Weekly Link Roundup #25
Calm Tech, maps telling stories, cuddly robots and great lessons on how to destroy your business
Where to start:
My Value vs Activity argument laid out with the Three Stooges.
Reading List (this is audience participation - please add your ‘must reads’)
My Commonplace post (kind of like a reading list but just quotes - also audience participation - feel free to add to this)
Designing Tech That (Finally) Respects Our Time & Humanity | Announcing The Calm Tech Institute: As it turns out, I am now in the medical device business. Medical devices probably represent the most intimate of connections between humans and machines - literal life-preserving connections. I think that really heightens the importance of thinking deeply about how that tech is designed. Into this new area of mine comes this awesome announcement from one of my favorite cyborg anthropologists, Amber Case. I started following Amber on Twitter (Hi CaseOrganic) and then bought her 2015 book, Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design. You should also catch her TED Talk on how We Are All Cyborgs Now. Now she’s opened the Calm Tech Institute and I’m super excited that calm tech principles will get paid greater attention. Notifications and interactions with medical devices are critical but they can also be ubiquitous and so demand careful attention and design - I think in that battle, an ally has a new resource. I’m thrilled.
Mapping and storytelling: I can’t love this story enough. “To view a map is to be invited to read someone’s world view.” It’s a literal visual artifact of a world view…duh Mark, it is a view of the world. I remember hearing some designers from a game I’ve played a lot, Skyrim, talk about how they started with the map, with the geography of the world and how so much spilled out of that. I think it holds true for our ‘roadmaps’ as well…they are stories about what we think and what we thought was important. I love the map reader in Close Encounters. Maybe let’s think more about the stories we are telling with our maps and read others’ maps more closely.
Patronus AI secures $17M to tackle AI hallucinations and copyright violations, fuel enterprise adoption: “Stepping into the fray is Patronus AI, a San Francisco startup that just raised $17 million in Series A funding to automatically detect costly — and potentially dangerous — LLM mistakes at scale.” > > These are the shovels and picks of the AI gold rush. I applaud their efforts but feel like orgs like this are serious acquisition targets and they’ll sooner vs later be built into systems. See also: WitnessAI is building guardrails for generative AI models.
U.S. Fears Undersea Cables Are Vulnerable to Espionage From Chinese Repair Ships: Sometimes we forget how fragile our interconnected world is.
OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game: All of this - that they asked her to use her voice, she said no and then they launched, and it sounded exactly like her and Her, to Altman totally missing the point of both Oppenheimer and Her…really makes it clear that the OpenAI board was probably right.
When Online Content Disappears - 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later: Both the anthropologist and the historian in are freaked by this. So much of our world has moved online and when that past disappears, so to does the ability of future generations to recreate it and understand it.
C. Gordon Bell, Creator of a Personal Computer Prototype, Dies at 89: One of the founders of just about everything we’re doing now. “Called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, Mr. Bell was the master architect in the effort to create smaller, affordable, interactive computers that could be clustered into a network. A virtuoso at computer architecture, he built the first time-sharing computer and championed efforts to build the Ethernet. He was among a handful of influential engineers whose designs formed the vital bridge between the room-size models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer.”
How cuddly robots could change dementia care - Researchers are using AI and technological advancements to create companion robots: I know, we all have these concerns about AI and robots in health care but dementia is so cruel and so hard on the caregivers, that if cuddly robots can help in any way, count me in big time.
AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside: “Olah believes that we’re on the path to this. He leads an Anthropic team that has peeked inside that black box. Essentially, they are trying to reverse engineer large language models to understand why they come up with specific outputs—and, according to a paper released today, they have made significant progress.”
This landmark AI legislation will have a ripple effect across the globe: Multiple landscapes are shifting at once - technical, business, legal, regulatory - “Europe’s landmark rules on artificial intelligence will enter into force next month after EU countries endorsed on Tuesday a political deal reached in December, setting a potential global benchmark for a technology used in business and everyday life.”
16 top AI firms make new safety commitments at Seoul summit: So we’re all good right? “Under the agreement, the AI firms that have not already shared how they assess the risks of their technology will publish those frameworks, according to the statement. These will include what risks are "deemed intolerable" and what the firms will do to ensure that these thresholds are not crossed. "In the most extreme circumstances, the companies have also committed to 'not develop or deploy a model or system at all' if mitigations cannot keep risks below the thresholds," the statement added. The definition of these thresholds will be decided ahead of the next AI summit, due to be hosted by France in 2025.” > > Love it that we haven’t even bothered to define thresholds that we should not pass yet.
AI trained to draw inspiration from images, not copy them: Interesting > “The newly proposed framework, called Ambient Diffusion, gets around this problem by training diffusion models through access only to corrupted image-based data. Early efforts suggest the framework is able to continue to generate high-quality samples without ever seeing anything that's recognizable as the original source images.”
The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery: Reading the prior story and then this just gives me the feeling of maybe y’all should have thought of the wreckage you could leave behind before you launched. Add that to how DA has been run and its like some step by step instruction manual for wrecking a community and a business.
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis: I kind of love this..need some philosophy majors to jump in…maybe AI is telling us there is an objective reality. “We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks represent data are becoming more aligned. Next, we demonstrate convergence across data modalities: as vision models and language models get larger, they measure distance between datapoints in a more and more alike way. We hypothesize that this convergence is driving toward a shared statistical model of reality, akin to Plato’s concept of an ideal reality.”
Oliv unveils its AI copilot to boost sales team efficiency and deal closures: Sharing this for a couple of reasons - one, I really think the reaction by salespeople to this will be stark and bifurcated - one camp will immediately embrace it and use it for all its worth and the other side won’t trust it and will use but will resist. I get that’s a natural set of reactions in any camp when you intro new tech but I think it will just be stark in sales. The second reason is that you really need to see that if someone can create this for sales, it is an insanely short hop for them doing this for whatever domain you work in. I know I go on and on about value vs activity but here it is folks. What will you do to demonstrate value when your To Do list is automated?
Electricity grids creak as AI demands soar: This is one that we are going to have to wrestle with. Maybe AI can help design the new smart grid that we so desperately need.