Unit ⑧ Letter #20242
We decided to open up to our wider network and share a selection of our resources with our colleagues and followers. 🦾
Dear Unit ⑧ friends,
We have been internally exchanging readings for a while, sharing links we find relevant for our development as a small organisation, looking for meaningful directions to head to, and keen to keep abreast in the realm of technology from a technical, political, ethical and artistic point of view. Here are some links to the articles we paid attention to these past weeks, covering topics from legal regulations of Blockchain and AI to the nature of consciousness and what it entails. We hope you enjoy them!
More about Alignment
Samuel Hammond’s new Substack entry develops some ideas around the notions of reason and autonomy in the advent of transformative AI. He goes through the theories of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, to Napoleon and Elon Musk, and others, to debate our capacity for reason and self-consciousness, as well as the one of AGI. He refers to it as “The Enlightenment,” a case study in AI misalignment. In his mind, a self-conscious future is possible, and he sees the Effective Accelerationists as “logical” successors to both historical materialism and the critical theories that followed. “As historical materialists, e/acc replaces class struggle with a kind of thermodynamic functionalism,” he claims. There is a possible path to build AGI with valid reason and autonomy, but this might require “training a neural network in our image, i.e. in a multi-agent RL environment with a System 2-like capacity for social learning and self-monitoring.” This would mean that agency and criticality, if adopted by AIs, might be followed by a search for autonomy and the take over that so many people fear. All in all, Hammonds expands on this complex and exciting subject, and the potential of technology to reach cognition and consciousness.
Farcaster Frames
In his Substack Not Boring, Packy McCormick discloses a new feature of the Farcaster protocol: Frames. Farcaster is a decentralised social network founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. There can be various clients for this protocol, but Farcaster created their own application called Warpcast. Warpcast looks like X – formerly Twitter – but the underlying technology is decentralised. In this light, some days ago, Farcaster released Frames, which are interactive applications embedded in casts. In McCormick’s words, Frames might be “the most compelling example of why blockchain networks might ultimately disrupt corporate networks.” There has been increasing excitement around Frames, with peripheral applications popping up, such as Bountycaster, a portal to search possible rewarded activities in the ecosystem. In their respective podcasts, Crypto Finance Bankless and Laura Shin from Unchain interview Farcaster’s Co-founder Dan Romero to disclose the juicy insights of his project. A lot is happening, and a lot is being reported, and probably there is a lot more to come.
Other Internet’s Three Body Problem
The decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies allows them to exist independently from any state authority validation. This nature makes the technology resistant to censorship and law with its pros and cons, and hence the obsession of sovereign organisms with finding ways to regulate blockchains. In their article, the research group Other Internet explains why the attempts to create decentralised incorruptible institutions have failed. On top of the usual market and code strategies developers carry, Other Internet pays attention to the lay and social fabric crucial to making these institutions function in the long run. Because Blockchains resist the state’s law and institute a regulatory regime, an interaction between the software architecture, markets, and norms is necessary.
Deep Dive on Aleph Alpha
For their last Substack entry, Michael Spencer and Tobias Marl Jensen (The Futuristic Lawyer) talk about — in their words — “the most important foundational LLM startup,” which is not based in the US but in Germany. Following the Eurozone identity standards, it is trustworthy in terms of privacy, ethics and accountability. Although it is still behind the generously funded OpenAI, Anthropic or Inflection, after securing $500 million in Series B funding in November of last year, it joined the AI race. It became a serious competitor to its American counterparts. Its main feature is the family of multimodal language models called Luminous, which processes both text and images. These models got the algorithm AtMan integrated and could explain where its outputs came from to some extent.
China Events 2023
Jeffrey Ding translates the main writings of China’s AI thinkers every week. In his Substack entry, ChinAI #252: The Top 10 Events of Internet Governance in China from 2023, he summarises his favourite round-up of 2023, in which Caijing Elaw lists the ten critical events in China’s internet governance chronologically.
New Book
Andreessen Horowitz’s partner, Chris Dixon, has recently published Read Write Own, a book about how blockchain technologies will finally revolutionise the internet as we know it. The industry is reaching its growth phase after a long incubation phase, and the book expands on the third phase of the internet era. In the “owning” era, almost everything can be potentially owned, due to Blockchain’s nature. Of course, a16z (Andreessen & Horowitz) has released a manifesto and a podcast according to the book’s main ideas, such as protocols, global states, digital identities and proprietary network lockdown. In the words of Blockworks’ Byron Gillian: “[it] feels like the world’s longest blog post, and I mean that as high praise — it's packed with knowledge and the learnings are delivered with efficiency.” The amount of interviews and reviews after just a couple of days is high and the book had some resonance. Stanford Blockchain has released a review, and Dixon held conversations with Laura Shin from Unchained and Balaji from The Networked State, amongst others.