The Metaverse's Environmental Cost - Tech Insiders News, November 2022

A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Today’s image generated by Midjourney, prompt: «Alignment is very difficult for humans, and it's difficult for AI as well!» (Inspired by the links below.) Full image at the bottom of the article.

1. It’s easier to adjust the course of something before it happens, right? This is the hopeful message of Amelia Kallman in her TEDx talk «The Metaverse & the Environment».
   In short: the increased usage of Virtual Worlds is creating more and more data, and the move to streaming will also increase data center usage. We will go that way anyway; it’s now up to us to address this issue… Will we be able to? Remember, coordination is complex, except when it’s for profit or power.
2. Meta has showcased CICERO, an AI that can achieve human-level performance in Diplomacy, a famous board game. It’s impressive… Here’s my take:
   One way of reacting to that is «Oh my god AI now knows how to do politics and it’s very bad please stop it or it’s going to kill us». I partially agree; AI has indeed a very high risk of turning badly…
   …but that’s not it yet. When presented with an AI solving a game, focus on the game mechanics, not its theme. CICERO has solved the specific problems of the game Diplomacy, not (yet?) all the complex political games.
3. In another AI news, Meta released Galactica, a generative AI that was trained on millions of research papers; in the hope of «organizing science»… and shut it down in 2 days.
   The main cause is that it was mostly spitting out wrong information. Once again, this shows that it’s very difficult to align AI to our needs.
4. It’s thanksgiving season, so a couple links for you:
   Did you know that you can actually have a great impact by donating to charities? I’ve myself taken the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of my income until I retire.
   And Underrated reasons to be thankful, a very funny read by .

And today’s image, thanks to Midjourney: «Alignment is very difficult for humans, and it's difficult for AI as well!».

It’s looking very nice. It made me realize why AI Art generation acceptance is easier: even if the result is not exactly what I had in mind (How could it be?), it’s still nice and I like it. For models that needs to be exact (like Galactica), it’s much harder…