AI & the future of civilization ⊗ Rethinking labels: the origins of Metalabel ⊗ Of pods, squads, crews & gangs

This week has felt kind of like the first week of the pandemic, and yet of course completely different. There’s this huge event happening, how can I write about trivial things? Well, as Matt Muir said, “I have nothing to say about the war–you don’t need my opinions or lukewarm takes.” But we also can’t stop everything else, so here’s a normal issue during yet another chunk of abnormal time.

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This week →{.caps} AI & the future of civilization ⊗ Rethinking labels: the origins of Metalabel ⊗ Of pods, squads, crews & gangs ⊗ Magic carpets ⊗ From cyberpunk to solarpunk ⊗ False futurism

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.162 was How to Design Better Systems in a World Overwhelmed by Complexity by Ingrid Burrington.

AI & the future of civilization

Very very good and very very long interview with Stephen Wolfram at Edge. It’s only when I started writing this that I realised it’s from five years ago (thanks to my Matter Weekly roundup), which is surprising and also a good sign of how deep and un-flavour-of-the-day his thinking is. It’s also an hour an a half in video and a 57min read so this summary will definitely not do it justice.

Instead of talking about creativity as the distinguishing trait of humans, he talks about the use of goals and purpose. “An AI on its own does not have a goal. Goals are a human construct.”

Wolfram has a very broad take on computation, how it happens in computers, brains, and natural systems.

It’s too bad he doesn’t explain what he means by “just go out and look in that space of possible programs” (I’m assuming it’s some evolution of cellular automata), but his insight that simple “random” programs can do useful things, not just complex programs built step-by-step, and the parallel with evolution in nature or finding uses for metals after we discover them, is fascinating.

In the Turing test, voice or textual interaction is assumed, but actually computer can and will be able to answer in much more detailed, higher bandwidth ways. An AI (or even just a cinema ticketing machine) can answer with a screen full of information, much more information than a human would be able to answer to the same question at the same speed. Imagine sketching a detailed reply as fast as you can talk.

Echoing [[because-your-algorithm-says-so|Because Your Algorithm Says So]]  last week, he ‘fears’ a domination of AI not in the usual catastrophe scenario but simply through the laziness of humans. Once an AI agent knows us as well as we know ourselves, might we not just follow their suggestions blindly?

And finally, throughout the conversation, the central theme is Wolfram’s work with a knowledge-based language, a ‘programming’ language that would replace today’s forms of coding and be a truer method of communication between humans and their machines. Something closer to a symbolic language, that would allow a much larger slice of the population to ‘programmatically’ direct computers to do tasks for them. He also doesn’t talk about everyone learning to code but of learning “computational thinking,” preparing people to communicate with machines using knowledge-based language.

Note →{.caps} For once, I copied all my 37 highlights to the note on the website.

I see technology as taking human goals and making them able to be automatically executed by machines. […]{.extraq}

We can think about all sorts of systems as effectively doing computations, whether it's a brain, whether it's a cloud responding to the different thermal environment that it finds itself in. We can ask ourselves, are our brains doing vastly more sophisticated computations than happens in these fluids in the atmosphere? […]{.extraq}

That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history. […]{.extraq}

The realization from that is that the thing I've spent a large part of my life doing, which is building computer languages, is not such a bad idea. In a computer language, you do get to represent more sophisticated concepts in a clean way, which can be progressively built up in a way that isn't possible in natural language. […]{.extraq}

I've been trying to build this knowledge-based language, where it's intended for communication between humans and machines in a way where humans can read it and machines can understand it too, where we're incorporating a lot of the existing knowledge of the world into the language in the same way that in human natural language we are constantly incorporating knowledge of the world into the language, because it helps us in communicating things. […]

My original belief had been in order to make a serious computational knowledge system, you first have to build a brain-like thing, then you have to feed it knowledge, just like we learn things in standard education. Then you'll have a good computational knowledge system. […]{.extraq}

What I discovered from that is that, yes, it works, to be able to take a large collection of the knowledge that's in the world, and automatically answer questions on the basis of it, using what are essentially merely computational techniques. […]{.extraq}

One of my conclusions was that's interesting in terms of understanding how nature works, but that's also important in terms of finding technology. […]{.extraq}

The other thing we can do is just go out into the computational universe and mine technology out of the computational universe. […]{.extraq}

==There are all kinds of programs out there, even very tiny programs that do very complicated things. Can we entrain them for some useful human purpose? This is a thing that we learned how to do. Given a particular purpose, given a particular goal, just go and exhaustively search a trillion programs and find one that does a useful thing for that purpose.== […]

My theory about these things is to make a language which panders not to the computers but to the humans, and try to make a language where the language is, as much as possible, able to take what the humans think of and convert it into some form that the computers can understand. […]{.extraq}

Can you encapsulate the knowledge that we've accumulated, both in science and in the collection of data in the world, into a language which we can use to communicate with computers? That's the big achievement of my last thirty years or something, being able to do that. […]{.extraq}

The actual way that these artificial neurons work is has little to do with the way that actual neurons in the brain work, but it's conceptually similar, and there's a certain universality to what's going on is. […]{.extraq}

==It's interesting to see, how a philosophical language of today would differ from a philosophical language from the mid-1600s. This is a measure of progress to see what difference there is.== […]{.extraq}

Siri will say back the short answer to you. But what most people want is the visual display of the bigger report that shows the infographic of this or that. This is something which is interesting, because it's a nonhuman form of communication that turns out to be richer than traditional human communication. […]{.extraq}

A good Turing test for me will be when I can have a bot respond to most of my email. That's a tough test. […]{.extraq}

What will happen, more to the point, is that there will be an AI that knows our history, and knows that on this menu, you're probably going to want to order this, or you're talking to this person, you should talk to them about this. I've looked at your interests, I know something about their interests, these are the common interests that you have, these are some great topics that you can talk to them about. ==More and more, the AIs will suggest what we should do, and I suspect most of the time people will just follow what the AIs tell them to do. It would probably be better than what they figured out for themselves.== […]

The great frontier 500 years ago was literacy. Today, it's doing programming of some kind. Today's programming will be obsolete in not very long. […]{.extraq}

Now, the big achievement, from having automated a lot of the stack, is that's not true anymore. A one-line piece of code, even a thing you could tweet sometimes, already does something interesting and useful. That means that it unlocks a vast range of people who couldn't previously make computers do things for them, make computers do things for them. […]{.extraq}

We've gotten to the point where anybody can learn to do knowledge-based programming, and more importantly, learn to think computationally. The actual mechanics of the programming are pretty easy now. What's difficult is imagining things in a computational way, and thinking through how we conceptualize this activity that we have in some computational way. […]

Which is not to say that it isn't super useful to program living systems, not least because we are living systems, and because living systems are the only example we know of successful molecular computing. […]{.extraq}

What does the world look like when many people know how to code? Coding is a form of expression, just like English writing is a form of expression. To me, some simple pieces of code are quite poetic. They express ideas in a very clean way. There's an aesthetic thing, much as there is to expression in a natural language. […]{.extraq}

Then there's a level of knowledge that was the big achievement of our species, which is natural language. The ability to take knowledge and represent it abstractly enough that we can communicate it in a disembodied way. […]{.extraq}

It's a thing that represents real things in the world, but it does so in a precise and symbolic way. It has this feature that not only is understandable by brains and communicable to other brains and to computers, it's also immediately executable. […]{.extraq}

==The other possibility that's much more interesting is you just rethink all the existing areas. If we have computational thinking, how does that affect how we study history? How does that affect how we study languages, social studies, whatever else? The answer is, it has great effect.== […]{.extraq}

computation is something that, in these times, is part of the basic way we should think about things. The great thing about computation is that if we think about things in terms of computation, then things become immediately executable. […]{.extraq}

We can imagine technology that works that way, but most of what we build is absolutely steeped in technological history, and it's incredibly non-minimal for achieving that purpose. […]{.extraq}

There's a little cellular automaton I made up once that makes primes. You can see how it works if you take it apart. It just has a little thing bouncing inside it, and out comes a sequence of primes. But that didn't need the whole history of civilization and biology and so on to get to that point. […]{.extraq}

We have to irreducibly follow through those steps. In a sense, that's why history means something. If it was the case that we could get to the endpoint without going through the steps, history would be in some sense pointless. […]{.extraq}

Rather, it's a detailed difference that this brain-like thing was produced by this long history of civilization, et cetera, whereas this cellular automaton was just created by my computer in the last microsecond. […]{.extraq}

==there just isn't a bright line between intelligence and mere computation.== […]{.extraq}

The answer will be that the box of trillion souls has this long history. The details of what's happening there were derived from the history of civilization and people watching videos made in 2015 or whatever. Whereas the rock came from its geological history, but it's not the particular history of our civilization.{.extraq}

Rethinking labels: the origins of Metalabel

I love this concept Yancey Strickler came up with (even though I don’t love that he comes up with it and immediately grabs the same word for his own org). Indie music labels operated with very few people. “They found and signed artists. They provided artists with creative, financial, and production support. They physically manufactured and distributed records. They helped them go on tour. They promoted their work and the larger scene.”

Riffing off of that, he proposes a media-agnostic and contemporary version of it with metalabels, “a group of people using a common identity for a common purpose with a focus on public releases that manifest their worldview.” Kind of multiplayer creator economy meets a portfolio of small bets, meets DAOs.

Could Sentiers become a metalabel? (Although it’s not like I’m in a position to finance others right now!) Would I need to join a new entity with metalabel goals? Hit reply if any of this, or other related ideas pop into your head.

A book publisher, a local collaborative creative project, an online community, an activist movement, an artist collective, a record label, and other collective cultural projects are examples of metalabels: groups of people using a shared identity for a shared purpose with a focus on public releases that manifest their worldview. […]

There’s (1) a core purpose why they exist; (2) a squad of collaborators who operate and release projects with the label; (3) public releases they put out into the world to express their worldview; and (4) rules for participation, like how they make decisions, who owns what, and their economic structure. […]

==Metalabels are startups and institutions for culture. They’re a proven recipe for cultural influence with clear role models from the past, and that fit with where culture is today.==

More →{.caps} It mostly covers the same terrain as the article above, but their about page has this nice definition of a metalabel:

A metalabel is creativity in multiplayer mode. A model for collaboration, collective world-building, and mutual support.

Of pods, squads, crews & gangs

Initially saved completely independently at different moments of the weeks, the previous piece and this one obviously fit together and seem to resurface a need I’ve expressed before (in July!!). Here Joe Lightfoot, whom I didn’t know but who seems to have a number of interesting articles on his site, goes into quite a bit of detail about different types of “small groups.” I’d roughly split his piece into three entangled themes; why there is a need for small groups, which kinds exist, and what he’s personally looking for and experimenting with. My interest in small groups skews more towards salons or study groups, professional support, and co-creating projects than his experiments, so that part was less useful to me, but worth a read if these emerging groups intrigue you.

The fact that our societies can still function with such a deficit of a meaningful sense of belonging illustrates our impressive ability to adapt to our surroundings, it also highlights how our resilience can ultimately cause harm by allowing us to acclimatise to social conditions that fall well short of what we require to thrive. […]

They can take the form of peer to peer mentoring groups, co-therapy groups, accountability groups, masterminds, project teams, co-op’s, study groups or just good old fashioned hang outs. Often they are a unique blend of all of these different formats. […]

‘If we’re living in an age of hyper individuality then perhaps the most revolutionary act available to us is to form small pockets of radical belonging.’

Magic carpets

At Real Life, Chenoe Hart questions the need for metaverse type of ideas when “ubiquitous screens aim to reshape our physical environment, not carry us away to an alternative space.” As screens multiply to cover every surface (grocery shelf screens are worth at least a couple of screams into the abyss) and change our perception of reality, “the need for a metaverse or VR helmets could seem like an odd detour when ordinary reality is more palpably made of and for information.”

Going back to my piece from last year, [[reality-ownership-scarcity|Reality, Ownership, Scarcity]] (which proposed a three axes model for the various ideas of what the metaverse is), I’d place this line of thought on the Reality axis, going from all physical to all digital. Twenty years ago → Today with always-on smartphones → Ubiquitous screens → AR → Metaverse.

Rather than serving as a proscenium separating us from a virtual or imagined realm, the screens come in flexible shapes and sizes and can be distributed throughout physical environments to dynamically alter them. In a sense, ==these screens are the inverse of virtual reality, not moving toward ever more intense three-dimensional immersions but toward an even flatter flat screen. Their presence within a room is subtle rather than attention-grabbing.== […]

[A]s the miniaturization technologies behind modern screens improve and make them lighter weight, the screens are becoming even less like familiar fixed displays and more like a new raw material to design with. Bulk sheets of high-tech screen material can be cut into customized forms and curvatures to suit the whims of designers and decorators. They could eventually become like chameleon skins, or a new kind of plastic. […]

Information might casually flow over many of the surfaces of the objects in the world around us, like waves lapping at the edge of a pond.

Two more (From cyberpunk to solarpunk and False futurism)

This issue is quite long enough already, and these two don’t necessarily add enough to other articles I’ve shared previously to be featured but…

From cyberpunk to solarpunkFor those really into solarpunk (like me), worth noting for the weaving together with Lewis Mumford’s Authoritarian and Democratic Technics. I’d like to see something similar with Ursula M. Franklin’s view of prescriptive v holistic technologies (see her 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, “The Real World of Technology” or the book). Holistic techs are definitely solarpunk.

What I would call democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature.

False futurismParis Marx on the false futurism of the metaverse, where he paints a good picture of how Facepalm, Microsoft, and others are pushing to jump beyond mobile (and its gatekeepers who beat them) as fast as possible, and get another chance at dominance.

Asides

• 🇸🇪 🇷🇴 🪵 🤬 Very disappointing. Ikea’s Race for the Last of Europe’s Old-Growth Forest. “Internally, however, the company closely tracks points of origin. A string of numbers on the box, inscrutable to the layperson, can indicate a particular manufacturer or contract within a country. Those codes remain fiercely guarded and are often changed, but in the course of my reporting, I was tipped off with the cipher for Plimob, the Ikea manufacturer in Romania that was recently exposed for using illegally logged wood in a number of Ikea’s low-cost, flagship chairs.” (Via Flash Forward.)
• 🇰🇪 💚 ☀️ Kenya to use solar panels to boost crops by ‘harvesting the sun twice’. “Known as agrivoltaics, the technique harvests solar energy twice: where panels have traditionally been used to harness the sun’s rays to generate energy, they are also utilised to provide shade for growing crops, helping to retain moisture in the soil and boosting growth.”
• 🇦🇺 ☀️ 👏🏼 Good on ya mate! Can a tech billionaire squash Australia’s coal industry by buying it?. “Frustrated with the Australian government’s inaction on climate change, software king Mike Cannon-Brookes is trying to buy several big coal plants so he can shut them down in favour of renewables”
• 🇦🇷 🇨🇳 Argentina joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “Argentina becomes the 20th of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to sign up for the Belt & Road, putting an official seal on what was already an extensive and growing economic relationship.”
• 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 🧂 Researchers from MIT and China invent $4 solar desalination device. “The device worked for a week straight with no signs of salt accumulation, but we still don’t know exactly how long it could operate. But the best news is that it would cost just $4 to build a solar desalination device large enough to meet the drinking water needs of a family of four”
• 😍 📸 The Winners of 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year Contest

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