Singularity shots is a roundup of beautifully curated notes about science, technology, and all the mesmerizing things indistinguishable from magic. Delivered as 2-minute shots, every 2 days, because we know you are busy. Read on and subscribe as we dissect the world, unfold ancient code and walk you towards wisdom.
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Stories:
Combining Science and Bible to create a digital afterlife. A fiction that makes you think.
Can humans create a digital afterlife to escape our mortality? Well, we all know, thanks to the matrix films, that brain is a chemo-electronic device (a staggering underestimation !), and all life is an assortment of electrical signals interpreted by the brain. So with technological process, given that enough time, we may be able to detect, scrutinize, classify and replicate entire life as it is. This is the subject of research of many silicon valley firms as well and this definitely is the keel upon which Neal Stephenson's new book, "Fall" is all about. In his book, a brain dead multi-billionaire named Richard "Dodge" Forthrast's close of kin is attempting to create a digital afterlife for preserving his life.
They are joined together by a tech billionaire who maps Dodge's brain and turns it on in the cloud, much like what happened to Johny Depp in the movie Transcendence. But once inside, he is joined by thousands of other dead souls entering the system, becoming an afterlife AI landscape called the "BitWorld". After this point, most of the book deals with this "BitWorld" instead of the "meatworld". In the book, the creation myth of Bible is converted into tech-fueled immortality; a digital continuity of the physical life; exploring the themes of human nature, gods and followers, in a quest that unfolds across a medieval-feeling fantasy world.
I also have written a not-so-boring blog about this, titled "God, Artificial Intelligence and Afterlife" here.
Happening now:
The Ghosts of A.I.
Quite recently, the Guardian published an article about A.I behind Google assistant. As it turns out, the real "magic" behind its ability to interpret 26 languages is a huge team of people - terribly underpaid linguists, being used to label the training data - to "teach" the system. They are often made to work overtime and are underpaid.
This raises a serious question. The "thing" that we call Artificial Intelligence" per se, is not truly what you think it is.
Drum roll...
All we have now, in terms of intelligence is a feeble effort to dilute the human brain into a series of mathematical models, with, let's say, 1 percent precision. This is soft AI we are talking about. Hard AI - the real deal, is still on R/D and it's ETA is still unknown. I will write about that later, but when you hear about people going "Skynet" lengths for clickbait blogs and podcasts, just keep in mind that it is not happening soon. Just like I said, I will write about it later.
Working behind Facebook's content-moderating AI are thousands of human moderators, Amazon Alexa is standing on the shoulders of a global team of transcribers, and Google Duplex calls are sometimes human calls mimicking the AI that mimics humans. These underpaid human resources and working overtime, creating a system that automates their jobs and makes their skills obsolete.
These global forces - powerhouses of AI in silicon valley and around the world are creating a global ghost underclass of unpaid workers, exploiting the labor of less privileged communities. Once the system acquires enough labeled data from them, they will be instantly written off- being forced back into a world where the systems they helped automate have taken their jobs. The AI powerhouses are thus essentially creating a "ghost" class of society, forced to work in what I would like to call the "Foxconn of AI".
Did you know?
Once, a video game helped epidemiologists create a mathematical model for infectious disease outbreak.
The incident, dubbed as Corrupted blood incident, happened inside the "World of Warcraft" game world, a Massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG). For the uninitiated, it is like PUBG, but on a world scale, with 2 million players. On September 13, 2005, The developers, Blizzard, introduced a new attack called "Corrupted Blood", which was used by a villain to attack the players. This infection could also spread from player to player. Although the infection was programmed not to spread much, a few programming errors and mistakes lead to the infection from being spread to pets. It then spread to Non-player characters (NPC) turning them into asymptomatic disease carriers, who showed no symptoms but passed the disease to others.
During the disruption, player responses mimicked real-world behaviors. Characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some characters fled from infected zones, some characters attempted to spread the disease to others. Blizzard company tried to institute a voluntary quarantine system, but it didn't work.
Major cities and towns were abandoned and were filled with corpses, with city streets literally white with bones of the dead.
Blizzard was forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying quick fixes.
The plague ended on October 8, 2005, when Blizzard made pets unable to be affected by Corrupted Blood.
The people who spread the disease out of malice were described by Security Focus editor Robert Lemos as terrorists of World of Warcraft.
In March 2007, Ran D. Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, published an article in the journal Epidemiology that described the similarities between this outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr. Balicer suggested that role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases. The one thing that blocks us from creating a mathematical model of the infection is social behavior, which is a chaotic system stemming from collective social psychology. Inside the game, people reacted how they would in the real world.
With Love,
Ashif Shereef.