Satanic Technology Through The Ages Reaches AI

 

AI and other tech breakthroughs have been treated with similar suspicion. This applies to the arrival of the printing press, the locomotive and the motor vehicle. 

Below is what happened when Gottfried Benz took his vehicle into town for a drive in the 19th Century. It was the AI breakthrough of its time.

“It was soon apparent to him that not a word about his experiments had reached the ears of those outside Mannheim… It was as though some diabolical engine of the father of evil had suddenly dropped from the clouds; children fled screaming from him to their houses; mothers made a hasty rush for their offspring and pulled them indoors as they did so. A number of the older people, less agile than the others, fell down on their knees as he approached, and made the sign of the cross on their breasts. Horses took fright, and either bolted or performed circus tricks in the middle of the road.  One young man fled in terror in front of him shouting to all at the Devil had come; men repairing the roads threw down their tools and made off across Fields as fast as their legs would carry them. in other villages he passed through, the inhabitants took up an aggressive attitude; large numbers of stones were thrown … 

In many parts of the country it was regarded as something supernatural. Astonishment, terror and hostility were intermixed, for the inhabitants seldom read newspapers and so missed the brief allusions to the new invention which were beginning to appear in the German Press.”

The motor vehicle is one of a long list of overreactions to satanic technologies. For example, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out,” said Elon Musk in 2014.  

More recently there was a letter urging for a pause on development signed by tech leaders, professors and researchers in urged artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” 

The motor car provides many new opportunities and changed society. However, it put the horse and cart transport out of business. Should we have demanded a 6-month pause back then?

Business Writing: The Hedgehog and The Fox

One of the articles that I wrote for Top Consultant is linked below. Project Management keeps moving and sometimes the behaviours need to catch up with the technology and sometimes we are waiting for the technology to become easier to support the way we want to work.

There is a balance to be struck between a specialist and a good consultant and this is discussed in the article below. I have no choice but to like being a fox and there are days when I can only admire the dedication that it takes to become a hedgehog.

http://images2.top-consultant.com/chopped/images/99943.pdf

Regards

The Fly and Machine Learning

I watched 1986 version of the 'The Fly' last week and realised that the core of the film was about machine learning and it was a good demonstration of how it works and how some limitations. I shan't explain the plot but at one point Jeff Goldblum (playing his familiar role of maverick scientist) realises that the reason his telepods are not teleporting animate objects properly is that they do not understand what organic material is so they create their approximation of it. He proves this by teleporting a piece of steak and cooking it for Geena Davis, his co-star. The steak looks OK but tastes wrong. After he realises this problem he trains the computer by teleporting steak until comes through the other side at a quality that is edible. He then has a workable teleportation machine that successfully transmits live animals and he tests it and it works. 1- 0 to machine learning v human overconfidence.

Alas, when he transmits himself there is a fly in the telepod and the machine hasn't been taught how to deal with two entities and has a guess and decides to fuse them at the DNA level with unfortunate results. The machine could have been taught how to deal with multiple entities but Jeff Goldblum did seem to be a scientist in a hurry with a taste for shortcuts. 1- 1 machine learning v human overconfidence.

Another subtle warning in the film is that the Goldblum character is a scientist/inventor but he does create any of the components. He designs them, other people build them and then send them to him. He puts them together to get the effect he wants without anyone being aware of the objective but he really doesn't know how they are built.

If he had been able to write a few lines of code he could have written something along the lines of:

If NumOf Entities >1 Then

Print "Clean Out The Telepod"

Exit

Endif

Then he would've avoided all the unpleasantness of being turned into a human fly and picked up his Nobel Prize and we would not have overcrowded trains on the way into work.

Evolving Communication - Emoji Wonderland!

 It is incredible that old stories can be restored through modern technology and techniques. Even though we know 'Alice in Wonderland' when you see a different set of pictures attached to it because it is set in a different time it will give you a new perspective. A man called Joe Hale has translated some well-known stories using emojis.

An emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication such as the smiley faces that you use in instant messaging.  Emojis are almost like modern-day hieroglyphics, An enterprising individual, Joe Hale, has created special emojis and used them to make a four-foot-tall Wonderland Emoji Poster that tells the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

The tale begins with a combination of "backhand pointing down," "rabbit," and "heavy large circle," to depict Alice's journey down the rabbit hole. Alice, represented by the princess emoji, encounters a Cheshire "smiling cat face with open mouth emoji," a mad "top hat emoji," and frightening "crown emoji" of hearts. Hale painstakingly translated these images, along with dozens more, from Carroll's original text, layering over 25,000 separate symbols until "the emoji text was sufficiently dense that [he] could transliterate the emoji back into a crude version of the original."

Joe believes the idea, ‘"Alice in Wonderland translated into emoji," is powerful enough to create images in the reader's mind's eye, and anybody curious enough can develop these images into their own personal Wonderland in their head and escape to that place. People should just use my poster as a visual aid to think about Wonderland, trip out and explore their imagination. Or: be inspired to read some Lewis Carroll!’

Here is a couple of examples of his translation of the ‘Alice’ text to a set of images. The emojis below translates as:

We're all mad here

The Hatter was the first to break the silence

Other Alice quotes as emojis can be seen on twitter account @emojiwonderland

Joe says “this project has taken inspiration from the intensely visual atmosphere of the Disney Alice in Wonderland film, William Burroughs' writings on hieroglyphics and the Buddhist concept of visualisation.”

'He described the creative process. 'When I was translating I put the emojis on in layers—almost more like painting than writing—until the emoji text was sufficiently dense that I could transliterate the emoji back into a crude version of the original. I think I put about five of these layers on, then countless read-throughs, cross-checks, etc. until I was reading through the text and not changing anything. It was a dreamy, dizzying endeavour.'

I wonder if this use of emojis might be a step in the direction of a new form of cryptography. 

The poster is available online for $29.95 at http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster. I will confess that I bought a copy as an appreciation of his quixotic, creative idea.