Computer Science

"My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now."

"A century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing began to reveal the hitherto unknown range of what machines could be made to do. These two streams of thought began to merge only in the 1940s, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts began to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember. Research in the modern science of Artificial Intelligence started only in the 1950s, stimulated by the invention of modern computers. This inspired a flood of new ideas about how machines could do what only minds had done previously."

"Despite efforts to block access, Chinese netizens are discussing a report by Australia’s public service broadcaster ABC about how China uses artificial intelligence to erase online content that directly or indirectly references the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. …Experts are raising alarms about AI-induced censorship, which leads to a growing sense of historical amnesia, as symbols, images, and even indirect references are systematically erased. This phenomenon affects not only the collective memory of the Chinese populace but also the global understanding of these pivotal events. The use of AI in this context highlights significant ethical concerns regarding technology’s power to shape and control information."

"…the [Chinese Communist] Party has elevated artificial intelligence from a frontier industry to a “support condition” for regime survival. … Xi Jinping’s remarks revealed a comprehensive strategy: artificial intelligence is to be embedded into governance as both a surveillance tool and a propaganda amplifier. … AI is explicitly tasked with enabling cadres to “better understand public opinion” and to anticipate dissent before it surfaces. In effect, the Party is building a machine for preemptive repression. The Cyberspace Administration of China and security organs are expected to accelerate AI-driven monitoring, not only filtering keywords but mapping sentiment trends, identifying “risk clusters,” and neutralizing them before they metastasize into protest."

"Suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. (We see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present system.) ... Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals. ... I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines."

"It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by Ai."

"I think we’re going to see AI get even better. It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs. And then there’ll be very few people need for software engineering projects."

"Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability. It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is. I [feel] utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves."

"AI is not going to replace physicians, but physicians who use AI are going to replace physicians who don’t."

"It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the "Turing test"), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems."

"Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."

"On November 5, Ruslan Perelygin, [an] opposition legislator in Oryol, used AI to create a clip showing protesters denouncing the local mayor for a variety of crimes and demanding his ouster, a creative use of new technology to protest at a time when genuine demonstrations are almost invariably illegal and subject to harsh punishments."

"Recent researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or provision of a global model. … the intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. … the member of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality and so forth. We need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such varied multiplicity."

"Even if conflicts like this don’t impede the advance of A.I., it might be stymied in other ways. At the end of May, several A.I. researchers collaborated on a paper that examined whether new A.I. systems could be developed from knowledge generated by existing A.I. models, rather than by human-generated databases. They discovered a systemic breakdown — a failure they called “model collapse.” The authors saw that using data from an A.I. to train new versions of A.I.s leads to chaos. Synthetic data, they wrote, ends up “polluting the training set of the next generation of models; being trained on polluted data, they then misperceive reality.” The lesson here is that it will prove challenging to build new models from old models. And with chat-bots, Ilia Shumailov, an Oxford University researcher and the paper’s primary author, told me, the downward spiral looks similar. Without human data to train on, Shumailov said, “your language model starts being completely oblivious to what you ask it to solve, and it starts just talking in circles about whatever it wants, as if it went into this madman mode.” Wouldn’t a plug-in from, say, Wikipedia, avert that problem, I asked? It could, Shumailov said. But if in the future Wikipedia were to become clogged with articles generated by A.I., the same cycle — essentially, the computer feeding on content it created itself — would be perpetuated."

"Quantum computing will pop the AI bubble."

"As difficult as the pursuit of truth can be for Wikipedians, though, it seems significantly harder for A.I. chatbots. ChatGPT has become infamous for generating fictional data points or false citations known as “hallucinations”; perhaps more insidious is the tendency of bots to oversimplify complex issues, like the origins of the Ukraine-Russia war, for example. One worry about generative A.I. at Wikipedia — whose articles on medical diagnoses and treatments are heavily visited — is related to health information. A summary of the March conference call captures the issue: “We’re putting people’s lives in the hands of this technology — e.g. people might ask this technology for medical advice, it may be wrong and people will die.” This apprehension extends not just to chatbots but also to new search engines connected to A.I. technologies. In April, a team of Stanford University scientists evaluated four engines powered by A.I. — Bing Chat, NeevaAI, perplexity.ai and YouChat — and found that only about half of the sentences generated by the search engines in response to a query could be fully supported by factual citations. “We believe that these results are concerningly low for systems that may serve as a primary tool for information-seeking users,” the researchers concluded, “especially given their facade of trustworthiness.”"

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it."

"What makes the goal of accuracy so vexing for chatbots is that they operate probabilistically when choosing the next word in a sentence; they aren’t trying to find the light of truth in a murky world. “These models are built to generate text that sounds like what a person would say — that’s the key thing,” Jesse Dodge says. “So they’re definitely not built to be truthful.” I asked Margaret Mitchell, a computer scientist who studied the ethics of A.I. at Google, whether factuality should have been a more fundamental priority for A.I. Mitchell, who has said she was fired from the company for criticizing how it treated colleagues working on bias in A.I. (Google says she was fired for violating the company’s security policies), said that most would find that logical. “This common-sense thing — ‘Shouldn’t we work on making it factual if we’re putting it forward for fact-based applications?’ — well, I think for most people who are not in tech, it’s like, ‘Why is this even a question?’” But, Mitchell said, the priorities at the big companies, now in frenzied competition with one another, are concerned with introducing A.I. products rather than reliability. The road ahead will almost certainly lead to improvements. Mitchell, who now works as the chief ethics scientist at the A.I. company Hugging Face, told me that she foresees A.I. companies’ making gains in accuracy and reducing biased answers by using better data. “The state of the art until now has just been a laissez-faire data approach,” she said. “You just throw everything in, and you’re operating with a mind-set where the more data you have, the more accurate your system will be, as opposed to the higher quality of data you have, the more accurate your system will be.” Jesse Dodge, for his part, points to an idea known as “retrieval,” whereby a chatbot will essentially consult a high-quality source on the web to fact-check an answer in real time. It would even cite precise links, as some A.I.-powered search engines now do. “Without that retrieval element,” Dodge says, “I don’t think there’s a way to solve the hallucination problem.” Otherwise, he says, he doubts that a chatbot answer can gain factual parity with Wikipedia or the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

"Another scientific development that we find difficult to absorb into our traditional value system is the new science of cybernetics: machines that may soon equal or surpass man in original thinking and problem-solving. [...] In the hands of the present establishment there is no doubt that the machine could be used – is being used – to intensify the apparatus of repression and to increase established power. But again, as in the issue of population control, misuse of science has often obscured the value of science itself. In this case, though perhaps the response may not be quite so hysterical and evasive, we still often have the same unimaginative concentration on the evils of the machine itself, rather than a recognition of its revolutionary significance."

"If you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK. If you free up human labor, you can help elder people better, have smaller class sizes – you know, the demand for labor to do good things is still there. And then if you ever get beyond that, you have a lot of leisure time and you’ll have to figure out what to do with it."

"What often happens is that an engineer has an idea of how the brain works (in his opinion) and then designs a machine that behaves that way. This new machine may in fact work very well. But, I must warn you that that does not tell us anything about how the brain actually works, nor is it necessary to ever really know that, in order to make a computer very capable. It is not necessary to understand the way birds flap their wings and how the feathers are designed in order to make a flying machine. It is not necessary to understand the lever system in the legs of a cheetah...in order to make an automobile with wheels that go very fast. It is therefore not necessary to imitate the behavior of Nature in detail in order to engineer a device which can in many respects surpass Nature's abilities."

"Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’. It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,."

"Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the universe which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the Universe is winning."

"There’s a lot of leverage in the system, there’s a lot of cash, but then there’s a whole bunch of other folks who are trying to build these data centers. Whether there’s the energy component side of it, or whether you think about the real estate component, I mean, there’s just a whole lot of things happening at one time. [...] Are we in an AI bubble? Of course, we are. We are hyped, we’re accelerating, we’re putting enormous leverage into the system,” Gelsinger answered. “With that said, I don’t see it ending for several years. I do think we have an industry shift to AI. As Jensen (Huang) talked about, and I agree with this, you know that businesses are yet to really start materially benefiting from [it]. We’re displacing all of the internet and the service provider industry as we think about it today — we have a long way to go."

"When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism."

"Physical sexual immorality is deeply evil and brings an additional shipload of devastating consequences and fallout; but when a man engages in adultery of the heart with whatever AI happens to “think” is a woman as the object, he is making all-out war on his connection to reality in a disastrous way. …Those who offer AI the worship, trust, and belief they should be placing in the one true God will become increasingly blind, dull, senseless, stagnated, and incapable of saying anything worth hearing, as those around them are treated to the ever-ripening stench of their own self-absorption."

"Since the 1960s, Japan has produced a considerable number of cyborg narratives in manga and anime, particularly in works targeting male children and adolescents. From early manga examples such as Kazumasa Hirai and Hiro Kuwata's 8 Man and Shotaro Ishinomori's Cyborg 009, and their subsequent anime versions, the protagonist is commonly cyborged against their will or desires. This positions them as victims, regardless of how physically powerful they are. Their sense of inferiority and vulnerability usually underpins these narratives, either subtly or explicitly. The depiction of female cyborgs adds complexity to the positioning of cyborgs in manga and anime, especially in terms of gender. Female cyborgs may be equipped with remarkable physical strength, combined with voluptuous, eroticized bodies (for instance Major Motoko Kusanagi in Masamune Shirow's original manga and Mamoru Oshii's anime version of Ghost in the Shell); and these powerful female cyborgs are also frequently ascribed roles as protectors or supporters of incompetent and insecure male protagonists. Although some female cyborgs may possess characteristics that indicate a transgression of the conventional boundaries of gender, this transgression is often limited and undermined by other elements of their depiction. As Kumiko Sato points out in her essay "How Information Technology Has "Not, Changed Feminism and Japanism", "female cyborgs and androids have been domesticated and fetishized into maternal and sexual protectors of the male hero" and thus "their functions is usually reduced to either a maid or a goddess obediantly serving her beloved male master, the sole reason for her militant nature.""

"For me, as I later came to say, cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and constraints. This is not just a romantic description, it portrays the new way of thinking quite accurately. Cybernetics differs from the traditional scientific procedure, because it does not try to explain phenomena by searching for their causes, but rather by specifying the constraints that determine the direction of their development."

"Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves."

"An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge"."

"Many of the core ideas of cybernetics have been assimilated by other disciplines, where they continue to influence scientific developments. Other important cybernetic principles seem to have been forgotten, though, only to be periodically rediscovered or reinvented in different domains. Some examples are the rebirth of neural networks, first invented by cyberneticists in the 1940's, in the late 1960's and again in the late 1980's; the rediscovery of the importance of autonomous interaction by robotics and AI in the 1990's; and the significance of positive feedback effects in complex systems, rediscovered by economists in the 1990's. Perhaps the most significant recent development is the growth of the complex adaptive systems movement, which, in the work of authors such as John Holland, Stuart Kauffman and Brian Arthur and the subfield of , has used the power of modern computers to simulate and thus experiment with and develop many of the ideas of cybernetics. It thus seems to have taken over the cybernetics banner in its mathematical modelling of complex systems across disciplinary boundaries, however, while largely ignoring the issues of goal-directedness and control."

"In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as , Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century."

"Think about the technology of sports footwear," she says. "Before the Civil War, right and left feet weren't even differentiated in shoe manufacture. Now we have a shoe for every activity." Winning the Olympics in the cyborg era isn't just about running fast. It's about "the interaction of medicine, diet, training practices, clothing and equipment manufacture, visualization and timekeeping." When the furor about the cyborgization of athletes through performance-enhancing drugs reached fever pitch last summer, Haraway could hardly see what the fuss was about. Drugs or no drugs, the training and technology make every Olympian a node in an international technocultural network just as "artificial" as sprinter Ben Johnson at his steroid peak."

"From the start, the cyborg was more than just another technical project; it was a kind of scientific and military daydream. The possibility of escaping its annoying bodily limitations led a generation that grew up on Superman and Captain America to throw the full weight of its grown-up R&D budget into achieving a real-life superpower. By the mid-1960s, cyborgs were big business, with millions of US Air Force dollars finding their way into projects to build exoskeletons, master-slave robot arms, biofeedback devices, and expert systems. For all the big bucks and high seriousness, the prevailing impression left by old cyborg technical papers is of a rather expensive kind of science fiction. Time and again, scientific reasoning melts into metaphysical speculation about evolution, human boundaries, and even the possibility of what Clynes and Kline call "a new and larger dimension for man's spirit." The cyborg was always as much a creature of scientific imagination as of scientific fact. It wasn't only the military that was captivated by the possibilities of the cyborg. The dream of improving human capabilities through selective breeding had long been a staple of the darker side of Western medical literature. Now there was the possibility of making better humans by augmenting them with artificial devices. Insulin drips had been used to regulate the metabolisms of diabetics since the 1920s. A heart-lung machine was used to control the blood circulation of an 18-year-old girl during an operation in 1953. A 43-year-old man received the first heart pacemaker implant in 1958. By the 1970s, the idea of an augmented human had entered the mainstream. Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, and his cohort Jaime Sommers, The Bionic Woman (with bionic limbs and a super-sensitive bionic ear), were popular heroes, their custom superpowers bought off the shelf like a digital watch. The cyborg had grown from a lecture-room fantasy into the stuff of prime-time TV."

"The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence:"

"Cyborg. The word has a whiff of the implausible about it that leads many people to discount it as mere fantasy. Yet cyborgs, real ones, have been among us for almost 50 years. The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental program at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s. The rat had implanted in its body a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals, altering various of its physiological parameters. It was part animal, part machine."

"During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems."

"Wiener's dream of a universal science of communication and control has faded with the years. Cybernetics has given rise to new areas like cognitive science and stimulated valuable research in numerous other fields. But almost no one today calls themselves a cyberneticist. Some believe that Wiener's project fell victim to scientific fashion, its funding sucked away by flashy but ultimately pointless AI research. Others think cybernetics was killed by the basic problem that the nuts-and-bolts mechanisms of control and communication in machines are significantly different from those in animals, and neither are very like control and communication in society. So cybernetics, which was based on an inspired generalization, fell victim to its inability to deal with details. Whichever perspective is true (and as with most such stories, the truth is likely to be a mixture of both), cybernetics has left two important cultural residues behind. The first is its picture of the world as a collection of networks. The second is its intuition that there's not as much clear blue water between people and machines as some would like to believe. These still-controversial concepts are at the bionic heart of the cyborg, which is alive and well, and constructing itself in a laboratory near you."

"The essence of cybernetic organizations is that they are self-controlling, self-maintaining, self-realizing. Indeed, cybernetics has been characterized as the “science of effective organization,” in just these terms. But the word “cybernetics” conjures, in the minds of an apparently great number of people, visions of computerized information networks, closed loop systems, and robotized man-surrogates, such as “artorgas” and “cyborgs.”"

"Another scientific development that we find difficult to absorb into our traditional value system is the new science of cybernetics: machines that may soon equal or surpass man in original thinking and problem-solving. [...] In the hands of the present establishment there is no doubt that the machine could be used – is being used – to intensify the apparatus of repression and to increase established power. But again, as in the issue of population control, misuse of science has often obscured the value of science itself. In this case, though perhaps the response may not be quite so hysterical and evasive, we still often have the same unimaginative concentration on the evils of the machine itself, rather than a recognition of its revolutionary significance."

"The meaning of the term "cybernetics" is today somewhat different from that used when Wiener, McCulloch, Rosenblueth, Bigelow and others used the Greek word "Kybernetes," or helmsmen, to describe an automatic computer... the definition, which I first gave in 1966: "Cybernetics describes an intelligent activity or event which can be expressed in algorithms. Algorithms, in turn, refer to a system of instructions which describes unambiguously and accurately an interaction which is equivalent to a given type of flux of intelligence and a subsequent, controlled activity. The development of cybernetics aims, among other things, at the design and reproduction of functions which are peculiar to intelligent organism.""

"Perhaps the most important single characteristic of modern organizational cybernetics is this: That in addition to concern with the deleterious impacts of rigidly-imposed notions of what constitutes the application of good "principles of organization and management" the organization is viewed as a subsystem of a larger system(s), and as comprised itself of functionally interdependent subsystems."

"The theory of information became the cornerstone of cybernetics because the latter deals with "the study of systems of any nature that are capable of receiving, storing and processing information and utilizing it for control"."

"Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment (hence one actually or potentially open)."

"Cybernetics is the science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors; showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence."

"As an anthropologist, I have been interested in the effects that the theories of Cybernetics have within our society. I am not referring to computers or to the electronic revolution as a whole, or to the end of dependence on script for knowledge, or to the way that dress has succeeded the mimeographing machine as a form of communication among the dissenting young. Let me repeat that, I am not referring to the way that dress has succeeded the mimeographing machine as a form of communication among the dissenting young. I specifically want to consider the significance of the set of cross-disciplinary ideas which we first called “feed-back” and then called “teleological mechanisms” and then called it “cybernetics,” a form of crossdisciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand."

"The main object of cybernetics is to supply adaptive, hierarchical models, involving feedback and the like, to all aspects of our environment. Often such modelling implies simulation of a system where the simulation should achieve the object of copying both the method of achievement and the end result. Synthesis, as opposed to simulation, is concerned with achieving only the end result and is less concerned (or completely unconcerned) with the method by which the end result is achieved. In the case of behaviour, psychology is concerned with simulation, while cybernetics, although also interested in simulation, is primarily concerned with synthesis. Most of the major developments in models and theories of artificial intelligence have taken place in the western world — mostly, indeed, in the US and Britain — and it was only relatively recently that "core developments", as opposed to more peripheral developments and applications, have spread over Europe and the Soviet Union."

"The '90s cyborg is both a more sophisticated creature than its '50s ancestor - and a more domestic one. Artificial hip joints, cochlear implants for the deaf, retinal implants for the blind, and all kinds of cosmetic surgery are part of the medical repertoire. Online information retrieval systems are used as prosthetics for limited human memories. In the closed world of advanced warfare, cyborg assemblages of humans and machines are used to pilot fighter aircraft - the response times and sensory apparatus of unaided humans are inadequate for the demands of supersonic air combat. These eerie military cyborgs may be harbingers of a new world stranger than any we have yet experienced."

"As Alain Enthoven was himself to recognize, ‘you assume that there is an information system that will tell you what you want to know. But that just isn’t so. There are huge amounts of misinformation and wronginformation’. Thus, far from eliminating the Clausewitzian ‘fog of war’, cybernetic warfare itself generated ‘a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are’."

"Cybernetics is still headline news, and increasingly we hear about its applications to new fields of scientific and industrial endeavour. Stafford Beer's new book Cybernetics and Management is an admirable account on the relation that exist between cybernetics and the problems of management in industry [and]... covers a range of applications that have not previously been dealt with in print."