No direction home

" A lot of this book is about “Demis-as-scientist”, contrasting him, for example, with the more atheoretical engineering culture at OpenAI. DeepMind has done literally Nobel-quality of research, but now, like everybody else, they are barely publishing anything. It all hammers home the Shakespearean tragedy we are in; the intensity of the race means that nobody gets what they want.

I hope to run a future AI Circle on the topic of ‘games’, in which case we’ll be digging more into the technical details of AlphaGo and AlphaStar.

I spoke with a former DeepMind employee who said they thought The Infinity Machine contained “one important error per page”, but was incredibly cagey about any of the details. Working in the labs is so time-consuming and sensitive that I can’t imagine it’s worth employees’ time to correct errors in what is, in the final analysis, a still enjoyable and presumably “directionally correct” book.

If you think I’m being too grumpy, here is a much more positive review from Jason Furman.

Finally, some quotes in the introduction may serve as a source of reflection:

“I think political systems will use [AI] to terrorize people,” [Geoffrey] Hinton answered.

“Then why are you doing the research?” [Nick] Bostrom asked.

“I could give you the usual arguments,” Hinton replied. “But the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.”26

George Berkeley, The Querist. I sometimes wonder whether I am the only person on earth who hasn’t read any of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, but has read his pamphlets on Irish coinage policy from the 1730s.

Berkeley’s famous philosophical work on idealism was all conducted in his 20s. What followed was a pretty fascinating life culminating in becoming the Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork in the Southwest of Ireland.

The Querist is a complete gem: a three-part pamphlet arguing for paper currency and a national bank, in the context of Ireland’s development, written entirely in the form of sarcastic numbered questions. It’s like if Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was about banking and credit but also occasionally agricultural productivity in 18th-century County Tipperary.

This book is sufficiently obscure that I struggled to find a copy, but the formatting on the Project Gutenberg edition was perfectly adequate. Eventually, I will finish my treatise on the Irish Enlightenment, but for now, you will have to make do with my saying that The Querist is one of the most underrated works in the history of economic thought.

Films

  I promise that, if ever elected to office, I would do everything in my power to increase public merriment.

Ulu Grosbard, Straight Time. On a recent trip for a wedding, I had a spare day and watched this in Filmhouse, a lovely arthouse cinema in Edinburgh. Straight Time is a 1978 neo-noir starring Dustin Hoffman as a thief attempting to reintegrate into society in Los Angeles. It was quite good, although it didn’t especially stick with me. Mostly, it just makes me think about how strong American cinema in the 1970s was; the fall into kitsch in the 1980s is a major theme of Quentin Tarantino’s book of film criticism