My new short sci-fi story is now available on Amazon.
The Bite-Size Sci-Fi collection delivers short science fiction stories intended for a 30 to 45-minute read, perfect for a train or bus ride, lunch break, or short reading before bed. For longer trips, try several stories together! Fresh ideas, new characters, and unique challenges and conflicts will keep the reader captivated!
New to the short story collection, “The Upgrade” begins on a UFO forum, when a user called Unbound states he was subjected to CAT, or “Clearly Alien Technology.” Unbound mentions it all happened when he was vacationing in New Mexico, somewhere south of Wagon Mound. He suddenly found himself in a circle of light, but it was as if the light was internal to him. Soon after the exposure, Unbound started to break things easily and lift heavy objects…
I continued to interview the AI writing Engine (GPT-2 generation). This time I asked the following question and followed the same rules I defined in my prior post:
Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?
Now, let’s see what kind of answers we received.
Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction? Or will it be merely a distraction, causing human suffering?
How do we protect our species from its most dangerous and alien enemies, the monsters it created in our dreams?
The rise of AI is a great tragedy and should be seen as an existential threat to humanity. If we believe this, then the whole argument for “cyborgs” in robots’ arms – which are intended primarily because they look robotic but act humanlike – will never go away. No matter how much people try their best not [to] get killed by cars (or other machines) using advanced technology… there’s always someone who’ll take out those stupid little brains instead! So just imagine what would happen if humans were taken care back when it comes down that all living things must have some form o machinery created from them before death actually hit.
Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction? Or will it help define human values in the future? The answers to these questions are open for debate but one thing is clear: AI and computer technology seems to be a force that promises more than just improvement of our lives. This concept would appear to apply most universally if you applied this definition to politics, science fiction stories (if there were any left) as well your own worldview. But what about things like art? And literature, etc.…
Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction? I’m not sure what people mean by that, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind for the future of AI. If they can figure out some way around our own natural tendencies – like we tend towards greater selfishness and higher levels [of] more love/hate behavior over longer periods — maybe there’ll be new ways beyond just being able [to] see things better through their eyes; another reason why a machine could eventually surpass humans as one human is because computers are smarter than any other person on earth … right?
This blog post is an experiment. This is how the post was generated:
I set the task to an AI writing Engine (GPT-2 generation) by seeding the first line in the text: “Artificial intelligence is the future of humanity, but we should be careful pursuing our goals.”
Then, I generated multiple answers (all different)
I ignored some clearly irrelevant versions
I removed some parts that were either incomplete or meaningless/irrelevant
I have compiled this article with all the answers arranged in the order I preferred
I checked its grammar using Grammarly–another grammar AI (and made no other changes)
I ran the plagiarism check (with Grammarly) but found no issues with the text.
Now, let’s see what how AI completes this text. Let me know if you think this makes sense. Below is AI-generated text only except for my comments marked ‘AK.’
Artificial intelligence is the future of humanity but we should be careful pursuing our goals. Artificial Intelligence does not mean that machines can have perfect consciousness, rather it means they cannot think and reason at all so humans must continue to strive for a more intelligent human being. “I believe artificial intelligences are on their way here in 2017… therefore this could give birth both towards technological breakthroughs like self-driving cars and deep learning which will transform business with AI into other industries including financial services.” – Richard Dawkins
Artificial intelligence is the future of humanity but we should be careful pursuing our goals. But how does AI help you? Can a self-driving car take over your job or would it just make life difficult for workers if they were driving on their own? Will these developments change who people are with regards to hiring and employment, which in turn will affect wages/costs etc.? (AK: Good questions.)
My new short sci-fi story is now available on Amazon.
The Bite-Size Sci-Fi collection delivers short science fiction stories intended for a 30 to 45-minute read, perfect for a train or bus ride, lunch break, or short reading before bed. For longer trips, try several stories together! Fresh ideas, new characters, and unique challenges and conflicts will keep the reader captivated!
New to the collection, “Unstoppable” explores how a transhuman spy of the future operates in a hostile world where everyone is trying to kill her.
She is a spy in an alien world where the criminal cartel roams the cities. Now, she wants two things—find out who the cartel leader is and leave the planet safely. Well trained and equipped with the latest generation cyber-brain, she is used to outmaneuvering her enemies. But this time, too many people are in her way, and the bounty on her head is high. Will she fulfill her mission, or has she finally met her match?
Twenty years ago, in 2001, I published my first book.
It was about computer data storage and took me over 6 months to write. My child was just one year old then but, with the full support of my wife, I used whatever available time I had to do research and write. It was an interesting experience that taught me a lot about book writing. And it was exciting to see my book in different libraries and online stores. Now, twenty years later, I am ready to publish another book. This time, however, it’s a collection of short science fiction stories about the future where AI and humans coexist, cooperate, help each other, betray each other. In other words, they do what two intelligent species normally do when they occupy the same space and time.
Twenty years ago, for my first book, I chose to use a real publisher––Prentice Hall. It was a time when the Internet was in its nascent state, Amazon.com was just starting its ascent, and ebooks were nothing but a promising concept. This time around, I am choosing Amazon.com as a place where you can buy the book.
I called my bookI, AI, which is an homage to the famous book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Below is the cover of the book, which was created by Ravven, a skillful and creative American artist living in the U.K.
The book is now available on Amazon at $0.99. I will keep it at this price for just a few days.
I hope you like it!
Ah, one more point: to keep my professional life and my other interests apart, I am using a pen name for my writing. So, don’t be too surprised.
It’s been a pleasure to speak twice at the Conference on World Affairs last week. Check out my second panel below. This time, we discuss “Fixing Spaceship Earth: Forecasting Our Future with Big Data and Tech.”
My wife is an expert wine-buyer and every good wine bottle she brings home has a little story attached to it. Even though, occasionally, I (secretly) don’t enjoy the taste of some of those wines, I know they are all considered to be of “high quality” and “very popular”. Some of them simply just don’t match my taste.
However, there have been plenty of wines I’ve tried in the past that were just plain bad. This made me think about the wine manufacturers – why do they even sell a particular (bad) wine? Can’t they just predict a customer’s response by tasting their own wine or by measuring objectively a few things about a wine’s chemistry and physics?
Wine-making is a big industry and there are already quite a few studies done and papers published in this field trying to answer this question. In fact, after a quick search online, I found a few data science studies trying to address it, and many of them were referring to the following paper:
P. Cortez, A. Cerdeira, F. Almeida, T. Matos and J. Reis. Modeling wine preferences by data mining from physicochemical properties. In Decision Support Systems, Elsevier, 47(4):547-553, 2009.
This particular publication came with a couple of datasets available for everyone to play around with, so I decided to use them for my next project. As an advisor to BigML, which is a leading analytics company, I wanted to analyze this wine quality data using their online platform and see 1) can I answer my question about predicting wine quality from some objective measurements and 2) how quickly could this be accomplished using the BigML online solution?
First, I downloaded the wine composition and quality assessment data from here: there are two datasets available with 1599 entries for red wine and 4898 entries for white. Even if I prefer red wine, I decided to go with the larger dataset for my study.
The dataset included 11 wine features such as residual sugar, density, pH, alcohol and few others (check the dataset if interested) and one numerical value for quality of each wine, which was expressed as a number between 0 (very bad) and 10 (excellent).
I felt that the regression analysis (having a numerical output in mind) will be too noisy and inaccurate, I decided to simply split the dataset into two classes: bad wine (0-6) and good wine (7-10).
I used ExcelⓇ to do these initial data manipulations and then imported the dataset into the BigML online portal (a simple drag and drop). Notice in the picture below how convenient it is to see all the distributions for each data column and their descriptive statistics.
The first post on this subject was focused on Cray supercomputers, which place beautiful images on the front to add an artistic touch to their technically-impressive machines.
In this (second) post, I will mostly address the “beauty through design” approach taken by Cray and a few other supercomputer makers.
Let’s start with the Thinking Machines Corporation. Founded in 1983, it has delivered some of the most advanced (for its time) and good-looking computers ever. A brief promotional video for its first models is available on YouTube.
Thinking Machines’ CM-5 Supercomputer, also known as FROSTBURG , was installed at the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1991 for code-breaking tasks, and was operational until 1997:
No decorations, no frills. However, this supercomputer still remains one of the most futuristic-looking supercomputers ever. Its flashing and constantly changing red light panels showed processing node usage, and were also used for its diagnostics. In fact, this old supercomputer looks so good it ended up in a Jurassic Park movie:
To me, the CM-5 design actually looks inspired by the WOPR computer from WarGames (1983), which wasn’t a real computer, of course, but a realistically-looking movie prop:
This subject has been of interest to me for a few years (post 1, post 2). This particular post was co-written with GPT-J AI Writer.
GPT-J is the largest model the EleutherAI has released to date. A 6-billion parameters language model is comparable in performance to the GPT-3 version of similar size — 6.7 billion parameters (but GPT-3 is over 175 billion parameters now).
This model was trained upon the Pile, which is an 825 GiB diverse, open-source language modeling data set that consists of 22 smaller, high-quality datasets combined together. For more information, please read this paper.
I admit that the story below came nicely out of the model, but I needed to guide it a few times, re-starting and re-seeding the conversation (to keep it meaningful). Otherwise, I simply followed the rules described in the prior post.
Now, will an all-knowing artificial intelligence govern us in the future?
A few years ago, the word “singularity” entered the popular lexicon. In this new era, which futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts will occur in the early 21st century, humanity will merge with technology to form a “transcendent” intelligence. This machine consciousness will surpass us in every way, and humanity will be a distant memory.
We are not there yet, but the concept of a singularity is beginning to make some waves in science and engineering. “The Singularity” is a term used by futurists to describe the future state of our technology and society in which the pace of scientific and technological development will lead to exponential growth in computational power, artificial intelligence, and longevity. (AK: actually, the concept was introduced in 1993 here, if you want to read more.)
Why all this fuss? Because the concepts of intelligence and consciousness have always been hard to define. While some of the current AI research is more like the U.S. space program of the 1950s, seeking a grand unified theory of intelligence, other AI researchers are more like the International Space Station program, focused on getting practical results as soon as possible. But there’s a chance that we’re on the verge of the technological Singularity, a time of significant change.
What is the Singularity? In the early days of AI, researchers like John McCarthy at Dartmouth College and Marvin Minsky at MIT thought AI would require a human-like level of intelligence. While this is still a possibility, it’s not the only one. The world of AI is so varied, with so many different ways of representing intelligence and consciousness, that it’s hard to say where exactly we are on the path to the Singularity. The goal of superintelligence is still largely a dream, but a few researchers have made significant progress towards the theoretical Singularity. (AK: this reference to superintelligence reminded me of my story The Interview from the I, AI collection of short stories.)
The Singularity as a theory
The concept of the Singularity as a future state of humanity is not a new idea. In the 1970s, Vernor Vinge first proposed it, arguing that the development of AI would lead to a new state of being that transcends human beings. The idea is still alive today, but it’s become increasingly focused on the concept of an all-knowing AI.
Dr. Andrei Khurshudov is a Director of Advanced IoT Analytics at Caterpillar. He is managing several teams of data scientists and software developers working on advanced monitoring and analytics solutions for the company’s fleet of connected machines and IoT devices.
With over 20 years of experience as a researcher and an executive leader, Andrei has something to say about the hottest areas in business and technology.
BLACK BOX PARADOX 