The Artifice, Hype and Artificial Intelligence
The word artificial contains art, in fact it begins with art. And these days it is preceding the word intelligence. Is this a signal to a new world and order, the priority of artificial before intelligence? The virtual world has extended its reach inside the real world and now AI has arrived. It is the BUZZ not a buzzword, a node emanating a series of ripples and a source of it. And I am left to wander more and figure less what the deal is? All the signs say it is BIG. So, I begin by asking and exploring. What if, my queries and doubts appear inane, mundane or refuse to take audible and verbal forms. Can AI help? Artificial science or it is an art? An engineering marvel or closer to craftsmanship associated with art. What is clear is that for the time being, the future and AI have been interwoven and tied together.
Artificial intelligence will throw the gates of ‘free intelligence’ open in future, while you will be billed for word, excel and Onenote. And Open AI will seamlessly integrate with Microsoft’s colossal software empire. Upgraded versions of chat-bots seek payment. The ordinary folks struggle to link or distinguish future from present and past from present, Gates presents a future for us to see and partake in. The goodies in future and business as usual in present. Bill Gates is a visionary, always has been.
Anything that is big, innovative and lined with the future is associated with innovation, creativity and augmentation or a leap in human capability. Anything big is expected to solve hitherto unsolved problems, tackle big issues like climate change. It is admissible that some of us are aware of our existing limitations( in tech?) and the problems that besets us. Did you wait till Bill Gates announced that Artificial Intelligence is going to do that?
Wait is alluded to for a reason. These are the only occasions when the powerful, influential and big accept/admit that the world we live in has problems and issues. The world we live in is largely a result of their actions, decisions and choices.
There is little that distinguishes( users perspective) one software empire from another -- Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and many more, especially with respect to Artificial Intelligence. However, the Chinese AI product/version (following how the English internet talks about China) arrived in no time. In terms of economy of scale and capability Deepseek matches AI from the first world? In AI and software scales Europe(Mistral) and Russia is lagging behind? In spite of the EU AI act 2024, a push towards ethical AI and commitment to open source development of software? And India and Indians are fine with being a market, most number of users and ahead in adopting/adapting ai!
The primitive tools starting with stones were of course technologies and artifice has been part of human lives for ages. Artifice, artificial and artificiality plays a central role in modern life. Its influence and spread permeates life. But why would anyone bring up the past when we are talking about the future? Past, anyway, is a path that breaks into thousand lines while its continuity's structure and orients us towards a specific present. Do we need such a background, compass to place, navigate and work with Artificial intelligence?
An analysis of the etymologies, history and semantics of artificial could be helpful. Artificial can be contrasted to what is organic or natural. Similarly Artificial can be compared to a human construct. These exercises could enlarge the ambit of artificial, they can also help in narrowing down what we may unreflectively take as natural or artificial. Assemblies as found in nature and human constructs are the same?
Assembly as a gathering of people or things, command line argument in assembly language, assembly line for production and manufacturing(Ford's vision), assemblage in art and French and assemblage as philosophical concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. assemble as a or any arrangement. to assemble following a command or spontaneously related, how?
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| Image sourced from Wordcloud.com |
The natural and artificial distinct or the line dividing them is thin? What if these lines have already been blurred? Artificial intelligence defines the moment when the line between artificial and natural is blurred, merged and forged as one for each one of us to see? How do these questions relate or connect to the emergence of artificial intelligence?
Once it became clear that to build artificial intelligence, Large Language Models computes billions of parameters and has been fed trillions of pages of knowledge, I decided to check what is stored in my computer and I read some of them, again. Among these reads was Alan Turing’s computing machinery and intelligence published in the science journal Mind in 1950! He mentions the game of chess as a possible beginning and I noticed how bots have adopted his Turing test; they now seek proof that you are human! Claude names one of its models as sonnet.
Turing mentions the minds of children and beginning with expansive organs to learn. And the process of learning language by children occupies a central place in Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory. In between, Copilot informs/interesting facts that ‘In their infancy, some computers were promoted as "artificial brains." It was a clever pitch to emphasize their ability to handle complex tasks resembling human intelligence.’
The imitation, thinking, mimics and mimesis of machines acting as human beings and vice versa would enhance the value of this conversation, but that requires more mediation and meditation. A paragraph or two may not capture the issues.
Expectedly, one of the bullet points Copilot summarized is what I thought was brought together in my last blog post. A week’s labor turns into a line. So, knowledge is the ability to condense, expand, compare, illustrate or apply?
Semantics, emotional grids and gradients and trends that surround us often interact and lead to what we label as a feeling or mark broadly as experience. Most people, especially the new generation, slide and dip like an arrow from a construct to spurious. phony and fake. Why is it not enough that analysis of this graph with its troughs and peaks is hinted at, and the impulse to indulge into this analysis is curbed? Any day I would advocate work with a pause( AI pause?). You want more? Let me propose that it is a loop, and we may encounter it again?
One finds an overemphasis of novel, the unexpected in the reported leap in available technologies and knowledge with respect to Artificial Intelligence. Let me assure you that the artifice of life has been erected, extended and defended with the artificial. Artificial flavours, colour, food, smells, products have been part of our lives. The AI copilot approves, or it likes ‘the flavors and scents’ idea? Following is presented as an interesting fact, ‘Artificial flavors and scents have been part of human life for centuries. For example, vanilla flavor is often created synthetically using chemicals like vanillin, which can be derived from wood pulp!’. Simply, Vanilla is unlike strawberry and all flavors are not sourced from fruits. Most consumables and products in stores near you have artificial flavours, colours and smells. Added and artificial flavours, tastes and smells aren’t extracts from naturals. Now artificial intelligence has hit stores.
There is an array of new artificial tools and products and unlike Neuralink most of them would not be embedded, implanted(silicon, chips) or inserted inside human bodies. Artificial to a large extent constitutes modern life and most human beings are partly cyborgs? A roof, a wall, cloth, shoes, lenses, hearing aids, refrigerators and heating apparatus, cooking gas are artificial tools, they condition and constitute life. So why balk at artificial?
The list of artificial medical implants is long. Its reach includes smiles and dentures. Beauty, an idea, concept, complex or an industry? The make-up business is artificial. I am not making it up!
AI adds generation to automation through tech. AI learns through simulation and mimics NLP while generating language. Artificial intelligence is not working with biological and genetic material.
The eye surgery of Tiger Woods is equivalent in value to the artificial limb provided to a soldier injured in a landmine blast? Questions like these have been raised and debated. Discussions always do not lead to insights or gains in knowledge. On several occasions discussions keep the conversation going, it allows differences and agreements in opinion to emerge and take form. As a manifestation of advance over other biological beings and more fundamentally conversation reiterates that humans are communicating beings. This discussion about artificial intelligence is of this kind.
Fears and anxieties do not exclusively belong to the future, they shape and colour our present. It is true that all of it cannot be allayed and conquered. Rational presentation of facts and anchoring future to deliverables is preferable to elevating expectations to mythical, magical level. The other extreme is to reduce and present life as a series of ritualistic, repetitive steps with roughly the same end/s. Rationality and reasonable expectations tend to avoid extremities of life. A better future or genuine advancements in capability of human beings is possible. And AI’s pitch whether it was for sale or adapt/adopt-ability can be faulted on these counts.
The future of a business model working with the internet and search engines looks shaky. The Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) business model for opinions, knowledge and products has been most affected by the advent and emergence of artificial intelligence. Professionals in this field have been thrown into a vortex of hyper anxieties about the new rules of the game. Well established brands and products depend on curated mentions; their PR machinery is also feeling a sense of unease. Perplexity offers a mix : cite sources, share revenue for follow-up questions and integrate and upgrade publisher-creator with the new Q&A business. The internet and virtual world -platform of platforms– has come up with a new product and AI is making news. Would it continue to do so, yes.
Software and the process of making them were becoming complex, cumbersome and expansive and beyond the reach of common folks. Despite user-friendly interface actual use and profitable and productive deployment of software remained latent and much below the optimal. The ai agents/assistants are navigational tools to help the users with the features and functions of software which were already in place. A lot of buzz about ai is just this. Expect that no one will tell me that software learns human languages but is unaware wbout how programming/coding works! In short, write codes and programs for free and it has begun.
Artificial as a label to sell and brand products have exponentially increased. Mostly because people do see a new capability. For many products it is a sales pitch and nothing more. This writing is also AI powered; is it impactful?
Whether creativity would reign supreme and human beings would be freed from mechanical, repetitive tasks and how work and labour would realign would pan out soon. We have heard about a future that holds this promise and possibility, before. Right? It is possible but unlikely in the near future.
Artificial intelligence poses risks and Geoffrey HInton has sounded an alarm and alerted us, before he won the Nobel prize in physics 2024. He is not alone and many AI scientists and notable figures have signed a statement.
AI would usher us to a new world. Once AI encounters words like usher(असर) --a phonetic similarity between languages, what does it do? Will it take a random number and mark( take a token) this shift and transit among languages or stays within a language? Lexical meanings and variations in meaning of one word, figure of speech within a language keeps language programmers and their vectors tense.
Have my own curiosities about AI but many are busy trying their hand with image generation or chatting. IT professionals in India are teaching how to use AI and the users are keeping its programmers awake. Sam Altman, if AI systems are ready why engineers can't leave their desk?
The new bloc in town artificial intelligence is a result of synergies and integration between computer science, neurosciences and linguistics. Large language models draw from linguistics and neurosciences and relies on mathematics. This emerging field, though lies at the intersection and overlapping field of computer science, electronics and physics.
It is a fact that computation capability--storage and speed--has seen rapid advancements. Computation has also forayed into various domains of knowledge and diversified. The moment of AI is an occasion to integrate its own diverse growth?
Let me present a future scenario. Skill, knowledge and technology available with genetics meets the advancements of artificial intelligence in NLP. Simple tissues have grown in labs, cloning, recombinant technology exists. Remember, Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997 and by 2003 the human genome project was complete. NLP AI in future will not need to or depend on human brain? If, biotechnology, genetics and NLP AI come together for a project, what that project could be? The ethical questions, bounds of knowledge and available technology have a long relation with each other. Discussing future scenarios is one way of thinking about them.
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