Another Godfather of AI Feeling Lost

Not so long ago, Geoffrey Hinton, another “godfather of AI”, raised his concerns about the future of AI and his own feelings towards it .

Now it seems, another “godfather of AI”, is feeling lost with his work

He is the second of the so-called three “godfathers” of AI, known for their pioneering work in the field, to voice concerns about the direction and the speed at which it is developing. […]

Prof Bengio told the BBC he was concerned about “bad actors” getting hold of AI, especially as it became more sophisticated and powerful.

“It might be military, it might be terrorists, it might be somebody very angry, psychotic. And so if it’s easy to program these AI systems to ask them to do something very bad, this could be very dangerous.

“If they’re smarter than us, then it’s hard for us to stop these systems or to prevent damage,” he added. Prof Bengio admitted those concerns were taking a personal toll on him, as his life’s work, which had given him direction and a sense of identity, was no longer clear to him. “It is challenging, emotionally speaking, for people who are inside [the AI sector],” he said. “You could say I feel lost. But you have to keep going and you have to engage, discuss, encourage others to think with you.”

What I Read in April 2023

Lots of non-fiction for me this month, mainly revolving around attention span. Very interesting topic overall, especially considering the highly technological dopamine filled world we live in today.

Gloria Mark: Attention Span, Adam Alter: Irresistible, Alex Soojung-Kim-Pang: The Distraction Addiction:

I decided to group these together since all three of these books revolved around technology, addiction, distraction and attention span. I’ve read a lot about these subjects so I didn’t necessarily learn too much new, but still, I would say these books were worth a read.

Basically, the key takeaway from these were the fact that modern digital technologies have changed the “structure of our attention”. We use screens more and more using software and products that constantly hinder our attention with constant bombardment of various stimulus from different sources.

But then again, it’s easy to blame technology for this and the culprit for distraction comes already from the state of mind on how you approach your given tasks.

Is the cause of your distraction social media? Maybe email? Maybe some IM app like Slack? Finding the main reason for your own distraction is very beneficial, since when you know that, it’s easy to limit access to it.

Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing:

Great book on how this overly capitalistic rat-race that most of us are in can be very detrimental to people. Big reason for this was the fact that nowadays people tend to see that every hour of the day is potentially monetisable. So we’re not “allowed” to do nothing anymore. Which is sad. As a practising buddhist, I really like this message. Pausing and engaging with the world can be very beneficial in finding new and interesting meanings in our everyday experiences. There’s no need to be in some sort of constant hustle.

Geoffrey Hinton Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation

Hinton, 75, said he quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI, and in part regrets his contribution to the field. He was brought on by Google a decade ago to help develop the company’s AI technology, and the approach he pioneered led the way for current systems such as ChatGPT. […]

Hinton’s concern in the short term is something that has already become a reality – people will not be able to discern what is true any more with AI-generated photos, videos and text flooding the internet.

The recent upgrades to image generators such as Midjourney mean people can now produce photo-realistic images – one such image of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer coat went viral in March.

Hinton was also concerned that AI will eventually replace jobs like paralegals, personal assistants and other “drudge work”, and potentially more in the future.

Google and Amazon Struggle to Lay Off Workers in Europe

cries in corporate…

“Difficult” labour laws make it hard for corporations to fire people. Voluntary departures and individual settlements are favoured

In the US, companies can announce widespread job cuts and let go of hundreds if not thousands of workers within months — and many have. Meanwhile, in Europe, mass layoffs among tech companies have stalled because of labor protections that make it virtually impossible to dismiss people in some countries without prior consultations with employee interest groups. […]

Both in France and Germany, where labor laws are among the strongest in the EU, Google is currently in negotiations with works councils — company-specific groups whose elected employee representatives negotiate with management about workforce issues, according to a person familiar with the matter. By law, companies are required to bargain with these councils before implementing layoffs — a sometimes lengthy process that includes information gathering, negotiations and the possibility of recourse. […]

While the different standards of treatment have not created friction among Google employees spread around the world, “people have realized the way things happen in the US versus France and Germany” are different, says Parul Koul, executive chair of the Alphabet Workers Union and a software engineer at Google based in New York.

“It is inspiring for people in the US to see things are different in other places – it’s a blueprint for what people can fight for,” they added.

What I Read in March 2023

Pretty technical month in my reading this time.

Liz Rice: Container Security

I got free copies of this book and the couple of next books from an event so I decided to read them through due to how close they are to my profession. While working as a plumber, container security tends to be a very common topic and also topic that I’m very interested in. Rice is pretty popular public figure in the “cloud native” world who I’ve seen to give great talks about wonderful topics in the past, which made me quite excited about this book.

Generally speaking book itself was good. It offered a nice and relatively brief overview of various techniques that are involved in container security and also giving a nice understanding of containers itself. Personally, I probably would’ve wanted it to be slightly more practical, but nonetheless, I think it’s a great tech book addition to many bookshelves.

Liz Rice: Learning eBPF

Another book from Rice. I’ve been big fan of eBPF for many years so I was quite excited about this one also. Timing of receiving this book was great since I was just about to give a talk on how me and my colleagues at my current employer have used eBPF based technologies in our day-to-day work at Isovalent’s (creators of eBPF) Cilium (Kubernetes CNI) Workshop that we were hosting in Berlin.

I have been already working quite a bit Linux Kernel and eBPF before so there wasn’t necessarily that much new stuff from the book but there were some and lots of refreshers so I really enjoyed it.

eBPF is also a topic quite dear to me, so I already have some posts about in the woodshed. So expect more in that front from me.

John Rosso et al: Production Kubernetes

This was the last book that I got for free and was quite interested about it too. Despite working with production Kubernetes for quite a few years already, I wanted to read this to see if I could learn some new stuff from it. Overall, I think it’s a great book if you happen to work with Kubernetes. For me, most of the stuff was something that I knew already from using Kubernetes for many year, but still I think it offers a great “introduction” to how to operate Kubernetes in production.

John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity

I’ve had this book on my library for many years but I just haven’t been able to start reading. Especially in tech, simplicity is something that tends to by highly valued, and for a reason. While this book applied mainly to design of various products etc., Maeda himself comes from technical background, so lots of the stuff he writes, can be applied to computer science and programming. I think it was a great book!

E.M. Foster: The Machine Stops (reread)

I have read this sci-fi short-story for many times already and I love it every time. It’s a very psychedelic book to read in 2020s. Book itself was written in 1909, but somehow even back then Foster was able to depict a future where humans are addicted to technology. Very short book but great! I think I originally found it from some Jaron Lanier’s talk about social media so this book made my almost luddite stance towards tech even stronger.