love in the age of AI, the license to having nice things & EV without China
CC#64 - Preventing People from Doing Bad Things with AI, Travel Prescriptions & Thoughtful Things to Say
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
👩 The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.
Emotional and thought provoking real-life story about death, grief and chatbots.
As Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people. What would happen, he wondered, if he tried to create a chatbot version of his dead fiancee?
There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief. How many survivors would gladly experiment with a technology that lets them pretend, for a moment, that their dead loved one is alive again — and able to text?
That night in September, Joshua hadn’t actually expected it to work. Jessica was so special, so distinct; a chatbot could never replicate her voice, he assumed. Still, he was curious to see what would happen.
When people talk about aligning AI technology, it often sounds like once we figured out the ‘magic sauce’ for how to make trustworthy AI, all our problems are solved. However, how do we make sure that no one builds non-trustworthy AI systems anyways?
Since AIs are cool, you decide to build one.
Fortunately, you are smart and careful, so you solve the insanely difficult problem of how to make an AI that would never hurt anyone (nor build a 2nd AI that could hurt anyone, ad infinitum), then build your AI and it works and is totally harmless, good job!
I see how cool your AI is and decide to make my own.
Unfortunately, I am dumb and sloppy and don’t correctly make my AI safe so after I turn it on it makes a nanovirus cobalt bomb and everyone dies. :(
💎 Why Altruists Can't Have Nice Things
Where is the line between providing services and goodies to make your employee’s (work) life easier vs. unnecessary, fancy perks? This article has some good thoughts on this.
There's a temptation, when solving the world's toughest and most-important problems, to throw money around.
Lattes on tap! Full-time massage team! Business class flights! Retreat in the Bahamas! When you do the cost/benefit analysis it comes out positive: "An extra four hours of sleep on the plane is worth four thousand dollars, because of how much we're getting paid and how tight the time is."
The problem, which we always underindex on, is that our culture doesn't stand up to this kind of assault on normalcy. No altruistic, mission-oriented culture can.
Food for Thought.
🧑⚖️ Are existing AI providers compliant with the current draft version of the AI Act? Stanford Researchers evaluated this question.. Conclusion: No one is fully compliant (yet) and variance is huge between providers.
🔌 Can we make EV batteries without China? Doesn’t look like it at the moment…
😶🌫️ Not that I am surprised by this headline, but still something to think about…
Random Stuff.
💬 Sometimes, saying something out of the ordinary small talk protocol can have large effects - here is list of thoughtful things to say that I think is worth reading & trying to keep in the back of your mind.
🏝️ I definitely do believe that travel has a positive effect on our mental health - not sure if we will be able to figure out a way to prescribe it to the people who need it without messing up the incentive system…?
💡 Tyler Cowen recently published a list of ideas he would like to see people work on - super inspiring.
Personal Update.
I have spent the last week at the Network Science Conference in Vienna. Definitely left with a better understanding of what network science is and what application domains it covers (I guess shame on me I didn’t have that before). Saw some really interesting presentations, got completely lost in some others (mainly due to my lack of physics knowledge) and had a delicious gala dinner.
Now back in CPH for the next conference -what a marathon! 🏃🏻♀️ Nonetheless, very much looking forward to the International Conference on Computational Social Science with the -extremely hard to remember - abbrevation IC2S2. If you happen to be there, I warmly invite you to catch my talk on social ties formation on Tuesday afternoon during the Social Networks Session.
Apart from that I just had some great ice cream - thus some thoroughly tested advice from life coach Johanna: Go and get yourself some ice cream while its still summer (best together with some friends) - it will increase your life satisfaction! 🍦🌞