AxS
Number 2
It feels peculiar writing this without Mazowe slumbering in close proximity, so in his honour, he has pride of place on the masthead for this issue.
I have been watching the Hinton lectures this week which charts the course of artificial intelligence across the themes of alignment, oversight and coordination. The full programme is on the link but each of the successive session explores:
- What recent AI behaviour reveals about the challenges of alignment, and how researchers are working to address them.
- Exploring how AI could accelerate its own development, what that means for human oversight and whether our ability to maintain control can keep pace.
- Examining how scientific oversight, shared safety standards and international cooperation could help manage the risks of transformative AI.
As we face the Collingridge dilemma, we confront the impossibility of predicting a technology's impact while it remains manageable and the subsequent impossibility of managing it once those impacts become manifest. The notion of the precautionary principle seems entirely lost in the reckless pursuit of shareholder value by frontier AI companies.
So many people and organisations are looking to make sense of AI and the ethical quandry and risks, economic consequences and potential of super intelligence. If you're interested in furthering your understanding, The Alan Turing Institute in London offers a variety of courses which are all free and part of their open learning platform.
I lived in London for 15 years and in all that time, never really grew accustomed to the tropical sound of feral Parakeets. The Guardian features a long read entitled Alien menace or victim of xenophobia? The battle over Britain’s parakeets. There are some sizeable roosts across London, it reminded me of this Instagram gallery that shows their density. I've seen a number of other images which feel equally incongruous.
I'm planning a trip to Paris and annoyingly, timings don't work to include Paris Photo Fair which start this week and is hosted in one of my favourite buildings in the capital - The Grand Palais. I actually wanted to see Penn & Fashion at the MEP and was going to combine it with "Remember Me" at the Bourse de Commerce. But I got talking to Bill Shapiro (former editor-in-chief of LIFE magazine) about it and he was pretty blunt and disproving of the 'Remember Me' exhibition. I won't repeat what he said verbatim, but not a positive word. He is possessed of sufficiently good judgement for me to not waste my time. For an event curated around photography's bicentenary and as a celebration of the medium, there are glaring artist omissions beyond the presentation and organisation failures he mentioned. In fairness, he did encourage me to visit Le Bal and recommended Musee de Montmartre's The Circus exhibition.
Vittles is a food and culture magazine whose mission is 'to make you eat tangibly better'. It's the only Substack I subscribe to and I have hassled Jonathan to move from Substack due to the platform's hands-off, decentralised approach to moderation which allows Substack to profit from hate speech and disinformation. But I digress. Whenever I am in London, I make a point of visiting at least one new restaurant and Vittles is always a good source of inspiration. I highly recommend 'The Vittles 99' as a source of inspiration. Think of it as a form of risk aversion. What I like about the list is that they don't discriminate – a hole in the wall Jerk chicken joint can rub up against a two Michelin-stared, see-and-be-seen fine dining restaurant in their list.
News media in the UK is currently awash with the exploits of a number of odious sexual miscreants, and it feels like someone has lifted a rock and exposed them all to daylight. I'm on a rest cure from the nauseation of the news and have found a replacement in Time Sensitive with Spencer Bailey. It's a podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form conversations with extraordinary people about their life and work. My initial reaction was faintly dismissive as it looked like YAWGP (yet another white guy podcast), but then I saw that Taryn Simon and Iris van Herpen had been guests.
And talking of too much of a good thing, a couple more photographs of Mazowe. These were taken on the Isle of Skye two years ago. He was always inherently fascinated by animals that were bigger and hairier than him and could scarcely believe that I was allowing him to approach the cow.
