agentiv is all you need

On Wednesday December 5th, 2017 at 3:35 PM in Palm Beach, A. Vaswani et al presented a simple and radical new paradigm in AI called the Transformer. The new methodology enabled a neural newtwork to attenuate focus across language sequences to identify relevances with a mechanism called multi-headed attention. The breakthrough, unlike previous methodologies enabled an elegant way of parallelizing learning on massive sets of data. Two months later, based on the same insights OpenAI released GPT-1 a Large Language Model trained on a massive corpus of human language. The rest is a history of bigger computers and bigger data sets. The age of artificial general intelligence had begun, birthed out of the insight that attention is the key to intelligence.

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Things are moving fast now, and there are those among us who have argued – for good and bad reasons alike – that resisting the pace is not only futile, but also a theoretical and practical failed project. These camps are broadly known as accelerationists, and they believe for political, ethical or aesthetic reasons that embracing the disruptive technological changes brought about by machine intelligence and hyper-capitalism is the way forward.

Let us state our allegiances very clearly:

• we like human beings
• we like human culture
• we like human cooperation
• we believe in human potential

We believe that human experience is worth living and worth remembering. Our utopia is ambulatory: it can live anywhere a meal can be shared, or a story can be told. We believe creating and building are at the heart of human life, and we believe these activities are best achieved through conversation and cooperation that elevates team members - however unequal in circumstance and innate capability - to a purpose that makes all feel equal and valued in their dreaming of what is possible.

We are not confident that capitalism and technology absent a robust ethos and culture will naturally incubate the above values and experiences. We are not confident that bureaucracies and corporations have the autonomy, or even the effectiveness to promote the above. We are certainly not confident that lagging political ideologies and agents that bemoan the direction of the world, while doing nothing to assess and address the complexity of it, will steer us towards a more human technological singularity.

The future is ours to decide, and unfortunately we are not deciding. Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both aspects of denial, and a failure to look in the mirror. Since we started using tools (language not the least amongst them), we have changed ourselves and the future of humanity. This is a very old story, with very new ramifications. We must look deep into the mirror to discover our future, and ourselves, in order to understand what we are becoming.

We will start here audaciously in the name of the human being, with small ideas and experiments conceived and instigated by people like you to:

• seize the means of agency: culture, cooperation, and capability
• steer towards a joyful future with an authentic understanding of the past
• innovate through the technology of tradition
• be agentiv in our acceleration towards the great unknown

agentiv = human/acc and we can't wait to grab lunch with you.

with love,
Holly + Day