Artificial Intelligence - An Owl & Ibis Presentation by Fred Benoff

 

Kudos to Fred Benoff on his July 31, 2021 Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds presentation, "Artificial Intelligence!"

A PDF copy of the slideshow is available here.

Fred did a masterful job presenting a complex science and technology topic. In a concise manner he covered:

• deep fakes
• misinformation
• the connection between AI and the activity of neurons and neural networks
• AI biases and mistakes
• AI applications in medicine and transportation
• AI ethics
• the future of artificial general intelligence (human-like) and artificial super intelligence (greater than human intelligence)
• the use of AI in war and terrorism
• the possibility of humans losing control of AI 

The discussion that followed was far-ranging and thought provoking.

Thanks, Fred. Great job!

Help a Small Health Clinic in Uganda Keep People Healthy

We are halfway to our goal thanks to all who have contributed! Please join us by making a donation of any amount to Pius Health Clinic through GoFundMe at this link:

https://gofund.me/7232ac72

Thank you.

JEL

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Primate Scorned

© Gary Larson (1985)

Fieldnotes refer to qualitative notes recorded by scientists or researchers while conducting research “out there” in the field, during or after their observation of a specific organism and its activities, or any other phenomenon they are studying. Such notes are intended to be aids to memory and as documentary evidence that supports the understandings researchers come up with about the object of their study.

I have written informally in my journal and more formally in ethnographic fieldnotes for decades. After completing my anthropological training in the 1970s, I thereafter regarded everyday living among my fellow humans as an opportunity to learn something about being human, and to learn something about how to be a better human myself.

Writing in a journal and recording fieldnotes helps me remember and aids my ability to study and benefit from my professional and personal experiences. I hope to benefit or gain something from doing this in terms of cultivating and becoming more consistent in displaying personal virtue, and in terms of understanding human thinking and behavior.

I sometimes fail in terms of behaving virtuously and misunderstand the ideas and actions of my fellows. Nevertheless, I think my anthropological understandings would have been far less accurate and the development of my personal virtues more stunted had I not recorded and reflected on my experiences in writing.

The ancient Stoics tell us there are some things in life that are within our control - our granting or not granting assent to emotions as they arise in us; and our ability to choose to use or not use deliberative reasoning in response to our emotional states as they ebb and flow in various modes and shades of intensity. Our emotions arise constantly during our life experiences. Our reasoned responses to them over which we have control can sometimes become beyond our control. That is, we can fail to exercise reason in responding to arising emotions and surrender behaviorally, partially or totally, to the emotion of the moment – happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, anger, contempt, passion, pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, or excitement.

In the above comic, Gary Larson shows what might lie in store for an anthropologist, in this case a primatologist, who underestimates the literacy and symbolic understandings gorillas have of humans, and who fails to protect from prying eyes the reasoned evidence and subjective impressions dutifully entered in her fieldnotes.

One must wonder if the gorillas depicted practiced Stoicism in some rudimentary form, and if they did how consistent they were in this instance in responding reasonably to their emotions of surprise and anger. After all, they had graciously allowed the anthropologist to live peacefully within their midst for months only to have her abuse one of their own in her fieldnotes.

Hmm, let’s see, where did I store my old fieldnotes and journals….

You, Me and the Truth Industry Against Modernity

 The Rise of the Truth Industry

Jem Bartholomew

June 28, 2021

New Humanist

The article linked above says much about the modern times we live in. The estrangement we feel from our fellows. The degree to which we are manipulated by others through mass media over which we have little to no control.

The writer makes a distinction between disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is media content that is deliberately false. Misinformation is content that is accidentally false.

The truth industry is an information ecosystem that emerged in the 21st Century to combat disinformation and misinformation on social media. Fact-checking began in print media newsrooms in the early 20^th Century. Fact-checkers now also include independent, post-media dis-/misinformation exposure efforts that began in the 2000s.

Culled from the article, here is a sample of things dis-/misinformation independent fact-checkers are trying to do:

• document, expose and combat mis- and disinformation;
• fight fake news (computational propaganda); tear down echo chambers and fact-check misinformation;
• fill the [media information oversight] holes left by inadequate government restrictions and tech platforms’ lack of action;
• verify politicians' claims; fact-check political statements; online verification and debunking;
• search for harmful, widely spread, and public figure megaphoned dis-/misinformation in newspapers, drivetime radio, news sites, TV talk shows;
• reinsert shades of grey into information people have presented as black and white;
• persuade misinformed people; discourage elites from repeating falsehoods; drive up standards in journalism;
• present a reputational cost for sexing up dodgy data or spinning the truth;
• shore up faith in public institutional sources of knowledge;
• help glue back together society’s fractured sense of a shared epistemology;
• look at more than untruths; factual but emotive content or partisan narratives are just as powerful when the aim is to change behaviour; truth can definitely be used and warped slightly to suit particular actors’ goals;
• enhance civic discourse;
• create maps of the structural relationships between social media actors;
• drive up media accountability and transparency and spot repeat spreaders of mis-/disinformation;
• look for threats to business models;
• pre-bunk disinformation before it goes viral; work not just when there’s a fire; strive to prevent these fires from occurring; douse the rising flames;
• once a threat is identified, encourage the mustering of political will – from governments and platforms – to tackle it;
• react against the lack of thought about the potential misuse of the information media tools tech companies build and compound by a desire to scale up as quickly as possible;
• address the symptoms and causes of the inability of social media companies to get a grip on misinformation on their platforms, and the unwillingness of governments to regulate them;
• repair the media environment that social media broke.

It is easy to argue that these efforts are commendable. I think they are noble pursuits in the sense that truth and trust have been fundamental to being human for the greatest portion of Homo sapiens' 300,000 year existence. Have we lied, cheated, and betrayed each other since the beginning? Yes, of course. But the reset position is always a return to the pursuit of truth regarding our physical and social environments, and the building of trust among our fellows, within and between groups.

But something very bad happened to (was done to?) truth and trust at some point in our species' cultural evolution. Something that would eventually contribute to the emergence of social and ecological conditions that would threaten all of humankind and the life-supporting capacity of Earth. When did this change begin?