Table of contents

• FigureAI
• FediForum, March 19-20, 2024
• March Creations
• Recent and Current Reading
• Implausi.blog
• Looking Forward

Looking westward down the Transcanada Highway, Banff Alberta, 2024.

From the author's personal collection.

I've seen commentary come up a couple times, wanted to talk about it here exclusively on the Newsletter.

On March 14th, BBC News ran a video, originally reported on TechRadar, about a video released by robotics startup Figure AI of a humanoid robot.

The robot uses a "Visual language model", linked between the robot and OpenAI, in interaction with a human providing it prompts verbally. It responds with actions, based on some OCR of the elements in front of it, and some decision trees.

This integration of the sensory (visual and auditory) with a link back to the LLM of OpenAI and other tools, provides the robot with a more lifelike feel, and provides the AI with an embodied presence in the world.

This is one of the key elements of Echanger (described in detail in E0025 Echanger). But that integration , that digital materiality or embodied presence, is also a way that we could move towards an AGI.  There is no particular reason that an AI would have to be humanoid in appearance, but that "being in the world", to engage with the world in the way that we do as humans, may be  a helpful step along the way to providing a human scale sense of things.

Otherwise, it's all abstract. (To the AI.)

A research group at Meta seems to agree: that physical embodiment is necessary for intelligence.  The researchers were working on building a virtual environment for training the AI, a place where it can grow and "learn".  This is one approach, bypassing the difficulties of robotics (and swapping it out for another one: VR and simulation).

Time will tell which of these competing approaches works best, but we'll continue monitoring this ongoing development here.

It's also interesting that this was one of the underlying sub-themes behind several television shows produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, including Person of Interest and Westworld. We touched a bit on Westworld season 4 at the beginning of the podcast, and I've been re-watching season 1 in order to close return to it in the near future.

But with the Fallout TV series due to drop soon, I'm looking to invite some special guests to discuss that series, and we'll keep an eye out to see if that theme returns.

Managed to listen in on a few sessions of the FediForum on March 19th and 20th, 2024.  This was the third "Unconference" put on by some of the leaders of the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol, and the Open Social Web. 

Session information is here at this link.

This was the 3rd session, I managed to attend the second one as well.  This conference is similar to an academic conference, but includes sessions devoted to product demos by various developers working on apps and tools for engaging with the Fediverse.  It is an example of the Recursive Public we discussed way back in August 2023 on Implausipod Episode E0009, and it was fantastic to see in operation.

A busy month of March saw three episodes of the Implausipod released, with two parts focused on the recently released Dune Part 2, and a follow-up looking at where GPT might go.

E0029 Why is it always a war on robots?

E0030 Appendix W 04 Dune

E0031 GPT Squared

In addition we put out a number of podcast episodes on YouTube early in March, with the audio  and subtitles overlaid atop a clip from City of Heroes Homecoming.

This is more of an experiment, trying to figure out how to display the information on YouTube effectively, as Google podcasts will be going away in June.

You can find them here.

Since its publication in 2019, the term "surveillance capitalism" is seeing more widespread adoption, enough so that it seems to have entered the zeitgeist to a degree.

I found it a frustrating read however, not because it's wrong necessarily, but because it ignores a wide chunk of history in order to make it's claims.  Zuboff's argument that the SurvCap industry (roughly Google, Facebook, and other similar data-driven tech companies) is "unprecedented" fails to account for how those advertising companies disguised as tech firms are an outgrowth of industries that had grown throughout the 20th century, and that there had already been a lot of work done on the advertising industry, as well as on the insurance industry and the rise of the actuarial sciences.

So, the book is ultimately correct, I think, in the author's observation of the current state of affairs, but it feels like they had this observation and then worked backwards to an arbitrary point (Google in 2011) in order to build the narrative, and in so doing didn't actually see the trail that they were on.  Google's particular arc was sent before the end of the 20th century when they first engaged with VC funding, as pointed out by Mordecai Kurz (see below).

Would I recommend it? Perhaps. As stated, it captures the state of 2019, but it comes across as what I might call a "dumb smart book". I think Zuboff's writing from 2014 and 2015 might be a better and more succinct read.  3/5

Recommended by my supervisor from my PhD days, this recent book does a fantastic job of explaining the dominance of the tech sector firms, in ways that are accessible to both an academic (economic) and a lay audience.  I spoke about this in Episode 31 (very briefly), but I'll got into it more as I finish reading it.

This recent paper is like the legal twin to the Kurz's book, above.  Covering much of the same ground, but from a different perspective, this time from the legal arena around patents and innovation.  Still digging through this, as it references some literature I know, and some I need to look up.

The most recent posts on the Implausi.blog.  (Mostly just testing out how this would look in a newsletter format; I may want to focus on new or exclusive material for the Newsletter.)

Next month, sometime in April, we'll release the first full issue of this letter. There will likely be a high degree of variability of the first few issues, as we work out timing, amount of info, and the variety of topics covered.

There's a few things that I know are coming:

• Implausipod: Fallout TV series review
• AppendixW: Episode 5 (The Forever War) and launch of the new website, separating the Warhammer material

Thanks for joining us, and looking forward to seeing what the future may hold. Let's have some fun.

Dr. Implausible