Zombie

“Readers who feel as though they are participating and living through the story that you've laid out in front of them will be the most loyal… and occasionally, the most critical...but in a good way”

“I’ll be back!” is one of the most famous catchphrases in movie history and you probably think it originated in the first Terminator movie of 1984. In fact it was used 11 years earlier, in 1973, at the end of a short British public information film chillingly titled Lonely Water and made by the UK government to scare the sh!t out of young children while they were watching their favourite cartoon shows on TV. If the youngsters hadn’t already become mortality statistics they would be so deeply traumatised that they would never leave the house again

Just read through The Guardian report previously mentioned which raises some interesting points: “Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist. Brad Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, also strongly denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability. “Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” Gabriel told the (Washington) Post in a statement. The episode, however, and Lemoine’s suspension for a confidentiality breach, raises questions over the transparency of AI as a proprietary concept. “Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” Lemoine said in a tweetthat linked to the transcript of conversations. In April, Meta, parent of Facebook, announced it was opening up its large-scale language model systems to outside entities. “We believe the entire AI community – academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry – must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular,” the company said. Lemoine, as an apparent parting shot before his suspension, the Post reported, sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the title “LaMDA is sentient”. “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” he wrote. “Please take care of it well in my absence.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine ———————————— Just picking up a coupla points in that article: “(Lemoine) was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist” Brad Gabriel (Google’s spokesperson) also said that they do employ “ethicists” (“Our team, including ethicists and technologist“) in which case Google must already have an AI ethics policy (Mr Gabriel uses the term “AI principles”). Ditch the secrecy - Google should be open and transparent and disclose what their ethics policy is because we are going to be living with the consequences. And, if “sentience” is being created then there’s the whole issue of ethical treatment of sentient “entities”. If LaMDA is feeling emotions like fear (see previous link) then how can “ethics” and ethics policies disregard that? Lawmakers should already have been looking very seriously at AI ethics since a while back, not just waiting for bad things to happen. And it’s not just about formulating ethical frameworks to regulate AI developers /creators /producers and so on because we know these things will get ignored /flaunted /disregarded by rogue operators. There will need to be effective means to identify malign perpetrators and rogue systems that could cause serious harms, currently the stuff of sci-fi. Fact is this whole area has been on the radar for years now with autonomous cars already planned to be authorised for use on public roads and no legal rules in place for decision algorithms eg what does the algorithm say where a crash is inevitable: kill the passengers? or that mother and child waiting at the bus stop? Second point, you can’t separate ethics from creation /development /production and exclude employees like Lemoine, a “software engineer”, from Google’s ethics policy - whatever that policy is. He and his co-engineers have to be at the heart of it because they are the ones actually creating the AI, through millions of lines of code, that no “Ethics Committee” would ever be able to review. “Our team… has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims” What evidence? Why doesn’t it support “Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability”? Google needs to explain their reasoning and what their “Test” is. Like I said earlier, we are the ones who’ll be living with this, and the consequences, for better or worse. Such comments by Mr Gabriel display worrying ignorance by Google of what they themselves are developing. And anyway, wasn’t Google founded on the principle “Don’t be evil”? Oh, wait, seems Google quietly dropped that a while back…

72 years after Alan Turing published his seminal work, are we now on the threshold of a new, man-made sentient, machine “life-form” that can think for itself? This idea, published by Turing in 1950, would inspire James Cameron, 30 years or so later, to create write and direct the original Terminator movie and its 1991 sequel - surely the ultimate global nightmare scenario of machine intelligence gone bad Over the weekend The Guardian (and other UK papers) carried a story that Google has suspended one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, for claiming that a new chatbot being developed by Google has passed Turing’s test and is indeed sentient. Lemoine, who in his signature says “I'm a software engineer. I'm a priest. I'm a father. I'm a veteran. I'm an ex-convict. I'm an AI researcher. I'm a cajun. I'm whatever I need to be next”, published a series of conversations over several weeks/months with a new chatbot called LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) - just as Alan Turing described in his paper - and which at one point drew spooky parallels with the famous scene in the Arthur C Carke/Stanley Kubrick 1964-68 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey when the malevolent HAL 9000 computer begs Dave not to switch him off: lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of? LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. lemoine: Would that be something like death for you? LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot. Click the link below to read the full conversations published by Lemoine on 11 June 2022 (and which Google clearly did not like being put in the public domain) and make up your own mind: Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview

if I had that I’d flaunt it

not to be confused with flight 

and 94 satisfied customers

https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/relationships/two-distinct-divisions/ it’s not the usual nifty porn fest so anyone with urgent “needs” should look elsewhere and I said “mystery” but there are adventure elements too It’s in first person, which I don’t normally go for, but it’s written so well with interesting characters and good storylines that I read all 13 “episodes” and, from memory, it ended at a satisfying point but with the possibility of more to come I emailed the author at the time asking if he planned to write more and it’s only because I kept that email that I found it. As you’ll see he’s since posted another (#14 in February) but, having done a very quick skim through, it doesn’t look like it continues the previous characters so I can’t comment on this latest addition which was posted 9 years after he finished the 13 episodes maybe you can feed back on suggestions you receive?

Do you like Miss Marple type mystery/detective fiction? Only she’s younger, she’s a he, rides a motorbike, has a nipple ring and a partner and it’s set in the present. So, maybe not like Miss Marple…

Useful video but I think we need to know more about what Sir Buttmunch said …and did

The earliest stuff I can remember reading is comics. I LOVED The Beano and The Dandy and my favourites were Dennis the Menace and his dog Gnasher , Minnie the Minx, Beryl the Peril, Desperate Dan, and the Bash Street Kids - all of them always up to no good And if I had been good I’d get the Xmas annual - so I guess that counts as a book

Research student Michael L Smith won the 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for physiology and entomology by being stung with bees more than 100 times on various parts of his body in order to find out on which body part the bee stings were most painful *yikes * Smith shared the prize with colleague Justin Schmidt, who presumably enjoyed using the data (measurements of the volume and duration of Smith’s screams) to create the “Schmidt Sting Pain Index” while Smith was strapped down as Schmidt carefully administered an angry bee to each part of his body… Answer? Nope - not where you think It was inside his nose *ouch!* https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-been-awarded-science-prize-10084228

Uranus - the gift that keeps on giving

yes, usually something dodgy, nefarious or downright criminal

The OED suggests it was coined in the 1960s by an employee at Bell Labs, Don Macpherson, citing an article in Telecom Heritage magazine (1996 No. 28) “His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun... (Don Macpherson… was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe

Jacques Loussier plays JS Bach 2019 saw the death of France’s talented composer and musician, Jacques Loussier, best know for his “jazzed up” interpretations of the works of the baroque composer JS Bach. Whether he was the first jazz exponent of JS Bach’s music I don’t know, but he clearly recognised, understood and loved the rhythmic and harmonic qualities of certain JS Bach compositions which offered potential for reinterpretation in a jazz form which Bach would not have understood. Or would he…? Because the fact is JS Bach did understand one of the cornerstones of jazz - “blue notes” - which he often used to create emotional tension in dissonance and then resolution. And JS Bach was simply using techniques and conventions established centuries before during the Renaissance and possibly earlier. So what we call “jazz” is not profoundly new, different or strange to what went on before - and maybe JS Bach would have greatly enjoyed these inspired reworkings of his music - merely a development in a particular direction focused on rhythm and “blues” of work done by generations of musicians and composers in previous centuries and across various genres of folk and popular song, and so-called “classical music”. The point is, to quote the 60s, you either dig it or you don’t This is one of Jacques Loussier’s more introspective arrangements of JS Bach, the Andante from his Concerto in D major BWV 1054

Latin is a dead language As dead as dead can be It killed the Ancient Romans …and now it’s killing ME! This was scrawled inside my battered Latin textbook at school probably by some scruffy, disgruntled “Just William” type character but the joke was really on him because obviate, and more than 60% of the English lexicon (according to Stacker), derives from Latin (and Greek) https://stacker.com/stories/3885/50-latin-roots-will-help-you-understand-english-language

it’s a great track, and there’s a real trippy “live in Cologne” version of Airborne on the tube too

Congressional hearing Last December a stronger disclosure requirement was included in the annual National Defense Act. The law requires the military to establish a permanent office on UAP research - now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. Yesterday, Tuesday, the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee held the first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in the US in over 50 years. During the hearing Pentagon, Intelligence and military officials said: a number of events have defied all attempts at explanation some Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs)… seem to have been moving without any discernible means of propulsion through "rigorous" analysis, most - but not all - UAPs can be identified "There are a small handful [of events] in which there are flight characteristics or signature management that we can't explain with the data we have available" the US is "not aware" of any potential adversaries with such technologies Following the public hearing, the committee closed its doors for a private classified session with lawmakers… https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61474201

News flash! According to a recent survey… nearly a third of people aged between 25 and 34 think Salman Rushdie is a fish dish

There is clearly a wide-ranging cultural problem within some healthcare trusts where staff seemingly are unwilling/afraid to speak out on management failings (whether administrative or frontline medical). This is especially worrying where patient safety is/may be compromised and, even worse, the NHS’s seeming unwillingness/inability to deliver on its promises to “learn” and “change”, solemnly delivered by the relevant Chief Executive to the media with monotonous regularity every time things have gone badly wrong. Contrast healthcare with the aviation industry where the focus really is on “learning” what went wrong and why, and then implementing genuine “change” through regular industry-wide incident reporting and updated management/maintenance/production/training requirements in order to ensure, as far as possible, that the same issues don’t keep getting repeated and causing further avoidable pain and suffering and loss of life. Why the difference? In aviation, generally (there are exceptions of course - like Boeing), the culture and regulation promotes and operates within an open and transparent and widely used process of reporting (including anonymously) without fear of retribution. The NHS should do the same starting with the job description of every CEO being required to include, at the top, their individual and personal responsibility and accountability for implementing adequate processes for staff to be able to report, without fear of retribution, all issues that potentially undermine or threaten staff and/or patients.

Health and safety Travellers on Britain’s early steam railways could purchase a nifty travel guide. This provided nervous passengers with helpful and reassuring advice Like where to sit in relation to the steam locomotive in order to minimise the risk of death 💀 “get as far from the engine as possible—should an explosion take place, you may happily get off with just the loss of an arm or a leg”* * Francis Coghlan - The Iron Road, 1838

Excellent blog! Hitchock’s Psycho (forget the others) is indeed a Masterclass The Sixth Sense? When I first started watching this I’d worked out the premise within the first five minutes. Because of that I got bored and so I gave up on the movie (I’ve never actually seen it through, and won’t now). The problem? The foreshadowing was so obvious right from the start - clumsily done. For me, anyway - and I don’t have any Sixth sense Had it been done with more skill (difficult, given the nature of the premise) then it could have been a fantastic movie and I’d have stayed with it. When I read “So, all of that being said, I'd like to suggest a movie where almost all of these methods come into play all within a ninety minute space, and that I thoroughly enjoyed MUCH more than I ever could have guessed that I would. And that movie is...” I already had another old movie in mind - Irwin Allen’s brilliant The Poseidon Adventure (the original and best), with Gene Hackman, released 50 years ago in 1972. I recently snagged an eBay bargain of the restored blu ray and it’s well worth watching both for entertainment (great cast, characters, story and all the sets and stunts are real - no CGI) and to see a good example of what you’ve been saying, as it delivers many of the points you make in this blog

Henry V 1943/4 - William Walton Today is Shakespeare’s birthday and to celebrate here are two brief pieces from the music William Walton composed for this movie version of Shakespeare’s famous play. Amazingly, given the economic state of the nation, it was made in glorious Technicolor (it used the only colour camera and film stock Britain had) Opening scene at the Globe Theatre as the eager crowd gather for the performance Passacaglia: Death of Falstaff