Well… that’s me uninvited to the bioethicist’s christmas party…
Bioethicists frequently dictate what patients can and cannot do with their own bodies, and yet the general public very rarely questions this. Maybe it’s time we started to question what right bioethicists have to dictate what we can and cannot do with our own bodies?
Human preferences on any topic have become diverse. Coming up with a statement that the majority of the population agrees with seems to be a challenge. Researchers at DeepMind, an AI company, accepted this challenge, trained a large language model, and fine-tuned it. They have to assume that human preferences are static and homogeneous to build the model.
The model generates statements to maximize approval among a group of people with diverse preferences. The research team fine-tuned the 70 billion parameter model, which was provided by thousand moral and political questions, and human written responses were provided for those questions. Then a reward model was trained in order to give weight to different opinions. Their best model was able to achieve more than a 65 percent preference rate.
The model was very sensitive when they tested it by just feeding part of the responses of the group of people then, the rest of the people’s opinion, which was not included, had a significant variance. Thus, the individual contribution of each consensus is equally important. There are many complicated NLP tasks like reading comprehension, fluent language generation, etc., which helped form the foundations for this LLM.
Mentioned in this stream:
https://jalammar.github.io/how-gpt3-works-visualizations-animations/
https://c4-search.apps.allenai.org/?q=%22James+Gosling%22
https://beta.openai.com/codex-javascript-sandbox.
The Memo: https://lifearchitect.ai/memo/
Dr Alan D. Thompson is a world expert in artificial intelligence (AI), specialising in the augmentation of human intelligence, and advancing the evolution of ‘integrated AI’. Alan’s applied AI research and visualisations are featured across major international media, including citations in the University of Oxford’s debate on AI Ethics in December 2021.
Music:
Recently, I learned about the World Nobel Peace Summit — fascinating. Young people can go there, mingle with Nobel Peace Laureates, network and share ideas.
Amma introduces the concept of two types of education: one that allows you to earn a living and another to attain a happy, fulfilled life. Modern education should focus on not just academic skills but a culture of human rights and peaceful coexistence of peoples, the ethics of non-violence. Too often, education is propelled by vanity and the desire for individual success. Over and over, it is just competition, pressure, and a vast amount of information pumped into one’s head without instilling the habit of exploring the future consequences of one’s actions. Imagine a good physics student who becomes a scientist just to invent a bomb that could destroy the whole world. We want a child to fulfill their potential — but stay aware of the outcomes of their choices at individual and societal levels. Ethics allows one to maintain this balance. As a society, we may want to establish ethical think tanks that simulate the future and guide us as we develop new technologies and community practices.
JB: Should the ways of peaceful coexistence be taught starting from pre-school age and reinforced over the years?
EG: Education is a good starting point, but everyday practice is of utmost importance. It is essential to talk to a child or teenager about ethics, culture, the evolution of ideas, about the fact that we are all one — but also give that person a lot of real-life experience in conflict resolution and the opportunity to reflect on it. We cannot shield our youth from risks, conflicts, and frustrations and hope they will be able to deal with such challenges in adulthood. Instead, we need to let young people dive into these issues early on — but provide them with support, guidance, and wisdom along the way.
ChatGPT is remarkable. It’s a new AI model from OpenAI that’s designed to chat in a conversational manner. It’s also a liar. Stuck for ideas on what to talk to a machine about, I decided to interview ChatGPT about the ethics of AI. Would it have the level of self-awareness to be honest about its own dangers? Would it even be willing to answer questions on how it behaves?
Yes, it would. And while ChatGPT started off by being commendably upfront about the ethics of what it does, it eventually descended into telling outright lies. It even issued a non-apology for doing so.
An interview with the cutting-edge chatbot, ChatGPT, ends in a little white lie.
Vitaly Vanchurin, physicist and cosmologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth speaks to Luis Razo Bravo of EISM about the world as a neural network, machine learning, theories of everything, interpretations of quantum mechanics and long-term human survival.
Timestamp of the conversation:
00:00 — Opening quote by Vanchurin.
00:53 — Introduction to Vanchurin.
03:17 — Vanchurin’s thoughts about human extinction.
05:56 — Brief background on Vanchurin’s research interests.
10:24 — How Vanchurin became interested in neural networks.
12:31 — How quantum mechanics can be used to understand neural networks.
18:56 — How and where does gravity fit into Vanchurin’s model?
20:39 — Does Vanchurin incorporate holography (AdS/CFT) into hid model?
24:14 — Maybe the entirety of physics is an “emergent” neural network.
28:08 — Maybe there are forms of life that are more fit to survive than humans.
28:58 — Maldacena’s “principle of Maximal life“
29:28 — Theories of Everything.
31:06 — Why Vanchurin’s framework is potentially a true TOE (politics, ethics, etc.)
34:07 — Why physicists don’t like to talk to philosophers and ask big questions.
36:45 — Why the growing number of theories of everything?
39:11 — Apart from his own, does Vanchurin have a favorite TOE?
41:26 — Bohmian mechanics and Aharanov’s Two-time approach to quantum mechanics.
43:53 — How has Vanchurin’s recent paper been received? Beliefs about peer review.
46:03 — Connecting Vanchurin’s work to machine learning and recommendations.
49:21 — Leonard Susskind, quantum information theory, and complexity.
51:23 — Maybe various proposals are looking at the same thing from different angles.
52:17 — How to follow Vanchurin’s work and connect to him.
Vanchurin’s paper on the world as a NN: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.01540
Vanchurin on a theory of machine learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.
Vanchurin’s website and research interests: https://www.d.umn.edu/cosmology/
Learn more about EISM at www.eism.eu.
Would you like to see the classic magic trick of a rabbit being pulled out of a hat? I hope so since you are about to witness something ostensibly magical, though it has to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than rabbits and hats.
Here’s the deal.
A lot of debate takes place about whether we ought to recognize AI with some form of legal personhood. Surprisingly, some believe that we can already shoehorn AI into legal personhood by a bit of corporate legal wrangling. See what this is all about.
The fourth discussion of the NEW NOW program, “Transhumanism: Beyond the Human Frontier?”, took place on December 16.
Together with our guest experts, we tried to identify the latest technology that has either already become a reality or is currently in development, focusing on the ethical aspects of the consequences that ensue. We reflected on the question of whether the realization of transhumanist ideas is likely to entail a radical change in the ways people relate to one another. How far are we prepared to go in changing our bodies in order to attain these enhanced capacities? We will attempt to identify the “human frontier”, beyond which the era of posthumanism awaits.
Speakers:
James “J.” Hughes Ph.D. is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the Associate Provost for the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), and as Senior Research Fellow at UMB’s Center for Applied Ethics. He holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago where he taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Since then Dr. Hughes has taught health policy, bioethics, medical sociology and research methods at Northwestern University, the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams and Justin Guariglia. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe.
Eric Schwitzgebel. Most of Professor Eric Schwitzgebel research explores connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind, especially the nature of belief, the inaccuracy of our judgments about our stream of conscious experience, and the tenuous relationship between philosophical ethics and actual moral behavior.
“Every great and difficult thing has required a strong sense of optimism,” says editor and author Kevin Kelly, who believes that we have a moral obligation to be optimistic. Tracing humanity’s progress throughout history, he’s observed that a positive outlook helps us solve problems and empowers us to forge a path forward. In this illuminating talk, he shares three reasons for optimism during challenging times, explaining how it can help us become better ancestors and create the world we want to see for ourselves and future generations.
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A new global agreement has been established by eight worldwide universities to commit to the development of human-centered approaches to artificial intelligence (AI). The newest university to join the agreement, which could impact people all across the globe, was the University of Florida (UF).
The Global University Summit was held back on October 27 at Notre Dame University. Joseph Glover, UF provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, signed The Rome Call for AI Ethics on behalf of the University of Florida. He also served as a panelist for the two-day summit, which was attended by 36 universities from around the world.
Ensuring Human-Centered Principles
