Jonathan Bartlett
The Information Age Has Forgotten Formation
We need more than mere information. We need practices, habits, and experiences that will positively shape who we become.Oftentimes people try to use the wrong delivery method for the kind of content they are conveying. Here, I am going to talk about three different kinds of content, and how they differ in how best to deliver them. The three types of content we will be discussing are formational, informational, and transformational. Of these types of content, you are probably most familiar with informational content, as we are inundated with it in the information age. In fact, that is probably the primary problem I am addressing here. In the information age, we address all content as if it were informational content that can be delivered by informational means. In fact, we do have the best information delivery systems that have ever existed Read More ›
Autonomous Vehicles Are Catching Up Fast
There are winners and losers. GM's Cruise was kicked out of California over safety issues but Alphabet's Waymo, which emphasizes safety, is still chugging alongWell, some are, anyway, and there is a lesson in that. It’s been a while since I wrote on autonomous vehicles, but there has been quite a lot of action lately in this space, and I thought it was a good time to bring everyone up to speed. Waymo’s Level 4 system continually advances Once upon a time, Tesla was thought to be the industry leader in autonomous vehicles. Their 2016 “Paint It Black” demo convinced most of the world that Tesla was on the verge of having the technology to get people autonomously to and from any destination that could be mapped. Mind Matters News, however, was skeptical. The problem is simple—Tesla was betting on the wrong horse. There Read More ›
Framework for AI Legislation
Unfortunately, current calls for AI legislation seems to be largely motivated by fear of the unknown rather than looking for specific policy goals.The sudden rise of artificial intelligence (AI) into the Internet landscape has caused many people to be concerned. The people advancing AI seem to have few scruples about where and how it should be applied. This sudden technological change coupled with the fact that those on the forefront seem to be largely amoral opportunists have raised calls for legislation of AI technology. Unfortunately, current calls for AI legislation seems to be largely motivated by fear of the unknown rather than looking for specific policy goals. In this article, I am going to lay the groundwork for what I think good AI legislation will be. However, before I do that, I want to give some cautionary advice about such legislation. It wasn’t too long ago Read More ›
Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
What exactly is a human and how does a human differ from a computer?On December 27, The New York Times Company sued Microsoft and OpenAI for violations of their copyright. The Times contends that training chatbots on its content in order to create an information competitor is a violation of its copyright. This suit is sure to bring up a number of old copyright issues that were never resolved, plus some new that need to be worked through. The fact is, the big search engines have been violating copyright from the very beginning. All search engines are in fact derivative works of the sites that they crawl, index, and dish out. Most search engines even provide excerpts from the sites they scan. However, most copyright holders have turned a blind eye to this for two main Read More ›
Directed Goals in Living and Evolving Systems
Nearly every action that an organism does is for something.Teleology is the technical term for goal-directedness, especially when describing living systems. Teleology has been problematic in the sciences because of the amount of hand-waving that teleology has historically allowed. From the outside, it is difficult to tell if something happened because it was intended or if it just happened to be beneficial. Determining the precise goal can be problematic, even if an action is goal-directed. It is easy to construct a story about why an organism does an action, but how do we ascertain whether this story is true? When are attributions of teleology science, and when does it degenerate to mere invention? Additionally, the lack of ability to measure goal-directedness has often placed teleology in the realm of storytelling instead of science. Read More ›
Why Build Process Automation Matters
Automated build processes allow for the standardization and systematization of your development pipeline.Uber Achieves Profitability After Giving Up Self-Driving
The alternative taxi service has finally parted ways with its self-driving unitOf Infinity and Beyond
What are the problems and solutions with infinity in mathematics?The concept of infinity has plagued a great many proofs, both formal and informal. I think that there are two foundational problems at play in most people’s thinking about infinity that causes issues. The first problem people have with infinity is that they treat it as if it were a single value. Because infinity is bigger than all possible natural numbers, people assume that it is bigger than any number, and therefore there is nothing beyond infinity. Therefore, people have the concept that if I have two infinities, then I still have the same number. They believe that 2 * infinity = infinity. However, using that logic can quickly lead to contradictions. This problem is exacerbated by much mathematical notation. People often will Read More ›
Why Is Object-Oriented Programming Popular?
This method makes programmers think more systematically about their codeProgramming practice has gone through several evolutions in its lifespan. The first phase might be considered the “exploratory” phase, where there were no rules but a lot of imagination. People wrote code that was simultaneously amazing and terrible—amazing at what people got their slow computers to do, but terrible in that no one but the author would ever be able to maintain the programs. The lessons learned from the exploratory phase led to what is known as “structured” programming. The goal of structured programming was to be able to write programs that someone else had a chance of reading and understanding. Structured programming favored having really well-documented inputs and outputs to every function, very clear entry and exit points to each function, and Read More ›
The Microservices Controversy from a Software Management Perspective
As projects get bigger, so do the reasons for having a microservice architectureA new report by Amazon has caused a bit of a stir on the Internet. In it, the Amazon Prime video team reported that changing their architecture from a microservice architecture to a monolithic architecture resulted in a 90% cost savings. While the report itself was very mild (its only claim was that this architecture helped in this specific situation), it has caused the people who disliked the microservice trend to make some noise of their own. Here, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I see as the benefits of the microservice approach from a software development management perspective. If you are not familiar with microservice architectures, you can find out more information in my book, Cloud Read More ›
The Raspberry Pi Phenomenon
A Raspberry Pi is a full computer that is not much larger than a credit card, but still packs enough power to be usable as a desktop computerFor the uninitiated, the Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer that runs the Linux operating system. It can be either operated as a desktop computer or as an embedded system (i.e., a custom electronic device), or both. Historically, computer systems were either general-purpose computers or embedded systems. General-purpose computers required too much hardware, too many chips, and too much power to work inside an electronic device. However, as manufacturers packed more and more functionality into less and less space using less and less power, eventually it became possible to have a computer that was small, cheap, powerful, and not especially power-hungry. The Raspberry Pi came about right as this was happening. A Raspberry Pi is a full computer that is not much Read More ›
Aren’t US Treasury Bonds Supposed to be Safe?
How can you lose money selling treasury bonds?For context, read Bartlett’s two previous articles on the fall of SVB and interest rates. Some people are confused as to how you can lose money selling treasury bonds, since they are supposed to be “safe” assets (the government is not expected to default on its loans, and, if it does, the economy probably has bigger problems). Economist Bob Murphy put together a great explainer thread on Twitter, which I will largely follow here. Let’s say that there is an asset that always yields a 1% return every year on however much you have invested, but you never get the principal back except by selling it to someone else. Let us call this asset ABC, and let us say that it is Read More ›
Why Did the Tech Bubble Correspond with Low Interest Rates?
Ultimately, our economy’s deeper problems aren’t so much a result of “money” as they are bad allocations of resources.For context, read Bartlett’s article explaining the fall of SVB here. I wanted to make a quick note about why tech bubbles tend to correspond with low interest rate environments. Interest rates essentially dictate how long someone can wait before they need to produce something of real value. In a 20% interest rate environment, it will be evident really quickly if you are failing to produce something of value. Since essentially 1/5 of your capital disappears each year, if you aren’t doing something that will generate real profits quickly, you are sunk. You can’t paper over problems with more borrowing because the cost of that borrowing is so high. Additionally, in such an environment, the payoffs for investment need to be large Read More ›
What’s Going on at Silicon Valley Bank?
The bank's failure is making a lot of people nervous about their moneyMany people awoke this morning to news of a bank that suddenly collapsed – Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB. While information is still developing, I thought I would provide some background information on what is known so far. SVB is the go-to bank for Silicon Valley startups. Over the last few years, the tech bubble has been growing and growing and growing, focused especially around Silicon Valley. That meant a lot of banking was happening, and it was happening with SVB. That is where the various companies put their deposits. How does a bank make money? By lending out deposits. In 2021, at the height of the tech bubble (and, not coincidentally, at a historically low-interest rate environment). The bank did what most banks do Read More ›
The Need for Accountability in AI-Generated Content
Just because we live in a world of AI does not mean we can escape responsibilityAI-generated content has become increasingly common on the web. However, as we enter this new era, we will need to think through the moral and social ramifications of what we are doing, and how we should negotiate the new ethical landscape. But first, a brief recap of recent history. The first major player to pioneer AI-generated content was the Associated Press. AP realized that many market-oriented articles were pretty monotonous and read like templates anyway, so they decided to fully commit and auto-generate many of them. If you read an AP story about a company’s earnings report and it sounds eerily like every other story about other companies’ earnings reports, there’s a reason for that. Templated content, while annoying, provides window-dressing to raw Read More ›
Whatever You Do, Don’t Ask GPT for Sources
The chatbot will give you a lot of links that don't necessarily direct you where you want to goOne of the more amusing things I’ve found from OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT is the fact that it will very confidently provide you with sources on anything you ask—and they will often be completely made up. It will even provide fake (but real-looking) URLs for you! I stumbled across this feature when researching a previous GPT-3 article about how well it could write blog posts compared to real authors. I initially tried asking GPT-3 to include sources, and it generated complete nonsense for the sources. I decided that, for that article, sources were not the main question, so I left it out of the final queries. However, in response to my latest article about ChatGPT not being a Google replacement, someone commented Read More ›
Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google
With Google, the algorithm eventually leads you to content made by real people. With ChatGPT, you never leave the algorithmTo some extent, ChatGPT is a newer, easier-to-use interface than Google. Unlike Google, it doesn’t make you waste time by visiting those pesky websites. It not only looks into its database for content, but it also summarizes it for you as paragraphs. There is a problem lurking in there, however. Being computers, neither Google nor ChatGPT cares about the truth. They are algorithms, and they merely do as they are told. Additionally, you can’t code the human mind into algorithms. However, there is a fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what Google does that will prevent content generators like ChatGPT from displacing search engines like Google: Google eventually lets you out of its system. Ultimately, the goal of search Read More ›
GPT-3 Versus the Writers at Mind Matters
How does the AI fare when it is asked to write on topics covered in Mind Matters articles?In order to give a real-world comparison of the output of GPT-3 to human-written writing, I decided it would be a fun activity to see how OpenAI’s GPT-3 compares to Mind Matters on a variety of topics that we cover. Here, we are using OpenAI’s direct API, not ChatGPT, as there is a lot of evidence that ChatGPT responses have a human-in-the-loop. Therefore, we are going to focus on the outputs from their API directly. I used several criteria for article selection in order to even the playing field as much as possible. For instance, I only chose articles that did not depend on recent events. This way, GPT-3 is not disadvantaged for not having up-to-date material. However, I also Read More ›
How are Developers Using OpenAI’s Tools in their Software?
There are several interesting uses of the new AI tools, but time will tell which ones take offOpenAI has released two major tools for developers to make use of GPT-3 and DALL-E. GPT-3 is the radical new text generation tool, which generates large or small amount of texts from simple prompts. It can also classify text into categories GPT-3’s text-generation system forms the core of OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. DALL-E is an image generation tool, which creates images from text prompts. Together, these two tools provide today’s state-of-the-art in AI-based content generation. So how are developers making use of these new features? Today we are looking at several ways that these tools have been put to use. Basic Content Generation The core of GPT-3 is generating content from prompts. Whether for making blog posts, writing summaries, or Read More ›