Collapse of generative AIs?

Some people are starting to predict a collapse of generative AIs, but I am perhaps more skeptical of the AI skeptics than of AI itself. The fact is that nobody, even the AI gods, don't know for sure. Butterfly effects are everywhere. It is difficult to predict the future, not only for AI (predictive AIs have bad track records) but also for humans.

Having said that, it may be argued that the road from intelligence (natural or artificial) to economic prosperity is not straightforward. Intelligent people do not necessarily make a lot of money. The correlation between IQ and income, if any, is very weak. Even if AI makes great progress from here, it does not necessarily follow that individuals or companies employing AI would be more productive.

The key missing link would be the embodiment of intelligence. Even if there is high intelligence, there need to be cleverly crafted schemes to make it socially and economically relevant. A newly discovered theorem in mathematics, for example, might provide brand new encryption schemes. In order for it to be materialized, certain sets of requirements need to be satisfied. The same goes for the road from AI to new cures of cancer, innovative ways to curb aging, and realization of nuclear fusion, all of which, needless to say, would provide huge utility and result in economic gains.

The benefits of AI are indirect compared to new energy resources. Right now, humans are converting a lot of energy into a huge amount of compute in the hope to achieve AGI and ASI. Even if humans are successful in that feat, ways to employ the superb intelligence to increase utility need to be considered. The societal and economic embodiment of AI towards increased utility would be part of the AI alignment schemes in general, and one of the most crucial challenges of our time.

Why Elon Musk is so powerful.

Mr Musk has been a marvel for obvious reasons, but in the last few weeks his influence has gown out of proportions. The bromance with Mr Donald Trump, the President-elect, is certainly a factor, but that alone cannot explain the Musk phenomenon that is sweeping the globe now. 

Wise people have always argued that it is not that AI would take over humanity. It would rather be that humans empowered by AI would overwhelm people less fortunate. The Musk phenomenon, bolstered by his success in Tesla and SpaceX, was given the crucial boost by his purchase of twitter (now converted to X). The house-made Grok is always on X, and X is evidently the embodiment of AI-powered dominance of the world, at least somewhere on the roadmap. Mr Musk has been one of the founders of Open AI. With his new startup xAI and much beyond to come, together with the track record of serial successes, give Mr. Musk power in reality and in imagination. If he could win in choosing sides in the American Presidential election, probably he will win in this arms race of AI towards AGI and ASI, at least will be on the winning side, an educated guess will suggest.

So as Mr. Musk goes about the business of interfering with European politics, even suggesting to King Charles to dissolve the parliament, there is an image of a man stroking a trademark white cat. AI would not conquer humans. People smart enough to employ AI would conquer humans. Mr. Musk is at the right place at the right time with the right track record. How the rest will turn out to be history is yet to be seen.

We don't understand what the language game is.

In board games such as chess, go, and shogi, the AIs have beaten human champions. Indeed, today, nobody is in the doubt as to whether AIs have edge over humans. The battle between AIs and humans are over in these fields.

When it comes to Large Language Models, the situations is not so clear. Although people are generally under the impression that the Turing test is now probably moot, especially because you can formulate the arguments in any ways you prefer, there is no clear measure to judge whether LLMs are doing the job better than humans.

The fundamental problem is our lack of understanding of the nature of the language game. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein described it in a passing manner in his Philosophical Investigations, the description is far from adequate. To this day, we do not have a clear model of what the language game is.

We humans don't know what the language game is exactly, and yet we engage ourselves in it every day. The Large Language Models are being developed and employed without a definite idea of what cognitive function it is addressing.  

How to measure the intelligence of AGI and/or ASI/

As we go on the road to AGI and/or ASI, there is a genuine problem of how to measure intelligence. IQ is based on the assumption of a Gaussian distribution and deviation from the mean as ratio to standard deviation, so it cannot be applied to AI far removed from humans.

Assessing intelligence purely by the vastness of memory and the speed of calculation would be a part of the equation, but not the essential part. Defining AGI and ASI in terms of the tasks they could perform would be helpful, but then we humans might not be able to conceptualize all the relevant tasks.

There is also the problem of Vingean uncertainty and xAI. If ASI ever materializes, it might not be possible for us humans to understand its functionality. It would be difficult to require explainable performance because that would mean mediocrity within the range of human intelligence.

The only hope would be instrumental convergence. Here, defining AGI and ASI in terms of embodied cognition would prove robust and essential.

Formalization of numbers.

I always felt that there was something strange about the way the concept of numbers are formalized by set theory or category theory. Although the concept of numbers do have some problems, unless we deal with infinities there does not seem to be an urgent need for formalization, as far as calculations are concerned, including complex numbers.

Humans seem to have an intuitive understanding of numbers, on par with qualia. By trying to formalize numbers by set or category or other theories, something extra is added, and there are consequently some "evil questions" that shouldn't be asked, as numbers represented by these formalisms have something external to our intuitive understanding of numbers. 

I am not saying that attempts at formalization are meaningless. I just feel that numbers should be treated on the same footing as qualia. Just as attempts at formalizing qualia do not go well, formalization of numbers is bound to be unsatisfactory, because such an approach is not addressing the essential nature of numbers directly. 

An entertainment of one's own. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl by Nick Park, released from Aardman @aardman

It is so wonderful when grownups do their best to entertain children and the inner children in our hearts.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) is such a labour of love, that when you imagine all the efforts and ingenuity that went into it you almost wanted to cry.

I saw it on Netflix in Tokyo on the release day.

The opening sequence of Heath Robinson gadgets achieving feats of waking up, body washing, changing clothes, and breakfast preparation would put a smile on everyone's face. The new invention by Wallace, a robot gnome for whom "no job is too small", invokes an alarm in the viewers' mind when the AI assisted agent goes about tidying up the garden. The contrast between a more contemporary, naturalistic gardening principles and the old school geometrical garden making enforced by the gnome is cleverly slipped into the plot.

The liberal arts hight standards of the animation is evident, for example, when the disgruntled Gromit, chased away from the usual habitat by the Wallace's-favour-winning gnome, reads none other than Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in bed.

The beauty is that the cleverness is never imposed upon the viewer. The AI alignment problem is clearly one of the themes, where an artificial agent designed with good intentions can cause unintentional havoc. The Waluigi effect, where an AI made as Luigi (a good guy) can turn into a bad guy (Waluigi) through a slight loss of balance, is one of the hidden themes of the film. Indeed, the whole film could be considered as a statement on AI safety, but the sheer entertainment value completely wraps it up, so that you don't have to notice to enjoy the story.

Children are very sensitive and they take messages with astonishing efficiency and sincerity. The fact that a number of grownups (I presume) of the Aardman clan led by the great Nick Park has produced such a sparkle joy for kids is a glimmer of hope at this otherwise gloomy turn of quarter century.

A final spoiler alert: You should take the art of old school tea making very seriously.

Queen of Hearts. Diane Morgan in Cunk on Life.

Cunk on Life, starring Diane Morgan as the cleverly irrelevant interviewer and interrogator Philomena Cunk, is a delightful repeat of this hugely popular franchise as well as a courageous trial at things sometimes shockingly and delightfully new. 

The hallmark deadpan dialogues with experts are still there (I wonder how the interviewees can keep straight faces confronted by Diane Morgan in the set), and the scripts are masterfully written, although I suspect there must be many ad-libs. There is something profoundly interesting in the way the Cunk character succeeds in producing laughter, by exposing something vulnerable in the experts or expert knowledge. It is quite all right, because that would be the job description for the experts involved. Well done.

Cunk is almost always beside the point, but in an up-to-date, politically aware (not necessarily correct, which is unfortunately important in today's cultural climate) way. Personally, Cunk somehow reminds me of Socrates, in that the ultimate wisdom can be only expressed in terms of self-acknowledged ignorance. But then Socrates was perhaps one of the first recorded comedians, and arguably one of the best ever.

When dealing with venerable issues such as religion, classic art, and theory of evolution, Cunk nonchalantly throws modern and contemporary items such as mobile phone, AI, and her mate Paul, which may appear inappropriate for the casual observer, but ultimately prove very relevant. After all, in Cunk on Life we are in a timeless zone, where things grand and trivial, meaningful and meaningless, noble and vulgar meet. 

That's the kind of place where genuine creativity happens, and Philomena Cunk reigns as the Queen of Comedy, as well of Hearts. The warm heart was felt, for example,  when the fourth wall was broken, and the sound guys were given the credit that were due. Wonderful stuff created by wonderful staff.  

We are all in the Big Bang gang, by the way.

Cunk on Life. BBC2 and Netflix.

Ken Mogi bio, contact, and profile photos.

 

Ken Mogi is a neuroscientist, writer, and broadcaster based in Tokyo. Ken Mogi is a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, and a visiting and project professor at the University of Tokyo. He leads the Collective Intelligence Research Laboratory (CIRL) at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo, together with Takashi Ikegami. He has a B.A. in Physics and Law, and Ph.D in Physics, from the University of Tokyo. He has done postdoctoral research in University of Cambridge, U.K. He has published more than 300 books in Japan covering popular science, essay, criticism, self-help, and novels. Ken Mogi published several bestsellers in Japan (with close to million copies sold). He was the first Japanese to give a talk at the TED main stage, in 2012 (Long Beach). 

As a broadcaster, Ken Mogi has hosted and is hosting many tv and radio programs, in stations including the national broadcaster NHK, and Discovery Channel Japan. He has also appeared in several international programs, such as Closer to Truth and a Bloomberg documentary hosted by Hannah Fry.

Ken Mogi has a life-long interest in understanding the origin of consciousness, with the focus on qualia (sensory qualities of phenomenal experience) and free will. Ken Mogi’s book on IKIGAI, published in 35 countries and in ~30 languages, has become a global bestseller. The German version of IKIGAI was the No.1 bestselling book in nonfiction in Germany for 38 cumulative weeks in 2024. Ken Mogi’s book with Thomas Leoncini, Ikigai in Love, was published in 2020. Ken Mogi's third book in English, The Way of Nagomi, came out in the U.K. in 2022 and in the U.S. in January 2023. Ken Mogi's fourth book, Think Like a Stoic, will come out in July 2024.

 

Contact:

e-mail:kenmogi2005qualia@gmail.com

X: @kenmogi

Instagram: @qualiaken

Ken Mogi profile photos.

You can download large files by clicking on the URL below.

Ken Mogi photos by Itaru Hirama (2021)

 

 

The self and the diversity of qualia.

The individualities of qualia are defined in the framework of the self, so in that sense, the uniqueness of qualia and the uniqueness of the self must be dual. The self is large enough to contain the diversity of qualia that we experience.

Within that diversity, self-consciousness occupies a special role. Self-consciousness itself is neutral, prior to any specific instances of qualia. However, the neutrality of self-consciousness is large enough to embrace the great diversity of qualia.

I LIKE MOVIES, written and directed by Chandler Levack.

I LIKE MOVIES (2022), written and directed by Chandler Levack, is a wonderfully realistic depiction of the growing pains of a young person. 

I saw it in a Tokyo theater.

The protagonist of the film, Lawrence Kweller, a movie geek in a rural town in Canada, is convincingly played by Isaiah Lehtinen. The uniquely moving aspect of this piece is that there is nothing particularly unique about the Lawrence character, except that he loves movies too much. As a result of his passion, Lawrence ruins relationships, and his greatest dream of going to NYU (spoiler alert!) does not materialize, as should be in a true-to-heart depiction of the tumultuous period of the typical adolescence.  

Lawrences's efforts to make it in life as a film director reflects the experience of Levack herself. The gender swap was well-thought and clever, resulting in an answer song to Lady Bird (2017). New York, or the United States in general, symbolically seen from the locality of Canada in which this masterpiece is situated would find resonance in many people's heart. The closing of the film is in a sense a self-assertion of the "True North" (a self-referential phrase in the Canadian national anthem), well fitting for a nation that produced similarly humanistic delights such as the sitcom Schitt's Creek in recent years. The paying of respect to the first nation people at the end of the credit roll was fitting and truly like Canada. 

AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor was a very interesting read. The authors make a salient point that compared to generative AIs, predictive AIs perform very badly. From gun shootings to the prospect of a person's academic performance, or from the next hit song to the breakout of civil wars, AI technologies categorically cannot predict the future. For sure, humans are equally bad at predicting, but the point is that AIs cannot be expected to do any better. Any illusion on this would lead to snail oil.

In addition to the disaster of predictive AI, another related, and significant deficiency of AI is content moderation. The authors argue how and why filtering out potentially harmful posts on the social media are hard. Some of the difficulties come from the incredible ingenuity of humans to bypass any perceived restrictions or algorithmic structuring. A side effect of this is that a lot of people need to be employed to label bad contents manually, a task with negative effects on mental health. 

Topics such as top-N accuracy, the Gartner hype cycle, and the reproducibility crisis in AI research are very effectively analyzed and streamlined. I recommend anyone interested in AI's status quo and beyond to read this wonderfully written book.  

CALL ME THE GOAT show by Daisuke Muramoto

I went to the CALL ME THE GOAT show by Daisuke Muramoto (20th December 2024), at Tokyo's Nissho hall, a prestigious venue which has been used for recordings of NHK programs in the past. I have been following his act over the last decade, as he made efforts to change the comedy culture in Japan, which rarely provides critical views on politics and social issues. I am a friend of his, and have expressed sympathy with his struggles to establish the standup comedy culture here in this country.

At the beginning of the show, Daisuke explained that GOAT, which is an acronym for Greatest OF All Time, meant that somebody was really good at something, arguably the no.1 in the genre (he actually did not explain the acronym explicitly). It was with this bold self-assertion, entirely justified in my view, that he set the stage for his highly anticipated comeback to the Japanese stage. Daisuke now lives in New York, appearing in Comedy Clubs throughout the city.

The topics covered were wide-ranging. The aftermath of earthquakes, peer pressure, street culture in New York, learning English, the not-so-smooth relationships between Japan, Korea, and China, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Donald Trump, Dragon Ball, communication and miscommunication, tattoos, nuclear power plants, love life, and, needless to say, Japanese politics. The climax of the act was when Daisuke described, with awe and joy but not forgetting his comedy, a chance encounter with his comic hero, Chris Rock, in a New York ramen restaurant. 

Through the act, Daisuke clearly showed that he is indeed GOAT, at least in Japan, and as far as standup comedy is concerned. It now remains for him to show that he is GOAT in the United States of America as well. That would surely be an uphill climb, but it would be exciting to watch the process, even if he ends up being a Don Quixote.

Through coverages such as the documentary film I AM A COMEDIAN following his life, Daisuke's journey as an evangelist of standup comedy came to be widely known in Japan. Now that Daisuke has moved to New York, with the aim of making it in the United States, his dream of becoming a Shohei Ohtani of comedy has found resonance in the hearts of many people dissatisfied by the status quo of Japanese laughter. Mainstream Japanese media do not broadcast critical comedy. Japanese laughter tends to be focused on physical acts, simplistic slapsticks, or observation of personal relationships under the assumption of peer pressure, and the tv producers, including those from the public broadcaster NHK, are notoriously shy of putting something equivalent to The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live on air.

But perhaps the times are changing. The stagnation of Japanese economy for three decades has raised the awareness of a need for a change in its culture, including that of comedy. Japanese people are now exposed to American and British comic acts through the internet in general and streaming platforms such as Netflix. The disappearance (which may be temporary) of Hitoshi Matsumoto from Japanese tv has put a huge question mark on the mainstream comedy culture here.

I hugely enjoyed Daisuke's CALL ME THE GOAT show, and I wish him well. I sincerely hope that he will be successful in New York and elsewhere. I am looking forward to his appearance in SNL! 

At the least, on this December evening, Daisuke Muramoto's earnest efforts to make people laugh in the Nissho Hall, while facing the realities of Japanese society, have moved the hearts of people, including my own.

The White Book by Han Kang

This was a work of revelation and inspiration in many senses. In parts, it read like Yoko Ono's wonderful Grapefruit. Images far reaching and penetrating were woven in terms of crystal clear words and poignant and sometimes even murky expressions. 

This was my second reading of Han Kang, after The Vegetarian, and surely would not be my last. I admire the writer very much. In a sense, reading The White Book helped me understand the merits of Han Kang's writings. I think the famed Korean author is capable of exercising gymnastics in the universe of concepts, weaving contemporary arts using linguistic materials. This aesthetics, combined with a keen intellect embracing the universal and generic human values, makes Han Kang the one and only in the world literature today. 

Civil War produced by A24.

 Civil War produced by A24.

To my surprise and delight, the film was totally different from the cleverly crafted trailer I have seen earlier, the effect of which I suspect was intentional. While the teaser appeared like another rollercoaster thriller of previously trodden paths, the work I saw before me in a movie theatre in Tokyo was a fresh, thought-provoking take at a theme people might have long started to think is run-of-the-mill.

The cinematography was stunningly beautiful and inspiring. My favorite scenes are the car trip through the burning forest at night and the terrifying scene in the field with the uncredited appearance of Jesse Plemons, who stole the show all the same.

From the beginning to the controversial ending, the film's statement seemed to be that nothing is sacred. While the more lucky among us breathe in the comfort zones of civilization, the reality of the world is that many people are suffering in chaos, right now, as I write this. There is no moat of presumed privileged society for people, even those in such a superb nation as the United States of America.

I am a great fan of A24, ever since I saw Lady Bird in 2017. It is reassuring that my trusted brand in the film industry took this creative approach to what is often treated as a mundane subject resting on the assumption of bipartisanship in the traditional media. Here's to the spirit of film-making and journalism.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a work of precision and structure. Although the novel deals with emotionally charged difficulties of contemporary human existence, the storyline follows a tightly-knit sequence which almost has the impression of the inevitable.

Han Kang is a great story-teller, and The Vegetarian is a page-turner, in the literarily heavy-weight sense. The co-existence of literature of the highest caliber and the ability to attract a wide range of readers with the basic urge to read on reminds one of Dostoevsky.

The Vegetarian is a great work dealing with generic human truths, and commonly-found difficulties of the present day. The fact that the novel deals with problems of gender, abuse, social norms, and existential risks could have well turned out to be yet another example of politically correct treatise, but the result is far from so. The novel is full of pleasant surprises out of the norm.

The almost beautifully savage intellect of Han Kang has made this work the true fruit of labour of love, which hangs from a tree of life in a wild orchard where other masterpieces coming from this Korean novelists thrive half-cultivated and half-native, with yet more surprises to be uncovered.