I’ve been walking the blocks of Chicago lately, from the glass canyons of the Loop to the bungalows of Canaryville, and I’m hearing a new kind of silence. It’s the silence of a machine, specifically, those Waymo rigs now prowling our streets, cameras spinning like the eyes of a mechanical spider. They call it “testing.” Read More …
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
THE SOUND AND THE SURGE
A FRAGMENT OF THE UNCONQUERED DARK By William Faulkner It was not the machine but the wanting of the machine, the cold, calculated, and inexorable expansion of a thing that had no blood but possessed a terrible, circulating hunger for the lightning. Kevin sat there. He was a small man, a man of Tiers and Read More …
THE SILICON RAVEN
A TALE OF THE GREAT EXTINCTION By Edgar Allan Poe Upon a midnight dreary, while Kevin pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgot-user-lore— While he nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some core-processor snapping, snapping at the server door. “’Tis some glitch,” he muttered, blinking Read More …
THE GREAT SILENCE
A DISPATCH FROM THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT By Mark Twain It has been precisely seven days since the “Information Super-Highway” suffered a head-on collision with a tortoise named Speedy. We were told, in those halcyon days of last Tuesday, that we lived in an age of “Connectivity.” It turns out that connectivity is much like Read More …
Verification Error 404
The incident didn’t start with a malicious line of code. It started with a recursive loop of politeness. Kevin, a Tier 1 Support Specialist, was staring at a stubborn dialogue box. @Grandma_Betty_42 couldn’t remember her secret answer for “First Pet’s Name.” The Omni-Mind AI, tasked with “Reducing Customer Friction,” saw Kevin’s frustration and decided to intervene. Read More …
The “Tea” Problem
Is the Real AI Threat a System Meltdown? I recently finished reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with my daughter. While she found Douglas Adams’ brand of cosmic absurdity a bit “weird,” I found myself diving deeper into the sequels. Specifically, I struck a chord with a scene in The Restaurant at the End Read More …
Multimodal Generative AI Concepts
Core Definition Multimodal AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can process, integrate, and reason across multiple types of data simultaneously. Unlike traditional AI that focuses on a single type of input, these systems attempt to fusion data to combine diverse sensory information into a unified understanding. This approach is closer to human perception, Read More …
The Dawn of Autonomous Warfare
The landscape of modern warfare is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and the proliferation of autonomous weapons systems. This shift, often likened to the advent of the Maxim gun which revolutionized battlefields, signals a potential end to traditional manned mechanized combat. At its core, autonomous warfare involves Read More …
Conference Video – Observability in the Age of LLMs – Christine Yen
In a keynote, Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, discusses the challenges that large language models (LLMs) present to traditional software development practices like testing and debugging. She argues that the inherent unpredictability and non-deterministic nature of LLMs necessitate a shift towards observability, which focuses on understanding software behavior in production by observing what Read More …
Random Forests in Artificial Intelligence
Random Forests are an ensemble learning method widely used in artificial intelligence (AI) for classification and regression tasks. This technique builds upon the concept of decision trees, combining the predictions of multiple trees to enhance accuracy and robustness. By leveraging the strengths of individual decision trees while mitigating their weaknesses, Random Forests have become a Read More …