A News Morsel - Decentralized Web, Google AI

Teh Interwebs (aka a series of tubes)

Decentralization is all the rage these days, and some would argure that it always has been. Anil Dash has written a post about how he sees us moving forward to fulfill the vision of the past. This is pretty interesting and well written, and I found the discussion of publishing and the history behind our tools particularly interesting. In essence, this post is a call for personal empowerment and autonomy, and for a move away from centralized power structures in our online environments. He doesn't delve into the blockchain as any part of the solution, but I think it's the perfect compliment and enabling technology for a lot of what he's suggesting. Somebody get that man a Steem account.

Just say no

I saw this and thought it was worth noting, whether it amounts to anything or not. The Google employee base has become quite the hotbed of political activism lately. The latest story is that they got up a petition and sent it to the CEO to attempt to get GOOG out of the business of doing business with the Pentagon. I would think this is quite unlikely to happen, but it is notable for a couple of reasons. First, Google is one of the leading AI research organizations in the world and has been throwing massive resources into expanding its capabilities very rapidly. In addition to that, it stands out to me because of the amount of interest and concern there is within the AI community to develop this technology in a responsible manner.

It is slightly controversial, the idea that AI could be dangerous, particularly to the point of being an existental threat to humanity. There are, however, a large number of highly credible voices on the side of "we better worry about this now" and the number seems to be growing. Google has arguably been a bit slow to jump on to that bandwagon. It is encouraging, to me at least, to see that there are a large number of people inside of the company who are concerned about the implications of the misuse of AI technology. The subject of "beneficial AI" as a whole is pretty vast, and has some high profile voices. Most notably, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have all chimed in on the big picture potential problems with AI. Something that is a bit less than that level of concern, but a very real issue is the dangers potentially posed by autonomous weapons. If you haven't already seen the slaughterbots video, you should definitely take a look at this. It's a high production value, dark mirror-esque look at a dystopian future that is mostly scary because it seems emminently possible. The story is a thought experiment of what could happen with just slight incremental improvements over the technology that we already have and which we know works. If you like a good conspiracy theory (this one's real), or just an unsettling look at where we might be heading, you won't be disappointed.

Anil Dash: https://medium.com/@anildash/the-missing-building-blocks-of-the-web-3fa490ae5cbc
Short bit about Google petition: https://www.axios.com/employees-urge-google-to-drop-p-1522861843-72c20576-00a0-46fe-8610-12e9f6c1d9b5.html
Autonomous Weapons: https://autonomousweapons.org

Tim ODell: