“I was aware that I was probably the first person to ever hear these sounds, and that what I was hearing was something musical that had probably never been heard by anyone before — at least, not by anyone on this planet.”
John Chowning - The Father of the Digital Synthesizer
“An AI, and others, would benefit from improved communication skill and infrastructure. Will the AI understand the wave of a police officer, indicating that the officer wants the AI to go through an intersection? Can it express to other vehicles that the reason it is idling in a narrow parking lot is to wait for a car up ahead to pull out? Can it accurately, precisely, and urgently express a sudden observation of dangerous road debris to (AI) drivers behind it? Can it communicate sufficiently with another brand of driver AI to achieve the subtle coordination required to safely convoy in close proximity?”
- Open Problems in Cooperative AI
“The most important challenges of cooperation might be the most difficult to benchmark; they involve creatively stepping out of our habitual roles to change the ‘game’ itself. Indeed, if we are to take the social nature of intelligence seriously, we need to move from individual objectives to the shared, poorly defined ways humans solve social problems: creating language, norms and institutions.”
- Cooperative AI: machines must learn to find common ground (Via Matt Jones)
“We designed tools and frameworks to help us see the world in new ways, but they also changed how we think. We shaped frameworks, and in turn they shaped us. 20th century approaches like design thinking, human-centered design, and jobs to be done too often look at people solely as individuals. Or, worse yet, only as consumers. They don’t consider people in relation to their communities or to wider society. And society itself is ignored by design.”
Society Centered Design
“What if new technologies could help us embrace nature’s diversity and complexity, instead of simplifying it? If breeders could unlock the genetic diversity of the 30,000 edible plant species that exist worldwide, they might be able to identify plant species and varieties that would be resilient and productive under the pressure of climate change. If growers could understand how each and every plant on their farm is growing and interacting with its environment, they could reduce the use of fertilizer, chemicals, and precious resources like water, and explore sophisticated growing techniques like intercropping and cover cropping that restore soil fertility and increase productivity.”
Project Mineral is using breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotics to find ways to grow more food, more sustainably
“Ideas by definition are always fragile. If they were resolved, they wouldn’t be ideas. They’d be products ready to ship. I’ve come to learn you have to make an extraordinary effort not to focus on the problems which are implicated with the new idea. These problems are known, they are quantifiable, understood. But you have to focus on the actual idea, which is partial, tentative and unproven. If you don’t actively suspend your disbelief, if you don’t believe there is a solution to the problems, of course you will lose faith in your ideas. That is why criticism and focusing on the problems can be so damaging, particularly in the absence of a constructive idea. Remember, opinions are not ideas, opinions are not as important as ideas, opinions are just…. opinions.”
Chobani’s society centred vision of the future is really something I can get behind. More heartfelt and humane than any inadvertently dystopian vision film created by the big tech companies. Lovely.