To The Big Bang Theory (“The Russian Rocket Reaction”, S5e05):
Howard: Someone has to go up with the telescope as a payload specialist, and guess who that someone is!
Sheldon: Muhammed Li.
Howard: Who’s Muhammed Li?
Sheldon: Muhammed is the most common first name in the world, Li the most common surname, and as I didn’t know the answer I thought that gave me a mathematical edge.
Experts tell me that exchange doesn’t perfectly explain how generative AI works; it’s too simplistic. Generative AI – or a Sheldon made more nuanced by his writers – takes into account contextual information to calculate the probable next word. So it wouldn’t pick from all the first names and surnames in the world. It might, however, pick from the names of all the payload specialists or some other group it correlated, or confect one.
More than a year on, I still can’t find a use for generative “AI” that is so unreliable and inscrutable. At Exponential View, Azeem Azhar has written about the “answer engine” Perplexity.ai. While it’s helpful that Perplexity provides references for its answers, it was producing misinformation by the third question I asked it, and offered no improvement when challenged. Wikipedia spent many years being accused of unreliability, too, but at least there you can read the talk page and understand how the editors arrived at the text they present.
On The Daily Show this week, Jon Stewart ranted about AI and interviewed FTC chair Lina Khan. Well-chosen video clips showed AI company heads’ true colors, telling the public AI is an assistant for humans while telling money people and each other that AI will enable greater productivity with fewer workers and help eliminate “the people tax”.
More interesting, however, was Khan’s note that the FTC is investigating the investments and partnerships in AI to understand if they’re giving current technology giants undue influence in the marketplace. If, in her example, all the competitors in a market outsource their pricing decisions to the same algorithm they may be guilty of price fixing even if they’re not actively colluding. And these markets are consolidating at an ever-earlier stage. Snapchat and WhatsApp had millions of users by the time Facebook thought it prudent to buy them rather than let them become dangerous competitors. AI is pre-consolidating: the usual suspects have been buying up AI startups and models at pace.
“More profound than fire or electricity,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells a camera at one point, speaking about AI. The last time I heard this level of hyperbole it was about the Internet in the 1990s, shortly before the bust. A friend’s answer to this sort of thing has never varied: “I’d rather have indoor plumbing.”
***
Last week the Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison for stealing $8 billion. In the end, you didn’t have to understand anything complicated about cryptocurrencies; it was just good old embezzlement.
And then the price of bitcoin went *up*. At the Guardian, Molly White explains that this is because cryptoevangelists are pushing the idea that the sector can reach its full potential, now that Bankman-Fried and other bad apples have been purged. But, as she says, nothing has really changed. No new use case has come along to make cryptocurrencies more useful, more valuable, or more trustworthy.
Both cryptocurrencies and generative AI are bubbles. The difference is that the AI bubble will likely leave behind it some technologies and knowledge that are genuinely useful; it will be like the Internet, which boomed and busted before settling in to change the world. Cryptocurrencies are more like the Dutch tulips. Unfortunately, in the meantime both these bubbles are consuming energy at an insane rate. How many wildfires is bitcoin worth?
**
I’ve seen a report suggesting that the last known professional words of the late Ross Anderson may have been, “Do they take us for fools?”
He was referring to the plans, debated in the House of Commons on March 25, to amend the Investigatory Powers Act to allow the government to pre-approve (or disapprove) new security features technology firms want to intorduce. The government is of course saying it’s all perfectly innocent, intended to keep the country safe. But recent clashes in the decades-old conflict over strong encryption have seen the technology companies roll out features like end-to-end encryption (Meta) and decide not to implement others, like client-side scanning (Apple). The latest in a long line of UK governments that want access to encrypted text was hardly going to take that quietly. So here we are, debating this yet again. Yet the laws of mathematics still haven’t changed: there is no such thing as a security hole that only “good guys” can use.
***
Returning to AI, it appears that costs may lead Google to charge for access to its AI-enhanced search, as Alex Hern reports at the Guardian. Hern thinks this is good news for its AI-focused startup competitors, which already charge for top-tier tools and who are at risk of being undercut by Google. I think it’s good for users by making it easy to avoid the AI “enhancement”. Of course, DuckDuckGo already does this without all the tracking and monopoly mishegoss.
Illustrations: Jon Stewart uninspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s demonstration of AI making toast.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.
