Kyle Roth

Having heard about the terrible privacy policies of car manufacturers and Ford’s new patent to automate vehicle repossession, I was finally able to formulate some thoughts I’ve had brewing for a while about ownership in this world of ubiquitous computing. Before the industrial revolution, humans could essentially understand what a thing did by looking at it, and ownership was about possession of the object. Now we don’t understand our tools, and so possession does not imply control.

In late March 2023, the NYT released a series of explainer articles about AI. The first article in the seriesYou can also read it on Archive.org if you don’t have a subscription. characterizes the recent history of AI as a progression of new technological ideas appearing over time. Of course that’s partially true, but it gets the order wrong and misses important non-technical events that are key to understanding our current position.

These are some thoughts I’ve had while listening to a Lex Fridman interview with Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on mathematical quantum physics. In the information age, we like to see everything as computation. But what do we mean when we say that something is computation? We mean that a physical system with predictable interactions has a meaningful result. If we somehow learned that the universe was computational in nature, the only thing that adds is that the universe’s state is meaningful somehow.

These are my notes from a conversation between Yoshua Bengio and Kate Crawford held at Mila on 2023-03-20, announcing the release of a new book created as a joint report between Mila and UNESCO called Missing links in AI governance (link). There were news articles in French (Le Devoir), but not as many in English unfortunately (Datanami). Bengio: What motivates you to do what you do? This topic has turned from an academic move to a societal one really quickly, and it’s scary.

On 2022-11-03 a class action lawsuit was announced against GitHub Copilot on the basis of copyright infringement, and now (2023-01-13) there’s one for stable diffusion (against StabilityAI and friends). Browsing through r/StableDiffusion, I’m seeing lots of posts like this making the very memeable point that 5 billion images can’t be stored in a 4 GB model. From the original poster:The thumbnail for this post was generated with stable diffusion. See the alt text for details.