From the Tesla web site. (This video showing knowing abuse of the system has just been retweeted by Musk).

We appreciate the shout out by Jack Stilgoe for the People's Panel on AI in this piece - demonstrating that public participation is very achievable. Read more about the People's Panel at: connectedbydata.org/projects/2023-…

‘The machine is, of course, amoral. It optimises for whatever “conversions” it is told to pursue: installs of Angry Birds; sales of saris made by village women; voters signing up for a Donald Trump rally.’ Donald MacKenzie on smartphone ads: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/…

Back in 2019 Alex Kendall gave me a turn around Cambridge in Wayve’s prototype self-driving Renault Twizzy. Today I had a 30 minute trip in their latest model around the streets of Camden. No interventions required. I’m impressed.

Introducing Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. Safety and Governance are core capacities for developing healthy and sustainable AI. Thank you for all levels of support from different ministries in Beijing. Glad to be the founding director of this institute.

This is such a fundamental category error? Go & poker are games with a fixed number of known states - computationally difficult but clearly feasible if you pattern match efficiently (which is what deep learning is good at). Writing a novel is a different type of task completely.

How to be a Hitler person, a free post open.substack.com/pub/davidaaron…

Good to see the politics of technology (algorithms, oximeters) getting parliamentary attention

See you tomorrow!

Today's NYT article by Yuval Harari repeats "GPT-4 Hired Task Rabbit Worker to Solve Captcha" story & concludes "This incident demonstrated that GPT-4 has the equivalent of a 'theory of mind'." Time to re-up my fact-check of this oft-repeated story. ⬇️

STS students won two awards at this years MAPS Faculty ECR Forum Awards 2024. Congratulations to Lucy Maun (Teaching Excellence Award) Catherine Lucas, Antonia Belli and Scott Keir (Community Work Award – The HoSCos Team).

TIL about Robert Boyle's scientific to-do list - written 360 years ago to guide the exploits of the Royal Society. it includes the "Prolongation of Lie," "Art of Flying," and "Perpetuall Light" but also "The Emulating of Fish without Engines" and "Attaining Gigantick Dimensions"

Such an honour and a joy to give this lecture. Thanks SATSU York for having me STS UCL Responsible Ai UK

This vainglorious tweet from He Jiankui, creator of the CRISPR babies, is getting a lot of attention. The research was deemed unpublishable because of ethics shortfalls and apparent deception used in the course of the experiment. 🧵

I just gave a lecture on organised irresponsibility. Immediately afterwards, I saw this, from the Grenfell Inquiry.

Somebody talk me through the bottlenecks that are preventing Concorde (Concorde!) from flying again…

This week’s Economist cover story is brought to you by US automakers and regulators, both of whom have been ignoring car bloat for decades.