Layoffs and Google's AI Panic - Tech Insiders News, January 2023
A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
Today’s image is generated by Midjourney, prompt: «Engineers in panic after releasing an AI that had low-security standards» (Inspired by the links below.) Full image at the bottom of the article.
Executive summary:
- Major layoffs and corporations optimizing for profit and not society's interest,
- My optimist vision of a better world…
- And some fun with Robots!
Ok, can I swear? After all, if a book with f*ck on its cover can sell millions of copies - great book, by the way - then I can, right?
Well, we’re fucked. Sorry for my French. This past week was a perfect real-world example of a multi-polar trap in action: “if the others are doing it, then we have to do it too, to keep earning money even if it’s a disaster for humanity.”
- Let’s start with Microsoft laying off their MRTK (Mixed Reality Tool Kit)/Hololens teams and closing AltspaceVR.
MRTK is an open-source framework that facilitates the development of Mixed Reality projects,
AltspaceVR was their Metaverse Virtual World.
Hololens 3 will probably never happen, which will probably slow down the adoption of Mixed Reality as Hololens was pushing the boundaries.
Is it caused by congress stopping the $400M Hololens Military program?
Or is it to re-focus on Artificial Intelligence? Microsoft is considering investing $10B in OpenAI, the company behind GPT/DALLE, and will integrate all OpenAI APIs in its cloud. - And then… In fear of competition after the enormous success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google also focuses on AI by calling back the founders for advice and - the worse - pushing employees working on AI safety to approve things faster!
All this while the CEO of DeepMind - a subsidiary of Google! - urges for caution around AI.
I can’t give a better summary than this tweet - Eliezer Yudkowsky is a proponent of the «AI will kill us in ~20 years» existential risk. - In other nice similar news…
Researchers find a way to track a body position using only Wifi. Great. Imagine all the security and privacy issues…
Boston Dynamics Robot has nice moves if you have yet to see it. Imagine a military version and a caretaker version. Which one will be released first?
Everyone, get a box! US Marines Use Cardboard Box to Defeat DARPA Robot Trained to Detect Humans.
Ok, enough complaining. What should have happened instead? Collaboration. Inter-operability. Collective Intelligence. Altruism. Compassion. I’ll leave you with a quote from Spencer Greenberg:
It's important that society constrains these giant machines [Corporations] using smart and effective means so that they maximize profit in ways that serve society's interests rather than in ways that harm most of our interests.
That is so important: a vision of our world that optimizes for collective happiness instead of profit.
Let’s color our daily experiences with that in mind, a completely different way of seeing the world. Let’s bring together Technology and Emotional Intellingence in a new paradigm that I will expand on here a lot in the future, which I’ll call Experiential Intelligence. To be continued!
And today’s image, thanks to Midjourney: «Engineers in panic after releasing an AI that had low security standards».
Caption: “Oh shit Bob, we fucked up! - They should have made us with legs! - It will be hard to get the world back on its feet! - It’s a waist of time! - That joke was leg-it! …Shut up Bob!“