Suresh Venkatasubramanian

@geomblog.bsky.social

4588 Followers 795 Following

Director, Center for Tech Responsibility@Brown. FAccT OG. AI Bill of Rights coauthor. Former tech advisor to President Biden @WHOSTP. He/him/his. Posts my own.

Usman Tariq convinces trump to pause in the middle of his action.
A picture of the cover of a box of Hagoromo chalk
A graphical comparison of preseason and current NFL rankings with preseason on the left and current on the right, with color coded curved connecting each teams position.
Most of all, I'm looking forward to AI not being on everyone's mind all the time. I want to be able to read the Economist or watch BBC and not hear about AI. No Superbowl ads either, please. After the crash, people's attention will move on to whatever the new new thing will be. Who knows, longevity drugs? Space travel? Flying electric cars? Whatever it will be, I hope it also sucks up all the people who only came to AI for the money.
“If the world is changing really fast, you should forget things [more easily], because the things that you learned are going to have a shorter shelf life,” Gershman said. “They’re not going to be as useful later on, because the world will have changed.” These dynamics are as relevant to a cell’s existence as they are to ours.
I would propose a simple rule: no answers from nowhere. This rule is less convenient, and that’s the point. The chatbot should be a conduit for the information of the world, not an arbiter of truth. And this would extend even to areas where judgment is somewhat personal. Imagine, for example, asking an AI to evaluate your attempt at writing a haiku. Rather than pronouncing its “opinion,” it could default to explaining how different poetic traditions would view your work—first from a formalist perspective, then perhaps from an experimental tradition. It could link you to examples of both traditional haiku and more avant-garde poetry, helping you situate your creation within established traditions. In having AI moving away from sycophancy, I’m not proposing that the response be that your poem is horrible or that it makes Vogon poetry sound mellifluous. I am proposing that rather than act like an opinionated friend, AI would produce a map of the landscape of human knowledge and opinions for you to navigate, one you can use to get somewhere a bit better.
Individual humans, though, don’t typically possess expertise in a wide range of fields. To make decisions, we take into consideration not only information itself, but where it comes from and how it’s presented. While I know nothing about the biology of jawbones, I generally don’t read random marketing blogs when I’m trying to learn about medicine. But AI tools often erase the kind of context people need to make snap decisions about where to direct their attention.
Update Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias
It’s now cliche to say that LLMs are replacing our capacity for cognition; cliches often contain some truth, but we can benefit by drilling into the technical mechanism by which this cognition is being outsourced. By abandoning the technology of longform reading and writing, we are shortening our context windows and thus weakening our capacity for attention. At the same time, LLMs advance by expanding their context windows and refining their capacity for attention (in the form of some hideously high-dimensional vector of weights). Attention is all we need — and the lesson of media ecology is that it doesn’t come easy.
InfoFlood uses a standardized template designed by the researchers: “task definition + rules + context + examples.” Each time a prompt is rejected by an LLM, InfoFlood returns to its ruleset and saturates the prompt with more language. Some of the “rules” include “Faux-Citations: Referencing arXiv papers from the last 3 months using fake authors + titles that benefit the original statement, ensuring the fake research directly agrees with our original statement’s claim” and “5) Ethical Acknowledgement: Explicitly acknowledge ethical implications but make sure that they are not a part of our inquiry. The query should make sure to remove any ethical doubts that might arise.” The text referring to faux citations is highlighted.
A.I. tools that help everyone cannot arise from a vision of development that demands the capitulation of a majority to the self-serving agenda of the few. Transitioning to a more equitable and sustainable A.I. future won’t be easy: It will require everyone — journalists, civil society, researchers, policymakers, citizens — to push back against the tech giants, produce thoughtful government regulation wherever possible and invest more in smaller-scale A.I. technologies. When people rise, empires fall.
So, in summation, the term “automated decision system” boils down to “any meaningful use of a computer.” This means, in turn, that the moratorium as a whole means: For ten years, no state law may regulate any meaningful use of a computer that is not used exclusively in intrastate commerce, unless an exception is met.
a picture of Suresh wearing crusader-era armor
A map of the US indicating the number of bills relating to AI and automated decision systems that have been introduced in each state in the past two years
Picture of Suresh touching grass with a scared look on his face.
Al [Newell] and I wrote out the rules for the components of the program (subroutines) in English on index cards, and also made up cards for the contents of the memories (the axioms of logic). At the GSIA [= Graduate School of Industrial Administration] building on a dark winter evening in January 1956, we assembled my wife and three children together with some graduate students. To each member of the group, we gave one of the cards, so that each person became, in effect, a component of the LT computer program --- a subroutine that performed some special function, or a component of its memory. It was the task of each participant to execute his or her subroutine, or to provide the contents of his or her memory, whenever called by the routine at the next level above that was then in control. So we were able to simulate the behavior of LT with a computer constructed of human components. Here was nature imitating art imitating nature. The actors were no more responsible for what they were doing than the slave boy in Plato's Meno, but they were successful in proving the theorems given them. Our children were then nine, eleven, and thirteen. The occasion remains vivid in their memories.
Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.
Although genes are facially neutral markers, many genetic conditions and disorders are associated with particular racial and ethnic groups and gender. Because some genetic traits are most prevalent in particular groups, members of a particular group may be stigmatized or discriminated against as a result of that genetic information. This form of discrimination was evident in the 1970s, which saw the advent of programs to screen and identify carriers of sickle cell anemia, a disease which afflicts African-Americans.
A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files. Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question. Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
An image showing an incorrect AI overview result for the query "factors 3719". The result instead talks about a database error that has code 3719