GOALOOP® - Connecting the World through Goals®

When we feel grateful, we’re doing something that’s more complex than it seems. “Does Gratitude to R for φ-ing Imply Gratitude that R φ-ed?” isn’t a question we often ask ourselves on Thanksgiving. Translated into plain English—it’s the title of a scholarly article by the philosopher Tony Manela—it asks whether it’s possible to be grateful to someone for doing something without being grateful that the same something has happened. The idea isn’t that complicated—at least, not at first.” By Joshua Rothman https://lnkd.in/gXY5A73h #Thanksgiving #HappyThanksgiving #gratitude

Has the #Internet Buried Your Originality? See the video by Kirby Ferguson at the link below: https://lnkd.in/dZaBWhG3 #algorithms #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #intellectualproperty #art #artists #creators #justice #equality #bias #ethics #philosophy #health #socialmedia #productivity #technology #regulations #privacy #security #data #datascience #democracy #humanity

Should You Still Learn to Code in an #AI World? Coding boot camps once looked like the golden ticket to an economically secure future. But as that promise fades, what should you do? Keep learning, until further notice. “Not everyone sees these developments as a death knell for coding jobs. Armando Solar-Lezama, who, as the leader of M.I.T.’s Computer Assisted Programming Group, spends his days thinking about how to bring more automation into coding, said A.I. tools still lacked a lot of the essential skills of even junior programmers. His research has shown, for example, how large language models like GPT-4 failed to truly understand the problems they were solving with code and made sometimes ridiculous mistakes. “When you’re talking about more foundational skills, knowing how to reason about a piece of code, knowing how to track down a bug across a large system, those are things that the current models really don’t know how to do,” he said. Still, A.I. is changing how software is made. In one study, an A.I. Coding assistant made developers 20 percent more productive. […] To be clear, both Mr. Solar-Lezama and Mr. Sims — and just about everyone working in technology whom I interviewed for this article — still think you should learn to code. But some see a parallel with long division: It’s good to understand how it works. It’s an arguably necessary exercise for learning more advanced mathematics. But on its own, it gets you only so far. […] Stay Sharp. Keep Learning.” By Sarah Kessler https://lnkd.in/dBs8qTSD #research #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #education #college #intellectualproperty #computerscience #jobs #softwaredevelopers #careers #justice #equality #bias #ethics #philosophy #art #artists #creators #health #socialmedia #productivity #labor #technology #regulations #privacy #security #data #datascience #democracy #humanity

The Artificial State As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by #algorithms, trust in #government has plummeted. Is there any turning back? “The artificial state involves the reduction of politics to the digital manipulations of attention-mining algorithms, the diminishment of #citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement. Predictive algorithms do the work of rallying support, communicating with constituents, even crafting policy.” By Jill Lepore https://lnkd.in/eJ5VDnFq #research #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #justice #equality #bias #ethics #philosophy #intellectualproperty #art #artists #creators #health #socialmedia #productivity #labor #technology #regulations #privacy #security #data #datascience #democracy #humanity

Study Indicates X #Algorithm Changed to Boost Right-Wing Accounts After Its Owner Officially Endorsed the President-Elect in July “A newly released computational study of engagement from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia says that X’s algorithm was changed in mid-July to boost right-wing accounts and Musk’s own page. […] The algorithm of X, a microblogging platform, was modified in mid-July – after its owner Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for US president – to systematically boost Republican-leaning accounts, a new study has found. […] The possibility of algorithmic prioritization   The findings are preliminary but they suggest “important questions about the potential impact of algorithmic adjustments on public discourse and the ‘neutrality’ of social media platforms as information carriers.” […] The study analyzed 56,184 posts sent by several accounts between January 1st, 2024, and October 25th, 2024, and examined view counts, retweet counts, and favorite counts for each. Researchers are finding clues that Musk may indeed have used X to shape online discourse leading up to the election by introducing algorithmic bias into the equation. The analysis found “a structural break for Musk's metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the day Musk formally endorsed Trump. Musk’s post view counts suddenly increased by 138.27%, and retweets increased by 237.94%, with a similarly large increase for favorites.” By Gintaras Radauskas https://lnkd.in/eF_mFahw #research #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #justice #equality #bias #ethics #philosophy #intellectualproperty #art #artists #creators #health #socialmedia #productivity #labor #technology #regulations #privacy #security #data #datascience #democracy #humanity

Do You Have Hope? And, if not, how can you get some? “Hope doesn’t deny how grim things are; it doesn’t look away from the news, or wish away the signs in the street, or sugarcoat the terrible plans of those coming to power. But it doesn’t deny the potential in people, either. “The hopeful expect the incalculable, possibilities beyond all likelihood,” Han writes.” By Joshua Rothman https://lnkd.in/gAjvYaTd #philosophy #health #democracy #humanity

MIT Technology Review: How #OpenAI Stress-Tests Its #LLMs The company really wants you to know that it’s trying to make its models safer. “OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful large language models to try to identify potential harmful or otherwise unwanted behavior, an approach known as red-teaming. Large language models are now being used by millions of people for many different things. But as OpenAI itself points out, these models are known to produce racist, misogynistic and hateful content; reveal private information; amplify biases and stereotypes; and make stuff up. The company wants to share what it is doing to minimize such behaviors. […] Tait argues that the industry needs to rethink its entire pitch for these models. Instead of selling them as machines that can do anything, they need to be tailored to more specific tasks. You can’t properly test a general-purpose model, he says. “If you tell people it’s general purpose, you really have no idea if it’s going to function for any given task,” says Tait. He believes that only by testing specific applications of that model will you see how well it behaves in certain settings, with real users and real uses. “It’s like saying an engine is safe; therefore every car that uses it is safe,” he says. “And that’s ludicrous.”” By Will Douglas Heaven https://lnkd.in/gRSMbKcb #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #justice #equality #bias #ethics #philosophy #intellectualproperty #art #artists #creators #philosophy #health #socialmedia #productivity #labor #technology #regulations #privacy #security #data #datascience #democracy #humanity

This #AI-Generated Version of Minecraft May Represent the Future of Real-Time #Video Generation The #game was created from clips and keyboard inputs alone, as a demo for real-time interactive video generation. “When you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just placed may have morphed into a totally new environment. That doesn’t happen in Minecraft. But this new version is entirely AI-generated, so it’s prone to hallucinations. Not a single line of code was written. For Decart and Etched, this demo is a proof of concept. They imagine that the technology could be used for real-time generation of videos or video games more generally. “Your screen can turn into a portal—into some imaginary world that doesn’t need to be coded, that can be changed on the fly. And that’s really what we’re trying to target here,” says Dean Leitersdorf, cofounder and CEO of Decart, which came out of stealth this week. Their version of Minecraft is generated in real time, in a technique known as next-frame prediction. They did this by training their model, Oasis, on millions of hours of Minecraft gameplay and recordings of the corresponding actions a user would take in the game. The AI is able to sort out the physics, environments, and controls of Minecraft from this data alone.” By Scott J Mulligan https://lnkd.in/gD3ZUPRb #NextFramePrediction #IRT #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #intellectualproperty #art #artists #filmmakers #creators #philosophy #justice #equality #bias #ethics #philosophy #health #socialmedia #productivity #labor #technology #regulations #privacy #security #diversity #democracy #humanity

The Ambience of #Information For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide? “They misjudged today’s flow of knowledge—what one might call the ambience of #information. […] Of all the #data visualizations that were churned out in the hours following the election, the one that struck me most was a map of the United States, showing whether individual areas had voted to the left or to the right of their positions in the Presidential race in 2020. It looks like a wind map. […] It is not the map of communities having their local concerns addressed or not. It’s the map of an entire nation swept by the same ambient premises. In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual #facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected #misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors. This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong.” By Nathan Heller https://lnkd.in/es4bxGBq #socialmedia #technology #internet #media #democracy #justice #disinformation #equality #journalism #humanity

“…psychological drama, not political disagreement, is at the root of our national turmoil. […] According to a new book, America’s political derangement has psychological roots. […] I’ve had nothing but the most pleasant interactions with my neighbor over the years; I doubt that, if she knew anything about my politics, she’d treat me or my family all that differently. I just can’t square the extremity of the signs with the normalcy of the person. That sort of dissonance is commonplace now. In parts of the country where everyone is of the same political persuasion, it’s possible to think of those on the other side as entirely evil, stupid, or deranged. But in places like the one where I live, where voters are roughly split, there’s no avoiding the fact that many ordinary, likable, and reliable people hold opinions that you find not just disagreeable but disturbing. Where do those opinions come from, and how deep do they go? Should they cause us to reconsider the character of those who hold them? These worrisome questions have been at the center of American life for years. […] We expect people to perform mental gymnastics in the political sphere. We call it spin, and regard it as normal. Yet sometimes we sense that people are spinning out of control, or we realize, queasily, that we’re spinning quite a lot ourselves. […] So, who are we? Payne argues that, although our identities are infinitely variable, we share a “psychological bottom line”: the conviction that we are “good and reasonable people.” It’s not necessarily true, of course. We treat each other badly, do and say mean things, and repeatedly discover that we’ve been mistaken, ignorant, careless, or worse. Yet, despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent, and decades of work in psychology have affirmed that we freely rewrite history to maintain this view. When psychologists convince people that they’re wrong about an issue, for instance, those people often later misremember their prior stance, forgetting that they ever thought differently. […] Payne’s analysis points to a different, more troubling level of irrationality. In his version of our political life, our deepest and most ineradicable habits of mind push some of us to indulge in radical fantasies about the rest of us. Irrespective of the underlying reality, these fantasies shape our collective life. “We need more humanizing, because people in our country have been dehumanizing one another a lot,” he writes.” Review by Joshua Rothman https://lnkd.in/eh_Gkk6k #socialmedia #democracy #justice #equality #bias #psychology #health #humanity