Another interesting PACOTTI update

Discussion 2049/10/05
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Building on Cuthbert’s post here, I found one of this week’s edits to the PACOTTI article very unusual (changes in italics):

PACOTTI units have been built into AI systems designed to tackle a range of tasks, including:

  • Quantum error correction (QEC)

  • Drone swarm co-ordination

  • Superparallel network optimisation

  • Disease modelling and management

  • Neural encoding and decoding

  • Movie recommendations

That seems like an incredibly…frivolous?…update to an article that is one of the most technically dense currently published to Omni. It feels like an attempt to almost humanize the article or make it more approachable. Also I think it’s a little spooky that it was updated the same day the Skynet movie article was published. Guess it’s time for a rewatch?

1 Like
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Spooky is the right word, considering how Skynet deals with a malevolent AI that can control people’s actions through their colloids while we’re worried about this website potentially doing exactly that!

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my recollection of the early days is that movie recommendations were one of the first ‘fun’ applications demonstrated by researchers at conferences, once the architecture became public. cultural recommendations have always been a challenge that scientists have been keen to tackle. of course, i still get recommended weavingway movies no matter how many times i tell my algorithms not to, so perhaps there’s still work to be done…