Posts Tagged ‘Bruno’
“Look before you ere you leap; / For as you sow, y’ are like to reap”*…
Further in a fashion to Saturday’s post, Robert Wright on the recent AI Summit in Paris…
[Last] week at the Paris AI summit, Vice President JD Vance stood before heads of state and tech titans and said, “When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting edge technology, oftentimes, I think, our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.”
Precisely the opposite of “too risk-averse” would seem to be “not risk-averse enough.” Or maybe, as both ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude said when asked for the opposite of “too risk-averse”: “too risk-seeking” or “reckless.” In any event, most people in the AI safety community would agree that such terms capture the Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation. And that includes people who generally share Trump’s and Vance’s laissez faire intuitions. AI researcher Rob Miles posted a video of Vance’s speech on X and commented, “It’s so depressing that the one time when the government takes the right approach to an emerging technology, it’s for basically the only technology where that’s actually a terrible idea.”
The news for AI safety advocates gets worse: The summit’s overall vibe wasn’t all that different from Vance’s. The host, French President Emmanuel Macron, after announcing a big AI infrastructure investment, said that France is “back in the AI race” and that “Europe and France must accelerate their investments.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen vowed to “accelerate innovation” and “cut red tape” that now hobbles innovators. China and the US may be the world’s AI leaders, she granted, but “the AI race is far from being over.” All of this sat well with the corporate sector. As Axios reported, “A range of tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, used their speeches to push the acceleration mantra.”
Seems like only yesterday Sundar Pichai was emphasizing the need for international regulation, saying that AI, for all its benefits, holds great dangers. But, actually, that was back in 2023, when people like Open AI’s Sam Altman were also saying such things. That was the year world leaders convened in Britain’s Bletchley Park to discuss ways to collectively address AI risks, including catastrophic ones. The idea was to hold annual global summits on the international governance of AI. In theory, the Paris summit was the third of these (after the 2024 summit in Seoul). But you should always read the fine print: Whereas the official name of the first summit was “AI Safety Summit,” this year’s version was “AI Action Summit.” The headline over the Axios story was: “Don’t miss out” replaces “doom is nigh” at Paris’ AI summit.
The statement that came out of the summit did call for AI “safety” (along with “sustainable development, innovation,” and many other virtuous things). But there was no elaboration. Nothing, for example, about preventing people from using AIs to help make bioweapons—the kind of problem you’d think would call for international regulation, since pandemics don’t recognize national borders (and the kind of problem that some knowledgeable observers worry has been posed by OpenAI’s recently released Deep Research model).
MIT physicist Max Tegmark tweeted on Monday that a leaked draft of the summit statement seemed “optimized to antagonize both the US government (with focus on diversity, gender and disinformation) and the UK government (completely ignoring the scientific and political consensus around risks from smarter-than-human AI systems that was agreed at the Bletchley Park Summit).” And indeed, Britain and the US refused to sign the statement. The other 60 attending nations, including China, signed it.
Journalist Shakeel Hashim wrote about the world’s journey from Bletchley Park to Paris: “What was supposed to be a crucial forum for international cooperation has ended as a cautionary tale about how easily serious governance efforts can be derailed by national self-interest.” But, he said, the Paris Summit may have value “as a wake-up call. It has shown, definitively, that the current approach to AI governance is broken. The question now is whether we have time to fix it.”…
The ropes are down; the brakes are off: “AI Accelerationism Goes Global,” from @robertwrighter.bsky.social.
Apposite: the always-illuminating (and amusing) Matt Levine on Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Open AI (gift link to Bloomberg).
* Samuel Butler, Hudibras
###
As we prioritize prudence, we might spare a thought for Giordano Bruno; he died on this date in 1600. A philosopher, poet, alchemist, astrologer, cosmological theorist, and esotericist (occultist), his theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the multiplicity of worlds, in which he rejected the traditional geocentric (or Earth-centred) astronomy and intuitively went beyond the Copernican heliocentric (sun-centred) theory, which still maintained a finite universe with a sphere of fixed stars. Although one of the most important philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Bruno’s various passionate utterings led to intense opposition. In 1592, after a trial by the Roman Inquisition, he was kept imprisoned for eight years and interrogated periodically. When, in the end, he refused to recant, he was burned at the stake in Rome for heresy.
Atavistic Tendencies: what’s old is new…
A team of astrobiologists, working with a a group of oncologists, has suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago. The genes that controlled the behavior of these early multicellular organisms still reside in our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check. It’s when these newer “control genes” fail that the older mechanisms take over, the cell reverts to its earlier behaviors– and cancer does its growing-out-of-control damage.
Reporting in the journal Physical Biology, Paul Davies and and Charles Lineweaver explain
“Advanced” metazoan life of the form we now know, i.e. organisms with cell specialization and organ differentiation, was preceded by colonies of eukaryotic cells in which cellular cooperation was fairly rudimentary, consisting of networks of adhering cells exchanging information chemically, and forming self-organized assemblages with only a moderate division of labor…
So, they suggest, cancer isn’t an attack of “rogue cells,” evolving quickly to overpower normal biological-metabolic routines; it’s a kind of atavism, a throwback… In conversation with Life Scientist, Lineweaver elaborates
Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when[life was] nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells.
We think that the tumors that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago…
The explanation makes a powerful kind of sense, at least at a systemic level: cancers occur in virtually all metazoans (with the exception of the altogether weird naked mole rat). As Davies and Lineweaver note, “This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics.”
The good news, Life Scientist observes, is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.
Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they’re susceptible to treatment, it’s unlikely they’ll evolve new ways to get around it.
“Given cancer’s formidable complexity and diversity, how might one make progress toward controlling it? If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism,” [Davies and Lineweaver] write.
[TotH to slashdot]
As we resist the impulse, remembering that there are other good reasons not to smoke, we might recall spare a thought for Giordano Bruno, the Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer whose concept of the infinite universe expanded on Copernicus’s model; he was the first European to understand the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno’s views were considered dangerously heretical by the (Roman) Inquisition, which imprisoned him in 1592; after eight years of refusals to recant, on this date in 1600, he was burned at the stake.
Alert: Avoiding embarrassing exposure…
As Sacha Baron Cohen roams the U.S. searching for folks to inveigle into appearing in his next film, he is operating behind a series of dummy companies and web sites intended to mask his involvement in the follow-up to his smash Borat.
In his new movie, Cohen appears as “Bruno,” a gay Austrian journalist who, like Borat, asks embarrassing (and often salacious) questions. Prospective interviewees– e.g., ballroom dancers, Alabama National Guard officials, and a white supremacist– are told that Bruno is working with Amesbury Chase, a Los Angeles-based production company, and are directed to the Amesbury Chase web site, on which the firm is described as having “world class facilities, and state-of-the art equipment to help you create dynamic and compelling content.”
The firm’s address is actually a box at Sunset Blvd. Mailboxes. And the company and its web site were both created within the last 18 months. Three other Cohen front companies– Cold Stream Productions, Coral Blue Productions, and Chromium Films–all use, as the reader will see, the same mailbox drop, phone number, and web site template as Amesbury Chase.
So, if an uber-stylish man with a microphone and a teutonic accent approaches you, claiming to have a Sunset Boulevard address…
(Thanks, Smoking Gun)
As we prepare to mince words, we might wish an alias-free happy birthday to Clyde Barrow, who teamed with Bonnie Parker to terrorize bankers and lawmen across the Mid-West through the 30s; the masculine half of “Bonnie and Clyde” was born on this date in 1909.
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