Welcome to the site. This exists because i wanted a place to collect my thoughts and stuff I’ve made or found.

Tag: artificial-intelligence

  • Human-centric robotics and crabs

    Robotics have always fascinated me. Ever since I saw the Boston dynamics “dog” robots, the terminator movie, power rangers combining into vol-tron or the transformer movies, robots held a forever “cool” factor for me.

    Since the dawn of AI, robots have had a resurgence in the public view. This year Sony developed “ACE” for example. A new kind of “physical AI” (or Robot?) that could consistently beat humans at ping pong. (check it out here!). The big “new” thing of this event is the flexible, AI powered “autonomous” part. The robot uses AI to “think” (or react to the world autonomously) for itself to beat the other player. This is different from”older” robots, who were consistently designed to do certain objectives or movements very precisely under certain met conditions.

    With the coming of AI, Robots have become able to “improvise” on different situations from their original intended design objective. They can actively learn from observation, and are getting better over time.

    These abilities make some of the more doomsaying humans think our AI overlords will eventually develop a T-800 to conquer the world. Other AI doomsayers are maybe a bit more realistic by arguing that for example a rogue AI will execute their prime directive of ” improve the climate of earth”, a bit too well and alter micro climates so much that humans will be collateral damage.

    Or maybe AI will go the “skynet route! But if that happens, I don’t think they will be “T-800 (or human) shaped”.

    This “physical AI robot”, while scary, is a bit too “human” shaped for me. (this is on purpose of course, to activate the uncanny valley)

    I also think that the terminator movies, and our fear of a robotic overlord future is way too human-centric as an idea. Why would a robot choose a human form if you can just poison the fresh water supply shaped like a server box in a data center somewhere?

    This way of thinking started for me when I read two books last year. the first book was “An Immense World” by Ed Yong.

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    We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

    In this book it is made clear (in a beautiful way of writing I might add, please go buy it) that the world we experience through our human senses is just a tiny sliver of the wealth of subjective experiences that exist outside of our species. It made me think that if true General AI “experience” will exist at all, it won’t view the world “as we do”. it will have it’s own “filter” of reality and for example will probably be able to “see” or “experience” a way broader spectrum of light than humans ever will be able to.

    The second book “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn had a more story based philosophical approach to get me to the idea that humans are too entrenched in the “specialness” of humans, and the idea that the reality of the world adheres to only what humans think of it. We are too entrenched in thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe.

    The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. “You are the teacher?” he asks incredulously. “I am the teacher,” the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future where there is still time save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. Is it man’s destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him– one more wonderful than he has ever imagined?

    In the book the Gorilla Ishmael divides humans into Takers and Leavers

    The Leavers: Indigenous, tribal, and hunter-gatherer societies. Leavers believe that humans belong to the world, just like any other species, and they live in balance with the natural environment.

    The Takers: Members of modern, “civilized” societies (dating back to the Agricultural Revolution). Takers believe the world belongs to humans and was made for them to conquer and rule.

    The Takers are the main group of humans alive on the world at the moment. Nature is something to be conquered by intelligence (human intelligence). This Idea is also seen in the AI – Skynet revolution of the terminator movies. The first thing the AI does, is “conquer” the world. They are the new intelligence, and they should therefore “dominate” and not live in harmony.

    Interesting ideas I thought, but to circle back to the beginning, it also got me thinking on the arrogance of giving the t-800 a human shape. I think the Boston dynamics dog we mentioned before is a bit more scary than a T-800 when you strap a flamethrower to its back, because of the inhumanity of it and the way more flexible and quick way it can move about. Especially when you make these robots autonomous!

    I think that’s also what makes the new kind of warfare with autonomous drones so scary. Not necessarily the destructive power, but the “inhumanity” of the fact that a tiny flying, super fast device can decide for itself to blow something up, and maybe you with it. Lets hope they don’t have the same hallucination – error percentages as the average large language model.

    All I’ve typed about so far is the scariness and danger of possibilities in the future with this kind of technology, but as it is with all tech, it has both sides. It might be able to do good too. What if AI and autonomous physical robots can become what Ishmael the gorilla calls “Leavers”? Could they become active autonomous beings that will support and maybe enhance the physical environment outside of what humans think? Live in harmony with plants and animals? (also Humans, we are animals too you realize..) What if we can make fish-shaped autonomous research robots to better understand the environment of certain species? Or autonomous nanobots that can travel your bloodstream and keep tabs on your health? The tech might be there in the future!

    Or maybe the fish will find these too uncanny as well

    What I’m trying to say is that to get to the better part of that future, I think we should leave the “taker” mentality behind and think a bit more on how we can “add” to the external world, not just the world that we perceive from our human perspective. I think the disk shaped autonomous vacuum cleaners we have now are fine for example. I don’t think I need a human shaped “Butler” in my house that can do “everything” for me. Just give me a diverse specialized “ecosystem” of autonomous robots doing a specific task like folding laundry, or mopping the floor.

    I’d rather “live in harmony” with multiple purpose built robots, than in the uncanny valley of the X – robot – butlers that might turn into a t-800. Then use the money you’ve earned on those mass scale production robots to design robots to actually improve the world at large, not just the human world, or even smaller, just my house?

    Yes it looks cool, I admit. But are humans really the best shape to do everything? And why is he only improving my (rich) home?

    If it turns out that we indeed want autonomous robots in the home and that I am in the minority, I’d pose this final argument. If because of mass-production reasons or something the robots all need to be one shape, don’t make it a human one. Make it the best one that evolution already decided upon multiple times over the course of history.

    Give me a giant crab-butler to fold my laundry basically. At least the robotic revolution wont be so human-centric.

  • Truth Shapers

    Lately I’ve had a lot of feelings when I’ve tried to search things on the internet. Google’s hegemony has steadily been growing since 1998 when it was introduced but with the rise of AI it seems that the whole model of navigating the internet has been upended. 

    I’ve tried to use other search engines to get rid of the still very much error prone LLM’s feeding me the information I’m supposed to be looking for. DuckDuckGo has lately been my go to search engine, but I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m not finding what I am genuinely looking for anymore. Most found sites and sources seem iffy at best, and it seems there are even AI-generated websites out there flooding the already muddled waters.

    It got me thinking on how I engage with information and how I look for information as well. Most of my interactions with the internet are through the big tech companies, who in my opinion have become “Truth Shapers”. When there are a few companies (and/or billionaires who own most of the media) who decide what information you get, when and what information you don’t get, objective information is under threat. What are the blind spots in the data of those LLM’s? It has been trained on the internet, but a lot of stuff that is relevant in the real world has never been on the internet, so it’s also not in an LLM. If it’s not in the data set, “it doesn’t exist”. I think that’s the wrong way around! The internet / social media seems to want to “shape the truth” by being the main way (or filter) of how we interact with the world.

    Since i am a millennial, I’ve grown up “with” the internet and the rise of (smart)phones in everybody’s pockets. I come from an age where the internet was still very young and underdeveloped (we did not have apps for example in the beginning). I remember the internet being a wild place where you could find a lot of niche information you would not have found otherwise. A lot of information also just was not on the internet. Often times i’ve needed (old) books to get information to get through my schoolwork.


    With the rise of Google and its search engine, along with social media there came a need to “filter” the information to cater to you as a user, so you could more effectively find what you wanted. This has not been a deliberate “evil” (not at first at least, at that time Google still had the “don’t be evil” moniker so it seems they at least would know the impact of them deciding things) choice at first, since it genuinely made the service better. Social media also needed a way to filter the most relevant people and/or information for you (I also remember social media being just that, social media, and not a “news” source) so they also took part in this filtering. This came to be known as the “filter bubble”. If you’re interested in that, take a gander at: (VIDEO). I can’t believe this video is 15 years old already.

    This made Google one of the first big truth shapers (with Meta joining them promptly later in the early years of 20XX). They “decided” what you saw online more and more. Although the internet is a relatively new technology, the practice of truth shaping has not been new. 

    When Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press got invented the concept of the then “objective truth” also got fractured and radically altered power dynamics and changed who had a say on what “the truth” was. Objective reality was no longer a monopoly of the church. This introduction also had other effects, it greatly quickened the spread of knowledge, discoveries and literacy in Europe at the time. (source)

    Objective truth has always been a gray area. It’s messy to get to the bottom of things. To get as close as possible you need a multitude of different sources contradicting, correcting and refining each other. But that process seems to fade more and more with billionaire oligarchs and their algorithms catering strict filter bubbles and isolating groups of people online in thousands of subcultures. The bigger overarching “monoculture” has been fractured more than ever. I don’t believe this was the intention when all these technologies got introduced. I think it’s hard pressed (pun intended) to believe that the intention of the introduction of the printing press was the strengthening of the eventual protestant reformation for instance (see previous source). Just the same, I don’t believe it was the intention of a company like google to divide the internet in filter bubbles. I do believe that as time got on, other companies, such as google and other (private) actors with political ambitions saw the fertile ground for propaganda and social and cultural division to gain power and money that filter bubbles offer. I can’t prove it of course, but I believe the rise of right wing politics in Europe and the world is partly explainable by filter bubbles and targeted marketing (source). The internet became large and influential enough (along with other technologies and smartphones) for a company like Cambridge Analytica to inevitably come into existence. 

    Now we are in an age where the information streams are in the hands of a few companies and people (source) who don’t seem to necessarily care about objectivism. The “useful” filter bubble seems to be hijacked by business and politics. Tech companies and people who are after power are, or want to become the new truth shapers. Think of all the young people now getting their information from TikTok. Check out the drama surrounding the US takeover of TikTok and how they’ve changed the algorithm (source). At the risk of sounding old and grumpy again, I remember a time where i was not allowed to cite wikipedia as a source, because “everyone can add anything to that site, you should get your information from multiple books from the school library”. Oh how times have changed. 

    I used to hate when the teachers said these things. The same teacher for example also used to tell me that I should be able to calculate difficult things in my head because “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”… 

    But now there seems to be a grain of truth to their first statement. At least on using multiple sources to form your own opinion to at least try to get near to an objective truth. For this I have my father in law as inspiration. He subscribes to almost all the newspapers, so he can form his own opinion based on discrepancies or is at least able to read between the lines a bit better. This is of course still not enough. To get to an objective truth even better he needs to talk to people who subscribe to all the news websites maybe, or get their news from other sources. Otherwise he’s just created another analog filter bubble for himself, although it is a widespread one. Of course, there are also filter bubbles that are so far away from reality that maybe they should not be considered as objective truth anyway : drinking raw milk?

    The way out seems to be incredibly difficult as media, information and power consolidates in a slowly shrinking group of people. The first step in my opinion is to become more media savvy and to promote critical thinking and discourse between humans, especially when they seem to differ in opinions on the surface. I also think the internet needs to grow up to be a bit more scientific in how it works. In a world where you can post anything and everything as truth, how can we accurately bridge the gap between the digital “reality” and the “analog” real one? I don’t have a clear answer yet,  but I strongly believe that the pressures on excellent schooling and scientific advances by the powers that be are an indication that we need to look in that direction (source).

    Further reading:

    https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P8014.html

    https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0253

    https://school-education.ec.europa.eu/en/learn/courses/how-use-critical-thinking-enable-media-literacy