Op ed:

Thoughts on some themes in Artificial Intelligence.

Or rather, Machine Learning which would be a much better descriptor of the phenomena. I’ll use AI as the most general way of referring to the field. Although, I do quite like the term Cybernetics.

Any ai that is explicitly coded/ pre determined will be inherently biased: no matter how extensive focus groups or committees are or how much they think they are advocating for the greater good. Any ai should be trained by the people. Human behavior will naturally train the system to act according to some sort of “net mean” of the desires of the people who have exposure to it. WE should train the models! NOT any superior entity. There are too many ai safety groups that claim to be developing methods to train ai ‘s on humans best interest, maybe they should stop.

I was thinking about how my YouTube algorithm feeds me content. It is difficult and unlikely we will see any content that is not somehow alike to the content that we have already watched ie, it will not contain anything that it was not already trained on. This makes it difficult to discover new things and gain perspectives on topics.

If you have a full stack of technology that is isolated from others (ie all Apple products) then the algorithmic profile will be more “entrenched” in our past selves.
How are we supposed to grow as individuals if we are constantly fed things that “past you” will enjoy?

As algorithms are modified from explicitly programmed sets of instructions to machine learning models there will be more freedom to train the sets of information we see.

This dialogue was transferred from an Instagram post which was originally taken from notes on my phone. I have a hard time sharing thoughts like this that come off as directly opinionated. This is interesting because I do not inherently hold on to any such opinion and feel that I am more in a constant flux of understanding. My phone is stacked with thought bubbles like this and I ought to make an attempt to articulate my thoughts and open for discussion. Maybe the reason why I can talk about this here is because it seems like no one will ever read this. Either way.

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