1,400%. A Soviet Cyberpunk Story

If you are in software development and worry that AI will take your job, you are in the wrong profession and never understood your purpose.

The first article I wrote about applying AI to organisations dates to 2017 - nearly 10 years ago. When I was asked to speak on the topic back then, it still landed as science fiction. The room was polite and curious, and quietly sceptical. The practitioners were a small group, and most of us had come to it sideways -developers, physicists, and philosophers. Nearly a decade later, here's what changed and what didn't. What changed: → The same year I wrote that article, a Google paper introduced the Transformer. Almost nobody outside research noticed. It became the foundation of nearly everything we now call AI. → In 2017, "doing AI" meant a narrow model, a labelled dataset, a data science team and months of work. Today a general-purpose model can draft, code, analyse documents and carry out multi-step tasks from a plain-language instruction. → The main question has moved from "can it?" to "should it, and who is accountable?" An international management-system standard for AI (ISO/IEC 42001) now exists. In 2017, that would have sounded as futuristic as the technology itself. What didn't change: → Bad data still produces confident nonsense, just more fluently. → Problem framing still decides most of the value. → Adoption is still a people and process problem more than a technology problem. → The organisations winning are still the ones that treat AI as a capability to govern, not a tool to buy. The science-fiction part is over. The hard part (trust, accountability, redesigning work) is just beginning.

We talk a lot about memory in LLMs, but memory is a broader capability than we tend to assume. Slime moulds can learn to ignore repeated harmless stimuli without a brain or a single neuron. Experiments with planarian flatworms suggest that traces of learning can survive decapitation and the growth of a new head. Tobacco hornworm moths can retain an aversion learned as caterpillars through metamorphosis. Mind you, their while body breaks down and rebuilds. These findings deserve attention. They challenge our assumptions about what is necessary to preserve experience. “Memory without any structure” would overstate the evidence, though. Slime moulds have complex cellular machinery. Flatworms have nervous systems. Metamorphosis preserves parts of the nervous system while reorganising others. My view: we should approach memory as a physical capacity with multiple implementations. Starting with the human brain and treating everything else as an exception may be the wrong way round.

These were naive, beautiful days full of hope.

Own or be owned - how the narrative is changing.

1,400%. A Soviet Cyberpunk Story

I asked Claude to read the Odyssey in dactylic hexameter. Not bad, but there is room to improve.

Claude made this rendition of the Homeric Hymn 28 to Athena. I requested 7-string phorminx, male voice, reconstructed pronunciation, respecting the hexametr, and few minor decisions. All in <2h as I was getting provisions for the upcoming Nor'easter. I had very low hopes but...

One of the methods I use when studying languages isn't mentioned anywhere, and I am flabbergasted. I think. I spend time thinking in that language, forming sentences and then checking if they are correct. It creates miracles.

This is one of the stupidest things I have ever read here. You don't need to say something just for the sake of saying something,

I use tools like Grammarly to check my grammar and punctiation. Any text it touches is deemed AI-created, no matter how small the changes are. Pathetic.

The hard pill to swallow is that not our politicians but tech oligarchs base their convictions and views on philosophical beliefs. They talk about Hegel and Gramsci, etc., and occasionally quote Greek myths. Unless the quality of thought shifts to the former group, expect the oligarchs to march on without restraint.

Hire those people. Be one of those people.

The set will probably cost ~ 0.8-1 million US$

Used ChatGPT to scan my X account and remove the bots. Removed 600 of them and counting,

My new piece is out: A Soviet Cyberpunk Story!