Pontus Wärnestål 🇸🇪

It's brilliant to compare inspiration, skill, perspiration, grit as a form of epilepsy! (Sci-fi) authors think about tech and society constantly, and here we have two examples (100 & 70 years old) warning us about what happens when machines dismantle the imaginative practice of human writing.

Here's what D-503 says about us living in the current era:
"What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy."

Another book on the same theme is "We" by Zamyatin (published in 1924!). The main character, called "D-503", lives in a machine-driven future where he describes machines that create symphonies by the minute. Convenient, right?

In 1953, Roald Dahl published "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" about an electrical engineer who wanted to be a writer and built a machine that modeled the English language using mathematical notation. The machine quickly wrote best-selling novels – but it came with a price... 😬 (cont’d)

Now and then (especially during hype heyday times) it's worth returning to @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social 's three laws of AI:
rodneybrooks.com/rodney-brook...

Ah, det skulle kunna innebära att hetsen kring att köpa in iPads till skolorna för några år sedan nu alltså ”ger effekt” i statistiken eftersom just dessa elever antagligen får bättre resultat? 🥴

‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought The massive computer clusters powering artificial intelligence consume vast quantities to answer the world’s queries, but how is Big Tech redressing the balance?

Pedagogical write-up on the water usage of LLMs.

www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog...

The Promise and Peril of Open Source AI with Elizabeth Seger and Jeffrey Ladish Podcast Episode · Your Undivided Attention · 21/11/2023 · 39m

Open source AI models are not like open source software. Here’s an enlightening episode:
podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/y...

Tony Blair is wrong – AI will not magically solve our public services Too many people might be left out of its revolution.

'Taking the time to do things right isn’t anti-innovation – it is what is required to get deep-rooted change in social systems.'
My piece on AI and public services in this week's @newstatesman.com
www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024...

🍂 I love the autumn. It's my favorite season, and I thrive in it. So, for my Saturday coding project this morning I decided to create a "memento mori" app, that tells you how many autumns you have left... (Inspired by John Maeda)
Try it, and then go out enjoy the autumn leaves.
warnestal.com/life/