News — At The Edge — 6/23

Tech frontier — deep learning, synthetic biology, autonomous weapons & techlash — the good, the bad and the ugly.

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Tech frontier: the good, the bad and the ugly

The Emergence of Inside Out Architectures in Deep Learning —

“Brain is a prediction engine and our perception is in the form of…its best guess of what is out there in the world…[from] prior expectations of the world and it uses this…from the inside out…[as] a ‘controlled hallucination.’

This is a very different…‘input-output’ machines…[because] Inside Out architecture, prediction comes from internal mental models (i.e. hallucinations) and…informed of any anomalies only in comparison with our own mental models…[that] override any real perception….

Consciousness is our mental models of ourselves…[and] predictive engine is to ensure…internal self models know how to stay alive….

[There’s] significant difference in architecture…[from] stimulus response to hallucinate a response….[Neocortex] evolved to specifically implement an Inside Out architecture….

[B]rains reinforce memories…in non-REM sleep and discover novel associations while in REM sleep…alternating between optimization and exploration…that trades off internal hallucination over reinforcement learning….

Inside Out design is…able to react quickly to an environment…primed when a context is identified and proceeds to hallucinate the subsequent sequential behavior…[Divergence] rapidly recognized and a new context is instantiated to compensate….

[So] controlled hallucinations…[circumvents] sample inefficiency of reinforcement learning. Inside Out architecture, by virtue of its drive for efficient sampling, conforms to the ‘Principle of Least Action.’” https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/controlled-hallucinations-in-deep-learning-architecture-fd617150d677

Synthetic biology raises risk of new bioweapons, US report warns —

“The rapid rise of synthetic biology…raises the risk of a new generation of bioweapons…[able] to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes…[to] churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body….

[A] review used only unclassified information…[and] fairly simple procedures…to tweak the genes of dangerous bacteria and make them resistant to antibiotics, so that people infected with them would be untreatable. A more exotic bioweapon…[is] a genetically-altered microbe that colonizes the gut and churns out poisons….

The report calls on the US government to rethink…disease surveillance…[to] better detect novel bioweapons, and…bolster defenses….

[Bioweapon] not considered an immediate threat is a…gene drive that spreads through a population, rewriting human DNA as it goes…[as] far more difficult to do [currently].” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/19/urgent-need-to-prepare-for-manmade-virus-attacks-says-us-government-report

LETHAL AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS —

“[AI] is poised to play an increasing role in military systems…[and need] to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable uses….

[Can] not allow machines to make life-taking decisions for which others — or nobody — will be culpable…[and] be dangerously destabilizing for every country…[as] instruments of violence and oppression, especially when linked to surveillance and data systems….

[Moreover] unilateral actions of a single group could too easily spark an arms race that the…[world] lacks the technical tools and global governance systems to manage.

Stigmatizing and preventing such an arms race should be a high priority for national and global security.” https://futureoflife.org/2018/04/30/lethal-autonomous-weapons-an-update-from-the-united-nations/

Our Twilight Zone & What Comes Next *_“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.”_medium.com

The techlash —

“[Most] hate hubris and hypocrisy more than [evil]…[so] beginnings of a bipartisan cultural backlash against the tech industry…[despite] most trusted entity in America….

The finance industry has become… a vampire squid wrapped around the our collective economic throat, siphoning off a quarter of our lifeblood…[with] very little benefit to the rest of us….

[Tech] treatment of factory and warehouse workers is at best questionable and at worst egregiously wrong….[The] talk about ‘making the world a better place’…seem to only be making it a better place for [themselves]….

[But] ‘with great power comes great responsibility’….[Why] work on really cool long-term goals like electric cars and space exploration, and not the messy short-term stuff like inequality, housing, and the ongoing brutal oppression….

[Tech] cannot delegate these complex problems off to the government and say, ‘We’re not all part of it’….[Must] find a way for technology to help with the overarching problem of incompetent and/or malevolent governments.” https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/17/the-techlash/

Civilization’s Anti-Human, Not Machines_April 2000, as millennium celebrations passed into history, Silicon Valley luminary, Bill Joy, wrote a provocative…_medium.com

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May you live long and prosper!Doc Huston