Retrospective 2024-31

This is a retrospective of week 31, 2024 (2024-07-29–2024-08-04).

This week I’ve been reading two books:

• How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball, and
• The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger.

I’ve also read the following articles about generative AI:

• AlphaZero: Shedding new light on chess, shogi, and Go by David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, and Demis Hassabis. They write that “systems capable of mastering specific skills” often fail when presented with “slightly modified tasks”.
• Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you: It’s easy to generate code, but not so easy to generate good code by Charity Majors. She writes, “you can generate a lot of code, really fast, but you can’t trust what comes out”. Management has a grossly simplified perspective.
• Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit? by Allison Nathan, Jenny Grimberg, and Ashley Rodes at Goldman Sachs Research. They write, “the technology isn’t designed to solve the complex problems that would justify the costs”.
• AlphaProof, AlphaGeometry, ChatGPT, and why the future of AI is neurosymbolic What comes after chatbots? by Gary Marcus. He writes, “[t]he biggest intrinsic failings of generative AI have to do with reliability, in a way that I believe can never be solved, given their inherent nature”.
• This one important fact about current AI explains almost everything: An entire industry has been built – and will collapse – because many people haven’t yet gotten it by Gary Marcus. He writes that “current approaches to machine learning (which underlies most of the AI people talk about today) are lousy at outliers, which is to say that when they encounter unusual circumstances […] they often say and do things that are absurd”. AI will fail on its most unrealistic promises.

I found the following quote of Iain McGilchrist in a mail 2024-08-02 from Eric Schaetzle to the McGilchrist Irregulars:

I don’t think practices in themselves will ever achieve what needs to happen, because they can still go on without the mind and heart of the person having fundamentally shifted.
–Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/XzT4tcC-aag?t=2286

I agree. I think the same can be said about ‘traditions’ (which McGilchrist mentions a little bit later). Traditions, as well as practices, can become literalistic, empty, and meaningless.

I’d like to add yet another observation. I was hospitalized a few years ago and went through the same medical procedure (ritual) several times. I became acutely aware of how painful (or at least, extremely uncomfortable) the procedure could be when some people did it.

I’ve come to believe that the ‘attitude’ with which you do something is very important. Practices, processes, and procedures will never achieve what needs to happen all by themselves.