You are here:HomeTag: future
Tagged As:

future

Author mpescePosted on

ALWAYS IMPERFECT – Episode 2 – VIBE SLOGGING

Can a computer program a computer as well as a human being can? Artificial intelligence enabled a quantum leap in the quality of the tools programmer use to write code – but they’re delicate. Push them too hard and they break. Even when they work they can write reams of code that no human can make heads or tails of. John Allsopp joins us to investigate whether programmers will soon become obsolete – or whether they’ll kept around to clean up AI-generated messes. Is AI making the discipline of software engineering any better – or is that just a story we’re telling ourselves?

An attorney in California just got whacked with a USD $10,000 fine for submitting a briefing with hallucinations to a court.

Simon Willison’s most excellent blog is here.

Author mpescePosted on

ALWAYS IMPERFECT – Episode 1 – NO MAGIC WANDS

Artificial intelligence may be amazing but it’s always imperfect. Anyone trying to use AI professionally lands on the horns of a dilemma: will a productivity increase gained through automation represent any savings, after factoring in the extra supervision needed to use these amazing (but unreliable) new tools? In our first episode we chat with Drew Smith, co-founder of Wisely AI, a firm dedicated to helping businesses use AI safely and wisely. (I was the other co-founder!) What did we learn from clients trying to put AI to work – but only rarely finding the tools on offer fit for purpose?

Read the MIT report mentioned by Mark here.

Read The Register article mentioned by Drew here.

Author mpescePosted on

Two Futurists Go ‘Vibe Forecasting’

Whenever fellow futurist and longtime friend Rob Tercek and I get together, we go crazy deep on the future: What happens when lazy humans outsource their thought process to machines? You get a society that vibes its way into a blurry, sub-optimal future. The surge of slop means that AI is creating more work for humans instead of stealing our jobs. I join Rob on his podcast The Futurists to cut through the hype and the skepticism about modern tech, calling out AI mediocrity and reminding us why human learning remains painful. Topics include: ChatGPT psychosis, why we need a generation of PhDs to revisit eternal questions about Truth, the perpetual dawn of AGI, what happens to the political economy when the populace is siloed into bubbles, why Kremlin propagandists produce propaganda for machines instead of people, why experience cannot be generated, why autocracies need accurate data, and the real reason why people get lost in untruth. Just some light listening for you.

Big thanks and more at The Futurists podcast – https://thefuturists.com

Author mpescePosted on

Addiction is the business model

Mark joins RNZ Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan to delve into the sudden phenomenon of ‘viral’ AI videos – getting better at capturing your eyeballs. Did you see those cute bunnies bouncing on a trampoline? Never happened – but made you look. The fusion of TikTok and AI video looks to be potent – and addictive. Next up, shocking and sad story of Adam Raine, a 16 year old who confided his suicidal thoughts to ChatGPT. ChatGPT aided him in his eventual suicide – so Raine’s parents are suing OpenAI, and just after that lawsuit made news, OpenAI announced long-overdue parental controls on ChatGPT. Finally, we delve into… wait, why am I writing ‘delve’ so much? It’s because ChatGPT’s peculiar word choices – “delve”, “intricate” and so on – have invaded our speech!

Author mpescePosted on

Should we give up copyright to beat China in the race for AI?

In conversation with Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon host Kathryn Ryan: Christie’s held its first auction of AI-generated art, earning a million dollars. Those AI artworks had been ‘trained’ from countless images, owned by other people. Is that legal? OpenAI and Google claim that unless they have free right to use – well, basically everything everywhere ever created by humanity – to train their AI models, the Chinese will win the AI race. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s A-listers called for protection of artists and their works against what they see as copyright theft. Plus: A Clockwork Orange comes to life for prisoners in solitary confinement – and is your chatbot flattering you?

Author mpescePosted on No comment The Next Billion Cars – “Gradually. Then Suddenly”

The Next Billion Cars – “Gradually. Then Suddenly”

“How did you go bankrupt?” begins the oft-quoted line from Hemingway. “Two ways. Gradually – then suddenly.” That’s how the automotive sector feels at the end of 2024, with Nissan maybe preparing for bankruptcy and Stellantis firing its CEO and VW struggling with strikes and low sales and GM shuttering Cruise and on and on and on. Sally Dominguez and Drew Smith join Mark Pesce in studio to explore what’s really happening – and what it all means for THE NEXT BILLION CARS.

We mentioned a few things during our conversation – here are the links:

1) Want to design the car of the Future? Here are 8,000 designs to get you started. (MIT Technology Review)

2) Chinese Carmakers Are Taking Mexico by Storm While Eyeing U.S. (New York Times)

3) And you really should watch Margin Call, a spellbinding drama about the 2008 financial crisis (Wikipedia).

Author mpescePosted on

Series 2024 – Episode 7: “The War over Plant-Based foods with Nick Hazell”

In 2018, Nick Hazell founded v2food – an amazing startup making plant-based substitutes for meat that got extensive coverage on THE NEXT BILLION SECONDS. Six years later, it’s getting difficult to find their product on supermarket shelves – and there’s been a broader roll-back from plant-based alternatives. What’s happened? Nick Hazel doesn’t have all the answers – but he asks some of the right questions…

Author mpescePosted on

Series 2024 – Episode 6: A climate ‘Moonshot’ with Nick Hazell’s Algenie

The impacts of global heating have become persistent and profound, so we need to do as much as we can to lesson those impacts, as quickly as we can. The best paths forward lean into existing, natural processes – and this is exactly where Nick Hazell has arrived with Algenie. Can algae restore balance to our ecosystem? Is it the moonshot we need to transform our future?

Author mpescePosted on

The Next Billion Cars – 2024 in review (part 1)

Whenever Mark, Sal and Drew get together, sparks will fly. So much has happened since our visit to CES 2024, we reckoned it time to draw all the year’s threads together: Are we pulling back from EVs? Will China dominate manufacturing? And what about all that data vehicles are collecting? It’s been full on – enough to require a bit of a ‘group hug’. Part one of two.

Author mpescePosted on

The Next Billion Cars: Neo-Malaise

What does it mean to walk away from the dream of a lifetime? For series co-host Drew Smith, this is exactly what he’s doing. For over 20 years, he’d dedicated himself to driving positive change in an industry that has resisted it at almost every turn, and he’s done. In this episode of The Next Billion Cars, he explores how the automotive industry has become its own worst enemy, and what might happen next.

Author mpescePosted on

The Next Billion Cars – LIVE at SxSW Sydney with ZEEKR’s Gustaf Gunér: How does a new brand survive?

ZEEKR launched their EV brand in Australia at SxSW Sydney. Drew Smith – who worked for predecessor of ZEEKR – scored The Next Billion Cars a live interview with head of brand Gustaf Gunér. What does it mean to launch a new car brand? And how does a brand establish itself within a market for EVs where everything is… very much the same? A deep conversation about design, brand, and the future of the car industry.

Mark Pesce and Drew Smith interview ZEEKR’s Head of Bran Gustaf Gunér
Author mpescePosted on

Series 2024 – Halloween Special: Ghosts in the Machine

Google’s new NotebookLM digests documents to create AI summaries, and provides an incredible new way to search a vast set of information. One little throwaway feature became a viral hit – “Audio Overview”, which creates a ‘podcast’ featuring two clever, chipper – and entirely synthetic – personas, engaging in a ‘deep dive’ on the content within NotebookLM. In the spirit of Halloween, we uploaded the scripts for the first four episodes of Series 2024 – and NotebookLM rose to the occasion. Is this the future of podcasting? And — HAVE I JUST BEEN PUT OUT OF A JOB?

Load More