Even after all our dreams, our technology can undergo unexpected changes that surprise and amaze us.
As A Christmas Carol puts it, when I agonize over another year over whether “the wrong ones will fail and the right ones will win”, I traditionally think I’ll do a “massive MapReduce in the year gone by”. We started the new year with something called — a vibrant lightning round of an overlooked moment at the final closing ceremony of the year gone by.
But by asking what really mattered in 2022, are we highlighting the events that foreshadow what lies ahead? Besides technology playing a role in the world’s geopolitical conflicts? , there was one undeniable trend in 2022 that was both haunting and hilarious. It was a breakthrough in both performance and accessibility of AI technology.
Along with our own very human concerns about them…
technology and problems
The year ended with OpenAI introducing a natural language chatbot that seemed to do it all, and before the year ended, ChatGPT…
On OpenAI’s page, ChatGPT offers more impressive achievements, such as simulating code debugging behavior, explaining mathematical theorems, and writing the full text of a friendly note to introduce yourself to your neighbors. Did. ChatGPT wrote his first three paragraphs for the Atlantic article Criticize ChatGPT — Later in the same article, you convincingly generated a medieval tale-style poem about Whataburger.
It was enough to have Google’s CEO issue a “Code Red” memo about the prospect that natural language bots could one day replace traditional search engines.
AI is finally advanced enough to start tackling the thorny problems it poses. Provocative examples were everywhere. DeepMind’s AlphaCode has achieved what developers call “near-human performance” in programming competitions. This is due to the possibility that “human work is transferred to problem formulation and machine learning is the main function responsible for code generation and execution”. And by June, he said, GitHub Copilot was already poised to sell AI-powered pair programming. GitHub was so confident in its success that it began charging $100 a year for subscriptions (although teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source software insisted it was still free). .
backlash and playfulness
The outburst of enthusiasm was undeniable. In November, when GitHub announced his voice-driven Copilot work, 7,000 people joined its “tech preview” waitlist. But GitHub has finally launched a long-anticipated class action lawsuit accusing the service of committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale (violating license requirements when copying code). as well).
“AI systems are not exempt from the law,” the class action website claimed.
All this proves that our technology has advanced enough that, both in recombination and re-evaluation, we can look at it in new ways. We now often play casually So it remains only to see what strange things happen next.
Eventbrite’s architecture director noted that ChatGPT was carefully crafted to avoid most inappropriate responses, which led to the idea of a new game. Meanwhile, 33 different coders produced computer-generated novels for the 9th Annual National Novel Generation Month.
And Janelle Shane, an optical research scientist, had fun giving donuts funny names to the AI, and then used the AI-generated output to describe them.
AI-generated illustration of donut names made by AI — Image by Janelle Shane via AI Weirdness dot com
Rise of the IT Army
As William Gibson once famously wrote, streets find their own uses for things. But in 2022, this unexpectedly played out on the world stage…
A review at the end of 2021 presciently cited the “rising Russian cyber soldier” believed to be responsible for the Solar Winds breach.Microsoft said 60 minutes Over 1000 engineers secretly rewrote 42,032 lines of code to create what Reuters described as “buggy network management software” that may have been eventually downloaded to over 18,000 companies.
In January 2022, another “highly destructive form of malware” was discovered lurking within dozens of Ukrainian government (and private) computer networks. And just 55 days until the next fateful month, 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine…
Surprisingly though, this ultimately sparked a wave of strong online counterattacks. Against Russia. Within four days, the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine “IT Army” And newspapers around the world scrambled to cover all the online antics that followed. The Jerusalem Post reported that the Kremlin and Defense Ministry websites immediately went down for hours (along with the Russian State Service web portal and his three other Russian government sites).
The Jerusalem Post also found Russian officials complaining about the “unprecedented scale” of the cyber attack. The Washington Post reported that “thousands” have logged into a new app designed specifically to overwhelm Russian propaganda sites.
Sure enough, the Russian invasion sparked all-out technological improvisation around the world. By July, a pro-Ukrainian cybersecurity expert analyzed a sample of 100 Russian databases and found that 92% of them had been compromised by the “hacktivist” group Anonymous. The expert later told CNBC that the group’s actions “demystified Russia’s cyber capabilities,” CNBC citing the group’s claims of deleting, encrypting, tampering with, and leaking data from its databases. Did.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Polish programmers somehow got hold of 20 million Russian mobile phone numbers and about 140 million email addresses, allowing them to send millions of anti-war messages directly to Russian citizens. I quickly created an app for sending.Meanwhile, Anonymous also claimed Breaking into a Russian streaming TV service Broadcast uncensored war footage.
hacking group #Anonymous Russian streaming services Wink and Ivi (including Netflix) and live TV channels Russia 24, Channel One and Moscow 24 were hacked to broadcast war footage from Ukraine. [today] pic.twitter.com/hzqcXT1xRU
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) March 6, 2022
All about tomorrow’s technology
It’s worth noting that almost every technology in the world seemed to be involved in 2022. According to The Washington Post, 3D printing enthusiasts around the world have started producing supplies to send to Ukraine, including splints, bandages, AK-47 add-ons and more than 5,000 reusable tourniquets. Elon Musk has been hailed as a hero for restoring vital internet access in Ukraine through his Starlink satellite internet service. The band Pink Floyd has reunited and used vocals from his Instagram post of a Ukrainian soldier to record a new single for fundraising. Banksy contributed seven of her murals.
Screenshot from PinkFloyd.com
And 1,300 librarians compared what The Washington Post calls “the nation’s digital history—its poetry, archives, and photographs” to “more than 2,500 national museums, libraries, and archives” (Census (including important government data such as the numbers of The federation saved the data on the rental server.
And last month, the Los Angeles Times revealed that since February, Amazon has been working with the Ukrainian government to physically export “massive amounts of government, tax, banking and financial data” out of the country ( Using Amazon’s suitcase-sized Snowball Edge “Data Transfer Appliance”), and finally uploading that data securely to Amazon’s cloud services. (Additionally, Amazon “made Ukraine pretend to be Santa Claus and flew goods such as blankets, hygiene kits, diapers, food and toys for refugees in the war-torn country and Poland and elsewhere in Europe.”) It is loaded and delivered.”)
The year also saw the United States pledge to send sophisticated “Patriot” anti-missile batteries as part of a new $1.85 billion aid package to boost Ukraine’s defense capabilities, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced that the U.S. It ended with a speech in parliament.
Toward 2023
Looking back on 2022, what lessons have we learned? It may be inevitable that the world’s technology will be involved in conflict in 2023, but it’s not all bad news. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already increased interest in alternative fuel technologies, including the launch of a complex project that will bring clean wind energy to the EU from Azerbaijan through Georgia and across the Black Sea 700 miles by 2026. increase.
Looking back and then looking straight ahead reveals a continuing turmoil of hope, anxiety and half-understood technology.
It is said that nothing begins until you dream.
But even more interesting is what happens next.
