samim

"Ethical Autonomous Algorithms" - A few chapters Matthieu Cherubini wrote during his PhD: https://medium.com/@mchrbn/ethical-autonomous-algorithms-5ad07c311bcc #ML #Ethics

Interviewed him & the guys at @automato_farm a while back, touching on related topics: 

Chancellor Merkel & the German government announced it's plans for a national A.I strategy, unifying all R&D activities to meet growing challenges posed especially by China: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/kuenstliche-intelligenz-so-will-merkel-china-die-stirn-bieten-15555143.html  (DE only) A few brief comments:

Highly ironic choice of image in this article, KUKA Robotics (Germany's leading robot maker) was acquired by the Chinese in 2016. Fascinating to hear Chancellor Merkel specifically talk about the Chinese as primary competitive threat in the AI race - but no the US. What is that about?

Germany and Europe have a unique opportunity when it comes to AI in combination with it's mission to become the world's first 100% renewable economy. The scale of the population (508m people), high education levels and strong industrial base are promising.

Yet in reality, the EU tech sector has been dysfunctional for years. Driven by utopian promises, EU decision makers allowed US corps to dominate the market - taking 100% of user data, while paying close to 0% tax. Such predatory behaviour makes domestic innovation impossible.

Despite such adversarial conditions, there is a real sense of hope in the EU tech scene today. The large US tech companies are under tremendous pressures (privacy, anti-compete, tax, etc.), and local innovation is strong (IP/Talent/Diversity/Continental collaboration). Onwards!

#ML #Politics 

DeepWriting: Making Digital Ink Editable via Deep Generative Modeling: #ML #Generative
Project: https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2018/deepwriting/   
Code: https://github.com/emreaksan/deepwriting

Japan has a wonderfully unique culture:

In 2011, Crypton showed on the official Hatsune Miku Facebook page a letter from the Japanese Minister of Economy for "contributing to the furtherance of the informatization by minister of economy." Geoffrey Cain of GlobalPost has argued that the phenomenon of Hatsune Miku is partly due to the love of Japanese for giving inanimate objects a soul, which is rooted in Shintoism or animism, but also in the long tradition of Karakuri ningyō or automated wooden puppets. Thus, Japanese are much more ready to accept a virtual character as "human". [source]

How Music Generated by Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping -- Not Destroying -- The Industry: https://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/legal-and-management/8350905/how-music-generated-by-artificial-intelligence-is #Music #ML #Generative

ResGAN: Speech synthesis from MFCC sequences with generative adversarial networks: 
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00920
Samples: https://users.aalto.fi/~ljuvela/mfcc_vocoding/
Code: https://github.com/ljuvela/ResGAN

#ML #Generative #Music

Botnets will be the quintessential art-form of the 2020s.

#Ideas #ML #Media  #Art #Prediction #Bots

If you want to viscerally understand Marshall Mcluhan's warnings about #Augmentation from 50y ago, spend a week in Tokyo. In this hyper artificial environment, tuned to meet seemingly any human need - Mcluhan's insight that "Augmentation leads to Amputation" is extremely real. 

#Ideas

As computation makes it increasingly easy to create virtual experiences which perfectly fool all our senses ~ experiences which mainly focus on sensory spectacles will will become meaningles quickly. Less extrospection, more introspection. Less "Wtf! Wow!", more laughter, peace and love.

#Ideas

My favorite #ML project of the month. A real world example of how computation can help reduce climate change related pressures and a case study for #FFHCI:

AI helps grow 6 billion roaches at China's largest breeding site: https://www.cnet.com/news/ai-helps-grow-6b-roaches-at-chinas-largest-breeding-facility/

"The system ensures an optimal growth environment for the cockroaches, which are eventually crushed to make a "healing potion" that cures ailments like stomachache"

Dream Lens: "Exploration and Visualization of Large-Scale Generative Design Datasets" - by Autodesk Research: https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/dreamlens

Generative design browsers are a key (missing) component for making generative processes go mainstream. The "Dream Lens" browser combines many relevant ideas, applicable to generative design tasks in other creative disciplines as well.  

#ML #Generative #Design

Thoughts on Scared Spaces

Over the past 100y, we have replaced Churches with Shopping Malls, Libraries with Fast Food Restaurants, Gardens with Parking Lots, Town Squares with Highways and Temples with Business Centres. While such changes made economically “sense”, the loss of sacred spaces is deeply inhumane. It is intimately connected with the rise of societal sicknesses and loss of diversity of experience. One of the great challenges for our generation is how to (re)invent secular sacred spaces. Any links/inspirations most welcome! #SacredSpaces

Thoughts on the generative creative economy 

I find it comedic how professional digital creative tools (video, music, design, etc.) in 2018 are still being mainly promoted as "tools for hand-crafted, artisanal creation" - while we are living in an age where bot-nets are producing and recommending artefacts by the trillions.

While the quality of creative artefacts generated with machine assistance is debatable - it is quickly getting "good enough" across many fields. Combined with other unique benefits of the generative model, traditional digital creative tools are becoming obsolete fast.

The outlines of the new creative economy are clear: 90% of all content will be machine generated (with little to no human intervention) and extremely cheap to buy. The remaining 10% will be artisanally made by humans, which focus mainly on branding and storytelling. Technologically, you don't need "AI" or very sophisticated machine learning for most of this to happen - good old creative computation (at massive scale) does the trick. 

Finally, a note to the people saying "no worries, AI + creativity is all about empowering and augmenting human creators, there won't be blood". I've worked in this industry for years & find such talk intellectually lazy and at times even deceptive. There will be blood.

I am not questioning that AI can and is empowering some creators and enable wonderful new forms of creation - it will. But to see what happens with such tech when at industrial scale, one can look at fake-news and spam generation bots. That's a more realistic view of whats coming to all creative industries, operating under our current global economic paradigm.

The generative creative economy won't be a utopia by any stretch, but likely a messy hell-hole for many creatives - not unlike the situation right now. We have to actively shape this future by fighting vested interests in the system. Yes, human jobs destroyed through growing automation capabilities can be replaced with entirely new jobs. But it won't happen magically - its a major generational effort which requires deep investment in education and culture. Human creators need to be recognised, not hidden by AI. Under the current klepto-capitalist global system, that seems highly unlikely.  

If we want more positive outcomes, the "why" needs to be addressed properly, beyond our current semi-pornographic obsession with the "how".

Follow up posts:

"Is this concern real or just doom & gloom? Is there a concrete example?":
https://samim.io/p/2018-05-26-my-recent-piece-thoughts-on-the-generative-ai-creative/

Thoughts on Botnets and Creativity:
https://samim.io/p/2018-04-23-the-solution-to-exploding-fake-news-and-spam-botnets-ca/

#Generative #Ideas

"Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet" - talk by Michael Jordan: #ML 
https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7 call to "broaden our scope, tone down the hype and recognize the serious challenges ahead."

If you are interested in innovation, never forget that - no matter what topic - it will first be used by the porn & spam industry.

#Ideas

#Prediction: The preservation or exploitation of "Cognitive Liberty" ("freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness") will become the unique selling point of many startups/companies by 2020.

Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the (Youtube) Algorithm

Finger Family Videos: 

Toy Channels are Ruining Society"

"Something is Wrong on the Internet":
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

#AGB

Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100/w: https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/r/ #AGB

"Shared Autonomy via Deep Reinforcement Learning":   #ML
http://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2018/04/18/shared-autonomy/

Deep Painterly Harmonization - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03189
Code: https://github.com/luanfujun/deep-painterly-harmonization #ML #Generative #Art