![]() ![]() Hertie School was one of the first places to come out with policy around generative AI. Is there any sense in which this hype bubble feels different from previous? We could have predicted within the month when it was going to pass human competence. Everyone was like, “oh my god, nobody could have anticipated this progress and Go.” Miles Brundage showed during his PhD that it’s actually linear. When you’re in those moments, it’s like, “oh my gosh, now people finally get AI.” We’ve known about it since the 30s, but now we keep having these moments. I remember when the web happened, and also when it won chess, when it won Go. I’ve been doing this since the 80s, and every so often, something would happen. All of the sudden your aunt is calling you to ask about AI. I write about tech for a living, so I was aware of a lot of the ethical conversations that were happening early. That’s very related to the word embeddings, which is for one word, but those are basically the puzzle pieces that are now getting stuff together by other programs. It’s about looking at a lot of exemplars and then figuring out, given a start, what things are most likely coming next. All the technology is not all that different. Don’t forget, in 2017, I did a language thing and people were freaked out by that too, and was there racism and sexism in the word embeddings? What people are calling “generative AI” – the ChatGPT stuff – the language part on that is not that different. ![]() They’re really wrapped up in the language thing. Part of the reason I’m going to this much detail is that for a lot of people, this is on their radar for the first time for some reason. It seems like it’s been more busy, but I don’t know how much of that is because of. Because I was available, and people were like, “we need to figure out our policy,” I was getting flown everywhere. So, I cut back to half time and was paid 30%. I also was working part-time because my partner had a job in New Jersey. That was when everybody was writing their policy. I was super, super busy from 2015 to 2020. I think generative AI is only part of why I’ve been especially busy. You must be busy with all of this generative AI news bubbling up. Below is an excerpt from the conversation we recently had during Bryson’s office hours. Given all talk around generative AI, the recent open letter and Geoffrey Hinton’s recent exit from Google, you couldn’t ask for better timing. Much of her work focuses on artificial and natural intelligence, including ethics and governance in AI. Prior to that, she taught at the the University of Bath and served as a research fellow at Oxford and the University of Nottingham. As she noted her tweet, she didn’t work directly with the robots themselves, but her work has plenty of overlap with that world.īryson currently serves as the Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. Naturally, I asked if she’d be interested in chatting. It’s one in a growing list of archaic slang terms that have slowly ingratiated themselves into my vernacular, and boy howdy, am I going to keep using it.Īs far as the second (and substantially more relevant) bit of the tweet, Bryson might be the one person on my initial list who I had never actually interacted with at any point. A day or two before, a gen-Z colleague was also entirely baffled by the phrase. I discovered subsequent to publishing that I may well be the last person on Earth saying, “Boy Howdy” who has never served as an editor at Creem Magazine (call me). My own supervisor (Lynn Stein) didn’t really do labs or teams. Marc, Gill & Hugh were all welcoming & supportive (I never got time to visit Hugh’s version though). ![]() I never worked on the robots, but I liked the lab culture / vibe & meetings. Boy howdy.”Īfter that edition of Actuator dropped, Bryson noted on Twitter, It included this sentence, “Also, just scrolling through that list of students and faculty: Gill Pratt, Jerry Pratt, Joanna Bryson, Hugh Herr, Jonathan Hurst, among others. Two weeks back, I posted about a bit of digging around I was doing in the old MIT pages – specifically around the Leg Lab. In addition to the usual roundup and job openings, I’ve got two great interviews for you. Turns out I lined up too much stuff – which is good news for all of you. Knowing I was going to be focused on this developer even all day, I made sure to line some stuff up for the week. I’ve got a handful of meetings lined up with startups and VCs and then a quiet, robot-free day and a half in Santa Cruz for my birthday. There’s a guy behind in a business suit and sockless loafers, taking a loud business meeting on his AirPods. I’m back in the South Bay this week, banging away at an introduction in the hotel lobby a few minutes before our crew heads to Shoreline for Google I/O. ![]()
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