Posts Tagged ‘Natural Selection’
“Man is not disturbed by events, but by the view he takes of them”*…
From Stripe Partners, a framework for rethinking the way we talk about the AI future…
AI is both a new technology and a new type of technology. It is the first technology that learns and that has the potential to outstrip its makers’ capabilities and develop independently.
As Large Language Models bring to life the realities of AI’s potential to operate at unprecedented, ‘human’ levels of sophistication, projections about its future have gained urgency. The dominant framework being applied to identify AI’s potential futures is 165 years old: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Darwin’s evolutionary framework is rendered most clearly in Dan Hendycks work for the Center for AI Safety which posits a future where natural selection could cause the most influential future AI agents to have selfish tendencies that might see AI’s favour their own agendas over the safety of humankind.
The choice of Natural Selection as a framework makes sense given AI’s emerging status as a quasi-sentient, highly adaptive technology that can learn and grow. The choice is a response to the limitations inherent in existing models for technological adoption which treat technologies as inert tools that only come to life when used by people.
The risk in applying this lens to AI is that it goes too far in assigning independent agency to AI. Estimates on the timing of the emergence of ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ vary, but spending some time with the current crop of Generative AI platforms confirms the view that AI’s with intelligences that are closer to humans are some way off. In the interim using natural selection as a lens to understand AI positions humans as further out of the developmental loop than is actually the case. Competitive forces whether market or military will shape AI’s development, but these will not be the only forces at play and direct interaction with humans will be the principal driver for AI’s progress in the near term.
A year ago we wrote about the opportunity to reframe the impact of AI on organisations through the lens of Actor Network Theory (ANT). More than a singular theory, ANT describes an approach to studying social and technological systems developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and John Law in the early 1980s.
ANT posits that the social and natural world is best understood as dynamic networks of humans and nonhuman actors… In our 2023 piece we suggested that ANT, with its focus on framing society and human-technology interactions in terms of dynamic networks where every actor whether human or machine impacts the network, was a useful way of exploring the ways in which AI will impact people, and people will impact AI.
A year on the value of ANT as a framework for exploring AI’s future has become clearer. The critical point when comparing an ANT frame to an evolutionary one is the way in which the ANT framing highlights how AI will progress with and through people’s interactions with it. When viewed as an actor in a network, not a technology in isolation, AI will never be separate from human interventions…
A provocative argument, well worth reading in full: “Why the debate about the future of AI needs less Darwin and more Latour,” from @stripepartners.
Apposite: “Whose risks? Whose benefits?” from Mandy Brown.
* Epictetus
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As we reframe, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that an ancestor of today’s AIs, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), was first demonstrated in operation. (It was announced to the public the following day.) The first general-purpose computer (Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being programmed and re-programmed to solve different problems), ENIAC was begun in 1943, as part of the U.S’s war effort (as a classified military project known as “Project PX“); it was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, where it was built. The finished machine, composed of 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints, weighed more than 27 tons and occupied a 30 x 50 foot room– in its time the largest single electronic apparatus in the world. ENIAC’s basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second (or Hertz). Today’s home computers have clock speeds of 3,500,000,000 cycles per second or more.
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order”*…
Between 1617 and 1621 the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd published his masterpiece Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, a two-volume work packed with over sixty intricate engravings. Urszula Szulakowska looks at the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the first volume, an exploration of the macrocosm of the universe and spiritual realm…
Robert Fludd was a respected English physician (of Welsh origins) employed at the court of King James I of England. He was a prolific writer of vast, multi-volume encyclopaedias in which he discussed a universal range of topics from magical practices — such as alchemy, astrology, kabbalism, and fortune-telling — to radical theological thinking concerning the interrelation of God with the natural and human worlds. However, he also proudly displayed his grasp of practical knowledge, such as mechanics, architecture, military fortifications, armaments, military manoeuvres, hydrology, musical theory and musical instruments, mathematics, geometry, optics, and the art of drawing, as well as chemistry and medicine. Fludd used the common metaphor for the arts as being the “ape of Nature”, a microcosmic form of how the universe itself functioned.
Fludd’s most famous work is the History of the Two Worlds (Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, 1617-21) published in two volumes by Theodore de Bry in Oppenheim. The two worlds under discussion are those of the Microcosm of human life on earth and the Macrocosm of the universe (which included the spiritual realm of the Divine).
Fludd himself was a staunch member of the Anglican Church. He was educated in the medical profession at St. John’s College in Oxford. At the turn of the seventeenth century, he set out for an extended period of travel on the continent. He spent a winter with some Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order deeply opposed to Protestantism who, nevertheless, tutored Fludd on magical practices. Fludd, however, always claimed to have worked out the theological and magical systems in his first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) during his undergraduate days at Oxford. In this work Fludd devised a lavishly illustrated cosmology based on the chemical theory of Paracelsus, in which the materials of the universe were separated out of chaos by God who acted in the manner of a laboratory alchemist…
All of Fludd’s treatises were lavishly illustrated with extraordinary engravings, unique in their form and subject matter, which have the visionary quality of a genuine spiritual seer and which exerted an influence on his contemporary occultists such as Michael Maier, Jacob Boehme, and Johannes Mylius. Fludd himself designed these images and they were engraved by the artisans employed at his publishers. (Some of his own original drawings still exist for the first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, 1617)…
Read on for more explanation and many more mesmerizing images. A 17th century “theory of everything”: “Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine,” in @PublicDomainRev.
* Carl Jung
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As we think holistically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.
“The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it.”*…
This afternoon’s Super Bowl is yet to be played, but it is already destined for the record books…
The American Gaming Association expects 50.4 million Americans to wager legally on the game (up over 61% from last year), for a total of $16 Billion at stake (more than twice last year’s betting). To put this into context, in 2022, U.S. legal gambling totaled about $55 billion.
It will also be the first Championship game with an on-site sports book (though attendees don’t need to leave their seats to wager; Arizona is one of the 33 states [plus D.C.] in which they can make bets in licensed betting shops on the way to the game… or, of course, they can just use their phones to bet online).
Sports betting is exploding in the U.S. About 20% of U.S. adults said that they had placed sports bets in 2022. Some of those bets were through legal channels. But The AGA estimates that American also wagered almost $64 billion in 2021 with illegal sports books– part of the $511 Billion bet on those books, iGaming websites, and “skill games.”
These figures exclude the purchase of state lottery tickets, which has grown to over $100 billion. The average American spent $46 on lottery tickets in the U.S. in 2022; but the amounts varied wildly from state-to-state– in Massachusetts, residents spent an average of $805.30.
See also: “How Sports Betting Upended the Economies of Native American Tribes.”
* Blaise Pascal, whose correspondence with Pierre de Fermat on gambling laid the foundation for the modern theory of probability
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As we wonder about wagering, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Charles Darwin; he was born on this date in 1809. A naturalist, geologist, and biologist, he is widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science.
In a 1858 joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published a more complete version of his theory of evolution, with compelling evidence. in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species.
Darwin’s scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life– for which he has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
“Two obsessions are the hallmarks of Nature’s artistic style: Symmetry- a love of harmony, balance, and proportion [and] Economy- satisfaction in producing an abundance of effects from very limited means”*…
Life is built of symmetrical structures. But why? Sachin Rawat explores…
Life comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but all organisms generally have at least one feature in common: symmetry.
Notice how your left half mirrors the right or the radial arrangement of the petals of a flower or a starfish’s arms. Such symmetry persists even at the microscopic level, too, in the near-spherical shape of many microbes or in the identical sub-units of different proteins.
The abundance of symmetry in biological forms begs the question of whether symmetric designs provide an advantage. Any engineer would tell you that they do. Symmetry is crucial to designing modular, robust parts that can be combined together to create more complex structures. Think of Lego blocks and how they can be assembled easily to create just about anything.
However, unlike an engineer, evolution doesn’t have the gift of foresight. Some biologists suggest that symmetry must provide an immediate selective advantage. But any adaptive advantage that symmetry may provide isn’t by itself sufficient to explain its pervasiveness in biology across scales both great and small.
Now, based on insights from algorithmic information theory, a study published in Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences suggests that there could be a non-adaptive explanation…
Symmetrical objects are less complex than non-symmetrical ones. Perhaps evolution acts as an algorithm with a bias toward simplicity: “Simple is beautiful: Why evolution repeatedly selects symmetrical structures,” from @sachinxr in @bigthink.
* Frank Wilczek (@FrankWilczek)
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As we celebrate symmetry, we might recall (speaking of symmetry) that it was on this date in 1963 that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law by president John F. Kennedy. Aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex, it provided that “[n]o employer having employees subject to any provisions of this section [section 206 of title 29 of the United States Code] shall discriminate, within any establishment in which such employees are employed, between employees on the basis of sex by paying wages to employees in such establishment at a rate less than the rate at which he pays wages to employees of the opposite sex in such establishment for equal work on jobs[,] the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions, except where such payment is made pursuant to (i) a seniority system; (ii) a merit system; (iii) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production; or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex […].
Those exceptions (and lax enforcement) have meant that, 60 years later, women in the U.S. are still paid less than men in comparable positions in nearly all occupations, earning on average 83 cents for every dollar earned by a man in a similar role.
“How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus?”*…
A common plant has yielded insights that question a fundamental assumption in biology– more specifically, an assumption about the mechanism of natural selection…
A simple roadside weed may hold the key to understanding and predicting DNA mutation, according to new research from University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany.
The findings, published today in the journal Nature, radically change our understanding of evolution and could one day help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer.
Mutations occur when DNA is damaged and left unrepaired, creating a new variation. The scientists wanted to know if mutation was purely random or something deeper. What they found was unexpected.
“We always thought of mutation as basically random across the genome,” said Grey Monroe, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences who is lead author on the paper. “It turns out that mutation is very non-random and it’s non-random in a way that benefits the plant. It’s a totally new way of thinking about mutation.”
…
Knowing why some regions of the genome mutate more than others could help breeders who rely on genetic variation to develop better crops. Scientists could also use the information to better predict or develop new treatments for diseases like cancer that are caused by mutation.
“Our discoveries yield a more complete account of the forces driving patterns of natural variation; they should inspire new avenues of theoretical and practical research on the role of mutation in evolution,” the paper concludes.
Evolutionary theory revised? A new study challenges the received wisdom that that DNA mutations are random. Read the underlying paper here.
* Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
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As we contemplate change, we might send micro-biological birthday greetings to Ruth Sager; she was born on this date in 1918. A geneticist, she had two careers in science.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics by discovering transmission of genetic traits through chloroplast DNA, the first known example of genetics not involving the cell nucleus. The academic community did not acknowledge the significance of her contribution until after the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.
Then, in the early 1970s, she moved into cancer genetics (with a specific focus on breast cancer); she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes.
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