Kyle Roth

I wrote this paper with Stephen Betts, a friend of mine doing Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia. (Click the title to download the preprint.) Our interest in the topic was initially piqued when we stumbled across the Wilford Woodruff AI Learning Experience, and this paper explores the unique intersection of Mormonism, transhumanism, and machine learning that makes such a thing possible. We’re currently looking for a venue to publish this work. Any feedback on the preprint is appreciated!

I will present this paper in the FATE (fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics) reading group tomorrow (2023-10-25). You can view the slides I’ll use here. There are unresolved tensions in the algorithmic ethics world. Here are two examples: Is inclusion always good? Gebru: “you can’t have ethical A.I. that’s not inclusive… [a]nd whoever is creating the technology is setting the standards” Nelson: “… I struggle to understand why we want to make black communities more cognizant in facial recognition systems that are disproportionately used for surveillance.” academic activism O’Neil: why is there a lack of academic efforts to inform policymakers and regulators? PERVADE: Academics have been doing this work for a while but it is underfunded, marginalized, and at odds with a US political apparatus generally favorable towards Silicon Valley. Ethics manifestos or value statements mask these tensions behind a business ethics lens.

You can view this episode here, and you can download a transcript I made with whisper-medium here. I accept responsibility for errors in the transcript, alongside OpenAI, all people whose voices exist on the web, and the rest of humanity. :) writing technology permalink DYT: You know, it took humans like centuries to perfect the technology of a dictionary and it took hundreds, thousands of people, probably like millions of hours to actually get to the point where you can easily look up a word.

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. We need to figure out what to do.