Robots and Me

Nick Bostrom (centre) and colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute Critiquing Nick Bostrum’s thinking feels a little bit like checking Einstein’s sums.   Bostrum’s an AI rockstar; his homepage carries recommendations from the likes of Bill Gates; I have heard nothing but praise for his work from people whose opinions I deeply respect; and I love the fact that (in homage to Alan Turing’s seminal paper ?) he used a Disney movie as inspiration for a his career-defining AI hypothesis . So how come his latest working paper, The Vulnerable World Hypothesis , gets so much wrong?   I have a hunch I know why . But first let’s look at what . The urn theory Let’s start with Bostrom’s definition of our vulnerability: One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The  balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, technological inventions. Over the course of history,  we have extracted a great many balls—mo...

Danny, the much-loved son of one of the people I love most in this world, died this summer. Yesterday would have been his nineteenth birthday. No words can make sense of Danny’s death, but there are far more powerful words inspired by his life. Some are Danny’s own: his poetry, his witty off-the-cuff remarks, his messages to friends and family, the wonderful novel he wrote. Others come from the people he loved and who loved him: after he died, the outpouring of appreciations and reminiscences made Danny feel more alive, more vibrant, more important and closer. The conversations we had with him and about him continue. He inspires us and makes us laugh and think and feel anew, and in new ways. He may have died, but he will never feel dead to us. And yet he has gone. For ever. And my dear friend his mother, who has been there for me at the worst as well as the best times, is left bleak and alone beyond my comforting. Most religions offer a hedge against death: cleave unto...

Your average working day Yesterday – bang on time for the pre-year-end panic that afflicts every workplace I’ve ever experienced – KornFerry published a survey on stress at work .   Surprise, surprise, nearly two out of every three respondents said their stress levels were higher than five years ago.   Two thirds claimed stress had disrupted their sleep; over three quarters blamed stress for problems in their personal relationships.   KF say – and who am I to question? – that workplace stress has risen by nearly 20% over the last three decades. Is work really that bad?   Is it getting worse?   And what, if any thing, can we do about it? Let’s get some perspective Work in the rich world could be a darn sight worse.   Not many of us would swap our lot for a gig putting together iPhones at Foxconn’s factories in Shenzen,   where you earn around $4 a day for a 12hr shift, minus a lunch break if you don’t keep up with targets and plus publi...

The more you talk, the smarter Tay gets.  Or not. Remember Tay? The Twitbot that took less than an Elon Musk working day to morph from a sweet Millennial teenager to a racist and sexist bigot ? And remember when it was taken offline for a week, only to return minus the racism but plus what looked like a very bad drug trip, culminating in tweeting “You are too fast, please take a rest” several times a second? Oh, the problems we had back in March 2016! But while few bots have turned ugly quite as spectacularly as Tay (or as political life since 2016), there’s growing concern that AI not only isn’t fair, but goes beyond ordinary human bias to discriminate in multiple and serious ways. Are robots bigots? There’s definitely little sign so far of AI’s moral superiority. Three years on from Gorillagate , facial recognition algorithms still make false identifications more often with darker-skinned faces. Language vector databases – multidimensional patterns of how ...