Recursion is the key to human consciousness – but what would the first experience of it have been like? CC-licensed photo by John Fowler on Flickr.
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On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t get the needle. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The link rot spreads: GIF-hosting site Gfycat shutting down Sept. 1 • Ars Technica
Kevin Purdy:
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The Internet continues to get a bit more fragmented and less accessible every week. Within the past seven days, Reddit finished its purge of third-party clients, Twitter required accounts to view tweets (temporarily or not), and Google News started pulling news articles from its Canadian results [false: Google says it will do that when the law comes into effect, at the end of the year – Overspill Ed].
Now there’s one more to add: Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of September 1, according to a message on its homepage.
Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to “Please save or delete your Gfycat content.” “After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com.”
Gfycat rose as a service during a period where, like Imgur, it was easier to use than any native tools provided by content sites like Facebook or Reddit. As CEO and co-founder Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10m from investors, GIFs were “hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn’t very good.” Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files and offered an API for other sites to tap in.
“I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions,” VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk’s Twitter ownership came to pass.
Signs of trouble at Gfycat popped up in May when an expired certificate led to cascading downtimes and inaccessibility for up to five days.
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The blocking of Facebook/Meta’s acquisition of Giphy looks more and more like it will just hasten the death of these add-on services. How can they cover their server (and staff) costs, let alone make a profit? Everything’s splintering. And that’s before the launch of Threads, which went live while this post was fermenting. (Yes, I’m there.)
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Paying to use a site that you can’t use anymore • Garbage Day
Ryan Broderick:
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I’ve seen a bunch of debates about Who Will Win The Twitter Wars. The argument against Threads becoming the new Twitter is what tech analyst Faine Greenwood calls “Terrible Uncle Problem”. Greenwood recently skeeted, “Meta ensuring Threads integrates with Facebook and Instagram means your weird older relatives will easily be able to find you there. A lot of people do NOT want that.” It’s certainly possible, but if it’s really going to come down to Threads or Bluesky, my money is on Threads. Though I doubt either will really capture what Twitter was useful for.
I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.
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Maybe a teensy bit into the paranoia, but the first part of the second paragraph there is surely right.
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Deja-you, the recursive construction of self • Vectors of Mind
“Andrew”, writing about how consciousness would have evolved – as a recursive process in the primitive brain:
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To be self-aware, the self must be aware of itself. Its own internal processes take itself as input. This is recursion.
I think of it like this. Imagine a primordial self, unable to perceive itself. Written as a function: self(perceptions). This would have been your own model of your own mind or interests. As input, it would receive all that you perceive. Introspection would necessarily produce recursion; the self would receive itself as input: self(self, perceptions).
From the example of RNNs [recursive neural networks], imagine how this recursion could change our perception and experience of time. It would be a new way to represent this dimension for free, a radical transformation to living in a particular moment.
It is also fruitful to imagine the rocky beginning of this function. Recursive programs are prone to blow up, and this one is running in your head. Take, for example, the most simple f(x) = x+1. If you recursively feed the output as input each time step, that function will grow to infinity. It’s doubtful that the chain of consciousness was initially unbroken or pleasant. It would have begun in fits and bursts, the self rearing up for a moment only to be smothered by its own exponential increase. Neurons can only handle so much excitement. The function would need some sort of control system to stabilize recursion and refrain from hitting biological limits. There must have been more split personalities and inner voices with whom we did not identify. Apart from hallucinations, it also seems likely that exploding recursion could produce other side effects like excruciating headaches. Evolving recursion would have broken a few eggs.
There are reasons to believe that the self is recursive even when we are not peering inward. That is the position of the paper Consciousness as recursive, spatiotemporal self-location and Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop. However, there is much debate on this point.
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I found this post mindblowing (almost literally): the self reflecting on the creation of the self in a self which wasn’t aware of itself. He also wrote a post positing that women gained consciousness before men – a possible source for the Garden of Eden story.
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An Indian politician blamed AI for alleged leaked audio. So we tested it • Rest of World
Nilesh Christopher:
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A political controversy rocked the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in April when K. Annamalai, state head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — India’s ruling party — released a controversial audio recording of Palanivel Thiagarajan, a lawmaker from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) that is currently in power in the state.
In the 26-second low-quality audio tape, Thiagarajan, who was the finance minister of Tamil Nadu at the time, could allegedly be heard accusing his own party members of illegally amassing $3.6 billion. Thiagarajan vehemently denied the veracity of the recording, calling it “fabricated” and “machine-generated.”
“NEVER trust an Audio clip without an attributable source,” Thiagarajan tweeted on April 22. He argued that it’s now easy to fabricate voices, citing a news clip on the infamous AI-generated songs of Drake and The Weeknd.
On April 25, Annamalai released a second clip — 56 seconds long, and with much clearer audio — where Thiagarajan allegedly spoke disparagingly of his own party and praised the BJP. This time, Thiagarajan called it a desperate attempt by a “blackmail gang” to create a political rift within his own party, and said no one had claimed ownership of the source of the clips.
…While experts have rattled off multiple alarming scenarios on how AI can play out in politics, in India, this could be the first high-profile case of the “liar’s dividend” — the ability of the powerful to claim plausible deniability of unflattering footage. Deepfake experts told Rest of World the rise of AI is being used as a ruse to sow information uncertainty in a new political era.
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First clip: maybe fake. Second: real. But it will get harder to tell, of course.
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Generative AI in games will create a copyright crisis • WIRED
Will Bedingfield:
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AI Dungeon, a text-based fantasy simulation that runs on OpenAI’s GPT-3, has been churning out weird tales since May 2019. Reminiscent of early text adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure, you get to choose from a roster of formulaic settings—fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, zombies—before picking a character class and name, and generating a story.
Here was mine: “You are Mr. Magoo, a survivor trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world by scavenging among the ruins of what is left. You have a backpack and a canteen. You haven’t eaten in two days, so you’re desperately searching for food.” So began Magoo’s 300-ish-word tale of woe in which, “driven half-mad” by starvation, he happens upon “a man dressed in white.” (Jesus? Gordon Ramsay?) Offering him a greeting kiss, Magoo is stabbed in the neck.
As lame as this story is, it hints at a knotty copyright issue the games industry is only just beginning to unravel. I’ve created a story using my imagination—but to do that I’ve used an AI helper. So who wrote the tale? And who gets paid for the work?
AI Dungeon was created by Nick Walton, a former researcher at a deep learning lab at Brigham Young University in Utah who is now the CEO of Latitude, a company that bills itself as “the future of AI-generated games.” AI Dungeon is certainly not a mainstream title, though it has still attracted millions of players. As Magoo’s tale shows, the player propels the story with action, dialog, and descriptions; AI Dungeon reacts with text, like a dungeon master—or a kind of fantasy improv.
…Laws in both the US and the UK stipulate that, when it comes to copyright, only humans can claim authorship. So for a game like AI Dungeon, where the platform allows a player to, essentially, “write” a narrative with the help of a chatbot, claims of ownership can get murky: who owns the output? The company that developed the AI, or the user?
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How about: the one who can reliably reproduce it? Which is usually going to be the company.
Renewable energy is saving Texas from brutal heat • The Washington Post
Catherine Rampell:
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this summer, like last summer, renewables have been the heroes of the story — yet they remain curiously vilified by politicians in the Lone Star State.
In recent years, renewable energy has been ramping up across Texas. The state has rapidly increased solar capacity, for instance, enabling as much as 16,800 megawatts of solar power to be produced on the grid as of the end of May. That’s roughly six times the capacity that existed in 2019 (about 2,600 megawatts), according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator.
This increase — coupled with greater wind and storage development — is what has allowed Texans to beat the heat and keep their electricity bills down.
After all, several thermal-energy plants in the state went offline in recent weeks, as coal, natural gas and nuclear facilities appeared to buckle under extreme temperatures and shrinking maintenance windows. Additional solar and wind generation more than made up the difference. Renewables overall have lately represented roughly 35% to 40% of power generation at peak, compared with about 30% last year.
The result is not only that renewables have enabled Texas residents to keep the lights and air conditioning on during this hellish heat. They probably also saved Texans “billions of dollars” last week alone by keeping prices from spiking, says Doug Lewin, an Austin-based energy consultant and author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter.
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And yet, as she points out, the legislators there are trying to introduce bills that’ll stop renewables investment. Insane.
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How human translators are coping with competition from powerful AI • Slow Boring
Timothy B Lee:
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Marc Eybert-Guillon started his career as a translator in 2017. In 2020, he founded From the Void, a firm that helps video game makers localize their games for foreign markets.
“It’s that meme of the guy with the noose around his neck,” Eybert-Guillon told me. The condemned man looks over at the guy standing next to him on the gallows and asks “first time?”
“We’ve been ‘in danger’ of being taken over by AI for 10 years now and it still hasn’t happened,” Eybert-Guillon said. “But we keep getting told that it’s going to happen.”
There are two big reasons AI hasn’t put many human translators out of work. First, human translators still do a better job in specialized fields like law and medicine. Translation errors in these fields can be very expensive, so clients are willing to pay extra for a human-quality translation.
Second, there has been rapid growth in hybrid translation services where a computer produces a first draft and a human translator checks it for errors. These hybrid services tend to be about 40% cheaper than a conventional human translation, and customers have taken advantage of that discount to translate more documents. Translators get paid less per word, but they’re able to translate more words per hour.
But while AI software has not put human translators out of work the way pessimists might have predicted, this isn’t an entirely positive story for translators either.
“I think rates for translators have stayed largely the same for 10 or 12 years,” said Mark Hemming, a translator in the United Kingdom. “I think it is harder to get work now. I think it’s harder to get well-paid work as well.”
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OK, translators might survive, just about, but I don’t see transcription services surviving for long.
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Toyota says solid-state battery breakthrough can halve cost and size • Financial Times
Kana Inagaki:
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Toyota initially said it wanted to start selling hybrid but not electric cars with solid-state batteries before 2025.
But on Tuesday, [president of Toyota’s research and development centre for carbon neutrality, Keiji] Kaita said the company discovered ways to address the durability problems from about three years ago and now had enough confidence to mass-produce solid-state batteries in EVs by 2027 or 2028.
Toyota claimed it had made a “technological breakthrough” to resolve durability issues and “a solution for materials” that would allow an EV powered by a solid-state battery to have a range of 1,200km and charging time of 10 minutes or less.
“All of our members are highly motivated and are working with the intention to definitely launch” the technology by the promised timeline, said Kaita.
By reducing the number of processes required to make battery materials, the cost of solid-state batteries could be lowered to similar or cheaper levels than liquid-based lithium-ion batteries, he added.
For Toyota, which has been slower than rivals to roll out electric vehicles, analysts said solid-state batteries could be a “game-changer” to narrow the gap with Tesla.
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1,200km (750 miles) and charge in 10 minutes? That’s a hell of a proposition.
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California must call Google’s and Facebook’s bluff on news • Los Angeles Times
Brian Merchant is the LA Times’s technology columnist:
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In June, Canada passed a law that will require major tech platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay a small fee when they host news on their platforms, to compensate the journalistic outlets that produced it. A similar bill recently cleared crucial hurdles in California and now has a serious chance at becoming law too.
In response, Google and Facebook say they will have no choice but to ban news altogether from their services in those markets when and if these laws go into effect.
California and Canada must absolutely not give in to the tech giants’ tantrum. This is a bluff, and not a particularly convincing one. For the sake of the beleaguered news industries in both places (yes, including this media outlet), the Canadian and Californian governments must absolutely call it.
For assurance, we should look to Australia, where a like-minded bill went into law in 2021, even after Google and Facebook made the same exact threats. Facebook did initially restrict access to news, but the ploy lasted barely a week before it backfired wildly, and Facebook agreed to comply, albeit after extracting some concessions.
That bill has already restored tens of millions of dollars in revenue to Australia’s troubled newsrooms, and, while far from perfect, has transformed the media environment dramatically.
…Over the years, the value that news has brought to Google and Facebook (not to mention to Twitter, Reddit and other major social platforms) is staggering. Journalism has bolstered the value proposition of these platforms considerably. Picture, for a minute, a Facebook without legitimate news — where the only posts you encounter aside from baby pics are your uncle’s political screeds and bad memes. It would be a cesspool. And try conjuring a portrait of Google with no media to index. Guess it would still be good for finding recipes and Wikipedia pages.
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I want online news to work as much as anyone. But the argument that Google and Facebook specifically must pay for specific kinds of links on their site, and that they’re not allowed not to carry those links, doesn’t make sense. Just be honest and tax them.
ITN boss and Labour minister throw weight behind big tech news payments bill • Press Gazette
Bron Maher:
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The chief executive of TV production giant ITN has thrown her weight behind a bill that could force Google and Meta to pay for news in the UK.
Rachel Corp said on Monday that she hoped the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Bill would create a more “competitive commercial environment” for media companies and impel technology firms to share data and algorithm information.
Executives from the News Media Association and charity the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) also expressed their support for the bill at a Westminster event convened by the Media All-Party Parliamentary Group and chaired by Press Gazette associate editor William Turvill. Although most panellists spoke warmly about the legislation, there were some reservations – largely focusing on the extent to which the bill centres the interests of the consumer.
Alex Davies-Jones, the shadow minister for tech, gambling, and the digital economy, said in closing remarks that the bill had Labour’s support: “It’s very, very rare to have a piece of legislation which I find hard to criticise.”
She added: “The government here absolutely must not bow down to the pressure from big tech – which we know it’s under, quite frankly. We know that our Prime Minister sees himself as a tech bro, he wants to feed that outward-looking focus, but [the government] cannot bow down to this pressure.”
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Again, great to see media getting more funding, but the logical inconsistencies of a link tax (that’s honestly what it is) only get bigger and bigger.
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| • 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. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 