On “Nine to Noon” host Kathryn Ryan and Mark discuss Anthropic’s latest ‘Mythos’ AI model, considered so dangerous to cybersecurity the company has set up a cross-company partnership to work on patching all of the hacks it found. Will other companies be as responsible if similar, powerful models of AI are created? Ronan Farrow’s New Yorkerpiece on Sam Altman paints him in a diabolical light. And the new White House app has some really concerning security features…
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.
A clever bit of AI software transforms my voice into a silky-smooth ‘Lisa’ – almost an archetypal radio host. In the near future we’ll be able to make ourselves sound – and look – like anyone else. How will we know if we’re being fooled?
Big thanks to Twitter user @nearcyan – who offered me a demo of https://koe.ai – have a play with it yourself!
Printing presses are hardware. Newspapers – they’re hardware too.
So what happens when something vaporises? Here’s Rob:
We’re living in a time of vaporised media – and we got here suddenly, with no preparation, or any clear plan on how to make this work for us.
How do we stay well informed as news organisations find their dollars taken instead by search engine giants Google and Facebook?
Rob talks about “the Gerasimov Doctrine” – using the collapse in the media to wage a sort of covert war against a government – and here’s an article Rob recommends in this episode, exploring that whole topic.
Also highly recommended is the Peter Pomerantsev book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about how this has become the new reality for Putin’s Russia. Read more in this article from The Guardian.
In our world, you flip a coin and it comes up either heads or tails. But in the spooky quantum world – that’s everything from a single atom all the way up to a small virus – that coin can come up both heads _and_ tails, depending on how you read it. So which is it? Heads? Tails? Both? Neither?
One of the experimental setups used to read qbits
Welcome to the strange world of quantum computing where this both-true-and-false ‘superposition’ allows quantum computers to vastly outperform their ‘classical’ peers (such as the one in your smartphone).
A string of ‘entangled’ qbits
At least, that’s the theory.
Quantum computers are so unstable they tend to self-destruct before we can get them to run a program!
Researchers Claire Edmunds and Virginia Frey from the University of Sydney’s Quantum Control Laboratory join us to explore this new quantum frontier: The deeper you go, the weirder it gets over the next billion seconds.
IBM Institute for Business Value Report on Quantum Cybersecurity – what happens after quantum computing breaks all the encryption we use on the Web to keep our information secure and private?
And since you’re going to need a quantum computer to run this program, here’s the IBM Q Quantum Experience (5 qubit device available publicly on the cloud) – a REAL quantum computer you can run your own experiments on!
It’s growing increasingly difficult to know where the truth lies. We’ve gotten very good at our electronic fakery – from photoshop to ‘deepfakes’ to synthetic audio of Obama so accurate it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
All of this feeds into a growing online community which instantly separates into tribes, then tunes out any competing with a cry of “fake news!”
Series Two of The Next Billion Seconds takes a look at the intersection of technology, truth and our future, beginning with frequent guest John Allsopp, revealed in the ways he teaches his children the spirit of inquiry, to help them discover where the truth lies.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
Here’s a few links to topics covered in our conversation:
