because they’re the team sports I often talk about, driven by social media. The algorithms there prioritise people arguing, it drives…

The easiest social media posts to critique are the obvious hate speech type things, or scammers, or people being generally abusive. But this type of friendly innocuous post is actually the most dangerous symptom of all…

You’re supposed to wish people a Happy Christmas here I’m sure, because we’re supposed to treat social media *as* our lives in the community, the venue for our social lives. The place we meet, the new public square. I…

I’ve criticised the use of social media as a personal space over many years. It’s not a personal space, though that’s overwhelmingly how it gets used. Peoples’ social lives are now transacted on these platforms. They’re…

What happens when you use social media as a platform for your actual life. It’s alarming when you think about it that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now providing the infrastructure for…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering…

You can see in what happened here how modern politics works. Turn everything into a ‘fight’. When Trump say he’s fighting, he means his own people, in the US. But on the other ‘team’. Which some call the ‘Far Left’. But…

The phone is the tool that transforms life into social media. And it’s not a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a circular self-referential loop, where we use the world to feed our social media feeds, which in turn…

Scrolling the FB feed, have a rough look at how many posts the algorithms now show you that are actually from your friends, compared to the number that are product placements, or ‘suggested’ things you might like based…

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our…

I’m not sure if my posts are still being seen in the same way, this absolutely ludicrous platform put a restriction on my account because last year I posted a picture of Neville Chamberlain shaking Hitler’s hand, in a…

A study compared the response of an artificial intelligence bot (ChatGPT) and doctors, to patients. The AI won hands-down, for both quality of information, and empathy of response. There’s some fear about AI, probably…

My favourite story of the day is Microsoft needing to urgently modify its new AI bot, because it was hitting on a married man.…

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for…

An example of what the new AI can already do. The Wharton business school is one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. It pitted 200 of its graduates against ChatGPT (AI software) in a competition to…

“Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara did not understand why the customer was So Fucking Angry. All of the customers were angry. The man at the counter was waving his plate at Farsith,…

Our world is mostly driven by algorithms. Techniques and machines for producing automatic knowledge, from basic arithmetic with pen and paper, through to computers. We wet our pants over artificial intelligence, but…

More of my love affair with analog photography. Look at the breathtaking quality of light in this shot. So many nuances that digital algorithms couldn't possibly capture here, I think. I'm a huge fan of the freedom and…

This guy's software can create hundreds of thousands of books automatically, which he sells on Amazon. It made me think about the TV stories you see about how machines are going to be smarter than us, and we should…

Some of the most solemn drivel in public debates is the stuff on A.I. Artificial intelligence is portrayed as computers becoming brains. Brains don’t ‘think’ either so it’s layer upon layer of drivel. There will never…

I think by far the most interesting thing to come out of artificial intelligence and robot research is the changes it forces in our ideas about thinking more generally. For example it was only when people tried to build…

Artificial intelligence is famous, but much more interesting I think is the research in the past couple of decades on collective intelligence. Can groups or even crowds, think? There’s a lot of prejudice against crowds,…