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AI design, AI chatbots, missing cars, lost violin music
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Thanks for signing up for my newsletter, which I'm starting just as the e-mail era begins to end. I'll use this to send out occasional notes about things I've been reading. And I'd love to hear about what you're working on; send me a note at jon@jebruner.com.

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Jon

Artificial intelligence and the future of design

Classical uses of artificial intelligence—the kinds of things you learn how to do when you're learning about machine learning—usually involve finding patterns in existing content: classifying images, for instance, or interpreting a block of text. But I'm fascinated by AI techniques that generate content, like classical music, trippy images, and convincing voices.

I spent a lot of the summer thinking about how generative algorithms will affect the process of design, and, by extension, the process of optimizing everything. Here's why we might someday talk about "discovering a design" instead of "creating a design."

(In the image above, Autodesk's Dreamcatcher generative-design software iterates through refinements to a motorcycle component.)

One way you can tell AI is progressing is that AI ethics suddenly feel urgent. With near-perfect AI would come the ability to intuit private information—like Target knowing when someone is pregnant, but with practically any characteristic. Sprawling AI models could tie together unrelated pieces of data to undermine privacy. Authoritarian-government CTOs are probably churning out AI-strategy memos right now.

Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Google, and Microsoft have launched an organization called the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (a cumbersome name of the kind that ought to generate a catchy acronym; alas). PAIBPS aims to come up with guidelines for ethical and transparent AI.

Right now the most sophisticated AI is only available to a handful of companies with lots of resources that, for now at least, seem to be approaching it responsibly. This is a little like nonproliferation; when only three countries have the resources to build a bomb, you can get them all in the same room and come up with formal mechanisms to control the technology. But pretty soon very sophisticated AI will become accessible much more broadly, and then we'll have suitcase AI to worry about.

Another important question: whether AI will take our jobs. Tim O'Reilly points out that AI won't take our jobs until all the important problems are solved, and there are plenty of important problems left.

Bots everywhere

Like everyone else, I've been into AI-powered conversational bots lately. Pete Skomoroch and I have a new podcast on the subject, and I've written some primers and made a graphic that illustrates the rise of a handful of bot stacks controlled by Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple.

Pete and I are also organizing the first-ever O'Reilly Bot Day, where we'll talk about bot strategy and bot technology with some outstanding thinkers from the worlds of AI, conversational interfaces, and messaging. Use the code JON20 at registration for a 20% discount. Register →

↖ Google | Bing ↗

That's weird

Ever noticed that the desktop version of Google Maps removes cars from roadways in satellite view? Microsoft (above right) doesn't. Parked cars show up, but traffic lanes are completely empty, except for a few ghost images here and there. I wonder if this is a capability that Google developed to analyze lane configurations for driverless cars. Probably, though, it's just about aesthetics. (It also looks like Google erases moving trains.)

Krylov - Bach - Toccata and Fugue
Bach's most famous organ work, played on the violin

Listen to this

J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is probably the most recognizable piece of organ music in the cannon, but its provenance is uncertain; the piece has some striking dissimilarities to almost all of Bach's other organ music, and, like much of his output, comes to us through scattered manuscripts and sloppy hand-made copies made by his children and students.

In the 1980s, the musicologist Peter Williams advanced a really interesting theory: that the Toccata and Fugue as we know it today is an adaptation of a lost work for solo violin. With some modest rearrangement, the chords are playable on a violin, and the style of the work resembles that of a virtuosic Baroque violin partita.

Williams's theory is seen as a little toward the fringe, but it resulted in some great proof-of-concept arrangements of the Toccata and Fugue for violin. The piece remains remarkably rich, and its texture sounds completely natural. Listen to the performance above; it's a little like seeing a new painting of an old subject.

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