Posts Tagged ‘Antikythera’
“The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them”*…
What we now call AI has gone through a series of paradigm shifts, and there appears to be no end in sight. Ashlee Vance shares an anecdote that suggests that AI might itself be an agent (perhaps the agent) of a broader paradigm shift (or shifts)…
AI madness is upon many of us, and it can take different forms. In August 2024, for example, I stumbled upon a post from a 20-year-old who had built a nuclear fusor [see here] in his home with a bunch of mail-ordered parts. More to the point, he’d done this while under the tutelage of Anthropic’s Claude AI service…
… The guy who built the fusor in question, Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, better known as HudZah on the internet, was a math student on his summer break from the University of Waterloo. I reached out and asked to see his experiment in person partly because it seemed weird and interesting and partly because it seemed to say something about AI technology and how some people are going to be in for a very uncomfortable time in short order.
A couple days after the fusor posts hit X, I showed up at Nazoordeen’s front door, a typical Victorian in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood. Nazoordeen, a tall, skinny dude with lots of energy and the gesticulations to match, had been crashing there for the summer with a bunch of his university friends as they tried to soak in the start-up and AI lifestyle. Decades ago, these same kids might have yearned to catch Jerry Garcia and The Dead playing their first gigs or to happen upon an Acid Test. This Waterloo set, though, had a different agenda. They were turned on and LLMed up.
Like many of the Victorian-style homes in the city, this one had a long hallway that stretched from the front door to the kitchen with bedrooms jutting off on both sides. The wooden flooring had been blackened in the center from years of foot traffic, but that was not the first thing anyone would notice. Instead, they’d see the mass of electrical cables that were 10-, 25- and sometimes 50-feet long and coming out of each room and leading to somewhere else in the house.
One of the cables powered a series of mind-reading experiments. Someone in the house, Nazoordeen said, had built his own electroencephalogram (EEG) device for measuring brain activity and had been testing it out on houseguests for weeks. Most of the cables, though, were there to feed GPU clusters, the computing systems filled with graphics chips (often designed by Nvidia) that have powered the recent AI boom. You’d follow a cable from one room to another and end up in front of a black box on the floor. All across San Francisco, I imagined, twenty-somethings were gathered around similar GPU altars to try out their ideas…
Vance tells HudZah’s story, recounts the building of his fusor, explains Claude’s (sometimes reluctant) role, and raises the all-too-legitimate safety questions the experiment raises… though in fairness, one might note that the web is rife with instuctions for building a fusor, e.g., here, here, and here, some of which encuraged HudZah.
But in the end, the takeaway for Vance was not the product, but the process…
I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe than I was. If the previous generation were digital natives, HudZah was an AI native.
HudZah enjoys reading the old-fashioned way, but he now finds that he gets more out of the experience by reading alongside an AI. He puts PDFs of books into Claude or ChatGPT and then queries the books as he moves through the text. He uses Granola to listen in on meetings so that he can query an AI after the chats as well. His friend built Globe Explorer, which can instantly break down, say, the history of rockets, as if you had a professional researcher at your disposal. And, of course, HudZah has all manner of AI tools for coding and interacting with his computer via voice.
It’s not that I don’t use these things. I do. It’s more that I was watching HudZah navigate his laptop with an AI fluency that felt alarming to me. He was using his computer in a much, much different way than I’d seen someone use their computer before, and it made me feel old and alarmed by the number of new tools at our disposal and how HudZah intuitively knew how to tame them.
It also excited me. Just spending a couple of hours with HudZah left me convinced that we’re on the verge of someone, somewhere creating a new type of computer with AI built into its core. I believe that laptops and PCs will give way to a more novel device rather soon.
I’m not sure that people know what’s coming for them. You’re either with the AIs now and really learning how to use them or you’re getting left behind in a profound way. Obviously, these situations follow every major technology transition, but I’m a very tech-forward person, and there were things HudZah could accomplish on his machine that gave off alien vibes to me. So, er, like, good luck if you’re not paying attention to this stuff.
After doing his AI and fusor show for me, HudZah gave me a tour of the house. Most of his roommates had already bailed out and returned to Canada. He was left to clean up the mess, which included piles of beer cans and bottles of booze in the backyard from a last hurrah.
The AI housemates had also left some gold panning equipment in a bathtub. At some point during the summer, they had decided to grab “a shit ton of sand from a nearby creek” and work it over in their communal bathroom for fun.
I’m honestly not sure what the takeaway there was exactly other than that something profound happened to the Bay Area brain in 1849, and it’s still doing its thing…
Goodbye, Digital Natives; hello, AI Natives: “A Young Man Used AI to Build A Nuclear Fusor and Now I Must Weep,” from @ashleevance. Eminently worth reading in full.
And for a look at one attempt to understand what may be the emerging new pardigm(s) of which AI may be a motive part, see Benjamin Bratton‘s explantion of the work he and his collegues are doing at a new institute at UCSD: “Antikythera.” See his recent Long Now Foundation talk on this same subject here.
On the other hand: “The Future Is Too Easy” (gift article) by David Roth in the always-illuminating Defector.
(Image above: source)
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As we ponder progress, we might spare a thought for Johannes Gutenberg; he died on this date in 1416. A craftsman and inventor, he invented the movable-type printing press. (Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled a much faster rate of printing.)
The printing press spread across the world and led to an information revolution and the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It was a profound enabler of the arts and the sciences of the Renaissance, of the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation), and of humanist movements… which is to say that it contributed to a series of pardigm shifts.
Leggo my Lego…
Readers will recall The Antikythera Mechanism (“A Connecticut Yankee in King Agamemnon’s Court?…“), the oldest known scientific computer, which was built in Greece probably around 100 BCE. It was recovered from a shipwreck in 1900; but its purpose remained a mystery for over a century, until archeologists and scientists realized its ingenious intent: it’s an extraordinarily-accurate astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies– an analog computer with over 100 gears and 7 differential gearboxes– accurate to a day or two over its range.
Andrew Carol has rebuilt the device… in Lego:
Read the story and see photos here. And for extra fun, check out Carol’s Lego homage to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. As he says of his work,
Having always loved complex mechanical devices, and never having fully outgrown LEGO, I decided to explore where computational mechanics and LEGO meet. This is not LEGO as toy, art, or even the MindStorms® fusion of LEGO and digital electronics. This is almost where Steampunk and LEGO meet. Hand cranked devices that perform complex mechanical tasks.
[TotH to Universe Today]
As we revel in the satisfaction of making round pegs fit, we might recall that it was on this date in 1271 that Genghis Khan’s grandson and Coleridge’s celebratee Kublai Khan renamed his empire “Yuan,” officially marking the start of the Yuan Dynasty of Mongolia and China. By 1279, the Yuan army had defeated the last resistance forces of the Song Dynasty, which it succeeded.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree
A Connecticut Yankee in King Agamemnon’s Court?…
Long-time (pre-blog) readers will remember the “Antikythera mechanism”… In 1900, divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. At last writing, it appeared to be some sort of astronomical time-keeping device…
Recent studies, using advanced imaging techniques have unlocked the story of the device– and what a story it is: the rough equivalent of finding a fully-functional Ford buried in a medieval ruin. As io9 reports:
The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as “mind blowing.” Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism’s compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.
Using nothing but an ingenious system of gears, the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon’s phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The Antikythera mechanism wasn’t just a scientific tool – it also had a social purpose. The Greeks held major athletic competitions (such as the Olympics) every two or four years. A small dial within the Metonic dial showed the dates of these important events.
The true genius of the mechanism goes beyond even the complex calculations and craftsmanship of a mechanical calendar. For example, the ancients didn’t know that the moon has an elliptical orbit, so they didn’t know why it sometimes slowed or sped up as it moved through the zodiac. The mechanism’s creator used epicyclic gears, also known as planetary gears, with a “pin-and-slot” mechanism that mimicked this apparent shifting in the moon’s movement. This use of epicyclic gears is far ahead of what anyone suspected ancient technology was capable of. Scientific American has a two-part video about the mechanism and the imaging techniques used in the research.
It’s still unclear who built the extraordinary device. Cicero’s writings link it to Archimedes, though he was dead by the time that this specimen was built. Researchers theorize that the Antikythera mechanism may be based on an Archimedian design, and might have been built by a workshop carrying on his technological tradition.
But if the design was “industrialized” in that way, why has there never been another one found like it? Perhaps it’s the consequence of the turmoil of the period. Indeed, the upheavals of war and natural disasters over 2,000 years have probably caused us to lose many more works and wonders that we will simply have to keep trying to find.
Though this is April Fool’s Day, the Antikythera mechanism is absolutely for real. More information here.
As we recalibrate our assumptions about antiquity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1891 that the William Wrigley Jr. Company was founded. Originally focused and making and selling soap and baking powder, Wrigley included chewing gum with each can of baking powder. As the gum’s popularity eclipsed that of the powder, the company shifted its focus; today it sells Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, and other sticky treats in over 180 countries (one of which is not Singapore, where the import and sale of any chewing gum that does not have explicit therapeutic purpose has been banned since 2004).
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