Art Intelligence/ Geoengineering/ Deepmind’s Isomorphic/ Video Game Cities and Real Ones/ The Right Time To Yell “Fire”!/ How To Govern The Metaverse
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale Bioyards, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Art Intelligence. For once I am going to write about a different kind of AI, Art Intelligence. This week Alphabet has announced Isomorphic, a new company based on DeepMind’s AlphaFold2. The announcement around its launch is, as usual, very “grand” claiming of a new era and of an AI-first approach to drug discovery. The Guardian article in this week’s Antidisciplinarian makes a very important point: that having an (extremely powerful) machine learning platform is not sufficient to do what they claim they can do. Mastering correlation is not like mastering causation, so the author of the article.
I would like to push it even further, as to really understand causation one needs to understand and embrace the complexity of Nature. One of the biggest limitations, preventing us from really leveraging the power provided by machine learning and algorithms, is that we are applying a very strong reductionist mindset to something that is intrinsically not reductionist: nature. And this problem is not confined to nature, every application of AI to complex adaptive systems has the same set of issues.
It is not a minor point, as all the advancements happening on the digital front have been relying on reductionism, where the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. If you marry this with an extractive mindset, then the two reinforce each other, severely limiting what can be achieved.
On the other side, artists are the category that is, in my view, most advanced in dealing with generative, causation, complexity, and bridging digital and physical. I had written about it back in 2016, stating that AI and machine learning will become the new brushes and chisels of artists, and it is a joy to follow the work of artists like Refik Anadol and Sougwen. We can learn a lot from their work, and how to shape the future, as they are currently (beautifully) pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
I had a chance to admire live Anadol’s latest impressive work last week in Berlin (see foto below). According to his website: „Anadol is intrigued by the ways in which the digital age and machine intelligence allow for a new aesthetic technique to create enriched immersive environments that offer a dynamic perception of space… …particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence.“
I have been following Sougwen since I had the pleasure of co-curating her TED talk for TED@BCG. She was one of the speakers at the House of Beautiful Business a few weeks ago. I continue to be deeply impressed by her work. Sougwen pushes it even further, as she moves to direct interaction with AI and robots to produce her art. To me, this (Anadol and Sougwen’s work) is the future not only for art but more in general for human-technology collaboration and for being able to fully embrace the complexity of the world we live in.
Hopefully both their approaches find their way from being applied in an artistic context to the industry and the business world.
Almost 30 years before Facebook renamed itself Meta, and it became the buzzword of 2021, the metaverse was the brainchild of author Neal Stephenson. In his 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, Stephenson coined the term, and his vision for the metaverse was surprisingly prescient. Stephenson predicted innovations that include "an encrypted electronic currency, similar to today’s cryptocurrencies," and virtual reality headsets. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg's optimistic vision for Meta, Stephenson's book "imagines a bleak future: The global economy has collapsed, and federal governments have lost most of their power to a handful of giant corporations."
Stephenson's latest novel, Termination Shock, tackles "human-generated climate change, projecting a near future of extreme weather and social chaos." In a recent interview with CNBC, he spoke at length about the urgency of slowing down climate change through geoengineering and eventually reducing it through carbon capture innovation. When asked about his thoughts on how the term 'metaverse' has been co-opted, Stephenson responded:
"All I can do is kind of sit back and watch it in amazement." But, as many have noticed, "There's a pretty big gap between what Facebook is actually doing, like running Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, and the visions that they're talking about for the metaverse."
News items:
Google and Microsoft have targeted 2030 for producing and running on 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) by 2030.
Alphabet's DeepMind recently launched a new pharmaceutical venture called Isomorphic Labs. According to Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO at DeepMind, Isomorphic's goal is "reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach." Isomorphic's tech may play a role in solving the complex problem of protein folding - unlocking how proteins function and take 3D shape. While this potential breakthrough could be useful, John Naughton, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at Open University, cautions that any claims that its tech is revolutionary should be taken with a pinch of salt. According to Naughton:
Isomorphic's tech "is not anything that is artificially intelligent, but simply machine learning, a technology of which DeepMind is an acknowledged master. AI has become a classic example of Orwellian newspeak adopted by the tech industry to sanitize a data-gobbling, energy-intensive technology that, like most things digital, has both socially useful and dystopian applications."
News items:
Apple's new Macbook Pros - powered by its custom-designed M1 Pro and M1 Max processors - are being hailed as the best laptops ever made. Not only that, "The chips portend a future absolutely saturated with computing power."
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With an estimated 3B people playing video games worldwide and a growing number of "obsessive role players" spending much of their waking lives in virtual cities in games like Grand Theft Auto, the "the interplay between digital and natural urban spaces" is taking on increased significance. Virtual urban planning is essential to "the sort of immersion that makes for great gameplay." According to Konstantinos Dimopoulos, a game designer with a Ph.D. in urban planning who teaches at creative media institute SAE Athens:
"Every city has to be internally cohesive - realism leads to believability. And that believability can lead to the sort of spatial immersion we crave, this sense of being in this new digital realm as an entity yourself."
News items:
Hyundai recently unveiled DOSS, a "sophisticated leg-and-wheel locomotion robot" that "can perform a variety of missions, including surveillance, reconnaissance, and transportation of goods and injured soldiers."
As 2021 draws rapidly to a close, the inevitable annual "Best of" lists are beginning to make their appearance. Strategy & Business has made an unorthodox choice for Best Business Book of 2021 with a collection of essays from MIT Press titled Your Computer Is On Fire. According to VentureBeat: "Your computer is on fire in part, [the] authors argue, because of automation that perpetuates racism and sexism, and the growth of resource-intensive data centers and the cloud at a time when climate change is an existential threat for the planet." In its review, Strategy & Business says: "The authors fearlessly dismantle the technology industry's most sacred assumptions, forcing a rethinking of everything we've come to accept as true about our digital lives and the multibillion-dollar digital transformations going on inside our companies."
According to essay author, University of Tulsa professor Benjamin Peters: "Tech will deliver on neither its promises nor its curses, and tech observers should avoid both utopian dreamers and dystopian catastrophists. The world truly is on fire, but that is no reason it will either be cleansed or ravaged in the precise day and hour that self-proclaimed prophets of profit and doom predict. The flow of history will continue to surprise."
A new study shows astonishing progress toward an emerging use for brain/computer interfaces: giving a voice to people who cannot speak.
As Neal Stephenson opined above - life in the metaverse may not be as imminent as Mark Zuckerberg and Roblox founder/CEO David Baszucki would have you believe. But as the real-world stakes of Virtual Reality get raised, the ability to mete out appropriate punishments to bad actors is of growing concern. Online multiplayer games may help guide us to justice in the metaverse.
Now that reports of virtual reality sexual assault and theft of items in online multiplayer games are commonplace, how are platforms ensuring appropriate consequences for virtual crimes and bad behavior? Riot Games experimented with (and abandoned) Tribunals - a form of community self-governance - in its popular game League of Legends. But "co-opting members of the community to do difficult, time-consuming, and emotionally laborious moderation work for free is not exactly an ethical business model."
Hiring Community Managers to police virtual spaces shows promise, but "unfortunately, CMs are currently incredibly undervalued, undertrained, and underpaid, and frequently face a barrage of death threats, rape threats, and other forms of abuse from the users they are hired to care for." Approaches to governance in gaming are imperfect. But, according to Lucy Sparrow, PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne:
"By continuing to draw on our rich experiences in multiplayer gaming to explore the community-driven, inclusive, and empowering potentials of VR, we can help build digital communities we actually want to be a part of. The quality of our virtually-real lives depends on it."
News items:
What do humans do with the double-edged sword of AI when according to sociobiologist E.O. Wilson: "We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology?" Gary Grossman, writing for VentureBeat, argues: "Now is the time for meaningful AI regulations and standards. An AI bill of rights is an important and useful step in that direction."