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Tag - Books
A writer with no technical background recounts his incredible journey into the
realm of coding and the invaluable lesson it taught him about the modern world
One day in 2017 I had a realisation that seems obvious now but had the power to
shock back then: almost everything I did was being mediated by computer code.
And as the trickle of code into my world became a flood, that world seemed to be
getting not better but worse in approximate proportion. I began to wonder why.
Two possibilities sprang immediately to mind. One was the people who wrote the
code – coders – long depicted in pop culture as a clan of vaguely comic,
Tolkien-worshipping misfits. Another was the uber-capitalist system within which
many worked, exemplified by the profoundly weird Silicon Valley. Were one or
both using code to recast the human environment as something more amenable to
them?
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Forget Hollywood depictions of gun-toting robots running wild in the streets –
the reality of artificial intelligence is far more dangerous, warns the
historian and author in an exclusive extract from his new book
Throughout history many traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in human
nature tempts us to pursue powers we don’t know how to handle. The Greek myth of
Phaethon told of a boy who discovers that he is the son of Helios, the sun god.
Wishing to prove his divine origin, Phaethon demands the privilege of driving
the chariot of the sun. Helios warns Phaethon that no human can control the
celestial horses that pull the solar chariot. But Phaethon insists, until the
sun god relents. After rising proudly in the sky, Phaethon indeed loses control
of the chariot. The sun veers off course, scorching all vegetation, killing
numerous beings and threatening to burn the Earth itself. Zeus intervenes and
strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt. The conceited human drops from the sky like
a falling star, himself on fire. The gods reassert control of the sky and save
the world.
Two thousand years later, when the Industrial Revolution was making its first
steps and machines began replacing humans in numerous tasks, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe published a similar cautionary tale titled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Goethe’s poem (later popularised as a Walt Disney animation starring Mickey
Mouse) tells of an old sorcerer who leaves a young apprentice in charge of his
workshop and gives him some chores to tend to while he is gone, such as fetching
water from the river. The apprentice decides to make things easier for himself
and, using one of the sorcerer’s spells, enchants a broom to fetch the water for
him. But the apprentice doesn’t know how to stop the broom, which relentlessly
fetches more and more water, threatening to flood the workshop. In panic, the
apprentice cuts the enchanted broom in two with an axe, only to see each half
become another broom. Now two enchanted brooms are inundating the workshop with
water. When the old sorcerer returns, the apprentice pleads for help: “The
spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again.” The sorcerer
immediately breaks the spell and stops the flood. The lesson to the apprentice –
and to humanity – is clear: never summon powers you cannot control.
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Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson allege company misused
work to teach chatbot Claude
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been hit with a class-action
lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who say it misused their
books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI-powered chatbot
Claude, which generates texts in response to users’ prompts.
The complaint, filed on Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles
Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said that Anthropic used pirated versions of
their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.
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As the ‘civic hacker’ who became Taiwan’s first transgender cabinet minister,
she is used to breaking boundaries. What can the rest of the world learn from
her vision of a happy and inclusive web?
Audrey Tang didn’t have the easiest of starts in life. The Taiwanese hacker
turned government minister was told at the age of four that she had a 50-50
chance of dying unless she had a major operation to fix a hole in her heart. Her
doctor told her she could drop down dead at any moment if she got overexcited –
and she had to wait eight more years for the op. This kind of news might bring
out someone’s selfish side – if your life is going to be so truncated, live for
yourself. Not Tang, though. She was a tiny child with a whopping IQ and a
precocious capacity to think. She decided she wanted to learn everything she
could and share it with the world. At five, living with her family in Taipei,
she started reading prodigiously – mainly classical Chinese literature. Huge
tomes. Then she’d recount her own version of the stories to her classmates. “I
liked storytelling. When I was seven I’d speak to the entire school about
stories I’d learned from a book and retell them in a way I found more
interesting.” Did she realise she was super bright back then? She shakes her
head. “No, I realised I was super ill.”
By six Tang was studying advanced mathematics; at eight she started writing code
for video games, using pencil and paper because she didn’t yet own a computer.
And whatever she learned, it was with the intention of sharing her knowledge.
Before long it became apparent she was a digital genius. Tang, 43, is roughly
the same age as the internet (1 January 1983 is considered its birthday). She
grew up alongside the world wide web; it was her playmate. In her teens, Tang
believed the internet was there to bring her vision to fruition: to democratise
knowledge, to make everything accessible, to make the world a better place. But
then she saw it changing, being used to spread falsehoods and generate
all-powerful companies that made digital capitalism’s founding fathers
unfeasibly rich while creating unimagined levels of inequality.
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