AI Legislation: Can the US Regulate What It Does Understand Like a Dull Normal Student?
April 20, 2023
I read an essay by publishing and technology luminary Tim O’Reilly. If you don’t know the individual, you may recognize the distinctive art used on many of his books. Here’s what I call the parrot book’s cover:
You can get a copy at this link.
The essay to which I referred in the first sentence of this post is “You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand.” The subtitle of the write up is “Or, Why AI Regulations Should Begin with Mandated Disclosures.” The idea is an interesting one.
Here’s a passage I found worth circling:
But if we are to create GAAP for AI, there is a lesson to be learned from the evolution of GAAP itself. The systems of accounting that we take for granted today and use to hold companies accountable were originally developed by medieval merchants for their own use. They were not imposed from without, but were adopted because they allowed merchants to track and manage their own trading ventures. They are universally used by businesses today for the same reason.
The idea is that those without first hand knowledge of something cannot make effective regulations.
The essay makes it clear that government regulators may be better off:
formalizing and requiring detailed disclosure about the measurement and control methods already used by those developing and operating advanced AI systems. [Emphasis in the original.]
The essay states:
Companies creating advanced AI should work together to formulate a comprehensive set of operating metrics that can be reported regularly and consistently to regulators and the public, as well as a process for updating those metrics as new best practices emerge.
The conclusion is warranted by the arguments offered in the essay:
We shouldn’t wait to regulate these systems until they have run amok. But nor should regulators overreact to AI alarmism in the press. Regulations should first focus on disclosure of current monitoring and best practices. In that way, companies, regulators, and guardians of the public interest can learn together how these systems work, how best they can be managed, and what the systemic risks really might be.
My thought is that it may be useful to look at what generalities and self-regulation deliver in real life. As examples, I would point out:
- The report “Independent Oversight of the Auditing Professionals: Lessons from US History.” To keep it short and sweet: Self regulation has failed. I will leave you to work through the somewhat academic argument. I have burrowed through the document and largely agree with the conclusion.
- The US Securities & Exchange Commission’s decision to accept $1.1 billion in penalties as a result of 16 Wall Street firms’ failure to comply with record keeping requirements.
- The hollowness of the points set forth in “The Role of Self-Regulation in the Cryptocurrency Industry: Where Do We Go from Here?” in the wake of the Sam Bankman Fried FTX problem.
- The MBA-infused “ethical compass” of outfits operating with a McKinsey-type of pivot point?
My view is that the potential payoff from pushing forward with smart software is sufficient incentive to create a Wild West, anything-goes environment. Those companies with the most to gain and the resources to win at any cost can overwhelm US government professionals with flights of legal eagles.
With innovations in smart software arriving quickly, possibly as quickly as new Web pages in the early days of the Internet, firms that don’t move quickly, act expediently, and push toward autonomous artificial intelligence will be unable to catch up with firms who move with alacrity.
Net net: No regulation, imposed or self-generated, will alter the rocket launch of news services. The US economy is not set up to encourage snail-speed innovation. The objective is met by generating money. Money, not guard rails, common sense, or actions which harm a company’s self interest, makes the system work… for some. Losers are the exhaust from an economic machine. One doesn’t drive a Model T Ford. Today those who can drive a Tesla Plaid or McLaren. The “pet” is a French bulldog, not a parrot.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2023
Italy Has an Interesting Idea Similar to Stromboli with Fried Flying Termites Perhaps?
April 19, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Bureaucratic thought processes are amusing, not as amusing as Google’s Paris demonstration of Bard, but darned close. I spotted one example of what seems so darned easy but may be as tough as getting 15th century Jesuits to embrace the concept of infinity. In short, mandating is different from doing.
“Italy Says ChatGPT Must Allow Users to Correct Inaccurate Personal Information” reports in prose which may or may not have been written by smart software. I noted this passage about “rights”:
[such as] allowing users and non-users of ChatGPT to object to having their data processed by OpenAI and letting them correct false or inaccurate information about them generated by ChatGPT…
Does anyone recall the Google right to remove capability. The issue was blocking data, not making a determination if the information was “accurate.”
In one of my lectures at the 2023 US National Cyber Crime Conference I discuss with examples the issue of determining “accuracy.” My audience consists of government professionals who have resources to determine accuracy. I will point out that accuracy is a slippery fish.
The other issue is getting whiz bang Sillycon Valley hot stuff companies to implement reliable, stable procedures. Most of these outfits operate with Philz coffee in mind, becoming a rock star at a specialist conference, or the future owner of a next generation Italian super car. Listening to Italian bureaucrats is not a key part of their Italian thinking.
How will this play out? Hearing, legal proceedings, and then a shrug of the shoulders.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2023
Business Baloney: Wowza, Google Management Is on the Ball
April 19, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid
I read “Google CEO Sundar Pichai Broke the Rules on OKRs. Why It Worked.” I looked at this story in Inc. Magazine because Google has managed to mire itself in deep mud since Mr. Pichai (one half of the Sundar and Prabhakar Comedy Act) got top billing. Sucking the exhaust of the Microsoft marketing four-wheel drives strikes me as somewhat dispiriting.
Scribble Diffusion’s imagineering of a Google management meeting with slide rules, computing devices, and management wisdom. Art generated by smart software.
I will enumerate a few of these quicksand filled voids after I pull out two comments from the rather wild and wooly story which is infused with MBA think.
I noted this comment:
…in 2019, Pichai cut out quarterly OKRs altogether, choosing to focus solely on annual OKRs with quarterly progress reports. Pichai’s move might have gone against conventional OKR wisdom, but it made sense because _Google was no longer in startup mode._ [Editor’s note: The weird underscores are supposed to make my eyes perk up and my mind turn from TikTok to the peals of wisdom in the statement “Google was no longer in start up mode. Since I count Google as existing since Backrub, when Mr. Pichai took the stage, the company was 20 years old. Yep, two decades.]
Here’s another quote to note from the Inc. article:
Take shortcuts and do what you need to do to keep things afloat. [Editor’s Note: The article does not mention the foundation short cuts at the GOOG; specifically, [a] the appropriation of some systems and methods from a company to which Google paid before its IPO about a billion dollars in cash and other considerations and [b] a focused effort to implement via acquisitions and staff work a method designed to make sure that buyers and sellers of advertising both paid Google whenever an advertising transaction took place.]
Now the fruits of Mr. Pichai’s management approach:
- Personnel decisions which sparked interest in stochastic parrots, protests, staff walk outs, and the exciting litigation related to staff reductions. Definitely excellent management from the perspective of taking shortcuts
- Triggering a massive loss in corporate value when the Google smart software displayed its dumbness. Remember this goof emerged from the company which awarded itself quantum supremacy and beat a humanoid Go player into international embarrassment
- Management behavior — yep, personal behavior — which caused one Googler to try to terminate her life, not a balky Chrome instance, death by heroin on a yacht in the presence of a specialized contractor who rendered personal services, and fathering a Googler to be within the company’s legal department. Classy, classy.
What about the article? From my point of view, it presents what I would call baloney. I think there are some interesting stories to write about Google; for example, the link between IBM Almaden’s CLEVER system and the Google relevance method, the company’s inability to generate substantive alternative revenue streams, and the mystery acquisitions like Transformic Inc., which few know or care about. There’s even a personal interest story to be written about the interesting interpersonal dynamics at DeepMind, the outfit that is light years ahead of the world in smart software.
But, no. We learn about management brilliance. Those of you familiar with my idiosyncratic lingo I conceptualize Google’s approach to running its business as a high school science club trying to organize a dance party.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2023
SenseChat: Better Than TikTok?
April 18, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
In the midst of “chat”-ter about smart software, the Middle Kingdom shifts into babble mode. “Meet SenseChat, China’s Latest Answer to ChatGPT” is an interesting report. Of course, I believe everything I read on the Internet. Others may be more skeptical. To those Doubting Thomasinas I say, “Get with the program.”
The article reports with the solemnity of an MBA quoting from Sunzi or Sun-Tzu (what does a person unable to make sense of ideographs know?):
…SenseChat could tell a story about a cat catching fish, with multiple rounds of questions and responses.
And what else? The write up reported:
… the bot could help with writing computer code, taking in layman-level questions in English or Chinese and then translating them into a workable product.
SenseTime, the company which appears to “own” the technology is, according to the write up:
best known as a leader in computer vision.
Who is funding SenseTime? Perhaps Alibaba, the dragon with the clipped wings and docked tail. The company is on the US sanctions list. Investors in the US? Chinese government entities?
The write up suggests that SenseTime is resource intensive. How will the Chinese company satiate its thirst for computing power? The article “China’s Loongson Unveils 32 Core CPU, Reportedly 4X Faster Than Arm Chip” implies that China’s push to be AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm free is stumbling forward.
But where did the surveillance savvy SenseTime technology originate? The answer is the labs and dorms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tang Xiao’ou started the company in 2021. Where does SenseTime operated? From a store front in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or a shabby building on Route 128? Nope. The MIT student labors away in the Miami Beach of the Pacific Rim, Pudong, Shanghai.
Several observations:
- Chinese developers, particularly entities involved with the government of the Middle Kingdom, are unlikely to respond from letters signed by US luminaries
- The software is likely to include a number of interesting features, possibly like those on one of the Chinese branded mobiles I once owned which sent data to Singapore data centers and then to other servers in a nearby country. That cloud interaction is a wonderful innovation for some in my opinion.
- Will individuals be able to determine what content was output by SenseTime-type systems?
That last question is an interesting one, isn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2023
Google Is Humming Like a Well Oiled High School Science Club: A Sensitive Science Club
April 18, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I believe everything I read on the Internet. Therefore, I am accepting as the truth inscribed on the floor of the Great Pyramid of Giza. (It’s numbers in case you did not know this factoid.)
The article “Dream Job Nightmare: Google Leaves New Hire Jobless and Without an Apartment” reports this slick personnel move executed with extreme prejudice by the Google. Yep, that Google. I noted this statement in a letter quoted by BoingBoing:
Unfortunately, these [Google internal budget] reviews mean that we have had to make the difficult decision to terminate the contract of employment which you signed with Google UK Ltd, and this letter is formal notice of termination.
What makes this statement interesting is that the never hired but fired Googler is:
- The individual fired before starting the Google job lives in Russia
- Getting in and out of Russia is not a simple nor risk free process
- Getting a job in the gloom of the special operation in Ukraine is more difficult that it was before the tanks got mired on the road to Kiev.
I suppose there is an upside to this story: Opportunities exist to enlist in the Russian armed forces. With computer skills, there are openings in the computer branch of several Russian agencies. In fact the boss of one of the advanced persistent threat units may be seeking his future elsewhere.
I am impressed with the coordination within the Google human resources people unit. I think this is one more example of how Google works to maintain the management panache of a high school science club organizing a field trip to a junior cotillion dance.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2023
Good Enough Is Not Good Enough. Sorry, You Get an F from Me
April 17, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I have become increasingly concerned about the idea of good enough. Whether it is the quality of Amazon’s customer service or the work of a handyman planting bushes, the idea of excellence has vaporized.
How far has the rot of “good enough” chewed into the philosophy of over achievers? I would say that the wooden structure of excellence has been beavered into woodchips. The result is that the woodchips have clogged the stream, flooded basements, and drowned children and pets.
One outstanding example of “good enough” is the essay (thank heavens, the write up was not presented as “real” news) is “Being Mediocre Sets You Free.” I wonder if the author would have been able to submit this to William James as a required analysis of motivation in his Harvard psychology class in the 19th Century? My hunch is that Mr. James would have offered the aspiring student to consider might be called the pursuit of excellence.
The article posits as a truth which can be extended to cover a wide swath of intellectual ground ideas like this statement about being a so-so gardener:
There was no performance with this hobby. No end goal. No metric of success other than I suppose, do I enjoy it? And even enjoyment isn’t quite the right word for enjoyment has its own never ending metrics. I suppose gardening brings me a modest sort of happiness. It focuses me. It releases me from my head and my nerves. And that is quite enough.
The idea exerts a powerful magnetic pull on those who lack the gumption to commit to a task, master it, and deliver excellence. Who judges excellence? May I suggest it is a result obtained from others engaged in the same activity. What if the person does not enjoy the activity? My response is, “Suck it in. Do the job in the best way possible?”
Mediocrity provides the warmth and comfort of a heavy blanket filled with plasticized pellets. Excellence means cold fingers wrestling with flower bulbs or recalcitrant books in a library, making notes when others are working on pre-diabetes at a tavern, or slapping plaster in a careless manner in order to watch TikToks.
I don’t need to learn about good enough. I want work done in an excellent way. Good enough is a C. Average. Sure, there is comfort in the normcore. Why not find solace in excellence? Why define freedom as gray? The bright colors of life shine from doing one’s best.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2023
Google versus Microsoft: Whose Marketing Is Wonkier?
April 17, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I want to do what used to be called a comparison. I read Microsoft’s posts on April 12, 2023 (I don’t know for certain because LinkedIn does not provide explicit data and time information because who really cares about indexing anymore.) The first post shown in the screenshot is from the Big Dog himself at Microsoftland. The information is one more announcement about the company’s use of OpenAI’s technology in another Microsoftland product. I want to shout, “Enough already,” but my opinion is not in sync with Microsoft’s full-scale assault on Microsoft users. It is now a combination of effective hyperbole and services designed to “add value.” The post below Mr. Nadella’s is from another Softie. The main point is that Microsoft is doing smart things for providers and payors. My view is that Microsoft is doing this AI thing for money, but again my view is orthogonal to the company which cannot make some of its software print on office printers.
Source: LinkedIn 2023 at shorturl.at/egnpz. Note: The LinkedIn url is a long worm thing. I do not know if the short url will render. If not, give Microsoft’s search function a whirl.
Key takeaways: Microsoft owns a communications channel. Microsoft posts razzmatazz verbiage about smart software. Microsoft controls the message. Want more? Just click the big plus and Microsoft will direct more information directly at you, maybe on your Windows 11 start menu.
Now navigate to “Sundar Pichai’s Response to the Delayed Launch of Bard Is Brilliant and Reminds Us Why Google Is Still Great.” I want to cry for joy because the Google has not lost the marketing battle with Microsoft. I want to shout, “Google is number one.” I want to wave Googley color pom poms and jump up and down. Join me. “Google is number one.”
The write up strikes me as a remarkable example of lip flapping and arm waving; to wit:
Google secures its competitive advantage not necessarily by being the fastest to act, but by staying the course on why it exists and what it stands for. Innovation and product disruption is baked into its existence. From its operating models to its people strategy, everything gets painted with a stroke of ingenuity, curiosity, and creativity. While other companies may have been first to market with new technologies or products, Google’s focus on innovation and improving upon existing solutions has allowed it to surpass competitors and become the market leader in many areas.
The statements in this snippet are remarkable for several reasons:
- Google itself announced Code Red, a crisis. Google itself called Mom and Dad (Messrs. Brin and Page) to return to the Mountain View mothership to help figure out what to do after Microsoft’s Davos AI blizzard. Google itself has asked every employee to work on smart software. Now Google is being cautious. Is that why Googler Jeff Dean has invested in a ChatGPT competitor?
- Google is killing off products. The online magazine with the weird logo published “The Google Graveyard” in 2019. On April 12, 2023, Google killed off something called Currents. Believe it or not, the product was to replaced Google Plus. Yeah, Google really put wood behind the hit for a social media home run.
- The phrase “ingenuity, curiosity, and creativity” does not strike me as the way to sum up how Google operates. I think in terms of “poaching and paying for the GoTo, Overture, Yahoo online advertising inspiration,” perfecting the swinging door so all parties to an ad deal pay Google, and speaking like a wandering holy figure when answering questions before a legal body.
Key takeaways: Google relies on a PR firm or a Ford F 150 Lightning carrying Google mouse pads to get a magazine to write an article which appears to be a reality not reflected by the quite specific statements and actions of the Google.
Bottom-line: Microsoft bought a channel. Google did not. Google may want to consider implementing the “me too” approach and buy an Inc.-type publication. I am now going to be increasingly skeptical of the information presented by Inc. Magazine. I already know to be deeply suspicious of LinkedIn.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2023
Big Wizards Discover What Some Autonomy Users Knew 30 Years Ago. Remarkable, Is It Not?
April 14, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
What happens if one assembles a corpus, feeds it into a smart software system, and turns it on after some tuning and optimizing for search or a related process like indexing. After a few months, the precision and recall of the system degrades. What’s the fix? Easy. Assemble a corpus. Feed it into the smart software system. Turn it on after some tuning and optimizing. The approach works and would keep the Autonomy neuro linguistic programming system working quite well.
Not only was Autonomy ahead of the information retrieval game in the late 1990s, I have made the case that its approach was one of the enablers for the smart software in use today at outfits like BAE Systems.
There were a couple of drawbacks with the Autonomy approach. The principal one was the expensive and time intensive job of assembling a training corpus. The narrower the domain, the easier this was. The broader the domain — for instance, general business information — the more resource intensive the work became.
The second drawback was that as new content was fed into the black box, the internals recalibrated to accommodate new words and phrases. Because the initial training set did not know about these words and phrases, the precision and recall from the point of the view of the user would degrade. From the engineering point of view, the Autonomy system was behaving in a known, predictable manner. The drawback was that users did not understand what I call “drift”, and the licensees’ accountants did not want to pay for the periodic and time consuming retraining.
What’s changed since the late 1990s? First, there are methods — not entirely satisfactory from my point of view — like the Snorkel-type approach. A system is trained once and then it uses methods that do retraining without expensive subject matter experts and massive time investments. The second method is the use of ChatGPT-type approaches which get trained on large volumes of content, not the comparatively small training sets feasible decades ago.
Are there “drift” issues with today’s whiz bang methods?
Yep. For supporting evidence, navigate to “91% of ML Models Degrade in Time.” The write up from big brains at “MIT, Harvard, The University of Monterrey, and other top institutions” learned about model degradation. On one hand, that’s good news. A bit of accuracy about magic software is helpful. On the other hand, the failure of big brain institutions to note the problem and then look into it is troubling. I am not going to discuss why experts don’t know what high profile advanced systems actually do. I have done that elsewhere in my monographs and articles.
I found this “explanatory diagram” in the write up interesting:
What was the authors’ conclusion other than not knowing what was common knowledge among Autonomy-type system users in the 1990s?
You need to retrain the model! You need to embrace low cost Snorkel-type methods for building training data! You have to know what subject matter experts know even though SMEs are an endangered species!
I am glad I am old and heading into what Dylan Thomas called “that good night.” Why? The “drift” is just one obvious characteristic. There are other, more sinister issues just around the corner.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2023
Has the Interior Magic of Cyber Security Professionals Been Revealed?
April 14, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
The idea of “real” secrets is an interesting one. Like much of life today, “real” and “secret” depend on the individual. Observation changes reality; therefore, information is malleable too. I wonder if this sounds too post-Heisenberg for a blog post by a dinobaby? The answer is, “Yes.” However, I don’t care, particularly after reading “40% of IT Security Pros Say They’ve Been Told Not to Report a Data Leak.”
The write up states:
According to responses from large companies in the US, EU, and Britain, half of organizations have experienced a data leak in the past year with America faring the worst: three quarters of respondents from that side of the pond said they experienced an intrusion of some kind. To further complicate matters, 40 percent of IT infosec folk polled said they were told to not report security incidents, and that climbs to 70.7 percent in the US, far higher than any other country.
After reading the article, I thought about the “interior character” of the individuals who cover up cyber security weaknesses. My initial reaction is that individuals are concerned about their own aura of “excellence.” Money, the position each holds, the perception of others via a LinkedIn profile — The fact of the breach is secondary to this other, more important consideration. Upon reflection, the failure to talk about flaws may be a desire to prevent miscreants from exploiting what is a factual condition: Lousy cyber security.
What about those marketing assurances from cyber security companies? What about the government oversight groups who are riding herd on appropriate cyber security actions and activities?
Perhaps the marketing is better than the policies, procedures, software, and people involved in protecting information and systems from bad actors?
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2023
Professional Publishers: You Have Failed Big Time
April 14, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Over the years, I have done some small tasks for professional publishers. Don’t get me wrong. I love these firms, their editorial policies, their pricing models, and the quality of the content. (I won’t raise the issue of commercial funding of research-centric papers, the role of special interests related to certain medical articles, or the marketing-centric rah rah about smart software from grant seekers and frightened online advertising vendors. Will I mention non-reproducible results? Sure, many peer reviewed articles are glorified tweets. There you go.)
Midjourney’s rendering of a big roll of baloney similar to that contained in many peer reviewed articles.
I will, however, point you toward the essay “A Whole Lotta Money for Nothin’.” The article explains that the peer-review methods have not worked to advance knowledge. What has been advanced is movement on a tenure track, “proof” that a government entity granting funds has evidence about the location of the institution to which the grant is delivered, and revenue for professional publishing outfits.
I noted this statement in the essay:
Does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published? It doesn’t.
Plus, papers have errors or made up data (hello, president of Stanford University, have you resolved your data issue yet?)
I noted this passage as well:
When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor’s words, “a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.”
As I recall, I learned how to do footnotes following assorted style sheets. The discipline of mastering the correct style was more interesting to me than the baloney in some of the journal articles I cited.
Professional publishers, what’s up besides charging libraries so much for subscriptions to journals with questionable research? Never mind. Don’t answer. I know already.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2023
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