The Future of Work, the Metaverse, & Everything

But Spring Has Sprung!

Springtime, the Vasant Season!

My latest episode of Brave New World with Microsoft Executive Jeff Teper is about the future of work, the metaverse, and more, so check it out!

But the last thing I feel like doing at the moment is work. Spring has sprung! I see the first flowers of the season right outside my door. Red, white and blue to boot! And for “ramp” lovers, they are out in force this year in the forest. I’m going to pick some and grill ‘em.

And I’m enjoying the long springtime walks in the forest with my yellow Labrador pup called Lucy Luce who becomes bigger and cuter by the day. When I told my “boss” at the Center for Data Science that I had gotten a puppy, she said “Vasant, you’ve worked hard raising kids and all that, don’t you want a break?!” (I say “boss” because in academia, bosses can turn into ordinary colleagues overnight and vice-versa.)

But take one look at that face. Would you want a break? I mean, I hadn’t planned to get a pup, but sometimes, cuteness is just too hard to resist. I happened to visit a breeder near Hudson last October, and there she was, two weeks old. She loves to roll in the mulch with the gardeners and is happy to get hosed down at the end of the day. To all the dog lovers out there, cheers amigos!

Spring is my favorite time of year, perhaps because that’s what my name means. Or perhaps because it signals my annual visit to Kashmir’s forests with their amazing hikes that I always look forward to.

Kashmir is a place where my brain refuses to function, regardless of how hard I try. Perhaps it is because the air is so “fat,” as Salman Rushdie would describe it in Shalimar the Clown. (He’s from Kashmir originally, before his family moved to Bombay) On a scale of 1 to 10, if my reference productivity in New York City is a 10, it is 5 in Rhinebeck (its too nice outside), and zero in Kashmir (its spectacular outside plus the fat air is a killer). So, I can’t exactly blame Kashmiris for their general state of lethargy where everything can wait for “mañana.” My brain comes to a complete standstill when I’m there, so I completely empathize.

HER: I’m Dating an OS!

Last night I watched “Her,” a 2013 film by Spike Jonze. I had seen it shortly after its release and thought it was a “cute” sci-fi fantasy. A man falls in love with an Operating System called Samantha. Yeah, sure, I thought, its one thing to make Samantha sound sexy, but quite another for the machine to make up jokes, be sarcastic, or witty.  I mused maybe we will have machines like that in the next century, if ever.

No mo’. Here’s what blows my mind.

A bunch of Google engineers just published an article describing their latest natural language processing neural network called PaLM that “understands” sarcasm, irony, humor, exhibits signs of wit. It was trained on Wikipedia pages, books, and data from public domain social media conversations. Like a lot of Google research, the training required several gazillion dollars’ worth of electricity and computing horsepower. One needs to be somewhat skeptical about the claims, though, because the research is impossible to replicate or tweak. Plus, I’m always skeptical about results in AI that show all the good stuff and mask the deficiencies. As an insider, I know first-hand how hard it is to actually make a machine behave the way you want.

But despite the skepticism, I think the results are mindboggling. And the first author is a kid from my alma mater, IIT Delhi. It’s good to see IIT graduates continuing to power high tech in America. I recall reading The New New Thing in 1999 by Michael Lewis that put the IITs centerstage in Silicon Valley. The book is a little dated now, but still a great read if you’re interested in the early early history of the Internet.

The Google paper is dense reading, but if you have the time and chops, its worth a read. Here are some of the examples, where “Input” is what is fed into the machine, and “Output” is its interpretation.

Input: I think I understand why me and my partner are such a good match. I get excited when I smell food and become super alert when the doorbell rings. My girlfriend Shelley becomes ecstatic when she sees a person who she just saw 5 hours ago.

Output: This joke is about dogs. Dogs get excited when they smell food and when the doorbell rings. The girlfriend is excited to see someone she just saw 5 hours ago, which is a trait of dogs.

Here’s a complete nerd joke for AI people:

Input: I tried 10,000 random restarts of my neural network, but I was accused of overfitting. I guess no good seed goes unpunished.

Output: This joke is a pun. A neural network is a computer program that can learn from data. A "seed" is a number that is used to initialize a random number generator. A "good seed" is a number that produces a good random number generator. The phrase "no good deed goes unpunished" means that if you do something good, you will be punished for it.

This witty one also blows my mind:

Input: I was going to fly to visit my family on April 6th. My mom said "Oh great, your step dad's poetry reading is that night!" So now I'm flying in on April 7th.

Output: The joke is that the speaker's mother is trying to get them to go to their step dad's poetry reading, but the speaker doesn't want to go, so they are changing their flight to the day after the poetry reading.

I didn’t think I’d see this in my lifetime!

Is AI Showing Early Signs of Consciousness?

Assuming that the machine above isn’t a hack, are these the early seeds of “consciousness?”

The consciousness I’m talking about isn’t the Indian kind, where some guru with flowing hair tells you to awaken your inner soul. (By the way, if you have not seen the Netflix series Wild Wild Country, you must. It is about the inspirational Indian guru “Osho,” who speaks eloquently about capitalism, spirituality, and sexuality, but ironically, falls prey to the dark side in America.  But I digress…)

Consciousness has figured in my conversations on Brave New World with Yann LeCun and Tony Zador. Given the speed of progress in AI these days, I think it is time to dig deeper into consciousness with a philosopher. So, look out for that episode.

Until next time. Enjoy the spring. And let’s hope the madness in Ukraine comes to and end soon and we can work towards World Peace.

V/