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Navigating Disruption: Why the AI Revolution Will Ultimately Benefit Humanity
Throughout history, humanity has faced significant transformations that reshape societies, economies, and individual lives. Each major revolution, despite its initial disruptions and challenges, has typically led to long-term improvements in human life. The ongoing development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies exemplifies another profound revolution in human history.…
You're running... feeling the panting breath of technological changes catching up on your neck.
It was June 2023 when I began writing. Six months earlier, at the Infoshare AI conference, I had spoken about how the next AI winter probably wasn't coming, but that we were entering a time of stabilization—a period for realistically assessing the technology's capabilities beyond the hype. Two weeks later, a black swan flapped its wings across the world: ChatGPT.
I write. My novel is set in the near future. The technological threads and characters' fates intertwine in my imagination... while in the real world, in the present, the lightning-fast progress of technology makes me wonder if I'll manage to publish the book before it becomes outdated. I invent new concepts, only to later read that similar technological ideas are already being tested (at least I can tell myself that I came up with them independently, rather than borrowing them). The writing is going well, but I constantly feel it's too slow. So much is happening in AI that I start experiencing FOMO. I watch Wes Roth and Dave Shapiro to stay current, and that has to be enough.
In the second half of 2023, some experts say, "it's just statistics." Other experts speak of "sparks of AGI." Still others talk about evidence of representations... Fortunately, I'm not writing about LLMs... no, that wouldn't make sense—this technology will probably hit a ceiling soon... or will it? I write, now gripped only by mild FOMO, watching for the next black swans.
July 8, 2024 arrives, when I place the final period. The race is over. No, it's not over. There's still beta reading, editing, layout... I work, still watching for black swans. It will probably be okay. Voices around the world speak of a plateau in AI...
Now it really is the end. The book is in readers' hands. Whether it will disappoint, intrigue, or perhaps put them to sleep... that's beyond my control now. And black swans can fly wherever they want.
Fortunately, this isn't a book about AI ;) Although actually, it is.
"Mirrors We Don't Have"
Stung by Russian manipulation of power markets, the EU plans to triple renewables by 2030 In the wake of a year when consumer energy prices across Europe skyrocketed, making it difficult for some people to heat their homes or cook, the European Commission today announced a new power market plan with ambitious targets: phase out gas, the fossil fuel that underpins much of the bloc’s power production, and…Read more... https://qz.com/stung-by-russian-manipulation-of-power-markets-the-eu-1850224228
A detail from my static film, Typewriter #3. Typing on an old typewriter--and by "old" I mean around one hundred years old, is a different experience in unexpected ways. Just think. This was the first time you could write directly in a type. It was socially disruptive in its own way. Was it high class or low class to type? Would beautiful handwriting long be a socially meaningful skill? Poor spelling and grammar would now be more obvious, too. Not to mention all those waves if technological and social change that created the need for the typewriter in the first place. #typewriter #typewriterrevolution #socialchange #technology #technologicalchange #video #videoart #art #artmusem #artistsoninstagram #artphotography #artoftheday #artcollector #artnerd #jrrtolkien #lotr
"Population reached approximately 4 million by 10000 BC, 50 million by 1000 BC, and 170 million by the year 1. Population then reached 265 million by the year 1000, 425 million by 1500, and 720 million by 1750 before the subsequent explosion of the British Industrial Revolution and the subsequent spread of Modern Economic Growth. [..] In Kremer's model, population will grow and eventually population will be high enough that research and development will proceed fast enough to push income per capita high enough to trigger the demographic transition and thus break the Malthusian proportional link between resources and technology on the one hand and population on the other. After that link is broken, economic growth will predominantly take the form not of Malthusian increases in population but rather Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth increases in living standards and labor productivity. The breakthrough to an Industrial Revolution, Modern Economic Growth, and our present prosperous global post-industrial economy is therefore baked into the cake: an all-but-inevitable event in human history produced by the simple fact that when it comes to generating useful ideas two heads are better than one: "the fundamental nonrivalry of technology as described by Paul Romer (1986)..." The alternative view to the inevitability of the breakthrough is that the breakthrough to the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent knock-on transition to Modern Economic Growth was a lucky throw of the historical dice--that while Kremer's model has something like our economic world today as our inevitable destiny, the world might well be substantially otherwise and remain substantially otherwise for millennia if not longer. [..] It was not Newtonian science that inclined British inventors and entrepreneurs to seek machines that raised labour productivity but the rising cost of labour... due to... Britain’s success in the global economy... in part the result of state policy... [and] Britain['s] vast and readily worked coal deposits.... The necessary R&D was profitable in Britain (under British conditions) but unprofitable elsewhere.... The theory advanced here explains the technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution in terms of the economic base of society–natural resources, international trade, profit opportunities. Through their impact on wages and prices, these prime movers affected both the demand for technology and its supply... [..] The nineteenth century engineering industry was a spin-off of the coal industry.... The British inventions of the eighteenth century–cheap iron and the steam engine, in particular–were so transformative... because of the possibilities they created for the further development of technology. Technologies invented in France–in paper production, glass, knitting–did not lead to general mechanization or globalization.... There is no reason to believe that French technology would have led to the engineering industry, the general mechanization of industrial processes, the railway, the steam ship, or the global economy. In other words, there was only one route to the twentieth century–and it went through northern Britain..."
The Downfall of Chrome
I'm always watching how my coworkers and friends are using computers, in part because people will always teach you something brilliant about how to use a computer if you give them a chance1. Also, being as I am, interested in the future of technology, I think Stephen O'Grady is right developers drive technological change.
One thing that I've noticed in the past 3 months, or so, is that folks are slowly moving away from Chrome and back to (mostly) Firefox. I don't think this is emblematic of any greater shift in the way that programmers work and I don't think that this is evidence that Chrome itself is unsuccessful...
I think there are a few interconnected reasons driving the move away from Chrome:
Chrome can be flakey in some cases: tabs freeze, the memory use tends to run away with large number of tabs.
All of the "magic" that Chrome is doing to make things fast and efficient, increases the actual heat generated by the machine, which is both uncomfortable and reduces battery life for laptops.
Firefox by contrast, has the same good standards compliant rendering, isolates tabs using a process model, has a more stable resource profile, has an emended PDF reader, has an established extension ecosystem, and a regular incremental development cycle. If competition is good for innovation, Chrome gave Firefox the push it needed.
Second, I think the most technologically interesting and important aspects of Chrome (from Google's perspective,) aren't actually the ones that would drive adoption of Chrome: notably the automatic "self-updating," and having a viable runtime for projects like ChromeOS and Dart. Some people have to use it, but they don't all have to use it for it to succeed.
As you were.
For one emacs using coworker, anytime we watch each other use emacs, we inevitably ask each other "wait, how did you do that," notably for flyspell-auto-correct-previous-word and dired-maybe-insert-subdir, which are both amazing but even after years of collective emacs use we each were only familiar with one. ↩︎
