Unit ⑧ Letter #20247
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 organization, looking for meaningful directions to head to, and keen to keep up-to-date 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!
Bitcoin Special by Outland
For their special issue on Bitcoin, Outland Magazine published a series of articles encompassing the uses and entails of the original blockchain in regards to contemporary art. We picked three articles out of them.
Alexander Iadarola observes the blockchain's capacity for digital signatures and embedded messages when adapted to artistic expressions. Iadarola's commentary explores the historical and conceptual development of blockchain art, from Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin to NFTs. It also examines the intersection of finance, technology, and art through the early adaptations of Bitcoin's blockchain for innovative uses, which challenges traditional notions of value and art ownership.
Samuel Reilly discusses market transformation due to blockchain, a technology that provides transparency, security, and standardization in art transactions and data management. Among other use cases, Reilly mentions a new venture backed by MCH Group and Luma Foundation that uses smart contracts for authentication, provenance verification, and enforcing artist and gallery royalties. Although using blockchain in this context offers some benefits, its effectiveness has yet to be proven and the challenges are certain.
Kevin Buist observes Bitcoin's capacity to act as a precise timekeeper, offering both opportunities and challenges for artists integrating this technology into their work. Bitcoin’s role as a chronological delineator and its intersection with the art world expose both philosophical and practical implications, which can significantly impact the creation and preservation of art.
Creativity and AI
In his Substack post, Jurgen Gravenstein explores generative AI's impact on writing and consulting in the realm of creativity. AI tools can enhance creativity, especially for uninspired people, and it can help improve novelty and eloquence in writing. On the other hand, AI might also lead to a homogenization of ideas, while diminishing the value of human expertise.
On his end, Alejandro Piad Morffis recounts a conversation about language models (LLMs) and creativity, focusing on the significance of sampling certain parameters, like temperature and top-p, in controlling the output variability of these models. Piad Morffis focuses on machine creativity, its philosophical aspects, and how their efficiency might depend on environmental factors.
Productivity and AI
Gary Marcus examines a study by the Upwork Research Institute, as reported by Baldur Bjarnason, highlighting negative perceptions and experiences of workers using AI tools like ChatGPT in office settings. AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, seem to be failing to meet expectations in terms of productivity. They still generate numerous errors and exhibit bias, which increases the workload and is negatively perceived by workers.
Tobias Mark Jensen (a.k.a. The Futuristic Lawyer), believes that generative AI like ChatGPT notably impacts knowledge work and productivity, enhancing performance on simple tasks. However, the results are disappointing when tasks become more complex, which he refers to as a "jagged technological frontier."
CrowdStrike's wakeup call
Some weeks ago, there was a fallout from a significant software deployment error by CrowdStrike, which caused unprecedented IT outages. For Runtime, Tom Krazit discusses the implications regarding enterprise security standards and vendor’s accountability. Krazit urges the need for greater transparency and accountability from vendors regarding enterprise security software, especially when testing and deploying critical updates, like kernel-level configurations.
Gary Marcus emphasizes the need for reliability in the software by improving its engineering before advancing towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In the article, he cites current vulnerabilities in various sectors due to software failures to argue that the world is still unprepared for AGI.
Zvi Mowshowitz thinks that the CrowdStrike outage, triggered by a simple programming error, exposed significant system software vulnerabilities, confirming Marcus’ and Krazit’s points that these cybersecurity challenges need to be addressed.
Claude 3.5. Sonnet
In AI #70: A Beautiful Sonnet, Zvi Mowshowitz lists advancements and debates surrounding the latest language model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It covers various applications of AI, from meme generation to cybersecurity, and touches on regulatory and ethical considerations. In On Claude 3.5 Sonnet, he highlights the model’s advancements over previous ones and its potential impact on language model development and applications. The model’s capabilities position it as a leading choice over other models such as Claude 3 Opus and Gemini 1.5 Flash.
Michael Spencer considers Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet a major advance in frontier models.
Podcast
Silicon Valley Leaders Cast Their Lot with Donald Trump
For the Tech Policy Press podcast, Justin Hendrix invited three sharp observers of politics and technology: Professor of International Affairs and Democracy Henry Farrell, writer and digital strategist Elizabeth Spiers (a contributing writer for the New York Times and co-host of the Slate Money podcast), and Associate Professor at George Washington University Dave Karpf. In discussion, they reflect on the possible motivations of multiple Silicon Valley billionaires to endorse and support former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance.
Videos
Going Deep on AI and Copyright Law
Tobias Mark Jensen talks with Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex Andres Guadamuz, (aka TechoLlama), about the intersection of AI and copyright law. Andres is the author behind the long-running and widely read law-tech blog TechoLlama.
Art
Simon Denny, in conversation with a16zcrypto
Throughout this interview, the artist Simon Denny discusses how technology has influenced art and how artists have adapted to and innovated, by adopting new forms of technological expression, from the early days of web browsers to the emergence of NFTs and blockchain art. The talk moves on to notions of originality versus remixing, commercialism versus artistry, and the impact of technology on artistic expression and culture.