AI Uber Alles

The hidden pattern machine:

Artificial intelligence reduces a 100,000-equation quantum physics problem to only four equations

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-artificial-intelligence-equation-quantum-physics.html

Quantum mechanically entangled electrons must be dealt with all at once rather than one at a time, making the computational challenge exponentially harder.

Until you have a machine that "has the power to discover hidden patterns."

via the Simons Foundation:  Domenico Di Sante et al, Deep Learning the Functional Renormalization Group, Physical Review Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.136402

https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.136402

Image credit: AI Art - Complicated Machine Illusion by Dan Mumford - 2022

And yet the human is still the model:

Mimicking human sleep as a way to prevent catastrophic forgetting in AI systems

Nov 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-mimicking-human-catastrophic-ai.html

To overcome the problem of catastrophic forgetting, the researchers added code that mimicked REM sleep in the human brain.

via University of California and Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences: Sleep prevents catastrophic forgetting in spiking neural networks by forming a joint synaptic weight representation, PLOS Computational Biology (2022). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010628

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010628

This is how it happens:

ChatGPT is enabling script kiddies to write functional malware

Jan 2023, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chatgpt-is-enabling-script-kiddies-to-write-functional-malware/

AI does more things:

No Linux? No problem. Just get AI to hallucinate it for you

Dec 2022, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/openais-new-chatbot-can-hallucinate-a-linux-shell-or-calling-a-bbs/

First of all it’s not supposed to do this, it’s supposed to be a chat bot; you’re supposed to talk to it. But then we realized that instead of talking to it, we can give it instructions, and make it do things in the virtual world that go far beyond chatting. It was never even taught how to use computer code or recognize it, this all happened by mistake. And that’s how these things happen. 

via OpenAI: ChatGPT - Optimizing Language Model Is for Dialogue, Dec 2022. 

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

Post Script:

I like how we refer to the output as hallucinations, which for the unaware is a direct result of the DeepDream explosion circa 2016.

Reverse Engineering

Moore's Law predicts life originated billions of years before Earth
Robert T. Gonzalez, 04.18.13
A new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health concludes that life originated elsewhere in the Universe around 9.8 billion years ago – roughly five-billion years before the Earth was even formed.

Life Before Earth

NIH geneticist Alexei A. Sharov and theoretical biologist Richard Gordon

(Submitted 28 Mar 2013) [link]

...origin of life can be estimated by examining genetic complexity through the lens of Moore's Law and backtracking to some point of temporal origin.

"Genome complexity reaches zero, which corresponds to just one base pair, at time ca. 9.7 billion years ago... ±2.5 billion years."

Earth is on the order of just 4.5-billion years old. Ipso facto, say the researchers, life originated somewhere besides Earth, evolving not on a geologic time scale, but a cosmic one.

[crit, i09.com]
One thing that worries me about this paper is that it makes no effort, as far as I can tell, to distinguish between complexity and progress, an important distinction that many people fail to recognize.

Another issue: the idea that the complexity of life on Earth has increased at the same rate throughout history is highly suspect.

...how little consensus there is on what complexity actually is.

Mimetic Desire

The object only has value according to how much it is desired by another...mimetic desire

We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object.

All desire is a desire to be [someone else]

1994. Quand ces choses commenceront ... Entretiens avec Michel Treguer. Paris: arléa. ISBN 2-86959-300-7. p28
Rene Girard

Post Script:

Peer pressure's influence calculated by mathematician
phys.org, Oct 09, 2013

Professor Ernesto Estrada, of the University of Strathclyde's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, examined the effect of direct and indirect social influences – otherwise known as peer pressure – on how decisions are reached on important issues. Using mathematical models, he analysed data taken from 15 networks – including US school superintendents and Brazilian farmers – to outline peer pressure's crucial role in society.

How Peer Pressure Shapes Consensus, Leadership, and Innovations in Social Groups
link, Provided by University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

the process begins when individuals directly connected to each other first reach agreement, then – under the influence of peers not directly connected to them – the entire social group eventually tips into a collective consensus. He said: "Consider a teenager who is pressed by her friends into binge-drinking on a Saturday night – this corresponds to the direct pressure exerted by the peers connected to that individual.

"However, she is also under indirect pressure, by seeing that many teenagers are doing the same every Saturday. Thus, this indirect pressure could make the difference in that individual to copy a given attitude."

In social groups in which indirect peer pressure is largely absent, the extent to which its leaders share the same views plays a critical role in the length of time it takes to reach agreement on issues. However, when there is strong indirect peer pressure, the role of the local leaders vanishes and individuals with no important positions in their networks can become the leaders of the group.