AI re-writes capitalism

Money can be a means of exchange or a store of value. traditionally, we therefore could use money to shift the returns for goods or labour in space and time, instead of having to just immediately exchange (barter) goods for labour or labour for labour or goods for goods.

the system then enabled trade across distance - wealth of nations, and was to some extent regulated by the "invisible hand" of capitalism (thanks adam smith for these enduring, if somewhat flawed metaphors from 250 years ago).

so more recently (but still 80+ years ago) von Neumann took the theoretical ideas from Turing (& Church) and with Eckart and Machley, documented the idea of the stored program computer - the key clever trick is that memory holds code and data. indeed, at any given time, code may be data for other code (machine translation, compiling, self-modifying etc).

So the new thing about AI isn't about very big neural networks and data centers. It is that the eco-system took all the world's data, and all the world's code, including all the algorithms for how money and exchange work, and combined them - the AI industry is now a hidden brain instead of an invisible hand, and controls the rules for the means of exchange and the store of value as well as the goods and services for which those exchanges and stores operate. 

We can think of this new processing paradigm much as we think of computers - noting that of course it is very mutable, where previous systems involved soverign currencies backed by states and national banks, and to some extent, markets learned value based on production of physical goods, or the size of labour markets. Now that is all tears in the rain.

just to note: I don't believe capitalism works at all, but like democracy, it is a model that is perhaps just less bad than many others. to this end, the computational socio-economy described above is at least as bad as capitalism, and then some, as it bears even less relationship to reality (i.e. until humans sublime, we do depend on food, shelter, social contact etc, and virtualisation doesn't preserve the conservation laws - you can't eat bits, you can't shelter under a process).

the internet (and web, and napster) kind of said the cost of copying a bit is effectively zero. This undermined the huge investment that creatives made (books, music, film) and led to wholesale theft of their livelihoods. AI turns this on its head - the cost of a bit in an LLM is insanely high. time to go back to paying people to make nice things once more.

AI singularity (as flawed or as hyped as the human upload drivel)

 the new kid on Hype Block is recursive self-improvement for AI.

so of course software tools & die has always been about making tools that can make more refined tools, that can make more refined tools - from stone, to iron/bronze to steel, carbon, and on to  high level languages with optimising compilers and so on - nothing new there

but the steps require scaling up the tooling, and re-tooling - so famous numbers for new chips and new biotech are we're around £500 billion to build the new fab for the new thing. so if you wanna go meta on that, lets assume add a 0 for each generation (actually, each generation usually takes a decade to really bed in, and that's 3 orders of magnitude more infrastructure).

so what about the AI singularity - i.e. the point at which it just self-improves ("recursively" is a bit of extra hype-sauce)? couple of challenges

1. we're out of chips right now

2. we're out of new data right now.

Aint gonna happen

sure you can use synthetic data, and then some randomizing hacks to avoid model collapse (kind of).

but if you can't buy the memory for love or money, just forget it.

the opposite direction of travel (millions of really small, specialised AI boxen, running on smart phones, or worst case £1000 laptops) makes a lot more sense. and cents.

there's a book about people that invest in cryogenics for keeping their body on ice for when the medical tech can grant them immortality - see Mark O'Connell's fun read.

back to the football...

+/- 250 years

50+ years ago in france, we had no mains water and no electricy - we could fetch water from the well, and light a wood fire to cool. this was what most people had for the previous thousands of years, certain 250 years ago. most people weren't in cities, and had that experience - a lot of the day was just keeping body and soul together. now, some people still don't have electricity or safe water. but most people do.

now many people don't have safe and reliable internet.

so 250 years from now, i predict we'll be back to most people not having safe land, water or internet. we mighyt be better off if only we can maintain fish stocks, since we certainly wont have large herds of pigs and cows....unless they can become aquatic.

we should be planning for the 1000 year dark age, and establish a couple of foundations to rebuild after we get things back into a stable operating point on planet A. (apologies to Asimov, who of course based his Foundation series, at least the first 3 volumes on Gibbon's Decline & Fall).

royal society event on 250 years this way or that made me think a bit.

If 5 were 10.....generational cycles in academic life

One of my fave songs of jimi is If six was 9 which I had on vinyl on one of those were 1970s compilations of rock tracks with one band one side, and a different band on the other (usually very good).

However, I'm writing about 5s and 10s.

This year sees the alarming 50th anniversary of my matriculation at Trinity College Cambridge.

It also is the 25th anniversary of being elected as Marconi Professor in The Computer Lab (as it used to be called when I moved here).

LOoking at my academic diary, it looks like it is the 40th anniversary of me teaching undergrads, PhDs and Masters students (begun a few years into working at UCL, where I was between Cambridge and, errr, Cambridge, in what was, at first, the department of computer science and statistics).

It is the 5th anniversary of my playing live and seeing in most open mike and jam sessions at The Artery sessions at the MAP studio Cafe. I suppose it must be about 45 years since we played a session at the Cambridge Folk Festival, and a support gig at Kings College may ball, too. Oh, and Girton Garden Party.

Having an academic career is, of course, full of cycles. The academic year, the degree, promotion processes etc, and of course this leads to generations. I recently met a PhD student who was being advised by someome whose advisor I'd advised - so that's 4 generations. Looking at this (e.g. from the Maths Genealogy Site), it makes sense - stats suggest it is abot 10 years after you finish your own PhD that your own first advisee finishes (n the UK system). Of course, to reach some number of generations, the survival rate (i.e. does a student become an academic (hard), do they get students of their own (quite hard), do those students finish in reasonable time (fairly hard), and rinse, repeat, or recurse, as we prefer)....

I'm still working on figuring out a legitimate Erdos/Bacon/Sabbath number...I've got E (crowcroft :- luby :- noga :- erdos) and S (bit obscure but if you count jamming) but Bacon is a challenge - i was on the same stage as Brian Cox once for a Royal Society AI event at the Royal Festival Hall, so if I can count that, I can inherit his numbers, plus 1.

Gee what fun.

In numbers...:-

60 PhDs supervised

120 PhDs examined

Lost track of masters&undergradute numbers...

237 papers (on orcid)

FRS since 2013. FREng since (space) 1999.

Hot off the press: Cambridge has a retirement policy. This is my last year accordingly. my take.

Conservation Laws

 As we see the Giant Killer Asteroid of AI plummet towards the Home of the Human Race, it becomes clear that the laws of thermodynamics were incomplete.

As well as the conservation of energy, momentum, mass and spin (oh, ok, angular momentum), we must now add the conservation of Intelligence.

This is made obvious by the ease with which obviously stupid AIs are able to fool humans in the imitation game. The AI did not have to be as smart as the person, it only had to meet them half way.

This works both at the indivual level, and at the group level, and at the academic level (people can use an AI to write a terrible paper that human reviewers will accept) and the investor level (venture capitalists fall over each other to fund companies whose products will lead to the ends of the earth).

This is the existential threat to humanity. Not that the AI will wish to eliminate us as competition - it won't need to, because once it gets anywhere near that level, we will all dimmer than a Toc H Lamp

It is already too late to put an end to this.

the internet family's least famous kin

People talk about the "Father of the Internet" or the "Grandfather of the Internet", but no-one mentions the strange uncle of the Internet, or the fairy godmother of the Internet. Nor do they speak (except perhaps on the dark web) of the evil twin of the Internet, or the secret love child of the Internet.

Where are the kissing cousins of the Internet, or the mother-in-law of the Internet? What happened to the wastrel son of the Internet? Indeed, the whole bastard offspring of the Internet have been totally erased from public discourse.

The maiden aunts of the Internet should be given credit, as well as the confirmed bachelor great uncle.

And of course, the Giddy Aunt of the Internet.

fencing the non rivalrous data commons, and the sovereign internet that never really was

Lovely idea, the declarations of independence of cyberspace notwithstanding, the vision of a new politics is not standing up well to the greatfirewalls and random total isolation of states (yes, old fashioned states, as defined by geographic boundaries, including space and maritime, like china, iran, north korea, but now lots of little old places in Europe)....it isn't that hard to find all the ingress/egress points (including satellite updownlinks etc) and plug them after all...

Meanwhile, the data commons that was the World Wide Web is being rivalled to death by hyperscalers, starting way back with google (search and click through) but now with AI.

Economicists love talk about data as non-rivalrous, because of their naive model of zero copy cost of bits, so anyone can "take" a copy, but the source is also left behind so there's no "loss" of value to the source.

Howver, attention (via meta data, provenance, attribution, even accounting/payment)....is very rivalrous - i only have two eyeballs, and one brain and so many hours each day, so it matters which copy I look at.

When the hyperscalers "add value" to the data, they subtract it from the originators. Worse, by trying to multiply the value (by combining), without recompense to the content creators, they undermine the motives of people to contribute any content. So the consequence is the death of Metcalfe's law (the value of the network is the square of the number of nodes -or at least is super-linear in the number of nodes, as any node that is added is both a consumer and a producer so the adding one more node to n, adds n+1 to the net value, not just 1). This means the hyperscalers' long term business plan is doubly dead. Their value cannot actually multiple once they trained on the common crawl - it will increase (at best) sub-linearly. In fact, as it de-motivates people from contributing any new content, the hyperscalers value will fall. We don't want to be data serfs to the AI overlords.

So AI wasn't an existential threat to humans, but it is an existential threat to knowledge.

Computer Science Fiction

 I was randomly thinking about stories that had no actual computing technology dimension, but illustrated a fundamental idea from Computer Science in some accessible way - so here's a few examples to be getting on with...

naming

bootstrapping

indirection

off-by-one-errors 

caching

recursion

encryption

some of my random acts of digital and literary london history

Bits:-

I was recently trawling through some bits of my past and recall that I was taken to program a DEC PDP-8 (in an outbuilding of the Royal Free hospital) in the 1960s by an enlightened maths teacher - we had to learn machine code (actual machine code, because we had to programme the machine on paper tape and so we learned the binary for the instructions....

A bit later in the 1970s i did some work for my cousin at the London hospital on a database he was building for a surgeon there who did knee&hip replacements and wanted to do some stats on how long each prosthetic type lasted...this was programmed in Algol-68 and involved punch cards and use of a remote ICL 2980 computer down the mile end road at Queen Mary College.

Not long after that, I got a real job at North London Polytechnic (up on Holloway Rd) in the math&CS department, where we ran a DEC-10 and I got to do some Fortran and Cobol (as well as Algol-60) but with the glory of a real glass tty (terminal) and screen editor (SOS)....also used to go to their teacher training outfit on Prince-of-Wales road to setup a modem link for people learning a bit about computers there to use the DEC -10 remotely...

Moving to the "modern" era, in 1981 I was writing C Code on a PDP-11 (using the DED screen/picture editor) and cross loading code to a DEC LSI 11/23...at UCL down on Gower St...

Words:-

Through the same 3 decades, my family (based mainly in Parliament Hill Fields, then later in Camden town) had a sequence of literary/political friends, so as a kid I was playing in Stella Gibbons house (with her grandson), or else with Benji Webb on Highgate hill - at some point we had a holiday with ponies and caravans near their grandmother's (the famous Beatrice Webb of the Fabians etc). Then I recall my father asking me if I knew who Ivor Cutler was, as my dad went drinking with him in local pubs in Mornington Crescent. We also knew Beryl Bainbridge (we were at this point living in Arlington Road and she was round the corner in Albert Street surrounded by eccentrics and a large cloud of cigarette smoke.

from cypberspace to necropolis

The Internet was dismantled as a space for humanity, first by the loss of community binding through person-to-person trust and group dynamics - 

blame blockchain/cryptocurrencies, but they are just one symptom of the alienation, that built environments like cities, then suburbs, then oneline social media and the web finally perfected.

As with crypto-currencies, so with AI, but this was foreseen by Mbemebe  in the analysis in the great book on Necropolitics

I was the Son of Sam, I contain multitudes, Now  I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

As with commons, land was enclosed, by Barons, by Kings, by Nation States - to keep people outbut camps and campfirewalls to keep people and ideas in and so with trade agreements, and the flow of information and knowledge, and so with the Interweb.

The Zombie Apocalypse is here and it is AI Voodoo, just as Neuromancer pressaged. And the zombies are the camp police. And we are interned. stoned. maculate, and soon not even dead.

p.s. a little machine learning is a dangerous thing...

fabless industries aren't exactly new

I'm reading Apple in China (see), which is interesting at the detail level (basically how they trained up with the help of Taiwan literally millions of skilled people to produce all their tech - it is now hardly surprising that china doesn't need the US's help any more to make new stuff...)

But the author seems to think that outsourcing tech manufacturing was something terribly new and clever.

Don't get me started on clothing and the east india company and the british empire...

Closer to home for the USA, however, is a much more instructive story - the electric guitar:

(Also lots of other instruments- remember Yamaha flutes were jolly good an way cheaper than Gemeinhardt)

but gibeon and fender both started manufacturing in mexico and japan then later in indonesia - sometimes trying to "brand" things different(ly) so western prejudice about "lower build quality" from those foreigners was offset by calling things Epiphone or Squier (actually its a bit more complex than that, but you get the idea)...

But in reality the outsorced products weren't just a whole lot cheaper. I own a japanese made custom shop fender strat and a 1982 squier tele (possibly/probably made in korea) - both are a very very good - better than instruments i've tried at 5-10 times the price (the tele was off a friend but if you look at the time they were £150. the strat was used so hard to know what new cost was but probably £1500.

And nowadays, i'd still buy a squier or epiphone (i had a beautiful 335 for a while) or just bite the bullet and buy an ibanez (actually, just did - £300 - fantastic quality - though i did recently buy a G&L Tribute (fretless) bass which was made in the USA and was very sensibly priced (unde £500).

Interestingly, just reading innovation in real places too which tells a similar story about bike manufacturing moving from US (schwinn et al) to Taiwan (Giant) for exactly the same set of reasons....

Anyhow, what Apple did (hollowing themselves out, bleeding to death) was absolutely nothing new. It wasn't even rock'n'roll.

Mind your Ps and Qs, and the K, M, G, and Ts will look after themselves....

• M I remember back in the early 1980s Sun Microsystems (old unix workstation maker of fine machines) said that the breakthrough was 3Ms - Megabyte of memory, MegaHz processor speed and Megabits of networking (I seem to recall 4Mb, 4MHz and 3Mbps) - prior to this, of course, we'd had 64Kbytes of RAM in PDP11s and 64kbps of network speed and some Khz process clocks).
• G A decade later, Craig Partridge published a great book on Gigabit networking,  and storage and processor speeds were, indeed, at least heading for Gbytes and GHz.
• T It took a bit longer, but it is certainly possible to get Tbps or close (800Mpbs) of networking, and Tbytes of storage (RAM is still a bit pricey for that to be common, but in cluster compute its a thing, but on my laptop, Tbyte SSD is totall affordable). While Moore's law ran out of steam fairly recently, so an individual core might still be GHz, I can have a lot of cores, so total processing throughput (including CPU and GPUs) might easily look like THz.
• P It's interesting to speculate what tech will look like for Petabits a second, but the optical fiber photonics folks definitely can do that and there are other transmission technologies which are fast and affordable. In storage, there seems to be no obvious reason - in fact if either of glass or synthetic DNA storage get on the market (and that is not science fiction) then Petabyte storage (at least write once/appeand) could easily be affordable soon too. So then there's processing speed - i think this will probably not happen in a simple way, partly because it probably isn't necessary in personal devices, but I could be wrong - I don't think it would come from neuromorphic hardware because that doesn't have to be fast, it is just massively more efficient than using tensor processors to do operations on neural network graph data structures. 
• Q - so what about quantum computing? While they don't really work yet, and also are not exactly going to fit in your new rayban specs or wrist-borne device, they might help speed things up (in some possibly rather limited, cases), however...

Many of those hyperscale companies led by personalities are guilty of massive hubris. Because they are hugely successful in one domain, their leaders assume they can repeat that in arbitrary other areas, and I think this has a massively negative effect on anyone else making progress (or even just getting funding) - 4 examples of over-claiming that have happened multiple times in recent years...

• Quantum Supremacy - multiple times there have been announcements that embarassingly jumped the gun on people actually making a working quantum computer that actually a) has enough Q bits to be useful and b) has Q bits that don't get overwhealmed by noise or decoherence so fast they are not even a ghost in the machine.
• Neural Interfaces - there have been beautiful experiments with bio-feedback systems that are now being used to treat various neurological conditions (and problems with phyisical consequences like Parkinsons) - but having an every day mind-computer interface is still science fiction really. Despite various people jumping the gun.
• Metaverse- we've (I myself included) being doing decades of work in immersive virtual reality. It was a staple of cyberpunk SF books 30+ years back (and more). But it is still a mess outside of games. While augmented reality as a tool (e.g. for repairing things or even surgery) will totally be a thing, I think the metaverse (as per Snow Crash, at least, let alone Neuromancer or Altered Carbon or even just the old Star Trek Holodeck) is not with us yet affordably. I think this is more a failure of use case/compelling application than actual technology, however.
• AGI - all the money in the world is being spent on better predictive text, but the same people getting the money promise AGI. Hah. Bunch of Marketroids (that's not an insult - they are very good at it given the levels of investment they are getting compared to the total paucity of actual usefulness of their tech beyond prompting governments to worry about their energy grids).

UK government introducing digital id by stealth - without proper inclusion or safeguards as far as I can see...

 If you are a director of a company in England, you will recently have received a letter requiring you to register for this: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login to be able to continue to do some things (e.g. mandatory for directors of companies). https://www.gov.uk/guidance/verifying-your-identity-for-companies-house

When i did this, the website said that you could do this at a post office 

if you only had paper documentation (e.g. birth cerfiticates, paper passports etc) 

and could use notaries to verify some of the documents.

However, it seems that this alternative may not have ever worked properly,

since now, if you look at the companies house web site guidance,

you have to use the digital service first to input your document details online..

So talking to someone else more recently , they said that this meant they had to step down as a company

director since they did not wish (or perhaps could not) use a digital id upload - 

Is this legal? The government is effectively ruling out people from some things in 

society if they cannot use the digital service -  it appears that companies house forces this, as when you look at the link for verifying your id via the postoffice, 

This seems inequitable at least, and possibly completely a massive security danger,

given the risk of leakage of photo id which many online organisations have so 

publically experiences in recent years....

Also, the behavoural/liveness checks on the photo-id look naive -  when many biometric systems are moving to multi-modal  (e.g. face+movement, + speech / speaker recognition when saying random given phrase or face + movement + fingerprint or iris etc etc)

So is the uk government a) introducing digital id by stealth? and worse b)

introducing a centralised, insecure system and c) ignoring any requirements

for inclusivity? and d) without any public debate?

Cloud versus Edge - I think the jury is still out - sort of...

With recent Cloudflare and AWS (and previous meta outage) it comes down to one simple tradeoff :

On the one side is everyone running an Internet service saves some money by paying a Cloud provider to run the infrastructure for them -

So the cloud outfit get to amortize a lot of costs over all the customers by having a small number of big data centers (numbered in thousands) instead of millions of enterprise computing services run by every tom, dick harry, tescos, twitter, openai, slack, signal, ticketmaster etc etc (all actual examples of people who lost service during aws and cloudflare outages)

As Spidey says "with great power comes great responsibility". So cloud providers not only provision carefully,

but they do actually provide some levels of fault tolerance by providing redundant servers,

and even run some consistency protocols to make sure of a customer's service needs very high availability,

so long as a majority of the duplicate servers are running, the service is ok - this can operate globally,

so even if there's a whole country disconnected (e.g. international fiber cut, or national grid outage, both also real events in recent years), the rest of the world can move on ok...

But it would seem that they don't fully apply this distributed, replicated, fault tolerant/high availability,

possibly somewhat even decentralised thinking to the implementation of their own internal necessary infrastructure - so in AWS and Cloudflare case, the error was central - someone in AWS didn't consider a particular pattern of performance that meant a DNS config (their design is 95% sane) led to a slow server updating DNS and overwriting more recent entries, causing customer services that had needed those new entries to be unable to find them In the Cloudflare case,

a centrally managed configuration file grew in one overnight update by twice the size, exceeding cloudflare services maximum file size constraint (this is actually rather sad in terms of being fairly esasy to prevent by normal system checking/validation processes. The AWS one is slightly more subtle, but not much more. in fact, earlier outages in replicated/distributed services (actually at cloudflare earlier) took PhD level thinking to come up with long term solution - see this paper for one example: Examining Raft’s behaviour during partial network failures

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3447851.3458739

The cloudflare example is also a little reminiscent of the Crowdstrike outage, but that wasn't cloud - crowdstrike has a rulebase for its firewall productsm and microsoft windows is required to allow thir parties to install firewall products (ven though a modern microsoft  OS firewall is actually good) - crowdstrike had a bug in a new rule base so when all the windows machines using that product updated their rules, the firewall code (inside the OS, allowed in by microsoft due to anti-monopoly rules) read a broken file, which caused an undetected code bug to triger an exception, and, due to oversight the crowdstrike software engineers had not put in an exception handler, which would have led to a safe exit of that code, so instead the exceptin caused an OS crash (i.e. bluescreen!)...i this case, the central error affected millions of edge systems directly. - and due to the way the s/w update worked, needed a lot of manual intervention by many many people in many organisations..

In a non-cloud setup, you'd have natural levels of diversity in all the millions different enterprise deployments (even if just different versions of things running) so outages would typically be restricted to particular services, but in the cloud setup, an infrastructure outage takes down thousands of enterprises....(I think AWS reckoned about 8000 large cusomters - not sure about Cloudflare but estimates are they run about 25% of the Internet ecosystem's defenses)...

background

AWS explainer

https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/

Cloudflare explainer

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

Replication failure during partial network outages

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3447851.3458739

UK government very useful report on data center sustainabilty (has lots of useful statistics):

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-10315/CBP-10315.pdf

To be fair to the cloud service folks at AWS and Cloudflare, they found, fixed and publically reported the problems in under a day, so the concentration of resources in cloud also meant a concentration of highly paid, really expert people who can troubleshoot a problem, and once its fixed, the deployment is also quick. on the other hand, a decentralised setup (more like the frowdstrike example) can also be deployed fairly fast if they had been slightly more careful about their s/w update process....

So i'd say clould v. edge, at the moment hard to pick which is more resilient, which is cheaper

prisoner of cellular blockheaded thinking #9

So the cellular industry is often lauded for its planning and general coherent approach to the world.

Let's remind people how inaccurate that is.

From the get go, Bell Labs & parent AT&T decided, having invented cellular telephony, that there was no market for it. (repeating the famous IBM error that "the world will only need 3 computers, 2 in America and maybe one in England).

Later, people invened the bluetooth stack (yech - serial line emulation, modem control tones, and no sensible mesh mode for ages)

Then blackberry and nokia tried to copy apple's iphone ideas and almost totally tanked what had previously been incredibly smart and succesful industries.

They they caused the fixed telephone service to run out of telephone numbers multiple times.

Most recently, car owners and smart meter owners are finding that the ability to remote access said vehicles and devices is being turned off because providers won't be running edge, gprs (2.5G) Or even 3G pretty soon - so because there's no backwards compatibility until much later generations, goodbye to all those useful services.

And what is 6G actually for, remind me?

My wifi still works ok :-) on IPv4 (only 46 years old) and IPv6 (20+ years old...

AI versus Humanity

humantity is too stupid to build an AI that would threaten its existence (humanity, not AI's existence...we could easily build a self-destructive AI - see below).

the main reason is logistical. we are rubbish at supply chains - food comes across the planet out of season, for rch folks but bypasses many people on the way who are suffering shortages. we make computing and communications devices that depend on rare earths only available in war zones or our adversaries land.

we throw away working stuff.

Any AI will have to build itself reliable supply chains for replacement parts, software maintenance and energy. To do that, it will need an army of robots (in the origianl sense of robot, Karel Capek's obedient tireless servants). But any humans spotting such a reliable supply chain will immediately take it over and steal from it, ratehr than rely on their own rubbish production line. Capitalism and natural selection mean a race to the bottom - humanity's inferiority will be AIs downfall. The seeds of our digital overlords demise are built in, due to the inherent contradictions in the rules of engagement.

zero inbox wars

 i've had a zero inbox policy since first getting e-mail (late 1970s) - having moved through various systems (roughly once a decade), recently landed on fastmail (which I very very much recommend- extremely fast, but also very easy to migrate to, integrate with other mail systems and calendars (!) and very good support).

so throughout various systems, I've used different tools for managing incoming, and also archives - i have kept all e-mail to/from/cc:d me since 1976:-) 

at some point, everything is esentially kept in a bunch of directories (folders) organised with a small (<=3) levels of hierarchy - somewhat like internet name space (.edu .com etc) - with names of people (students) or projects or personal (money, health, house, transport etc).... 

not sure what fastmail uses behind the scenes but seems to scale well and has nice rule system for automatically processing incoming too....plus I really like how it interacts with other mail systems ( I have to maintain several outlook accounts for some places I work, and at least one doesn't allow forwarding, but fastmail can pretend to be a client, and make the mail look like it was just got through imap etc)....

anyhow, through various stages (cambridge's ownbrew, then exchange baed system, gmail, and now fastmail) have seen a steady decrease in spam - really very little getting through at all these days (maybe one a day) and very low false positives too ...

but what's left has two things steadily increasing 

1/ academic "spam" - e.g. calls for papers, invitations to review, offers to publish my work "for free" (like why would I ever pay?) etc

2/ mandarin - not reading or speaking any version of chinese, I'm assuming this is actually more of 1/ but just for chinese events and publications...

I'm looking for a two stage LLM to deal with those two cases - one "translate", two see if it is relevant - could train the model (or refine/fine tune) based on my own publications or conferences i'm on programme committee for...

maybe a student project!

Anyhow, in my current fastmail setup with 5G of mail, there are only 3 messages in the inbox...soon to be 0.

How to reform a National AI Institute?

The Reform Club

A lot of people have been busy recently writing plans for the Turing Institute most of which revolve around criticising the pace and direction of changes that it has been attempting over the past 2 years, and several culminating in the trivial proposal to put all the eggs in one basket (defense and security) and use the big stick that the EPSRC has of deciding whether to continue the block core funding for the next 4+ years to "make it so". This got up to ministerial level.

That isn't reform. That's simply asset stripping. Not that the asset isn't a good one - the defense&security program has always been strong (at least as much as we can publically know) - other work had variable mileage, although commercial partners from banking/commerce, pharmaceuticals et al, keep coming back with more money, which suggests that they liked what they got (with their real world hard-nosed attitide to funds, especially in the UK where R&D spend is so typically low from industry). We're talking £1M per annum per partner levels.

Also the Turing managed to hire very strong people, both as postdoc researchers and as research engineers, in the face of fierce competition from the hyperscale companies (that all have significant bases in the UK, e.g. Google&Deepmind based here, Microsoft, Amazon in Cambridge, Meta and X in London, OpenAI has a London lab, etc etc) - as well as quite a reasonable set of opportunities in UK universities in places significantly more affordable than London (or the South in general) - so presumably, the interesting jobs had challenges, and an open type of work, that attracted people who had a choice.

How not to reform a National AI Institute?

Make it defense. You will lose a large fraction of the other money, and the majority of staff will not be allowed to work here. As with medicine, the UK does not have capacity to provide AI expertise at the level needed from UK citizens alone. Those left with real clue will often find it easier to work at one of those companies too. Especially since salaries start at 3 to 4 times as much.

• You will lose all the cross-fertilization of ideas that happen in one domain into others especially with the Turing's unique engineeing team acting across all the possible projects, acting as a conduit for tools and techniques. 
• You will lose all the visitor programmes including the PhD visitors, which benefits students from all over the UK, many of whom would not be allowed to visit.
• You'd lose access to much interesting data, which would not be allowed to be given to people that can't transparently say what they will do with it. Legally. 
• You wouldnt have a "national institute" - you'd just have another defense lab. It might be very good, but no-one would know. In fact, how come there isn't already one, e.g. in Cheltenham? They have plenty of funds?

What's my alternative?

To be honest, I don't have one. The nearest thing I have is what the Turing has managed to do in weather prediction (see Nature papers on Aardvaak and Aurora), and what we did (still do) in Finance & Economics with some very nice work in explainable AI and fraud detection, and synthetic data, which have multiple applications across many domains. Likewise the engineering teams work on data safe havens which is useful in aforesaid finance, but also in practical privacy preserving machine learning in healthcare and any other sensitive domains. And recent work on lean language models. There are quite a few other things one could mention like that.

You can't predict where good or useful ideas will come from. Who knew giving a ton of money to CERN would lead to the World Wide Web? Who knew a Dutch free OS (minix) would incentivise a Finnish gradute student to write Linux (the OS platform on most the cloud, half the smart phones out there)? Who knew that some small TV company (the BBC) request for a simple low cost computer would lead to the founding of ARM (that has more chips in the world than Intel or anyone else - again in your mobile device)? Who knew this neat little paper on Attention is all you need, would lead to all the harsh language about peoples' failure to predict the importance of LLMs (hey some of those people predicted that blockchain might not be a good idea:-) Who knew?

And who knows how to reform a national AI institute? 

persistent technology design mistakes that go on giving

 History of technology is littered with design mistakes. Quite a few are mercifully shortlived, and some, deservedly, just don't even see the light of day at all (sadly in some cases as they might be useful lessons in what not to do:-)

some mistakes aren't mistakes - one famous one was the choice between VHS and Betamax video tape formats - this was actually a tradeoff in cost/price/distribution and quality - in the end it didn't really matter.

Others somehow survive, grow and persist, and persist in having negative consequences for decades - 

In Computer Science, these are things like the C++ language....enough has been written about that and alternative histories (if only Algol 60, or if only Objective C or if only people had written better compilers and libraries for functional languages earlier) - 

In Communications Systems, two examples I'd pick: Bluetooth, and Edge.

An early workshop (25+ years ago) in california had presentations on bluetooth and explained why they had made it look like a serial lines (think COM3 on a windows box), stemming from everything lookling like circuits, or telephones to the folks who made this up. And Edge was made reliable (local retransmissions) to mask wireless packet loss, when everything should just "look like an ethernet", as I think Craig Partride put it. The cellular data folks eventually got it (and have done a number of other things much better than wifi), but bluetooth's horribleness persists, partly because the broken architecture was baked in to early software stacks, and is very very hard to persuade people to just ditch. In the IoT world, this led to a plethora of other wireless technologies (zigbee, lorawan etc) at least partly so people could avoid that fate, although there were other goals too.

Anyhow, we avoided being stuck with X.25, but we are stuck with QWERTY. We avoided being stuck with VHS, but we are still stuck with IPv4.

a brief history of asking for forgiveness versus permission - the napsterisation of AI...

 

Back in the day, the Jesuits used to say that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. I think that this may refer to the idea that people may have committed minor errors without knowing what they did was wrong, so they were less blameworthy, especially if, after the event, when the priest or other wise person explained to them the error of their ways, they recanted and were forgiven. To ask permission implies that the answer might be "no".

So now we are in a. world where people are being paid to run stuff like this legitimised botnet, effectively becoming part of a P2P file sharing world. Once upon a time (a generation ago, or almost infinitely in the past) if you ran a thing like this (the Napsterised Internet) you would get sharp letters from lawyers or even just be fined by the copyright infringement police.

Post Napster, Google acquired Youtube and took an interesting step...they basically took the Jesuit line, with a vengance - the trick was that Google went and did massive deals with all the large copyright owners (actually paying quite serious money) and then if you or I uploaded something already covered by that agreement, then no problem. If we uplaoded something not yet covered by the agreement, Google had an offer - they could offer advertising revenue, or possibly market research (popularity metrics), or as a last resort, take down the content.

While the large copyright owners have not been the best of friends to the artists who actually create stuff, this was at least semi-legitimate (I'm not a lawyer, obviously, but it seems to follow the aforesaid Jesuit model, and that has history behind it:-)

Now we have all those GenAI tools trained on a  lot of content that is avaialble on the non pay-walled Internet - this does not mean it isn't copyrighted. The AI/LLM companies are notably trying to claim fair use type arguments (which search engines 20 years ago most notably did not) - the difference may reflect a change of culture, a shift in legal interpretation (of say fair use) or perhaps simply a shift in power (AIs owned by companies that have a larger market cap than the GDP of most countries).

At least one of those AIs is run by the aforesaid search engine company. But others are not, and don't necessarily have search, and certainly don't appear to have done the large deals for content with those big copyright owning companies...

So the game is afoot... ... ...