Observations from a Hill

What's wrong with this picture? In fact, what's at all  right with this picture, for [Deity of your choice]'s sake? What appears to be an image of Jonny Ive and Sam Altman introducing the world to a bloodshot eye in a box, is self-evidently the product of a rather crude AI representation of the two of them. What on earth is the takeaway from this, and what does it bode for their future collaboration? Well, first off the bat is that poor old Jonny Ive appears to have suffered rather more badly than I did in a table-saw accident, having apparently lost most of his fingertips. The one remaining, apparently complete digit has an obvious genetic defect, in that the [only extant on either hand] fingernail would seem to be comprised of soft flesh rather than keratin. Both of them also have gazes that suggest they suffer from strabismus, or that they have been smoking something rather too strong for their constitutions, rather akin to Elon Musk's actual appearance half the ti...

I've always marked the various phases of my life as individual lives in themselves, one leading to another and sometimes intersecting back and forth through time via the conduits of experience and relationship. When we first moved to Wales in 1980, on my taking my place on the postgraduate course in Linguistics that I'd won that year, we lived in a number of rented cottages before we eventually bought a house here. Each of these moves netted us new friends and acquaintances, culminating in the social circle we dubbed the 'Gerlan Bohemia' of the early/mid eighties [blog posts passim] centred mainly around the arts, music and of course, food and drink. One of the consequences of living a life fragmented thusly is people come and go, touching on yours briefly and then they're off into a different orbit altogether. People who were the young children of friends at the time grow up in yet different worlds to you, sometimes to re-impinge on your trajectory at a future time...

It can't simply be coincidence that concurrent with the travails of the UK's National Health Service, so many otherwise great healthcare systems around the world are suffering similarly. Once held to be the very bedrock and a clear indicator of a civilised society, there seems to be a global decline in public health services. The cause is the elephant in the room that no-one seems ballsy enough to tackle head-on: capital. Capital: and its deification to the status of modern religious faith in recent decades, the allegedly inviolable markets and ultra-wealth-inequality characterised as somehow normal. Simple as. Think back to the 'bad old days' of decent labour representation, fairer wage structures, proper taxation, and yes, a health system that functioned beautifully and integrated well with social care. What has caused this shift from the twentieth century into what now seems closer to the eighteenth for the vast majority of the population? Capital. But of course Mar...

Once again, courtesy of my mate Steve, a quote from a BBC piece on the issue of AI potentially becoming, or even already being 'conscious'. Prof Murray Shanahan, principal scientist at Google DeepMind and emeritus professor in AI at Imperial College, London:  "We don't actually understand very well the way in which LLMs work internally, and that is some cause for concern,". I would have thought that such a lack of understanding of the nature of an entity's workings places it in a relationship with us somewhat akin to our understanding of the inner workings of species other than our own: indeed, our understanding of the inner workings of each other. No-one can truly understand or inhabit the mind of another. If we have created some sort of entity that we ourselves don't understand, doesn't that imply this third party's 'consciousness' by default?  A very good question. A philosophical question. A moral question. A theological question. We ha...

So Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI is "...completely unbothered" that he might be less intelligent than his AI. As Guy Keleny puts it most succinctly in his letter to today's FT: 'AI is either stupider than people or smarter. If stupider it is useless, if smarter terribly dangerous. Where's the upside?'. I tend to agree, particularly with regard to the race to develop a General AI model, which is fraught with all manner of potential demons, practical, moral and political. But as to very vertical, use-case-specific models? I feel that much useful work can be done here [blog posts passim]. The main issue surely has to be the sheer expenditure of electrical energy that AI, along with crypto and the cloud, consumes? There has to be an upper limit on it, for practical as well as environmental reasons, one would reasonably think. The law of diminishing returns has to influence things in the long run, with long-term profits eventually being outstripped by the running c...

Today's awful weather amplifies my strong urge to take a rain check from the news at the moment, which generally is simply anxiety-inducing gloom and doom, right across the board. Frankly the state of the world is just depressing. I know it's always going to be less than optimum, let alone perfect, and probably always has been, but I do seem to remember periods in my long-ish life that were slightly less fraught. Again, the rosy spectacles might be responsible, but I'm not so sure. This last decade-and-a-half has just been plain weird, as far as I'm concerned. Of course, some things never change, such as the seemingly destined-to-be-eternal conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Much like the Postmasters' continuing struggle for justice here in the UK. Having got so far as they did in getting recognition that the Post Office had fucked them over for so long and at such great personal expense to them, they now are struggling against the tide of Civ...

  Tonight's post comes courtesy of my mate Steve, who pointed me in the direction of a nineteenth century photographic - I would say, pioneering - artist, of whose existence and work, I'm ashamed to say, I was hitherto totally unaware. One Henry Peach Robinson, born in Ludlow in Shropshire, and a founding member of the Birmingham Photographic Society. Obviously a photographer of a painterly sensibility, he sought to overcome the severe dynamic limitations of the chemical photographic processes then available to him by the ingenious use of multiple exposures of the same scene, each taken to expose for the different light levels throughout the subject he was trying to capture. In the image shown, he achieved perfect exposure of all the layers of the subject from close to mid and out to the far distance, capturing shadow, mid-tone and highlight detail throughout the entire image; which, given the technological limitations of the day would have been impossible to capture on a singl...