Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.66: Electricity and the consumption of power: an exercise in machine learning.

Fresh from the triumph of managing to get through, and actually speak to somebody from my electricity provider. I started thinking about the consumption of electricity by different appliances and particularly by those that sit quietly in the background consuming electricity without anyone really noticing what are called phantom appliances. And I then thought this could be a good test case for machine learning, so I started to find out if I could do it.

Episode 8.65: The arrival of chatGPT-4 and some reflections about coding.

We discuss GPT-4 and consider some data structures in python.

Episode 8.64: The trans-human and it’s implications for human knowledge.

We like to think that the way human beings think is the way the world works. The ultimate human theory is something that can be printed in a formula on a T-shirt. But trans-human artificial intelligence suggests something different: that the universe may not be intelligible at all in terms of such simple theories; that big data may exhibit patterns that rely on more dimensions of simultaneous perception than any human is capable of perceiving.

Episode 8.63: Thinking many things at once in many dimensions. Why chatGPT is already trans-human.

We think about one sense in which a chatbot may already be trans-human. That is because it is trained to deal with multiple dimensions of information both in terms of the training data, and in terms of its neural net architecture, it is intrinsically multidimensional. Human brains at least in their non-conscious form may similarly be multidimensional, but a conscious mind is very one-dimensional and that makes it very difficult for us to understand some of the solutions that a chatbot my present to us. We consider one response by my fine-tuned model based upon Marcus Aurelius, as an example of the dilemma that we face. We also consider the black box problem of not being able to understand, as human beings, conclusions and modes of argumentation that are trans-human because they lie by definition in a domain more sophisticated than we are.

Episode 8.62: Polynomial and Non-Polynomial time. Implications for conversation lengths.

We consider the way a chatbot evaluates the previous conversation, how that makes its computational time increase exponentially and must impose a serious limit on how long any conversation with it can be. We look at that in the context more generally of the way we converse and the chatbot responds to conversations: with humility, gracefulness, affirmation and courtesy.

Episode 8.61: On the unreasonable efficiency of chatGPT and some of the implications for us.

I have my first experience of the chapel writing, a complete python program that works straight away to download the details of this podcast series from the Anchor website.

Episode 8.60: Results of an embedding experiment.

We pick a text and compare it with four others texts using embedding.

Episode 8.59: Using embedding to compare similar and dissimilar texts and the results.

From episode 58 of series 8 an embedding is a way of comparing so I thought that I would do a little bit of experimentation on texts similar and dissimilar from different texts to fraudulent texts that are manufactured and see what the results were, and the results were exactly what you would hope.

Episode 8.58: Embeddings and Encodings: differences, similarities and uses in chatGPT and its cousins.

The ways in which we encode the natural language text that we use in order to communicate with a chatbot are fundamental to its effectiveness and its efficiency. Unfortunately, terminology like “embedding” and “encoding” tends to get thrown around with a certain amount of abandon as though the two are the same, when they are not. We start exploring the differences and seeing under what circumstances each of these techniques is used.

Episode 8.57: ChatJCP is the 300th episode of Unmaking Sense. We celebrate JCP’s immortality.

This is the 300th episode of a Unmaking Sense: Living the Present without Mortgaging the Future. Thanks to all my listeners who have stayed with me on this long journey. We celebrate by considering the possibility that by customising a chat bot like chatGPT with our personal characteristics as a final fine-tuned wrapper, we might achieve a kind of immortality.