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Re: [nexa] ARM
by Giuseppe Attardi Aug. 24, 2020

Aug. 24, 2020

Dietro mia sollecitazione, Hauser ha scritto questa lettera al Financial Times. ARM, a British company, headquartered in the UK, has provided the design for over 160 billion processors via its 500+ licensees, making it the world’s most valuable IP Company. The proposed sale of ARM to Nvidia the dominant American graphics processor company would have disastrous consequences for Cambridge, the UK and Europe for three main reasons. - Firstly, it will lead to inevitable job losses in Cambridge, where 2500 people are employed, as the HQ will move to Silicon Valley. Nvidia bought the Bristol based company Icera in 2011 and subsequently in 2015 sacked all 300+ UK based staff. - Secondly, it will destroy ARM’s neutrality and even handedness to over 500 hundred licensees all over the world, many of which, including European companies are competitors of Nvidia. - Thirdly, and most seriously it will make ARM a division of an American company to which the US CFIUS regulations apply. This means that the American president can decide which companies ARM is allowed to sell to worldwide. This raises the vital issue of technology sovereignty which the UK and Europe have suffered from for many years. The dominance of Silicon Valley companies in search (Google), social media (Facebook), films (Netflix), e-commerce (Amazon) has become a pressing issue, fostering the belatedly debate on how we could have allowed this dominance to happen. Now we are about to witness one of our last great European technology companies with a dominant position in mobile phones becoming part of the US trade armoury. Whether we are allowed to use our own British designed microprocessors in the UK and Europe will be decided in the White House rather than in Downing Street. This is a major step towards the UK becoming an American vassal state. It must be stopped. A viable alternative to provide the cash to Softbank, ARM’s current owner, is to list ARM on the LSE and make it a UK based company again. If the LSE does not have enough firepower for an estimated $40bn IPO they will be happy to work with the NYSE, Shanghai Star or Euronext. This will be a crucial test of whether the UK government is serious about an industrial strategy. > On 20 Aug 2020, at 12:00, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2020 11:37:30 +0200 > From: Giuseppe Attardi <attardi(a)di.unipi.it <mailto:attardi@di.unipi.it>> > To: nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <mailto:nexa@server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] ARM > Message-ID: <472D9C85-EA5B-498A-884A-BE8CECFCE308(a)di.unipi.it <mailto:472D9C85-EA5B-498A-884A-BE8CECFCE308@di.unipi.it>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > ARM è la società di Cambridge creata da Herman Hauser come spinoff di Acorn. > Quando Acorn venne acquisita da Olivetti, Hauser divenne direttore di ricerca Olivetti e interagii con lui sullo sviluppo di software per ARM, tra cui il port del linguaggio Lisp che comprendeva un innovativo sistema di parallelismo a thread. > Oggi ARM progetta i chip a basso consumo usati nei cellulari ed è stata acquistata dall?investitore giapponese SoftBank, che ora la vuole vendere. > SMT e Samsung producono i chip ARM. > ARM ha anche una divisione che progetta coprocessori GPU da usare per AI. > BTW: 30 anni fa aiutai SMT a realizzare una GPU per cellulari Nokia, evitando che questa si rivolgesse a Texas Instrument, che ne aveva una già pronta. > > ARM è oggi un asset strategico per l?Europa, visto che è l?unica azienda di processori e GPU in grado di competere con Intel, almeno nel settore dei chip a basso consumo. > > All?acquisto di ARM è interessata NVIDIA, la principale ditta che produce GPU per applicazioni sia grafiche tradizionali, che industriali (visione e AI), avendo introdotto la libreria CUDA, che consente di programmare le GPU per svolgere calcoli tensoriali ad alto parallelismo. > Oggi tutta l?AI di punto viene sviluppata su GPU NVIDIA. > > Herman Hauser stesso è contrario all?acquisto di ARM da parte di NVIDIA, che mette a rischio non solo l?esistenza della divisione GPU ma di lasciare agli USA il dominio totale dei processori. > > STM potrebbe essere l?acquirente ideale. > Ho provato a sondare gli attuali dirigenti di STM che conosco, ma mi hanno risposto che l?acquisto non sarebbe possibile per motivi antitrust. > Non mi sembra sia questo il caso: ci sono altri ben agguerriti produttori di chip, ben più monopolisti di una eventuale STM+ARM ed NVIDIA+ARM sarebbe avrebbe un più invadente dominio nel settore dei chip per AI. > > Bisognerebbe promuovere una cordata di grandi imprenditori europei del settore dei chip, comprendente ad esempio Herman Hauser, Federico Faggin, Pasquale Pistorio, che col sostegno dei politici europei, si proponga a per l?acquisto di ARM al fine di farla restare in mani europee. > > ? Beppe >

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Earth Overshoot Day 2020: 20 giorni in più “grazie” al COVID
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 23, 2020

Aug. 23, 2020

Impronta ecologica e tecnologia. Buona lettura e buona domenica dl https://www.techeconomy2030.it/2020/08/22/earth-overshoot-day-2020-20-giorn… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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MusashiAI: World-First Technological Advances and Proof of Concept Agreements in Commercial Launch of Robotic Employees
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 23, 2020

Aug. 23, 2020

Mutazioni ed adattamenti Buona lettura e buona domenica dl https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200727005009/en/MusashiAI-World-Fi… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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sull'impossibilità dell'esistenza dell'AI "Strong" (o AGI)
by Giovanni Biscuolo Aug. 22, 2020

Aug. 22, 2020

Buongiorno, Voglio condividere con voi questa citazione di Adorno che trovo tanto impegnativa (almeno per me) quanto efficace nell'illustrare l'impossibilità dell'esistenza dell'AI "Strong" [1] (detta anche AGI "Artificial General Intelligence") Parto, per evidenziarla, dalla conclusione: «Philosophical thinking begins as soon as it ceases to content itself with cognitions that are predictable and from which nothing more emerges than what had been placed there beforehand.» http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adorno_formalism.html --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- Adorno on Philosophy, Formalism, & Artificial Intelligence [...] It is certainly better—as in prephilosophical knowledge so in philosophy—not to proceed without a measure of autonomy of thought in relation to its subject matter. The logical apparatus owes its immeasurable improvement beyond primitive consciousness to this autonomy. It contains, intensified, at the level of content, the force of enlightenment that marks the historical development of philosophy. Yet as it became autonomous and developed into an apparatus, thinking also became the prey of reification and congealed into a high-handed method. Cybernetic machines are a crude example of this. They graphically demonstrate to people the nullity of formalized thinking abstracted from its contents insofar as such machines perform better than thinking subjects much of what used to be the proud achievement of the method of subjective reason. Should thinking subjects passively transform themselves into the instruments of such formalization, then they virtually cease being subjects. They approach the machine in the guise of its imperfect replica. Philosophical thinking begins as soon as it ceases to content itself with cognitions that are predictable and from which nothing more emerges than what had been placed there beforehand. The humane significance of computers would be to unburden the thinking of living beings to the extent that thought would gain the freedom to attain a knowledge that is not already implicit. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Tratto da: Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), extract, pp. 127-128. Saluti, Giovanni [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artificial-intelligence/#StroVersWeakAI “Strong” AI seeks to create artificial persons: machines that have all the mental powers we have, including phenomenal consciousness. “Weak” AI, on the other hand, seeks to build information-processing machines that appear to have the full mental repertoire of human persons (Searle 1997). -- Giovanni Biscuolo

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Artificial Intelligence, Authentic Humanity, and the Future of War
by Giovanni Biscuolo Aug. 22, 2020

Aug. 22, 2020

Buongiorno, un interessante punto di vista da una associazione che promuove il «contemporary british military thought». --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- [...] If the wars of the 21st Century have imparted a singular lesson it is this: having our troops mired in ambiguous situations, unable to see into the next compound, incapable of loitering without exposing themselves to mortal risk is increasingly unacceptable to the generals, politicians, and citizens who—ultimately—put them there. Enter technology: uninhabited, quasi-autonomous weapons systems designed to undertake these kinds of prolonged and dangerous measures are perfect solutions for the kinds of stability operations we repeatedly and incessantly find ourselves in. Algorithms already create search patterns, power facial and signature recognition systems, and remain at their posts indefinitely. [...] This obsession with technology is an extension of two impulses that have driven military development: to overcome human weaknesses and to outsource as much of the brutal aspects of war to others [...] We constantly strive for “the externalization of the burden of warfare”, whereby we seek out “technological and human surrogates [that] enable the state to manage the risks of post-modern conflict remotely.”6 We are aware now that those risks are not just corporeal; contemporary warfare not only ends lives and removes limbs. Combat has the power to wound mentally those who take part in it, causing critical stress that can lead to secondary damage in the form of haunting nightmares, chemical dependency, anti-social behaviour, and, all too often, suicide. Even drone pilots, often thousands of kilometers away from their targets, are not wholly liberated from this trauma.7 In that way, AI represents nothing more than the latest attempt to put distance—literal and figurative—between humans and the injury, both physical and moral, caused by war.8 However, AI does promise something revolutionary in this regard: it would not just displace humans from the battlefield, it could replace them altogether. [...]We feel more comfortable with a human ‘in the loop’ making the final decision about when or if to pull the trigger. AI might be able to do the sums rapidly, but do we trust it with matters of life or death? The kind of future we want “should be a society where people feel empowered, not threatened by AI.”10 That just makes sense…right? [...]It is clear that the slowest portion of the AI/human loop will forever be the human. There will be little sense in building faster AI that can perform 99% of the find, fix, fire cycle in a fraction of a second, only to need to wait for a ponderous human to give the thumbs up. This has already led to a retreat from a posture of positive control (human in the loop) to one of monitoring (human on the loop), whereby a human keeps watch on what is going on, ready to intervene at the first sign of trouble. The reality is, though, that this position is untenable and illusory. Human monitors will be overwhelmed by the speed, scale, and scope of the systems they are charged with; indeed, they may wish to create AI systems solely for aiding in the monitoring process, which of course would lead to a cycle of infinite recursion. Even if rapidity and size could be tamed, our human monitors would still be faced with deeper problem: “No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do.”13 We have created tools that we do not fully understand, and may not be able to control. [...] war, as we know it, cannot be strictly viewed as logical: there are too many ambiguities—what rational actor theorists, like economists—might call ‘externalities’. If war is disembedded from its surrounding social and political—its human context15—what is to prevent it from reaching the end point of absolute war? War’s nature, as we know it now, is founded on human particularities and bounded by our failings. If those limits were to be removed through the application of Artificial Intelligence, then the nature of war—long held to be unchanging—would melt away, transformed into something non-human, potentially inhuman, probably inhumane. When waging war, authentic humanity is our safety net; alarmingly, artificial intelligence has already begun to pick at its all too gossamer threads. [...] What must be done, though, is to match the efforts at weaponizing artificial intelligence with a commitment to maintaining our authentic humanity. We need doubt, pity, and hesitation if we are to survive. [...] --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Continua su https://web.archive.org/save/https://wavellroom.com/2020/06/30/melancholic-… IMHO nell'ultima parte (What is to be done?) perde un po' di lucidità di analisi, forse perché l'autore non ha sufficiente conoscenza dei principi dell'AI, ma ciò non toglie nulla al resto. Saluti, Giovanni -- Giovanni Biscuolo

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Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and Solutions
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 22, 2020

Aug. 22, 2020

This article offers the first systematic, interdisciplinary literature analysis of the foreseeable threats of AIC, providing ethicists, policy-makers, and law enforcement organisations with a synthesis of the current problems, and a possible solution space. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-018-00081-0 _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Cory Doctorow su contact tracing - exposure notification
by Roberto Resoli Aug. 21, 2020

Aug. 21, 2020

Grazie a Stefano Zacchiroli per averlo segnalato: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1296248163653660672.html Traduco la considerazione imho più saliente e di carattere generale: «In prima approssimazione, tutte le cose importanti del nostro mondo hanno una dimensione qualitativa irriducibile e vitale. Prendete le esenzioni dal copyright: le regole del fair use sono volutamente qualitative ("Il vostro uso è trasformativo in modo da commentare o criticare l'opera che utilizza?) Sono questioni che riflettono le priorità politiche: secondo le parole della Corte Suprema, il "fair use" è la "valvola di sfogo" del Primo Emendamento, ciò che fa quadrare i diritti esclusivi degli autori con il diritto del pubblico alla libera espressione. Ma l'industria della tecnologia e dell'intrattenimento ha speso decenni a cercare di scartare questo in favore di una misura puramente quantitativa: non è giusto che la vostra immagine incorpori più di X pixel da un'altra, o che il vostro video o il vostro suono abbia più di Y secondi da un'altra opera. E' un'idiozia. Risolvere le sfide dell'automazione dichiarando che le parti non automatizzabili non sono importanti è il modo in cui gli stronzi delle auto a guida autonoma dicono: "Dobbiamo solo dire alla gente che non è permesso loro di agire in pubblico in modo imprevedibile".» rob

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Why Microsoft's new Flight Simulator should make Google and Amazon nervous
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 21, 2020

Aug. 21, 2020

Un aspetto per nulla secondario della trasformazione digitale, soprattutto in relazione alle nuove generazioni. Buona lettura dl https://www.protocol.com/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020?_lrsc=ac31e3f7-6c9… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Un anno senza Giovanni Buttarelli. L’inedito ricordo dei suoi più stretti collaboratori “Il leader visionario dell’Ue”
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 21, 2020

Aug. 21, 2020

Una persona perbene che ha dato molto ai temi che in lista ci sono cari. Buona lettura dl https://www.key4biz.it/un-anno-senza-giovanni-buttarelli-linedito-ricordo-d… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Facial Recognition Violates Human Rights, Court Rules
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 21, 2020

Aug. 21, 2020

<https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezelizabeth/2020/08/13/facial-recogniti…> On Tuesday, the 11th of August, a UK court ruled that facial recognition technology violates human rights. This ruling is the latest in a growing movement that facial recognition technology violates personal freedoms, invades privacy, and is discriminatory. The case came about when Ed Bridges, a resident of Cardiff, filed a suit against the South Wales Police. His facial image was recorded twice - once in 2017, when he was on his lunch break, and again in 2018, when he was participating in a peaceful protest. During the protest, a facial recognition van parked across the street from the protesters. Bridges, along with other protesters, took note. “We felt it was done to try and deter us from using our rights to peaceful protest,” said Bridges. “I take the view that in this country we have policing by consent and the police should be supporting our right to free protest, rather than trying to intimidate protesters.” The court originally ruled against Bridges but overturned this ruling on Tuesday. The ruling stated that facial recognition technology violates human rights. It does not suspend the use of all facial recognition technology, but rather, states that better parameters need to be put in place as to when it can be used.

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