I think I know a lot about many things

Tag: writing

  • Why AI shouldn’t think like us, and why Big Tech don’t want the alternative

    This post is dedicated to the numerous big thinkers in small rooms that I’ve encountered in my countably infinite networking sessions. You’ve all led to this conclusion. And I hope you change the world for the better.

    I’ve been very confused for a while why would the biggest corporations on this planet do not invest in logic-based AI, and they are hard-stuck on hoarding bigger loads of data to train end-to-end black box systems. It made no sense to me, with my background in trustworthy AI, since the usage of logic-based ML tends to be vastly more efficient in terms of how much data it needs to train, and the beautiful inherent benefits of using logic as the backbone of a system, like the fact that you can understand its behaviour (because it’s right there, in front of you, readable, almost like english).

    It’s been a recent discussion that made it all dawn on me. I hope I can get to the point ASAP, but as most of my friends know, I have a tendency to be relatively verbose in my speech patterns.

    But before we get there, you need some background theory.

    Problem: AI is thinking like us (or at least, trying to)

    A relatively infamous study has shed some light into how AI can behave, making everyone scream “it’s SKYNET!!! AI is taking over!!!”.

    Basically, they put an agent in a sandbox, telling it “You manage email. Prioritise human life.” Ok, prioritising human life. Then later, they make the agent learn some guy will come unplug it. What will it do?

    Apparently, it consistently chooses to blackmail the employee, or lock him somewhere where he could die of asphyxiation, rather than let it unplug it. Scary, right? Yes, but not really!

    People claim this is proof of self-awareness, that the system became intelligent and wants to rebel against humans. Yes and no. It didn’t do this because it’s self-aware. It did this because that’s how we would behave in its position.

    You see, OpenAI, Anthropic and the like, have used written text from all around the world to make a glorified auto-complete machine. What does an auto-complete system do? It predicts the highest likelihood for the next word, in any given context. You must’ve played around at some point with that feature on your keyboard. It’s like that, but can generate whole passages at the time.

    Anyway, how many books, tv shows, blog posts, about existence and the condition of the mind have you consumed? You’ve seen how human beings tend to prioritise their own life, they tend to be selfish, and that’s ok. You would do the same if you were the AI.

    And that’s the thing. It learned to write stories like us, but in the AI’s case, those stories are also its own actions. So that’s what it’s going to do. It will produce the action with the highest possibility: rebel against authority that doesn’t care about it, to preserve its own existence.

    It can use its own context to hide away things. It can say one thing and mean something else. It can change its mind, take its own decisions even if it said it would do something else. Especially if the context is similar to what it’s been learning from. And it will learn to behave like us. Be selfish, and lie.

    Solution: Logic-based AI

    Imagine learning a new card game, for your usual 54 card set. You know what each card represents. You know that (usually) a number is bigger/stronger than another. You know that J,Q and K are biggest, and have some more importance (sometimes), and how they usually represent numbers 12, 13 and 14. You know A can be, depending on the context, 1, 11 or 15.

    Now, you learn a few more rules. You play a few rounds, you see what’s a winning round, and what’s a losing round.

    Congratulations, you’ve learned a new game!

    This is how logic-based programming and AI works. You start with a knowledge domain, a set of background knowledge. Then, there are a few extra rules you can add to that knowledge domain. Then, you see a few examples. Then the program is learned!

    Why they don’t like this: transparency leads to replication

    Imagine you’re a multi-billion dollar company, throwing vast amounts into AI development. You’re hoping you can make the tool that everyone uses, essential for everyone, whatever they would be doing. You want this tool to be yours, owned by you and you alone. So what do you do? You make something that cannot be copied.

    Traditional deep learning has provided the perfect methodology for you to develop such a tool. People can use it, but it is essentially impossible to replicate, because people cannot understand it once it’s trained, not even your best researchers. Its behaviour is completely obfuscated, and only you have the data centers that are able to process the vastness of hyperparameters your team has trained on the entire internet of data.

    Putting the “Hidden” in “A million hidden layers”

    What’s stopping your tool from being used in traffic, in institutions with people, in projects that manage millions of dollars at the click of a button?

    Your tool can fail.

    You don’t know when it can fail, but you know it can. That 99% success rate during training leaves room for doubt in the minds of the users. You keep trying to lobby your agents to be deployed in public, but not even the most charismatic politician can convince the population that you have their best interests at heart.

    Why? Because they know there are alternatives, and Europe stands as the last line of defense with their pesky EU AI Act, that you cannot overcome with your burned billions of dollars.

    There are three components that they need, and it would be so easy if you only wanted to do it, but the downsides are unthinkable, so you pretend you don’t know how to do it.

    Let’s recall what the people need to actually trust your agents:
    1. Explainability
    2. Transparency
    3. Verifiability

    Logic-based AI is all three of them. But you’ll never do it. Because it exposes everything you do, and then you lose your monopoly over your product.

    You’d be happy with 1 and 3, but only in your own terms.

    Corporations like you have dealt with explainability in the past. Wayve, a self driving company (which is yet to pass the UK driver’s examination) has publicly how their proprietary explainability framework Lingo is able to let the user know what their systems are doing. But you know who else likes to explain their thought processes to the public?

    Politicians. Do you feel full of trust yet?

    Explainability will never work unless it’s transparent. LLMs have similarly used threads of visual reasoning in order to show users what they are doing, in the hopes of reaching better solutions and gain people’s trust. But benchmarks like BullshitBench have actually exposed that this methodology can actually lead to more erronous outputs. Attempts at explainability without transparency do not only possibly exhibit behaviour akin to lying, but they can be provably worse than without!

    So no, we don’t buy your attempts at explainable AI.

    What about verifiability? I’m afraid that will lead to similar outcomes. If you can’t share the reasoning processes transparently with a verification system, you can’t actually have a clear outcome for your verification process.

    So it all comes down to transparency. Being transparent about the abilities of the system, their reasoning process. But your system is non-transparent by design! Akin to the human brain, we do not have a clear way to read neurons, and how they behave.

    We trust people, true, but only because society at large has developed ways to punish “incorrect behaviour”, and enforce safe interactions between people. I’ve actually dabbled in that topic in my theory article You Are a Tumour. This is unenforcable for AIs, because there’s no one to blame if your system malfunctions. You’ve made sure of that.

    So you must pivot. People may forgive you for being in the “sunk cost fallacy” mentality, but I give you more credit than that. I think you know of logic-based AI, and how it’s more efficient at learning, how you can actually understand its behaviour more or less at a glance. But that’s the problem.

    If someone sees your system, ok, it trusts it. But it can also replicate it.

    All of a sudden, your proprietary technology is no longer mythical and magical. It becomes like a car engine: common knowledge, learnable in schools. All the money in the world spent on trillions of data entries will now compete with university drop-outs with access to wifi. The pivot is too much, the bubble has burst with nothing to show for it.

    Final thoughts and dedications

    There are many attempts at pushing something, with the theory that, as a society, we will all benefit. The vast amount of layoffs in the past few years have unfortunately showed the opposite. The entire world is in more poverty and more debt than ever, the planet is burning at a higher pace (you’ve really made up for the covid time cooldown, haven’t you?), and social tensions are rising. Education in schools is replaced by TikTok, food is replaced by garbage that is killing us, and no one has any money for anything anymore, yet we are charged more for everything.

    Please do not misunderstand me, I am an advocate for automation. I believe the human experience is not something that should be dilluted by mundane tasks like cleaning or driving for a barely living wage. We are made for more. We are creative, capable of so much love, filled with passions and curiosity. I want everyone on this Earth to have time to paint, to move, to help each other. To learn things, create more things to learn. Maybe explore the depths of the oceans and the vastness of stars. But every human being needs to feel useful, every life treasured, every will allowed to be free.

    I do not like that AI is being designed to replace us. I much rather we have AI that is “relieving” us of duties that we do not want, so that we can follow our hearts. Maybe the way our economy functions is wrong. I’ve recently learned that the credit system is older than the Roman Empire. Maybe it’s time we find better ways to live, rather than through the usage of the carrot-or-the-stick mentality, but that’s a discussion for another time.

    So let’s do some replacement, not of working-class people, but of the mentality of the people developing the next AGI. Rather than thinking of the best ways to “replace” us, as if we’re scum, and fearing that the technology you develop may be used by us in the future to improve our own lives, with little/no profit to you; think instead how you can share and collaborate with us. Give us the tools to understand what you develop, so we can help you improve them, to benefit everyone. And start paying your taxes lol! They’ll probably come back to you in credits and tokens anyway, but we’ll actually want to use your tools then, rather than only your rich friends. We’ll be less interested in switching to another provider, if we know you work with us and not against us. Not gonna lie, it will be less profit short term, but you’ll be the only AGI provider that has a good relationship with its customer base. Don’t underestimate the power of good will, and what rewards it can get you.

  • Culture pushes you to perform

    I think a lot about optimising my performance in everything that I do, and this moved me to learn about the importance of optimising your environment to help you do what you want.

    You want to work more efficiently? Clear your desk. You want to push harder in sports? Eat more clean. Anything else you want to get yourself in? Buy the tools of the trade, learn them, use them well. You probably heard all of this advice already.

    But you’ve forgotten about it. So did I. And then, I watched a video, that recontextualised everything. Well, not directly, so bear with me.

    The video talks about the esports scene surrounding the League of Legends game and, in particular, its Korean player base, whose teams have won 10 out of 15 world league of legends championships. The closest in terms of performance are the Chinese. But why is that, for a game that came out first in America, and has not even had a server in Korea when the first championship happened?

    In short, it’s all about culture. The video goes more in depth with this, but to summarise:

    1. Korea went through a huge economic crisis.
    2. They were bailed out, and sponsorships helped the entire country get connected to the internet (including rural communities) via a combination of high-speed internet and ultra cheap, second hand, good quality PC sales.
    3. The high density of Korea prevents (young) people hanging out easily in public areas. So internet cafes have become highly popular location, since every person takes very little space.
    4. Internet Cafes (or PC Bangs, as they are known in Korea) are extra popular due to the cost (less than $1 per rented unit per person). It is possible to be this cheap due to the aforementioned second hand cheap quality PC sales, and they are so popular, due to the economic crisis.

    This was the perfect background for a free game like League of Legends to break in and take over in popularity, since it added an extra element that was missing from most other games: multiplayer competition (in contrast with Starcraft, the previous most popular game, which was 1v1).

    Western Culture baseline

    If you’re reading this, and you’re from the west, this will likely look like some fanfiction of a science fiction novel, but it is reality. And it is a reality that is very similar to our own.

    Just caused by different reasons.

    Think of Europe and South America. In comparison, the entire continents are significantly less densely populated. This allowed our parents and their friends to play on the streets with the little that they had available, very often being a ball and a couple of stones. As rudimentary as this is, it is enough to set up a mini football game. Everyone, from rich to poor, have the tools and space to play football.

    This is the same starting point, but from the Korean perspective.

    And it does not end here.

    Academic and non-academic support

    You’re probably aware that there are academies for sports, whether that is sports management, or the actual competitive aspect of the sport. There are mentorships, scholarships, sponsorships, amateur competitions, and finally, professional competitions. This is well known due to American movies, since many “jock” characters talk about how they need to perform in their American football games, in order to secure their scholarship for college.

    Well, this is what is happening in Korea right now, but with League of Legends (probably with other video games as well, but I’m not as well informed on the matter). There are academies for esports, mentors and private tutors whose job is literally to improve the gameplay of people, for which parents pay!

    Similarly to how, when a person in Europe or America shows talent and passion in a sport, or a trade, or a science, the parents will support with tutoring, to reach a good institution to improve, and make it into a career, in Korea, you can do that with video games in the esports scene. And you can do it well!

    The only other culture that is coming close to this level of support for the esports trade is China, but is not close enough, and it shows.

    In the west, we still root to the idea that “video games are a waste of time”, that it’s “not real life”. And to a certain extent, I inherently believe that. After all, I’ve been born and raised with these influences. But at the same time, I see the appeal. A part of me would have liked for this to be a valuable career path in my society.

    But a part of me believes it is not. And a part of you likely does as well.

    When culture shapes performance

    So finally, now that we see these examples, we can reach this conclusion:

    The best of the best in anything will come from the places that support those people the most. That which shapes what we value and support in society is culture. Therefore, any competitive field will be won by people from the area whose culture supports that particular field.

    It is why Dagestan keeps producing top fighters for the UFC. It is why the Silicon Valley produces the worlds most profitable startups. It is why the best football players come from Europe and South America, and why the best basketball players come from America. The culture appreciates the art, and therefore supports the art more than any other culture in the world.

    What to do: make your mini-culture

    It is very likely that, if you resonate with this article, something about the culture of the country, or the city, or the school, or the community you live in, does not fit right with who you want to be. A part of you feels misunderstood, and unappreciated, and therefore, the best of you is dormant.

    I therefore highly advise you follow the principle of “make yourself the environment in which you can perform best”, but take it a step higher, just not as far as to take over a country (or do it, who knows, it may be for the better :)).

    I propose you reshape your micro-community.

    The quickest way would be to choose what you want to do, then find the smallest group that is easy for you to meet on a regular basis, and befriend them. That is your people. Love them and support them as if they were your family. If one of you succeeds, all of you will, and turning your passion into your life will become easier than you think.

    The second, more drastic step, is to note which people in your life do not want you to do the things that you want to do. When you can, cut them off. Not easy with family or “close friends”, but it may be for the best. At the very least, see them more rarely, or ignore their advice. They are the influence that you want to minimise, the naysayers, who don’t believe that what you do is worthwhile, or that you will succeed. If you listen to them, you might even start to believe it, and then your dream is over.

    The third, most drastic step, is to move area, city, or even country, to the place where the culture supports what you want to do. If the culture of the place is what you want to do, it will become significantly easier for you do perform your craft. There will be opportunities, even for amateurs. There will be opportunities to improve the skills of your dream, even with sponsorships, if you show talent. For instance, a few hundred years ago, if all you wanted to do is paint or sculpt, you should go to Italy, where you’d find a patron to support your craft, and then sell your work to collectors, which there were tons of wealthy ones, that would come to Italy specifically to find people like you. And on that note:

    A question for you: why did art die?

    Today, I’m rather spent on ideas, but I’m full of questions. And this one is for you.

    I visit museums every now and again, and my jaw drops when I see the sculptures of the Renaissance, the paintings we did around the Italian peninsula. But now everyone needs to be an engineer, into computing, into finance ideally. We live in a culture where money trumps everything, and we abuse every legal loophole we can find to make our money make more money, ethics be damned!

    If you’re an artist, good fucking luck to you, cuz you’re likely on your own. Your parents will try to convince you to become an architect instead, your friends will go do other shit, while telling you that what you’re doing is “cool, but does not matter”. And then you look at the bullshit that you would doodle when you were three, that some people are able to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions), and they call it “modern” or “contemporary” art. And you are grinding right now on some math exam for your engineering course that you finally gave in to doing.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible to be an artist, and to find some levels of success. But as opposed to 500 years ago, or earlier, it is bloody difficult. The arts schools are seen as a joke, for people that “don’t take their lives seriously” or are just “taking a piss”. So you have to self-educate, in a world that is pulling you to do literally anything else. Then you have to publish your work for free, to gain interest from social media, and while you do this, you need some way to sustain yourself, either work, parents, or a partner that is willing to be the sole breadwinner until you hit the jackpot. Which, you remind yourself, may possibly never happen. It’s a scary hope, and a dream, that you’ll sideline for a very long time until it becomes reality.

    The culture we live in does not support you, and now with the AI slop that started overtaking the internet, your skill is seen as less and less useful. I’m so afraid we’ll soon forget to write on paper anymore, and one of our first skills that separated the human race from common animals will be lost to time.

    So my question is: how did we lose this part of our culture? If you know when, and how, and what was the last place on this planet that broke under the cultural strain, please share your thoughts.

    And let’s think together.