New Week #66
Google's new AI language model conducts an uncanny conversation. World Economic Forum experts fear for the future. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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Let’s Go
This week, Google’s new AI language model does a brilliant impersonation of a seal, and offers a glimpse of our uncanny conversational future.
Meanwhile, Fortnite brings high art to 400 million gamers. And the World Economic Forum’s experts reveal what’s worrying them in 2022, but leave their deepest fear unspoken.
Let’s get into it!
🤖 Do AIs dream of electric seals?
This week, the head of Google’s AI division shared a fascinating expert view on where machine intelligence is leading us.
In Themes from 2021 and Beyond, Jeff Dean says AI is set to transform robotics, medical diagnosis, scientific research and more in the years ahead. The most arresting part of the note, though, came via a conversation between a human and Google’s new LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).
Before the conversation, LaMDA was asked to mimic a seal. This is what followed — you can click the image below to enlarge it:
Uncanny enough for you? As Dean notes, LaMDA does a staggeringly good job of staying in seal-character throughout.
Launched last year, LaMDA is built on the same Transformer neural network architecture that fuels OpenAI’s GPT-3. But unlike that and other similar models, it was trained on dialogue. That means, says Google, it’s uniquely good at open-ended conversation. Ask yourself: if LaMDA was told to mimic a bank customer service rep, or a stranger, or a therapist, would you be able to tell that you were talking to a machine?
⚡ NWSH Take: Highly convincing AI-generated language is about to become ubiquitous. Why does that matter? // A certain species of technology journalist is keen to remind us, these days, that AI language models are just doing pattern recognition; that they don’t understand. Fine, but that’s only half the picture. Humans will often respond to these models as if they’re conscious entities, and that won’t change no matter how many times we say they’re not. // One glimpse? Check out this subreddit dedicated to the popular AI chatbot Replika. It’s full of users declaring love for their AI companion. You can dismiss them as misguided or insane, but (i) they don’t care, and (ii) they’re really not so different to a child who talks to his teddy bear, or an adult who talks to her pet dog or a photo of a dead loved one. When non-human agents are able to mimic understanding, or even just remind us of the feeling of being understood, we often treat them as pseudo-persons. // In the 2020s, AIs are set to tap into that tendency. We’ll see AIs posing as celebrities, cute animals, loved ones. They won’t understand, but we will. It’s about to get uncanny; it’s about to get emotional.
🖼️ Just Kaws
An unlikely partnership was unveiled this week.
The prestigious Serpentine Gallery in London is currently hosting New Fiction, an exhibition by the crossover street artist Kaws. This week, Fortnite opened an in-game replica of the exhibition; it’s in the Creative Hub, meaning any players who enter creative mode will see it.
Kaws got his start as a graffiti artists on the streets of NYC in the 90s. Now, his distinctive paintings and cartoon-like sculptures sell for millions.
⚡ NWSH Take: Gaming and high art: an intriguing mash up. Around 30 million people play Fortnite every day; Kaws isn’t wrong when he says the partnership will bring him to younger audiences ‘in a new and massive way’. // But the deeper principle here? A small, exclusive, high-status physical space is being mirrored inside one of the world’s most popular video games. As AR and VR evolve, we’re sure to see more of this: real-time, mirrorworld exhibitions, live concerts, sports events, and more. But the status calculus here isn’t straightforward. When millions are able to visit exclusive spaces inside the metaverse, access to the physical space will become even more prized.
😱 What worries Davos Man?
The World Economic Forum published its Global Risks Report 2022 this week.
The report is based on a survey of 1,000 ‘global experts and leaders’, each of whom were asked to name the key risks faced by the human collective across the coming year.
This year, climate and environmental concerns took the top three spots. But the fastest-growing concern was for inequality, or, as the report puts it, the erosion of social cohesion. Meanwhile, a full 89.3% of respondents said their outlook for the world across the next three years was somewhat or very negative.
⚡ NWSH Take: Full disclosure: I’ve been a part of the WEF myself. As Philip Tetlock of superforecasting fame demonstrated, ‘experts are as accurate as monkeys throwing darts’ when it comes to predicting wars, economic collapse, and the like. This document is valuable, then, not for its predictive power, but as a portrait of a global elite class and its anxieties. // We all know Davos Man and Woman: they are corporate and political leaders, think tank founders, famous columnists. They believe in globalisation, markets, and progress. But echoing through the pages of this report, you can hear the sound of the Davos Humans losing faith in their Universal Civilisation: 89% with a negative outlook! // Their principal fears are widely shared: environmental collapse, economic meltdown, another pandemic. But underlying all that is another, deeper fear. That is, that the world may finally be spinning beyond their control. That’s the real crisis the WEF will set about solving in the 2020s. The final purpose of any elite is always to preserve itself. And Davos Human has plan to do just that — the WEF’s Great Reset: a manifesto for yet more globalism, markets, and the further insinuation of Big Tech and corporations into our lives.
🗓️ Also this week
🧞 The founder of iconic virtual world Second Life is rejoining the company to help it evolve in the age of the metaverse. Philip Rosedale will come back as an investor and adviser. He says Second Life, which launched in 1999, will compete with Meta and others to own the future of the metaverse.
📷 A 22-year-old Indonesian computer science student made $1 million selling NFT selfies on OpenSea. Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali’s selfie’s blew up when prominent members of the crypto community started to share them on Twitter.
✈️ Dubai’s Emirates airlines says it will suspend some flights to the US because of safety concerns associated with the roll out of the 5G mobile network. The Federal Aviation Administration has warned that 5G interference could prevent Boeing 787 engine and braking systems from transitioning to landing mode.
⛏️ A senior EU official says the EU should ban proof-of-work crypto mining. This form of mining, which sees miners use banks of powerful computers to execute complex mathematics, is highly energy intensive. Meanwhile, Intel is reportedly set to enter the crypto market with a new mining chip called Bonanza Mine.
🇺🇦 Over 70 government websites in Ukraine suffered cyber attacks suspected to come from Russian hackers. Around 100,000 Russian soldiers are currently massed on the Ukrainian border; Putin says he has no plans to invade.
💰 On-demand ride service Lyft is spending millions of dollars to prevent Massachusetts drivers from becoming employees. The company has contributed over $14 million to a campaign to persuade citizens, who are likely to vote on the issue in November.
🚗 A group of Berlin residents want to turn their city into the world’s largest car-free zone. The activist group Volksentscheid Berlin Autofrei have collected 50,000 signatures for their plan, which would ban almost all private cars in inner city Berlin.
🧪 Altos Labs, a Silicon Valley startup on a mission to defeat human ageing, launched with $3 billion in funding. Altos says it will ‘decipher the pathways of cellular rejuvenation programming to create a completely new approach to medicine’.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,921,434,818
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8012983012
💉 Global population vaccinated: 50.4%
🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 5% complete
📖 On this day: On 19 January 1983 the Apple Lisa, one of the the first personal computers to employ a GUI and mouse, is launched.
Seal of Approval
Thanks for reading this week.
We are, perhaps above all, the language animal. And now, we’re about to start swimming in new oceans of uncanny language generated by machine intelligence. It’s a classic case of new world, same humans.
As this story evolves NWSH will be there every step of the way, asking what it all means for our shared future. And there’s one thing you can do to further that mission: share!
Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward this email to a friend or colleague? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
In the meantime, I’ll get back to work on the first NWSH monthly essay. Be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.