Next week, backprop before Werbos or Hinton!

Please ignore the man behind the curtain AI Histories #5: The Mechanical Turk

Every week I write a short history of AI: a trend, person, or technology from AI or the fields that influenced it

This week deals with the Mechanical Turk. I look at its tricks, second life, and games with Ben Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Napoleon

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/the-man-be...

The Coming Race Bovril Among the Machines

A bit on AI in the Victorian imagination by way of the AI researcher’s favourite classic book, Erewhon, and what came before it

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/the-coming...

A Verhoevenian Moment It’s a feature, not a bug

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/a-verhoeve...

Definitional questions about AI can be tedious, but their staying power is curious. I argue that's because AI is the quintessentially Verhoevenian technology: an especially supple cypher for politics, values, beliefs, and biases

Link below

Ghosts of Greenland Myths, missiles, and memory

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/ghosts-of-...

I wrote about the territory of the moment. Link below for a history of science essay about Greenland, by way of pulp sci-fi outposts, lost colonies, and Sherlock Holmes 🧊

Thanks very much!

The Economy of Magic On alchemy, imagination, and machine learning

New blog on something I've been wanting to write about for a while: historical parallels between AI and alchemy, where they hold & where they break

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/the-econom...

extremely zoomable, super high resolution picture of de heem’s ‘flowers in a glass vase’ from 1660: tahpaul.github.io/deheem/

Thanks very much!

Conversation Galante [TWIE] The Week In Examples #61 | 30 November 2024

A Turing test for poetry, copyright, and finetuning - three things I enjoyed writing about in this week’s newsletter. Check it out if you’re into that sort of thing

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/conversati...

in 1971 you could look like this and play a 29 year old

west point academy has identified civ vi as a promising training platform for the next generation of military strategists

guy who is sceptical of AI but supports export controls on GPUs

t.co/QPBuD9jopp

Colleagues at Google DeepMind wrote a new essay aiming to provide an overview of the AI for science opportunity, a nuanced take on the risks, insights on the ingredients needed to succeed, and an ambitious policy agenda. Read it below on our policy blog 🫡

it’s friday night

it’s good despite the bait title

fr

let me tell you about instrumental convergence, anon

Check it out if you’re interested in that sort of thing

My way or the highway [TWIE] The Week In Examples #59 | 16 November 2024

Every week I publish a newsletter about AI and society. This week I looked at:

🛣️ Calls for ‘AI highways’

🌍 Safety implications of world models

✍️The first draft of the EU’s Code of Practice for AI

www.learningfromexamples.com/p/my-way-or-the-highway-...