Remember Nature?
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Do not take life too seriously—you will never get out of it alive.
Cartoons by B.Kliban - Quote by? - #Art #Comedy #Philosophy
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AI rivals average human competitive coder?
A journalist asked me to comment on the story "DeepMind AI rivals average human competitive coder". My comments ended up in the CNBC story "Machines are getting better at writing their own code. But human-level is ‘light years away’". Here are my comments in full length:
Every good computer programmer knows, that it is essentially impossible to create "perfect code" and that all programs are flawed and will eventually fail in unforeseeable ways, due to Hacks, Bugs or Complexity. Hence, computer programming in most critical contexts is fundamentally about building "fail safe" systems that are "accountable". In a 1979 presentation, IBM made the statement: "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision". Besides all the recent hype around "AI Coder outperforming humans", the question of the accountability of code remains largely ignored. Has anything changed since IBM made that statement? Do we really want hyper-complex, in-transparent, non-introspectable, so called "autonomous" systems that are essentially incomprehensibly to most and unaccountable to all, to run our critical infrastructure, such as the finance system, food supply chain, Nuclear power plants, weapon systems or space ships?
#ML #Augmentation #Complexity #InfoSec #Robot #Systems #Comment
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Shabako Stone - a relic incised with an ancient Egyptian religious text (Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt)
The Shabako Stone tells of the god Ptah, the cosmic architect who created the entire Cosmos simply by uttering words. Lines 56-57 of the text state: “Lo, every word of god came into being through the thoughts of the mind and the command on the tongue.” Read More, More, More
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How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Is Real
The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations.
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Allen Ginsberg, Angleton and the ‘Poetics of the CIA’
Yes, Kids, Cookie Monster is a Psyop
Sesame Street was created by veteran officers of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Office with the goal of blunting the force of social-justice radicalism in the United States by promoting the liberal ideology that oppression not a structural economic injustice, but a matter of poor individual character or bad social skills. In a 1970’s state-directed project to determine how humans establish cathexis with military hardware, computer engineer Alan Kay leveraged the graphical capabilities of highly-advanced prototype personal computers to display animations of one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters, Cookie Monster, because he felt this would help children see personal computers not as technological artifacts derived from Air Force weapons, but as friendly and even “magical” helpers in their lives.
Kay, who developed the PARC Alto computer and Smalltalk programming language concurrently with Xerox funding the creation of Sesame Street, is very clear about this in his “Early History of Smalltalk.” Building the Sesame Street characters in to the design of the Alto’s user interface was an evolutionary step in ARPA’s 20 year study on “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”
Aerial combat was the initial use case for this cyborg symbiosis, and in the 1950’s/early 1960s this research was directed towards neuromuscular interfaces with the hardware – humans being literally “wired in” to the computers. By the late 1960s / early 1970s, computer displays + pointing devices (derived from Air Force radar scopes) had become responsive enough that it was possible to use the computer as an interface to display traditional works of art: books, music, animation. This is where it became possible for the user to establish deeper cathexis with the hardware across the full range of human emotions. Control feedback loops became visual / endocrine, not mechanical / muscular. This was the conceptual leap that Engelbart + Kay pulled off at SRI and PARC. It took Steve Jobs another few years to figure out how to commodify that cathexis, and then the Personal Computer Revolution was underway.
Although MK-Ultra was a CIA black operation nominally under the control of Dulles, it was in reality a British intelligence operation run into the United States under the cover of the CIA and the Rand Corporation. Furthermore. the presence of the Office of Naval Intelligence and Air Force Intelligence in the original -Operation Artichoke and MK-Ultra task force. and the subsequent importance of trained operatives of ONI and Air Force Intelligence in the creation of U.S.-based terrorist cults. points to heavy contamination of these agencies in particular by British SIS
The three British intelligence agents heading up MK Ultra as research directors from 1952 on were Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman of the Warburg-owned San doz drug firm (where Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1943), and Humphrey Osmond, a close Huxley family friend and physician based at the University of London Hospital where he studied schizophrenia.
#Cryptocracy #Media #Culture #HCI #Military #Art #History #Psychedelic
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Everyday objects can run artificial intelligence programs - Nontraditional hardware could help neural networks operate faster and more efficiently than computer chips. (paper)
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How James Webb will reveal what Hubble missed - Hubble's deepest views of space revealed fewer than 10% of the Universe's galaxies. James Webb will change that forever.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been designed to answer many of the core questions that have animated astronomers over the past half-century. With a $10 billion price tag, it is one of the most ambitious engineering initiatives ever attempted. But for it to achieve its potential — nothing less than to rewrite the history of the cosmos and reshape humanity’s position within it — a lot of things have to work just right.
