Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
anatomyof.ai
Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
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Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#2I can't speak on the technical side of things, but that graphic is beautiful. Might even frame and hang it up.
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#3Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining:
> Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce, science, politics and power.
This purple language is evocative of, something? Like ya, we live in a globalized economy, things are connected, what of it? Is this supposed to be a brilliant insight or just a poetic restating of the obvious?
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#4Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining: > Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce,…
It seems it's supposed to evoke how everything is causally connected. Unfortunately, just pointing that out doesn't really do much without other things to connect to; "everything is connected" is just a truism without tying it back to something that flies in the face of that fact. Cybernetics is cool, but it's meant to be applied, not some hypothetical interesting factoid like pop-sci quantum mechanics.
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#5Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining: > Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce,…
It's a Factorio prerequisite chart of all the things you need to build before you can build Alexa. Although the pentagram plus seemingly unrelated fractal and u.s. wage diagrams make it look a bit strange. Needs more quantum mechanics and Gödel.
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#6Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining: > Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce,…
Do you really think that child slavery for sourcing cobalt is "obvious" to most iPhone users? I doubt that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJ8me22NVs&list=PLnUeRIXMDq...
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#7Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining: > Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce,…
I am so used to articles with a meaningless header image that I totally skipped that the map they're talking about is right at the top of the page. My brain filtered it out. After going back and looking at it, I think the map is pretty cool and would be great if it were dynamic and navigable in a leaflet container or something of the sort.
But I agree I got tired of the prose about a third of the way in. I appreciate it, and can tell what they are getting at but I think regular hacker news readers are in a demographic that is already keenly aware of the interconnected nature of raw material extraction, supply chains, applied and theoretical sciences etc. I mean it's in our nature to process these thoughts because we're always looking for some missing connection, a forgotten or undiscovered niche, (edit to add, not to forget the human and environmental impacts of all of this as another user mentioned) etc etc.
I do think there's plenty of folk who might see this as eye opening, especially the average consumer for whom devices just materialise out of money. I imagine the philosophical angle would be more thought provoking for someone who hasn't sat down and thought about it a whole heap.
(second and final edit to add - on more thought I think if they made the map dynamic, and put the prose on little markers, that would be way more impactful to me at least as I think the spatial context would add a ton of value).
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#8The graphic is wonderful -- wide ranging and mind expanding. Think of it as a jumping off point in connecting sociotechnical systems around "AI".
Also, for context around the project as a whole, you need to read the accompanying narrative (scroll down).
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#9The author wrote that book, which I found quite interesting: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300209570/atlas-ai
In particular, in this book there is a discussion about the dangers and epistemic distortions induced by the "supervised learning" paradigm in machine learning, which imposes rigid systems of classification on reality, which was a novel and refreshing angle for me.
Re: Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
#10I only got partway through this. I want to say to the author:
Oh my god just stop taking yourself so seriously. Really. You don't need to do this. You're trying waaaay too hard.
It's opaque and mysterious and lovecraftian to you because you clearly spend all of your time making cool graphics and drawing tenuous metaphors between 16th century monks, pharaohs, and jeff bezos. I assure you, for everyone who works in a lithium mine or amazon datacenter doing the actual thing, it's actually pretty obvious. you just, you don't need to write this maam.
And also google "commodity fetishism" sometime.
It does look cool though. Wonderful typography and illustrations. I have a nitpick which is that it's a little bit monochrome, a pop of color (maybe a gold? or like neon red) would really take it to the next level.