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Weeknotes 258 - physical AI in autonomous worlds

By Iskander Smit in weeknotes —

Notions from the news on robotics, AI and connected worlds. With interesting events.

"ubiquitous intelligent objects flocking our daily life at home", Midjourney

Hi, y’all!

Last week I miscalculated my vacation planning and newsletter timing and had to skip the weekly update. Returning on Monday evening and having to prepare for a workshop later that week in Hamburg occupied the calendar timewise and mentally… The workshop was very nice btw, part of the Hoodbot/Wijkbot toolkit for prototyping human-urban robot interactions. You can find a short report on the Wijkbot website.

This month, I am starting a new professional endeavour. More below at the end of this newsletter. First, let’s look at the news of last week.

Triggered thoughts

Hard Fork is definitely one of my favourite tech podcasts now. Almost every week they dive into topics that are top of my mind too and they say the right things adding the right examples, and are also very amusable to listen to.

This week's topic is about AI becoming tangible and entering physical products. Rewind, Humane AI pin, Meta Raybans. And OpenAI is teaming up with Jony Ive for the iPhone of AI. The AI promise is now mainly on the interaction making frictionless; they discuss what friction should remain friction. For me, it is more than those interactions, but also the consequences of living with an intelligence. It is something that is, of course, the foundation of the predictive relations thinking I started at TU Delft. This paper by Peicheng Guo is a nice exploration. And I feel like I need to close read this piece of Ethan Mollick: the shape of the shadow of the Thing.

Are we automating the simple stuff with stupid tools? Another angle in the post by Matt Webb this week, thinking about the consequences when intelligence is too cheap to meter. The predicted consequences of ubicomp, when almost everything we use day to day is computational, is a state we have almost reached. What if we have ubigpt? The intelligence has the same level of seamless integration. That connects to the physical AI that is starting to pop up. And to the state of predictive relations that can alienate or create another layer of consciousness. Something to explore further.

“Autonomous Worlds are not just worlds that happen to exist on-chain, but worlds that could not exist otherwise.” This event makes me curious…

Events

Speaking of events, these are some that are happening soon:

Notions from the News

I decided to limit it to last week; there is already so much. Unless there is some bigger story I should mention and save during my vacation… Also, I limit it to tech news, although the world has the danger of getting into a race to the bottom.

Israel’s Failure to Stop the Hamas Attack Shows the Danger of Too Much Surveillance
Hundreds dead, thousands wounded—Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel shows the limits of even the most advanced and invasive surveillance dragnets as full-scale war erupts.
WIREDCondé Nast

New AI capabilities: Arc browser combines OpenAI and Anthropic model, Object aware editing in Adobe AI photo, Canva Magic Studio, new Google Assistant

And mundane robots: a muffle voices. Or delegated people

In case you like to refresh your prompt engineering skills:

Prompt Engineering: Understanding the Potential of Large Language Models | HackerNoon
Whether you’re a developer integrating AI into your software or a no-coder, marketer, or business analyst adopting AI, prompt engineering is a MUST-HAVE skill t
apple-logoMuratcan Koylan

After finishing the writers strike, there is now some discussion on using generated AI images…

Disney’s Loki faces backlash over reported use of generative AI
A human designer isn’t likely to have made these mistakes.
The Verge

What is a photo? The computational photography on smartphones is the poster child for our synthetic reality

The Pixel 8 and the what-is-a-photo apocalypse
Google’s new AI photo editing tools could be a slippery slope.
The Verge

The success of NVIDIA stimulates other players to look into AI-focused chips. Like Microsoft and  OpenAI.

Instructions for AI-assisted decision-making, how to incorporate more heuristics and mental models into your life

AI-assisted Decision-making
How to use ChatGPT to master the best of what other people have figured out
Chain of ThoughtDan Shipper

AI as better validator

AI beats human sleuth at finding problematic images in research papers
An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person.
NatureAnil Oza

How about scale? “The natural world shows us how to grow without leaving behind a trail of ruin.”

Against Scale
The natural world shows us how to grow without leaving behind a trail of ruin.
Grow by GinkgoClaire L. Evans, Joana Huguenin

Choudary - who introduced an insightful model for the protocol economy - is now describing how to create value in Generative AI

How to lose at Generative AI!
When the old economy eats the new economy
Platforms, AI, and the Economics of BigTechSangeet Paul Choudary

Can people deal with an AI Sticker Generator?

Meta’s AI Sticker Generator Proves We Can’t Be Trusted
While the stickers can be innocent and cute, some prompts yield disturbing racial biases that show how AI can be abused.
HyperallergicRhea Nayyar

SmartThings everywhere; hubbing your home

Samsung just turned its soundbar into a SmartThings hub
The company is enabling Thread and Zigbee radios on its newest devices.
The Verge

An autonomous wheelchair sounds like a no-brainer at first, but as a second thought, do you want to delegate that final agency?

How this robotics student used NVIDIA Jetson to make an autonomous wheelchair - The Robot Report
Robotics developer Kabilan KB is bringing autonomous navigation to wheelchairs with the aim of helping improve mobility for people with disabilities.
The Robot ReportBrianna Wessling

Investing in robotics: an overview of companies

Robotics companies raise $851M in August 2023 - The Robot Report
The total amount of funding for 2023 to date is about $8.85 billion.
The Robot ReportDan Kara

Radicle Civics aims to explore alternative approaches for organising the future, focusing on pathways encouraging distributed agency and participation from a super-diverse public to challenge concentrations of power and responsibility.

Radicle Civics – Unconstituting Society
Building 21st century civic infrastructures
Radicle Civics – Unconstituting Society

CJ Trowbridge is doing an interesting analysis on TikTok. On Musk mainly, but also more generic. Or sometimes more focused on philosophy in general…

On the list for my next vacation:

Brutalist Italy book showcases “sometimes surprising” concrete architecture
A Star Wars-like cemetery extension and a cheese-shaped temple feature in this roundup, where photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego spotlight the best brutalist buildings from their book Brutalist Italy.
DezeenCajsa Carlson

Or maybe the Sphere? Kelly is describing on the platform aspects of this attention-grabbing object.

The Sphere, a new platform
You can see the Sphere from the air as you fly into Las Vegas. It is a monumental globe wrapped in pixels — a spherical screen. One moment the building is a gigantic eyeball blinking, the next it is morphed … Continue reading →
The TechniumKevin Kelly

Paper for this week

Beyond data transactions: a framework for meaningfully informed data donation

This model for literacy in data donations could go beyond use by researchers and designers.

In this paper, we investigate how to foster (personal) data literacy and increase donors’ understanding of their data. We introduce a Research through Design approach where we define a data donation journey in the context of speech records, data collected by Google Assistant.

Gomez Ortega, A., Bourgeois, J., Hutiri, W.T. et al. Beyond data transactions: a framework for meaningfully informed data donation. AI & Soc (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01755-5

See you all!

As mentioned above, my daily activities will shift. I have been working on shaping the design principles of the AI co-pilot, among others, for Structural in the last year. New funding is needed to continue the development, and in the meantime, the company is in hibernation. I will use the opportunity to focus on Cities of Things and Wijkbot activities (and not to forget ThingsCon), and extend future research activities and product discovery via a new company with an existing name: Target_is_New. More on that later in detail, but find some backgrounds via the targetisnew.com. And I love to have a chat to tell you more!

See you next week!