Ponderings
Material intelligence
Quite probably, you are surrounded by many things of which you know next to nothing - among them, the device on which you are reading these words. Most of us live in a state of general ignorance about our physical surroundings. It's not our fault; centuries of technological sophistication and global commerce have distanced most of us from making physical things, and even from seeing or knowing how they are made. But the slow and pervasive separation of people from knowledge of the material world brings with it a serious problem.
Aeon Magazine, 28 November 2018
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
... a large computing machine, whether in the form of mechanical or electric apparatus or in the form of the brain itself, uses up a considerable amount of power, all of which is wasted and dissipated in heat. The blood leaving the brain is a fraction of a degree warmer than that entering it. No other computing machine approaches the economy of energy of the brain. In a large apparatus like the Eniac or Edvac, the filaments of the tubes consume a quantity of energy which may well be measured in kilowatts, and unless adequate ventilating and cooling apparatus is provided, the system will suffer from what is the mechanical equivalent of pyrexia, until the constants of the machine are radically changed by the heat, and its performance breaks down. Nevertheless, the energy spent per individual operation is almost vanishingly small, and does not even begin to form an adequate measure of the performance of the apparatus. The mechanical brain does not secrete thought “as the liver does bile,” as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.
read Chapter 5, pp. 159-182
Economist
Schools brief | Artificial intelligence: How AI models are getting smarter
Just as deep neural networks, transformers and diffusion models all made the leap from research curiosities to widespread deployment, features and principles from these other models will be seized upon and incorporated into future AI models. Transformers are highly efficient, but it is not clear that scaling them up can solve their tendencies to hallucinate and to make logical errors when reasoning. The search is already under way for “post-transformer” architectures, from “state-space models” to “neuro-symbolic” AI, that can overcome such weaknesses and enable the next leap forward. Ideally such an architecture would combine attention with greater prowess at reasoning. Right now no human yet knows how to build that kind of model. Maybe someday an AI model will do the job.
Something else
Toumani Diabaté & Sidiki Diabaté - Jarabi
Toumani Diabaté (born in Gallé, Mali, on 10 August 1965; died 19 July 2024) was a Malian kora player remembered for performing the traditional music of Mali and for being involved in cross-cultural collaborations with flamenco, blues, jazz, and other international styles.
Diabaté was considered by many to be the world's finest kora player. He was a versatile performer, being equally at home with the traditional music of Mali as well as with cross-cultural collaborations with flamenco, blues, jazz, and other international styles. He came from a long family tradition of kora players including his father, Sidiki Diabaté, who recorded the first ever kora album in 1970. (Last.fm)