A quotation from Eric Hoffer

The people we meet are the playwrights and stage managers of our lives: they cast us in a role, and we play it whether we will or not. It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American writer, philosopher, longshoreman
Passionate State of Mind, Aphorism 130 (1955)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/hoffer-eric/78373/

Okay, here it is. This is the unofficial official timeline of #AI. I'm going to tell you what to expect, and it's definitely not: this all goes away and we return to before.

Are you ready for this? Are you sure? Well, read on.

Before I continue, I'm going to lay out some AI #benchmarks that we'll use to define "how good / scary is this AI?" This is in rough order of difficulty.

#Lovelace #Test for #Emergence: "Can a system produce surprising and useful outputes that weren't explicitely programmed via weak emergence?"

#Loebner Test: "Can a computer fool casual human judges in text conversations?" ( #Modern #LLM AIs are close to this )

#Turing Test (Original Imitation Game): "A man or a computer and a woman are both answering text interrogations trying to convince them that they are the woman. Can the computer perform as well as the man?" (This was the actual orginial #TuringTest.)

Strengthened #Imitation Game: "A man or a #computer and a woman are both answering text interrogations. Can the computer perform as well as the woman?"

#Coffee Test: "Can a #system enter a strangers house with no prior infor and using #perception, imitation, and #reasoning figure out how to make a cup of coffee?"

#College #Student Test: "Can a robot enroll in college, attend classes like an actual student, learn from the instructions things it didn't know before, and graduate?"

#VoightKampff Test: "Can a machine withstand adversarial exper interrogation and still pass as #human?"

#Harnad's Total Turing Test: "Is the system indistinguishible from humans in every aspect?" (This is a #DuckTest.)

Non #Duck Test: "Even with full access to internals, can experts find no evidence that it isn't a genuine human mind?"

Good morning, friends.

6 July 2024

Most people don't really sail alone until they mature, me thinks. Maturity comes at different times; personally, I was a late bloomer in both appearance and personality, and it is a little embarrassing to think back on at times. In youth people are imitators, that is what fashion is mostly about, after all, people playing dress up. In the 60s somebody, Sony and Cher I think, picked up the bell bottom trend and it spread like wildfire, young people everywhere were imitating the "cool look," me included. Bellbottom denim was the rage, and the beat goes on. Does that mean that we try to be or at least look like what we see?

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." - Confucius

Here is a #FunFriday piece (is that a thing? Let's make it a thing!)

It's a resin piece in the style of a Qing Dynasty 1 Cash (Qian Long Tong Bao with Boo-Chiowan reverse) coin from #China. Like this one: https://coinofnote.com/1-cash-qian-long-tong-bao/ (about 1/2 way down is a group of four, this has similar elements to several of them). It is thick compared to a genuine coin.

Clearly not designed to deceive, does anyone know what this resin piece is for? Feng Shui?

Here's the next Sadler's Lectures podcast episode on Plutarch's detour into discussion of frankness of speech in his How To Tell A Flatterer From A Friend. This one looks at how flatterers imitate real frankness

https://soundcloud.com/gregorybsadler/plutarch-how-to-tell-a-flatterer-from-a-friend-flatterers-imitation-of-frankness-of-speech
#Podcast #Plutarch #Frankness #Imitation #Criticism #Friendship #Ethics #Philosophy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51188y6n6yo

It's borderline ridiculous that with the exposure that #OpenAI has since Dec 2022, nobody had the guts (or worse: the hunch about it in the first place) to tell the producing team that this might be a bad idea.

You see, it's not just about #imitation (which it might or might not be, it's obvious to everybody it's similar *enough*...), but about the disregard for #prior_art. You'd think that they'd want to stay away from even the idea, but no...

Continuing on with the series of new core concept videos on Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, here's one on the second sketch of an ethics of quantity, drama or the actor

https://youtu.be/ESnvvhnWNU4
#Camus #Video #Absurd #Philosophy #Drama #Actor #Existentialism #Ethics #Imitation

In one popular robot training technique, called #imitation #learning, models learn to perform tasks by, for example, imitating the actions of a human teleoperating a robot or using a VR headset to collect data on a robot.

It’s a technique that has gone in and out of fashion over decades but has recently become more popular with robots that do manipulation tasks, says Russ Tedrake, vice president of robotics research at the Toyota Research Institute and an MIT professor.
By pairing this technique with #generative #AI, researchers at the Toyota Research Institute, Columbia University, and MIT have been able to quickly teach robots to do many new tasks.

They believe they have found a way to extend the technology propelling generative AI from the realm of text, images, and videos into the domain of robot movements. 
The idea is to start with a human, who manually controls the robot to #demonstrate #behaviors such as whisking eggs or picking up plates.

Using a technique called #diffusion #policy, the robot is then able to use the data fed into it to learn skills.
The researchers have taught robots more than 200 skills, such as peeling vegetables and pouring liquids, and say they are working toward teaching 1,000 skills by the end of the year. 

Many others have taken advantage of generative AI as well. #Covariant, a robotics startup that spun off from OpenAI’s now-shuttered robotics research unit, has built a multimodal model called RFM-1.
It can accept prompts in the form of text, image, video, robot instructions, or measurements. 
Generative AI allows the robot to both understand instructions and generate images or videos relating to those tasks. 

The Toyota Research Institute team hopes this will one day lead to
“large behavior models,” which are analogous to large language models, says Tedrake
“A lot of people think behavior cloning is going to get us to a ChatGPT moment for robotics,” he says. 

In a similar demonstration, earlier this year a team at Stanford managed to use a relatively cheap off-the-shelf robot costing $32,000 to do complex manipulation tasks such as cooking shrimp and cleaning stains. It learned those new skills quickly with AI. 

Called Mobile ALOHA (a loose acronym for “a low-cost open-source hardware teleoperation system”), the robot learned to cook shrimp with the help of just 20 human demonstrations and data from other tasks, such as tearing off a paper towel or piece of tape.
The Stanford researchers found that AI can help robots acquire transferable skills: training on one task can improve its performance for others

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/11/1090718/household-robots-ai-data-robotics/

Plutarch notes that friendship arises out of and is sustained by similarities of habits, character, outlooks, feelings, & other matters. Flatterers know this, and for that reason imitate similarity with their targets

https://youtu.be/uTw_6PBnOW4
#Video #Plutarch #Friendship #Flattery #Imitation #Similarity

'Sample-efficient Adversarial Imitation Learning', by Dahuin Jung, Hyungyu Lee, Sungroh Yoon.

http://jmlr.org/papers/v25/23-0314.html

#imitation #adversarial #supervised

In Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? there's a fake police station staffed almost entirely by androids, where Deckard gets taken. Here's a Sadler's Lectures podcast episode about that

https://soundcloud.com/gregorybsadler/philip-dick-dadoes-the-mission-street-hall-of-justice
#PhilipDick #Androids #Police #Podcast #Imitation

Starting a new set of Sadler's Lectures podcast episodes on Aristotle's Poetics with this one on distinctions he makes early in the work. Early-released this & 3 others to Patreon supporters last weekend

https://soundcloud.com/gregorybsadler/aristotle-poetics-three-distinctions-in-mimesis
#Podcast #Aristotle #Poetics #Mimesis #Aesthetics #Imitation #Media

Here's another Sadler's Lectures podcast episode looking at Plato's discussion of mimesis and knowledge in Republic book 10, this one drawing out implications for present-day media as well

https://soundcloud.com/gregorybsadler/plato-republic-book-10-poets-lack-of-knowledge
#Podcast #Plato #Education #Mimesis #Media #Imitation #Knowledge