Score: 1 star out of 5. It’s hard to not write a fascinating book on the Philosophy of the Internet. The Internet is a recent phenomenon that has pervaded all aspects of our lives at lightning speed. And just like social and political policies, philosophy is finding it hard to keep up. We just haven’t had the time to step back and process how what is happening around us could be understood at a metaphysical or phenomenological level. This is the current wild, wild west of the intellectual world. So, if you’re a smart, observant, intuitive cookie, a book on the Philosophy of the Internet is a g ..read more

We were recently handed an open letter where it was pleaded that we pause giant AI experiments and in the meantime “ask ourselves…Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” Prominent names in computer science, such as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak are signatories to this letter and as a result it made headlines all over the world with the usual hype and pomp surrounding anything even remotely pertaining to AI. Time magazine, for instance, posted this in an artic ..read more

Deep learning (DL) revolutionised computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence in general. It was a huge breakthrough (circa 2012) that allowed AI to blast into the headlines and into our lives like never before. ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, autonomous cars, etc. – deep learning is the engine driving these stories. DL is so good, that it has reached a point where every solution to a problem involving AI is now most probably being solved using it. Just take a look at any academic conference/workshop and scan through the presented publications. All of them, no matter who, what, where or when, present ..read more

There is a fundamental difference between humans and machines. Jack Ma, Chinese business magnate, co-founder of Alibaba, 35th richest man in the world, once said (in his half-broken English): Computers only have chips, men have the heart. It’s the heart where the wisdom comes from. Forgive me if I also quote myself on this topic: Machines operate on the level of knowledge. We operate on the level of knowledge and understanding. — Zbigniew Zdziarski (@zbigatron) April 9, 2021 This is a tough issue to talk about because of the other opinions on the matter. Many people like to think that we ..read more

I’ve written before that AI is Fundamentally Unintelligent. I’ve also written that AI is Slowing Down (part 2 here). One would perhaps consider me a pessimist or cynic of AI if I were to write another post criticising AI from another perspective. But please don’t think ill of me as I embark on exactly such an endeavour. I love AI and always will, which is why most of my posts show AI and its achievements in a positive light (my favourite post is probably on the exploits of GPT-3). But AI is not only fundamentally unintelligent but at the moment it is fundamentally over-hyped. And somebody ..read more

Summary of review: This book is the best analysis of the state of Artificial Intelligence currently in print. It is a cool and level-headed presentation and discussion on a broad range of topics. An easy 5-stars.  “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” is a book about the current state of Artificial Intelligence. Although published in late 2018 – light years ago for computer science – it is still very much relevant. This is important because it is the best book on AI that I have read to date. I’d hate for it to become obsolete because it is simply the most level ..read more

In July of last year I wrote an opinion piece entitled “Artificial Intelligence is Slowing Down” in which I shared my judgement that as AI and Deep Learning (DL) currently stand, their growth is slowly becoming unsustainable. The main reason for this is that training costs are starting to go through the roof the more DL models are scaled up in size to accommodate more and more complex tasks. (See my original post for a discussion on this). In this post, part 2 of “AI Slowing Down”, I wanted to present findings from an article written a few months after mine for IEEE Spectrum. The art ..read more

This is the 50th post on my blog. Golden anniversary, perhaps? Maybe not. To celebrate this milestone, however, I thought I’d return to my very first post that I made at the end of 2017 (4 years ago!) on the topic of image enhancing scenes in Hollywood films. We all know what scenes I’m talking about here: we see some IT expert scanning security footage and zooming in on a face or a vehicle licence plate; when the image becomes blurry the detective standing over the expert’s shoulder requests for the image to be enhanced. The IT guy waves his wand and presto!, we see a full reso ..read more

My last post talked about how AI’s hitherto growth is unsustainable and will hence see a slowing down unless a new paradigm is discovered. A discovery like this may or may not happen, as discoveries go. In this post I wish to follow along a similar vein. Today, I wish to discuss how AI, despite all its achievements, is still fundamentally unintelligent and, hence, the hype behind it is to some significant degree unjustified. I will use the GPT-3 language model as representative of AI to argue my case. Conclusions from my analyses can be generalised to AI as a whole, as I will talk about below ..read more

Over the last few months here at Carnegie Mellon University (Australia campus) I’ve been giving a set of talks on AI and the great leaps it has made in the last 5 or so years. I focus on disruptive technologies and give examples ranging from smart fridges and jackets to autonomous cars, robots, and drones. The title of one of my talks is “AI and the 4th Industrial Revolution”. Indeed, we are living in the 4th industrial revolution – a significant time in the history of mankind. The first revolution occurred in the 18th century with the advent of mechanisation and steam power; the second came a ..read more