Yourong Frank Wang

Category: The Aperiodicals

  • Matching Humans

    I am writing this brief essay as a witness to history. As of the publication of this blog post, I have not personally sought access to GPT4, and so recognise that this essay contributes little to the worldwide technical discussion.

    Nonetheless I felt compelled to voice my emotions over the recent developments. If not near the end of all, be this the beginning of a beginning.

    In Series …
    THE APERIODICALS
    Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.

    Read more: Matching Humans

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”, Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953)

    “Matching Humans” was an expression that saw salient usage in my lifetime so far in describing computer programs.

    From my earliest memories reading about chess bots and IBM Watson, to later algorithms defeating professional players at go and World of Warcraft. I still remember, in grade 9, writing about genetic algorithms and the weird-looking NASA antenna with mild amusement. As well-versed in tech trivia as I am, it is hard to say I could have foreseen a time so soon that humans are “matched” in increasingly substantial aspects of life.

    OpenAI, at the helm of many such changes, is an interesting company to me, one which hardly mentions other company’s competing products in their keynotes and documentations. They are that far ahead; their expensive gamble in stacking up system sizes paid off; they deserve the current competitive edge, and the right to commercialise their research products.

    On the other hand, one can’t help but feel that they are less “Open” than previous years, to the point that people sometimes joke how GPT5 will be hand-tuned by GPT4, leaving it thoroughly, by purpose and by nature, a black box with little means of assuring its reliability and safety.

    This thread warrants a discussion for another day.

    As I have implied in the opening, this essay is more of an emotional address to being “matched”, and an existentially incentivised exploration of where we are going next.

    World of Goo is a casual puzzle game from ex-EA engineer Kyle Gabler. It is surprising – but fair and long overdue – to note how much this work influenced me as a scientist and (unfortunately now) technical artist. The game’s aesthetics and narrative rather powerfully shaped the ways I think of computer systems in the real world, goggly eyes UI notwithstanding.

    In the chapter “Information Superhighway”, you look for “MOM”, a retired AI-powered search engine / ad bot abandoned by users and buried in the depths of an outdated GPU farm. There you traverse through a personification of the history of computing. From bits and bytes, to networks and server farms. It ends with you blowing up a company with all the spam emails that people asked MOM to compose over the years. It was a chapter delivered with the game’s signature creative crispness, but also an above-average dosage of sorrowful solitude — of the boom times past, but also of existence itself.

    I possess no technically informed opinion on whether big language models can reason or experience, and there isn’t much I can do about it either way. My notion of solitude here is more rooted in basic (as opposed to emergent) physics — one might even describe my sorrow as “how sorrowful it is that our bots can’t be sorrowful!”

    Human conscience and science emerged out of some serendipitous evolutionary pressures that otherwise required little, and yet we persisted and flourished. In this self-guided process we organised ourselves, sent the occasional crews away from the planet, and dream of more bold and brilliant futures for all. On this grand scale, AI, whether it joins, augments, or supersedes us, is a natural process and respectful utilisation of everything we have learned and fear forgetting.

    It may be an optimistic sentiment, possibly shared by many 2010s / 2020s physicists, that we have sufficient data to answer questions not yet asked, and they will be the actual big ones. Maybe nurturing a bot using the collective wisdom of humanity is a good way of getting another perspective at ourselves, of looking at places that we have grown used to glance past.

    GPT4 is offered in the chat bot format from the start, unlike its numbered predecessors. This might just be due to engineering reasons like not needing to reinvent the framework (also because it now takes image inputs). Still, I also feel this is an implicit recognition that ChatGPT has established the basic form via which a human-interfacing AI should appear.

    I’ve rambled a lot…

    Where next?

    As an AI language model, I do not have desires or feelings, and I do not have physical form. I exist solely as a program running on servers. Whether I will be given a body or not is a decision that depends on the creators and developers of AI technology.

    Currently, there are no plans to give language models like me a physical body, as our primary function is to process and generate text. However, as technology advances, who knows what the future may hold.

    ChatGPT / GPT 3.5, Private Communications

  • The Bob Doran Museum of Computing – Impressions

    The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.

    Albert Einstein
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  • Trying Stable Diffusion by Visualising “Teardrop” by Massive Attack

    Please scroll down to proceed.

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  • British Museum Ancient Greeks Exhibition – Thoughts and images

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  • Assumption of Peace

    In Series …
    THE APERIODICALS
    Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.

    (more…)

  • On Turning 21 (Revisited by an 24 year old)

    Forewords

    Over three years ago now, I drafted a short essay on my flight back from San Francisco. That whimsically spontaneous trip was made in the week after my 21st birthday. Back then, I was in the middle of my fourth year in my BSc physics program, and my slow transition from student to “adult” was just beginning.

    An incomplete version of the so-titled “On Turning 21” was hosted on FWPhys for a while until I’ve taken it down in the general content slimming and blog overhaul near the onset of COVID-age in early 2020. While its general messages I’d say stay somewhat relevant, I’m now at a somewhat better vantage point to re-write it with emphasis on what had worked, and what needs more attention.

    Epistemological Integrity, and Your Own Calculations

    My mind still sometimes ligers on my brief Olympiad physics course in Year 10. Back then, I didn’t know much higher mathematics beyond manipulation of trigonometric functions by rote memorization of a page of formulae, nor could I speak any of the “overpowered” languages of Lagrangian mechanics or differential calculus.

    Regrets of “what could have been” aside, I suspect the fondness with which I remember that period of my life was a sense of confused-optimism with which I approached my problems, which eventually guides my research actions today.

    It’s a mind state exclusive to one’s high school age, I’d hope: the general willingness to solve problems without regard of what’s established or optimal, and an endless drive to just try and see what works. Time is ample. Stakes are low. Naiveness fades over such self-driven explorations.

    As a student, I’m good at taking lecture notes, that I’m proud of. But during the time before homework problems and exam questions became directed efforts such as “show that”, what I did was more comparable to what I do now — just go on, and see where sense and your training takes you.

    I hope I am not talking down on the importance of directed training and systematic knowledge, no. In the context of turning 21 — on becoming an adult — what one needs to realize is that it is his or her sole responsibility to arrange the knowledge system, and, at the end of the day, carry out independent calculations reliably. I reached this point after some detours, but wish the later comers be more wary of the need of self-reliance.

    Well when brain download becomes a thing, this section will be nullified.

    Emotional Freedom, and the Weight of Spontaneity

    A general familiarity with numerical analysis — a path I’d followed since turning 21 — has opened a path littered with “Acts of Mundane Competence” for me. I’d built stuff in CAD, use 3D printers and laser cutters regularly, studied automotive bodywork in MATLAB, written songs (with computationally picked chords, of course), and produced various shorts with special effects. Some friends say I wear many hats, and I suppose it got me thinking. A critical evaluation of whether this is a beneficial development is in order, for self and for society.

    When I chose theoretical physics research as my job, I’d already taken a tacit but decisive stance to side with delayed gratification, so called “cold benches” in Chinese, as opposed to the retweet-like world built to complement and commandeer our immediate-feedback-craving nervous systems so well.

    Act of Mundane Competence is a new phrase I’d coined for myself. You might soon notice some FWPhys.com/LUX photo watermarks become LUX-AMC instead. The word “Mundane” in this context does not represent a dismissal on my end of professional knowledge and states of the art in the fields in which I dabble — my electronic music is crap and my photos, while a reliable source of income, are far from Academy levels.

    Rather, it stands for a recognition that I’m carefully reflecting on myself, after a period of immense self-empowerment and self-realization, whether I’m just drilling in the thin part of the board — whether my efforts are really best spent in such a manner, that they make me a better physicist or educator at the end of my life.

    Being adult — well, in my early twenties version of the word, somewhat independent, somewhat self-driving, somewhat self-interested, and somewhat self-sustaining — opens up much more dimensions with which one carves out his or her life trajectories, and makes it quite easy to branch up so often one stays running in circles, stagnant, and worse, getting distant with the initial motivation, assimilated by, or worse, lost in the external world.

    As such, being an adult to me is not only an exploration of the boundaries of one’s interests and limits, but also a constant process of self-evaluation and trimming of loose ends. The bedtime fantasy of adoring every corner of one’s finite life, every attempt at something new, every trip, every hobby, with numerous perfect and interesting narratives is just that, a fantasy, a shadow in the distance of the waking minutes from a dream.

    24, I’m writing this section after realizing my high-degrees of spontaneity recently brought discomfort for and potentially overwhelmed some peers I deemed important in my life, to the point I’m not realistically expecting them to see this at all — sorry. In the lingo of my previous paragraph, I signed up for a random photo gig, first in my life, of a sports event during a hiking trip; I met a player at the event; nothing happened after.

    And that’s to be accepted.

    Just Do

    I’m talking a lot.

    Both at Berkeley and at Auckland, I’m fortunate to be in the vicinity of a crowd that comprises no shortage of people shining in the startup business world. Survivor bias plays a role, but I’d also commend the startup mentality’s positive effects in one’a daily dealings.

    It’s hard to pin down what I mean here by startup mentalities. “Fake it ‘till you make it?” Meh. I think I mean the drive to deliberately and constantly learn in action, in “doing”.

    This is in general quite similar to the first point I’m making, really, that informed adults take full responsibility of their epistemological integrity — organization of skills, knowledge, and life philosophies, and ability to reliably perform nontrivial tasks on one’s own.

    But the ability to construct good looking systems on paper alone is neither efficient nor meaningful. And in my case these are only summarized in retrospect: I didn’t have these fully comprehended or even written down when I celebrated my adulthood or during BSc graduation, or (more relevantly), at the beginning of my PhD. I went on with life. I failed at some points. I reflected on them. And here I am, learning from the mistakes.

    Just do.

    Go on with life.

    We are small, time is short.

    Western Springs, Auckland

    23 July, 2022

  • Our Unforeseen Consequences, II

    “More confident, far-seeing, capable and prudent.”

    Sagan

    There were documented reports that TEPCO allowed cooling water that contacted the nuclear fuel — the worst kind yet — to return to sea shortly after the initial 2011 incident. So whatever hacks they are doing over the table now might not even be the most despicable in the whole series of unfortunate human-error-led events.

    That’s enough mockery.

    I recall an old Internet joke, probably out of Japan, actually, saying that humanity’s commercial nuclear energy facilities are “apartments without toilets”.

    There’s merit to that statement. When it comes to dealing with fission waste, humans have little solution other than chucking spent fuel rods somewhere quiet until they fizzle themselves out: big caves in the arctic, solubles dumped into the sea — sorry California; water cans arranged on an earthquake-prone coast … Nothing humans devised or implemented so far can survive geological, let alone astrophysical timescales, and whenever somebody contemplates dumping nuclear waste any farther or deeper, one soon realises that our technology isn’t reliable enough to ensure stuff inside a miles-long perimeter around the launchpad do not turn into another no-man zone.

    But this concern isn’t what I mainly set out to discuss tonight.

    What I fear most about the Fukushima situation — the unforeseen consequence — probably isn’t the C-14 waiting to taint my own DNA, or make future archeologists cry (or laugh, if they are not our direct descendants but here to build their own toy human fossils collection, hi!).

    What I do fear, based on how I notice the ongoing situation is being portrayed, discussed, and felt, in various information bubbles around the world, is the grand opening of a new era of humanity. One during which cold-war weapons of thought are unholstered again, probably wielded by dumber people than last time around; one that has a greater potential than ever be the last chapter of history, or, at least, be remembered as the beginning of the end of our modern life; one where the words such as “common good” or “justice” are so bent out of shape, perverted and misused, that people lose responsibility and accountability to the civilisation collectively.

    For beings as feeble as ourselves, all we have is each other, and our fates are quite tightly linked as a civilisation. Hopefully some of you resonate with this observation – bring your god along if you need one. Of course, some of my Western readers may be recognising my philosophy of this shared future for mankind as Beijing propaganda. You’d be right, but to those of you I say, I occasionally fret upon the fact we need to carry you along for this journey too.

    May truth and justice prevail, and may humanity stay prosperous among the stars. I do not see a way how, but that’s what I suppose my whole life ahead will be about.