Articles for anyone concerned about AI.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-experts-challenge-doomer-narrative-including-extinction-risk-claims/

AI experts challenge ‘doomer’ narrative, including ‘extinction risk’ claims

Top AI researchers are pushing back on the current ‘doomer’ narrative focused on existential future risk from runaway artificial general intelligence (AGI). These include yesterday’s Statement on AI Risk, signed by hundreds of experts including the CEOs of OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, which warned of a “risk of extinction” from advanced AI if its development is not properly managed.

Many say this ‘doomsday’ take, with its focus on existential risk from AI, or x-risk, is happening to the detriment of a necessary focus on current, measurable AI risks — including bias, misinformation, high-risk applications and cybersecurity. The truth is, most AI researchers are not focused on or highly-concerned about x-risk, they emphasize.

“It’s almost a topsy-turvy world,” Sara Hooker, head of the nonprofit Cohere for AI and former research scientist at Google Brain, told VentureBeat. “In the public discourse, [x-risk] is being treated as if it’s the dominant view of this technology.” But, she explained, at machine learning (ML) conferences such as the recent International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in early May that attracts researchers from all over the world, x-risk was a “fringe topic.”

(Related)

https://www-ft-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’

… “The machines we have now, they’re not conscious,” he says. “When one person teaches another person, that is an interaction between consciousnesses.” Meanwhile, AI models are trained by toggling so-called “weights” or the strength of connections between different variables in the model, in order to get a desired output. “It would be a real mistake to think that when you’re teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.”

Chiang’s main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none.

“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”

So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-best-ways-to-scan-a-document-using-your-phone-or-tablet/

The Best Ways to Scan a Document Using Your Phone or Tablet

How to Geek: “Scanners had their moment, but nowadays it’s not as necessary to own one. However, that doesn’t mean you never need to scan a document or photo. Thankfully, you probably have some tools to do it without a scanner. If you find yourself scanning a lot of documents and photos, it’s a good idea to invest in an actual scanner. Most people only need to scan a few things a year, so we’ll show you some good alternatives.”

• How to Scan Photos and Documents Without a Scanner – includes screen shots and useful, specific directions.