Bibs & bobs #5

 Bibs and bobs #5

Delegating work to nonhumans

This b&b is short. I’ve been spending way too much time mulling the big framings of automation versus augmentation. While I have a lot of sympathy for the argument put forward by Erik Brynjolfsson in this paper: Brynjolfsson, E. (2022). The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence. Daedalus, 151(2), 272-287. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01915, What needs a lot more attention is what actually happens when augmentation happens, the trade-offs, the capacity swaps between human and nonhuman. There is a lot of noise in AI around the neglect of this issue, e.g. the alignment problem and the other panics associated with giving large language models tasks. Much more to say and think about.

Abstractions

A wild, playful and insightful ride courtesy of Venkatesh Rao, @vgr. If you emerge from this unmoved then good luck with keeping those trusty mental routines spinning the way they always have.

Expectations

There is a lot of fun things the brain does when we tinker with things like expectations, placebos and the like. 

Reproducibility

Via Steve Stewart-Williams, 

73 teams tested the same hypotheses with the same data. Some found negative results, some positive, some nada. No effect of expertise or confirmation bias. "Idiosyncratic researcher variability is a threat to the reliability of scientific findings." 

link.

Humour

If you are in need of inspiration for a book dedication, a list.  And if you were a fan of Whose Line is it Anyway?, you might enjoy ToonProv.