AI | Bob Schwartz

March 28, 2024

Claude AI (aka Bucky) helps us become great generalists

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)—widely known as Bucky—was a world-changing architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He was a genius and prophet of generalism. He believed that over-specialization narrows us and stands in the way of solving problems and envisioning the future.

When Stewart Brand began publishing the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s, he put Fuller’s books on the very first page. “The insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog,” he wrote. As a mission for the holistic all-encompassing general reach of the catalog Brand said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Fuller attributed his big-picture holistic perspective to his service as a naval officer in the early 20th century. At the time, and in some ways still, ships at sea were almost entirely self-sufficient. Those on board had to know about everything and be able to do anything. That is reflected in one of his most famous books, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Claude and other AI resources can help us become better generalists. The World Wide Web (thank you Tim Berners-Lee) was a major step in that direction. AI is the next step. It is not that Claude can access trillions of words while even the best of us only know thousands. It is that when we are motivated to know more about lots of things—which as gods we should want—we have a new resource to help us be the generalists that we need to be. Now more than ever.

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November 20, 2023

Mountaintops disappear: Bob, Coyote, AI (Part 2). Clouds are better than volcanoes or coal companies.

In Part 1 of this post, I transcribed a conversation with me, Coyote and AI about mountaintops disappearing. AI had a long explanation of this phenomenon.

Reviewing the conversation, I read that AI had said this:

“So in summary – distance, weather, sunlight and pollution can all contribute to an optical illusion where mountain peaks seem to blend into their surroundings and temporarily “disappear” under certain viewing conditions. Their disappearance is usually not literal.”

At first, I was shocked. AI seemed to be saying that sometimes, unusually, mountaintops actually do disappear. Then I realized that, of course, there are circumstances where this does happen. Volcanoes do blow off the tops of mountains. So do coal companies. I asked AI about this.

AI:

“Yes, coal companies do sometimes remove or “blast off” the tops of mountains as part of mountaintop removal mining operations. Here are a few key points about this practice:
• Mountaintop removal mining involves removing vegetation on a mountain ridge and then explosively removing the top of the mountain to expose underlying coal seams. This is done with heavy machinery and explosives.
• Blasting off mountaintops allows mining companies to access multiple coal seams that were previously buried deep within the mountain. It’s more economically efficient than underground mining.
• However, it has significant environmental impacts like destroying habitats, increasing erosion and sedimentation in streams, and reducing biodiversity. Entire ecosystems on mountaintops are removed.
• The blasted debris and rock is typically dumped into nearby valleys and waterways, further damaging the landscape and water quality. Reclamation of mined sites is difficult.
• Mountaintop removal mining is controversial and has faced legal challenges from environmental groups concerned about its widespread damage. Some areas have imposed restrictions on it.
• As of 2010, an estimated 500 mountains had been leveled in Appalachia by this practice to extract coal over several decades. The technique remains in use today at some surface mining sites.
So in summary – yes, removing or “blasting off” the tops of mountains is a real mining technique some coal companies employ as part of mountaintop removal operations to access coal deposits. It has significant environmental consequences.”

In the case of my waking up to see the mountaintops gone, which turned out to be low-hanging clouds, those instances don’t apply. These mountains are not volcanic and there are no coal companies operating here. If a volcano had erupted or a coal company had blasted the tops off, it would have been obvious and have woken me up even earlier. Clouds are much better.

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July 24, 2023

AI and The Library of Babel

The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges is an illuminating insight into AI. That may not be (probably isn’t) immediately obvious. The story is by no means didactic or directly germane to the topic, as are the proliferating texts about the specific applications, opportunities and implications of AI. Consider it obliquely but brightly enlightening about the meaning of AI. That may be a reach, but worth reaching for.

Below is a brief excerpt from the story. Any excerpt does disservice to the genius of Borges, maybe here more than most. This is meant to offer a taste; please read the whole in one of his collections, such as Labyrinths.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase….

There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say….

This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s palm. . . They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves….

Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variation with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): in other words, all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad. . . The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero….

The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned the suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. I have just written the word “infinite.” I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end — which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

From The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges

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May 13, 2019

AI Writes: Talk to Transformer

Artificial Intelligence (AI) won’t replace writers. No machine can ride the emotional roller coaster that writing can be, and what computer could consume the inappropriate volume of coffee (or alcohol) it takes sometimes to string words together? I mean, where would you pour it?

But then…

The Verge:

Even the most advanced chatbots can’t hold a decent conversation, but AI systems are definitely getting better at generating the written word. A new web app provides ample proof, letting anyone enter a text prompt to which AI software will automatically respond.

Enter the start of a made-up news article, and it’ll finish it for you. Ask it a question (by formatting your input like this: “Q: What should I do today?”), and it’ll happily respond.

The site is called TalkToTransformer.com, and it’s the creation of Canadian engineer Adam King. King made the site, but the underlying technology comes from research lab OpenAI. Earlier this year, OpenAI unveiled its new AI language system, GPT-2, and TalkToTransformer is a slimmed-down, accessible version of that same technology, which has been made accessible only to select scientists and journalists in the past. (The name “transformer” refers to the type of neural network used by GPT-2 and other systems.)

If you want to learn about AI language generation, there’s no better way to understand its huge potential and serious limitations than by playing around with TalkToTransformer.

On the plus side, the model is incredibly flexible. It’s able to recognize a huge variety of inputs, from news articles and stories to song lyrics, poems, recipes, code, and HTML. It can even identify familiar characters from franchises like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.

At the same time, you’ll soon see that, at a fundamental level, the system doesn’t understand language or the world at large. The text it generates has surface-level coherence but no long-term structure. When it writes stories, for example, characters appear and disappear at random, with no consistency in their needs or actions. When it generates dialogue, conversations drift aimlessly from topic to topic. If it gets more than a few responses, it seems like good luck, not skill.

Still, as The Verge explained in our original coverage of GPT-2, this system is hugely impressive. Remember: this is a single algorithm that has learned to generate text by studying a huge dataset scraped from the web and other sources. It learned by looking for patterns in this information, and the result is a surprisingly multitalented system.

It may not be hard to find gaps in GPT-2’s knowledge, but it’s impossible to know whether you’ve explored the limits of what it can do.

Putting Talk to Transformer to the test, I prompted it with some of the most famous opening lines from classic novels (shown in bold). Note that for the sake of space, I have not included the actual opening paragraphs for comparison, author v. machine. If you’re not familiar with the real thing, you can easily look it up.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. But no one would speak of him as a beggar. He has nothing that may entitle him to such a wife; and therefore it lies open to him, as to a man of ill estate, and who does not have any means, that he might marry his daughter, to whom his fortune might furnish a dowry—a woman who bore his child. So that, in other respects, the poor man is so fortunate in life as almost to be the chief benefactor of his country, without the necessity of making a comparison of his wealth with his want of property. But he has no reason to make such an comparison. For without it his property may grow to become much greater than the property of the richest in the family, whom it is not fit to receive any assistance from. So that no one will be willing, by any means, to enter into a marriage-contract with any one who is rich enough to support him. But if the property of any one whom he is bound to support can be reduced to…

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

It is possible that the old prophets who would write in our days, the last of them we are not able to remember, would go mad during the coming of the Age of Light, but only among us, for now all is still the same to them.

The world, or at least that part of the world, which is not dominated by the forces of light and sound, becomes a desert of blind blindness, which has its origin in the lack of knowledge in the human brain. The old prophets said that all of us who have knowledge of God must, sooner or later, fall into an abject state of ignorance about the reality of Things. However, those who are the more ignorant, have never the slightest fear of the Age of Light, as there is…

James Joyce, Ulysses:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. He had a large brown dog with blue eyes in his mouth, about twelve feet long.

“We are in the presence of the gods,” he said with a tone like a dog barking. As I walked inside, I glanced through the mirror which had the words “THE GODS” stamped upon it . I recognized the face that stood behind the mirror and the voice of the god. The god, whose name was Ouroboros, the One who is above and beyond, asked him if it was his name. The dwarf replied that his name was “Buck”. The god asked Buck Mulligan how he liked to be called. Buck answered, “Well, in order to be called what we are, we must be named. I like it when you call me that way.” The god had been talking about the god with his eyes shining and he felt something in his chest.
“I need a shave,” said Buck,…

Albert Camus, The Stranger:

Mother died today. I’m sure she has a daughter too. I’ve been trying to get her to talk to me for years. I tried to give her a name, to remind her what her life was worth, to show a smile to tell her I love her and that she is special. But, I couldn’t talk to her much. She just was. I’m not sure even if I could talk to her on the phone that would be enough to help her out. Not a real good idea because, the moment she does meet someone, she will feel abandoned and so will almost any adult. The last time I talked to her was before she passed away. She was sick. I saw her one last time in one of her many hospitals in the hospital. She didn’t talk very often. She seemed okay, at least when I had her. She told me she was sorry she didn’t talk to me sooner. I asked her about her kids, she said she was not home for the kids…

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. If the hobbit was happy, it was also easy to look upon him. Why, that hobbit could do whatever he liked, and so he came often and went noisily and noisily of one to another to meet his needs, but the poor hobbit felt nothing and never had anything to feel for. How can a hobbit feel for someone else? It is hard for him to have the confidence that someone else would feel for him.

Then when the hobbit is very tired and doesn’t know what to do, how he feels for somebody is also not easy to come in contact with him if he is far from civilization; there is so little contact with a non-European. The one time the hobbit fell very sick he looked back in vain for all his friends and nobody would tell…

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Tag: AI