Kevin Kelly on the future of technology
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🔗 via noahpinion.substack.com.
Highlights
I call our human made system of all technologies working together, the technium. Each technology can not stand alone. It takes a saw to make a hammer and it takes a hammer to make a saw. And it takes both tools to make a computer, and in today’s factory it takes a computer to make saws and hammers. This co-dependency creates an ecosystem of highly interdependent technologies that support each other. The higher the technologies the more intertwined, complex, and codependent they become. At this point in our evolution we need farmers to support indoor plumbing and plumbing to support banks, and banks to enable farmers, and round and round
23 other inventors created electric incandescent light bulbs prior to Thomas Edison. Edison is renowned primarily because he was the first to figure out the business model of electric lighting
while technology has gotten us into this mess (climate change) only technology can get us out of it. Only the technium (our technological system) is “big” enough to work at the global scale needed to fix this planetary sized problem. Individual personal virtue (bicycling, using recycling bins) is not enough. However the worry of some environmentalists is that technology can only contribute more to the problem and none to the solution. They believe that tech is incapable of being green because it is the source of relentless consumerism at the expense of diminishing nature, and that our technological civilization requires endless growth to keep the system going. I disagree.
These are some of the most important ideas for understanding the current and future state of the world.
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Waymo expanded its fully autonomous driving from 3.8 million to 25.3 million miles.
Yucatán, Mexico, partnered with the AI-powered app MeMind in 2022 to prevent suicides, leading to a 9% drop in the suicide rate.
The use of AI monitoring software in a Malawian clinic has reduced stillbirths and neonatal deaths by 82% over three years.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s use of generative AI tools has halved customer losses from scams and reduced fraud by 30%.
Text-generative Transformers include an embedding component that converts text tokens into numerical vectors to capture semantic meaning.
Here’s a Bash script that uses a TDD loop with an LLM to iteratively write Python code to pass tests.
Researchers have developed a portable, wireless EEG acquisition system called BrainGPT capable of converting thoughts into text without the need for an fMRI machine.
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Economic history shows an expansion in the variety of tasks performed by humans, with new jobs continually emerging despite automation.
Meta has developed TestGen-LLM, a tool using LLMs to enhance human-written tests, ensuring test suite improvements by passing certain filters.
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The paper compares Large Language Models (LLMs) with Junior Lawyers and Legal Process Outsourcers (LPOs) in terms of contract review performance.
Researchers have developed a system called Mobile ALOHA for mobile manipulation tasks that require both hands and the whole body, aiming to improve robotic mobility and dexterity beyond simple table-top manipulation.
Clinicians developed a deep learning model that predicts reported sex from retinal fundus photographs without needing to code.
Apple has launched a new machine learning framework specifically for Apple Silicon.
These researchers suggest each occupation has an inflection point after which AI improvements harm human workers’ prospects.
Here’s a GPT trained on knowledge from 17th-century texts. So, it answers in historical style, including outdated scientific concepts.
The author has been at OpenAI for a year and observed that generative models closely approximate their training datasets.
This team taught GPT to navigate iOS and Android by sending it screenshots and giving it instructions.
President Biden released an executive order on AI development, drawing parallels to the early fears and regulatory considerations during the dawn of the microprocessor and internet, highlighting that past technological advancements were less hindered by government intervention.