The arrival of superhuman Go-playing AI has actually improved top-level play. Might that happen in other fields too? CC-licensed photo by Chad Miller on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Exercising. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
After AI beat them, professional go players got better and more creative • Escaping Flatland
Henrik Karlsson:
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For many decades, it seemed professional Go players had reached a hard limit on how well it is possible to play. They were not getting better. Decision quality was largely plateaued from 1950 to the mid-2010s.
Then, in May 2016, DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGo, an AI that could beat the best human Go players. This is how the humans reacted: [graphic shows abrupt rise in “decision quality” of professional players’ moves].
After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players before AI. The strongest players pushed beyond what had been thought possible.
Or were they cheating by using the AI? No. They really were getting better.
And it wasn’t simply that they imitated the AI, in a mechanical way. They got more creative, too. There was an uptick in historically novel moves and sequences. Shin et al calculate about 40% of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60% of the improvement.
My guess is that AlphaGo’s success forced the humans to reevaluate certain moves and abandon weak heuristics. This let them see possibilities that had been missed before.
Something is considered impossible. Then somebody does it. Soon it is standard. This is a common pattern. Until Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile, the best runners clustered just above 4 minutes for decades. A few months later Bannister was no longer the only runner to do a 4-minute mile. These days, high schoolers do it. The same story can be told about the French composer Pierre Boulez. His music was considered unplayable until recordings started circulating on YouTube and elsewhere. Now it is standard repertoire at concert houses.
The recent development in Go suggests that superhuman AI systems can have this effect, too. They can prove something is possible and lift people up. This doesn’t mean that AI systems will not displace humans at many tasks, and it doesn’t mean that humans can always adapt to keep up with the systems—in fact, the human Go players are not keeping up. But the flourishing of creativity and skills tells us something about what might happen at the tail end of the human skill distribution when more AI systems come online.
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What’s important, Karlsson points out, is that the AI needs to explain how why some moves are suboptimal; otherwise we’re just guessing.
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“Social order could collapse” in AI era, two top Japan companies say • WSJ
Peter Landers:
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Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.
The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users’ attention without regard to morals or accuracy.
Unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars,” the manifesto said.
It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.
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That’s definitely the way to get your office memo noticed: say that a new tech could cause the collapse of civilisation. Lots of IT administrators wishing they’d used that line about Dropbox, Slack and Teams, no doubt.
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Elon Musk threatens to disobey court order over banned profiles • FT via Ars Technica
Bryan Harris and Hannah Murphy:
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Brazil’s attorney general has demanded “urgent regulation” of social media sites after Elon Musk threatened to disobey a court order banning certain profiles on his X platform and after he called for a Supreme Court justice to “resign or be impeached.”
“It is urgent to regulate social networks,” said Jorge Messias. “We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities.”
The comments came after X’s global government affairs team posted that it “has been forced by court decisions to block certain popular accounts in Brazil…We do not know the reasons these blocking orders have been issued [and] we are prohibited from saying which court or judge issued the order, or on what grounds.”
The profiles are probably linked to far-right movements, which have found fertile ground on X and other social media platforms, including Telegram.
Musk suggested the court orders came from Alexandre De Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who has been a vocal advocate of cracking down on anti-democratic content online, particularly following riots on January 8 last year when thousands of far-right demonstrators stormed government buildings in Brasília.
Musk, the billionaire owner of X, vowed on Sunday to “publish everything demanded by [De Moraes] and how those requests violate Brazilian law.” He called for Moraes to “resign or be impeached” and said the judge had “brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil.”
…Musk’s latest comments echo talking points of Brazil’s far-right, which has long accused De Moraes and the Supreme Court of censorship and running a “judicial dictatorship.”
De Moraes is widely considered to have played a role in protecting Brazilian democracy during the 2022 presidential election, when the president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro, was spreading unsubstantiated claims about the integrity of the electoral system. De Moraes also took a hard line in the aftermath of the Brasília riots, handing down lengthy sentences and accusing the demonstrators of trying to launch a coup.
Orlando Silva, a lawmaker aligned with the government, said Musk had disrespected the judiciary and that in response he would propose legislation setting out a “responsibilities regime for these digital platforms.”
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Really impossible to know who the bad actor is here. Could it be both?
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Microsoft is confident Windows on Arm could finally beat Apple • The Verge
Tom Warren:
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Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks.
After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft’s latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.
Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2” — the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple’s own processors.
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Aren’t we a long way past the point where these sorts of comparisons persuade anyone about anything? Your choice of computer is going to be more about the ecosystem; plus the internet effectively began pulling down the barriers between Windows and macOS in the late 1990s.
Still, this must also bring Windows running on M-series Macs closer. Doesn’t it?
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Just you and the universe • The Atlantic
Marina Koren:
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A total solar eclipse …requires no embellishment or interpretation. You don’t need an expert to decipher “the un-sunlike sun,” as the astronomer Maria Mitchell described it during her own eclipse experience in 1878. You don’t need a solar physicist by your side to experience the wonder of the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which peeks out from behind the moon as it sends light shimmering in waves across the skin of your arms and the grass at your feet. And even without a sense of sight, eclipses are visceral: Some birds cease chirping; watchful humans will hoot and holler. And when the sun temporarily stops warming the Earth, the air suddenly grows chillier.
In their easy perceptibility, eclipses can make us keenly aware of the universe’s machinations. Rarely do we consider sunrises and sunsets for what they actually represent: the movement of a giant rocky planet rotating on its axis, toward and away from its parent star. When I admire a full moon or a gleaming crescent, I don’t think at all about the orbital mechanics that produce our satellite’s shifting appearance. Such spectacles are clear-cut signs of a universe in motion, but a total solar eclipse provides unignorable proof.
The scenes of an eclipse unfold within minutes, transitioning smoothly from one set to another, as if guided by an invisible stagehand. They make one very aware of the fact that, as Andy Rash, an illustrator of a children’s book about eclipses, put it to me recently, “you’re watching giant objects move around and hide one behind the other.”
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The descriptions of totality, and the photos, have given me a hankering to experience one: XKCD says there’s a big, big difference between partial (done that) and total. (XKCD: “a partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.”)
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The total eclipse shows us how important solar energy is to the US • The Verge
Justine Calma:
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All 50 states will experience some degree of disruption to solar power generation during the eclipse, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). It forecasts a whopping 93% peak power reduction from solar panels within the Texas grid, where the solar eclipse will first cross into the US before slicing a diagonal path across the nation toward Maine. Peak power reduction is expected to reach 71% within the eastern power grid and 45% in the western grid.
The eclipse only reaches “totality,” when the Sun is completely blocked by the Moon, for several minutes in each location. But a partial eclipse can persist for several hours. While solar generation falls, electricity demand is expected to rise. Households and businesses with photovoltaic panels won’t be able to depend on their own solar systems as much — they’ll need to rely more on the grid.
That kind of mismatch in supply and demand is what can lead to outages. Grid managers have had a lot of time to prepare for this eclipse, so experts aren’t expecting any blackouts. Hydropower and gas are supposed to make up for most of the the shortfall in solar energy. NREL expects gas to cover about 30% of the loss in utility-scale solar generation.
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Phew, thought we might not get a solar eclipse story desperately trying to wedge something in for a moment there. The effect is comparable to heavy cloud, which has been known to happen in the sky.
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ClickWheel JS – a Javascript Library
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Cursors and touch screens are inefficient tools to navigate the web.
We built ClickWheel.js, to bring the web into a more civilized age.Scroll with the click wheel to give it a try.
Remember this is an iPod click wheel. Click and scroll around in a circle just like on an iPod
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Works better on mobile than desktop (guess why). Isn’t very finished – they haven’t considered what “MENU” should take you to (the hamburger menu perhaps?), what the select button in the middle should do (follow a link?), and the purpose of the back, skip and play/pause buttons is lost.
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Global PC shipments return to growth and pre-pandemic volumes in the first quarter of 2024 • IDC
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After two years of decline, the worldwide traditional PC market returned to growth during the first quarter of 2024 (1Q24) with 59.8m shipments, growing 1.5% year over year, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.
Growth was largely achieved due to easy year-over-year comparisons as the market declined 28.7% during the first quarter of 2023, which was the lowest point in PC history. In addition, global PC shipments finally returned to pre-pandemic levels as 1Q24 volumes rivalled those seen in 1Q19 when 60.5m units were shipped.
With inflation numbers trending down, PC shipments have begun to recover in most regions, leading to growth in the Americas as well as Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). However, the deflationary pressures in China directly impacted the global PC market. As the largest consumer of desktop PCs, weak demand in China led to yet another quarter of declines for global desktop shipments, which already faced pressure from notebooks as the preferred form factor.
“Despite China’s struggles, the recovery is expected to continue in 2024 as newer AI PCs hit shelves later this year and as commercial buyers begin refreshing the PCs that were purchased during the pandemic,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers.
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Ah yes, “AI PCs”, the latest saviour of the PC market, which has been hopping from saviour to saviour for more than a decade now. (Side note: IDC gives Apple an 8.1% sales share, which would have sounded frankly bonkers 15 years ago.)
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Music has just changed forever and we should be freaking out more about it • Odd and Ends of History
James O’Malley:
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I’ve written before about how even if AI was to develop no further than its capabilities today, it is already world changing, as it represents billions of small, marginal gains in productivity.
And I think similar is the case for AI-generated music like with Suno. Even if AI music doesn’t improve any further, it already represents a profound change to the music industry.
And like the high status jobs I describe above, I don’t think it will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.
But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances when music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme-tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.
For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music”, for the entire world, and it will have terrible consequences for many people working in the music industry today. Musicians who earn a living making adverts or taking commissions from el-cheapo outsourcing websites like Fiverr are basically fucked – just like “low-level” visual artists and copywriters are by Midjourney and ChatGPT.
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This post is isn’t paywalled, but this is the key part: if AI can write music, does that mean it’s going to take over the music business? I think not – it can’t do live gigs, it can’t create that parasocial feeling that people like to have with their musical heroes. Sure, it can do some of the Muzak function – the Muzak company might be interested in buying Suno – but humans and music are far bigger than just writing tracks.
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Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon competition hit by AI controversy • Bleeding Cool
Rich Johnston:
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Pink Floyd has announced the winners of its The Dark Side of The Moon animation competition, which coincided with the album’s fiftieth anniversary. They invited a new generation of animators to create music videos for any of the album’s ten songs, with judges Nick Mason, Kyle Alba, Gerald Scarfe, Sarah Smith, Daisy Jacobs, Harry Pearce, Terry Gilliam, Alan Yentob, and Anton Corbijn.
“Given that it was the 50th anniversary of the album, and with the band’s history of working with animation both in videos and on stage, we felt this needed to be acknowledged,” said Pink Floyd’s long-time creative consultant Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. “It was a huge success with over 900 films being entered and the process of elimination for the judges was very complex. They eventually came up with the final 10 and I can only say they were brilliant choices and representative of the diverse styles of entries that all gave deep respect to the legacy of the band.”
Ten winners were announced by Nick Mason. However there may be an issue with one of them. The winning video by Damián Gaume for Any Colour You Like was created, according to Gaume, using Stable Diffusion AI software. There was an immediate backlash and reaction against this video online, which overshadowed the other nine winners and the planned overall winners intended to be announced [on Monday]. Some condemned Gerald Scarfe, one of the judges, especially as the cartoonist and animator most associated with Pink Floyd’s album and movie Another Brick In The Wall, which included intricate hand drawn animation, based on his cartoons, and considered a true classic.
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Consider that it was just 18 months ago that people were upset about an AI illustration winning a prize. Now it’s video. Judge for yourself:
| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 