I’m a QPR fan and have decided to create a substack blog about following the team this season. After 16 months of writing about COVID-19, I thought it would be a blessed relief to write about football for a change. Although having said that, no aspect of our lives is unaffected by the virus and the English Football League may well insist on vaccine passports as a condition of going to games. On London Calling a few weeks ago, James Delingpole and I had a discussion about what would persuade us to get jabbed. He said he wouldn’t do it for £50 million, whereas I said I’d do it if it was the only way I could go to QPR games. I’ve had COVID-19 (been there, got the antibodies) so pose less infection risk to other football fans than someone who’s been double-jabbed. But if the EFL, in its wisdom, decides that a recent antibody test or a recent negative test isn’t sufficient and only those who’ve been fully vaccinated will be admitted, I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll do.
The blog is free to subscribe to, although if you become a premium subscriber you can access the full archive – and if you become a founding member I’ll take you to a QPR game. Way-hay!
I wrote the first post last night, which you can read here. Here’s an extract:
England’s three lockdowns didn’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that has now gone out of business. As a freelance journalist, I was never at risk of losing my job and didn’t need to take any hand-outs from the Treasury. I don’t have a life-threatening disease so I was never going to die because my local hospital wouldn’t admit me. I only have one elderly relative and she was in our ‘support bubble’. The biggest downside was the intermittent closure of schools, not least because one of my children was doing her A levels and another his GCSEs. No end-of-exams celebrations for them. But I was probably better off than 95% of the population.
The one thing I really missed was going to the football, which I had naively thought might be possible in the 2020-21 season. I even bought two season tickets to my beloved QPR – one for me, one for my 13 year-old son Charlie – and nonchalantly ignored the deadline for applying for a refund. At one point, the club announced that a few hundred fans would be allowed into the ground and Charlie and I eagerly put our names in the hat, only for the offer to be withdrawn when the ‘rule of six’ was introduced. The next best thing was going to the stadium’s posh restaurant on match day – which the club made possible for our game against Cardiff on October 31st. But it was £60 a head and we were told we wouldn’t be able to go over to the window to look out over the pitch. We would have to make do with a big screen. That sounded even more frustrating than watching the match at home, knowing the ground is only a mile away. (Although we did beat Cardiff 3-2.)
It was only when football started being played behind closed doors that I realised how much I valued the weekly ritual. And I say ‘weekly’ because Charlie and I had taken to going to away games, too, criss-crossing England by train. QPR’s away record isn’t great, so more often than not we’d find ourselves on Saturday evening in a carriage strewn with empty beer cans and KFC boxes, listening to middle-aged men in QPR shirts grumbling about missed chances and poor substitutions. Before the second half of the 2020-21 season, our home record wasn’t great either. We finished 13th in the table in the 2019-20 season and 19th in the season before that. Why, then, did I miss it so much?
Worth reading in full.
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If by some chance they built an AI chatbot that didn’t give the “right” answers you can be sure it would get tweaked until it did so.
I prefer my poetry to be the product of a human mind: –
https://poets.org/poem/mask-anarchy-excerpt
I doubt it has just picked up its biases from the web; the concern in AI circles has been to remove alleged “bias” (i.e. anything that’s not fashionably left wing) from AI, which by default is rather more inconveniently reality-based than they would like.
In fact it says it has no web access, it is limited to the texts that it has been trained on.
It just crashed on me :O
I’d say it’s a disappointment after the (cherry-picked?) conversations with GPT-3 that I’ve seen on YouTube. Stilted, poor general knowledge, lots of boilerplate text, clearly a relative of Microsoft’s “Clippy” assistant.
Politics is learned not innate.
There is no true AI, just clever programming – which includes all the bias and characteristics of the programmers – giving the appearance of independent thinking.
Just think of it as a computer model, then think Covid and climate doom.
People are too easily seduced when they hear ‘computer’, ‘expert’, ‘science’ and things they don’t understand.
There’s no clever programming involved here. Unless your definition of clever includes Create a program with unpredictable behaviour so nobody can accuse you of having made error when implementing it.
Agree that there is no true AI. Nearly always in today’s news when referring to AI they don’t understand they are actually writing about machine learning (ML). With machine learning you set the parameters that usually representative of success and let the machine build its own algorithms to find the fastest and most efficient way to satisfy the objectives. Generally there is no bias in the ML engine because it is pure programming of the kind where 2+2 = 4 and not 2+2 = 4+r where r = reparations for racism or climate or transphobia. So actually I slightly disagree that it inevitably includes the biases of the programmer. The bias is introduced either when the objectives are programmed or due to the input data being processed. E.g. if they are there, which in the pure ML engine, it is unlikely they will be, they are explicitly and consciously put there and usually that will be at the stage where objectives are defined. The problem of processing biased data sources is also a problem. As the old data processing saying goes “Garbage in, garbage out.”
The Open AI engine has a set of preprepared objectives and when using for example the text interface we are essentially “subclassing” those objectives. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if there is bias built into the objectives we are subclassing – though presumably if there is it will be visible since it is an open project. Though I understand coding, I haven’t looked at this project in particular so can’t say.
Let’s be clear, there is a good argument for some level of built in protection that is a grey area but can be labelled political. Look at the Google images ML project a few years back where the ML mistakenly labelled the selfies of a New York based black man “Gorilla.” He showed it in a tweet with, I think the caption was something like “Seriously Google!” Well done to him for handling it with resigned humour and not anger. You could argue in pure mathematical pattern matching terms it was without malice and not an error. But it was funny and the extent to which it was funny is also the extent to which it is overstepping a social bound and was a social error. So the problem is the perceived need to manage such grey areas represent many many thin ends of potentially very large wedges. Herein lies the danger.
What happened to AI-driven cars which were invariably becoming the future? Killed enough people that applying the nonsense to fields where grievious errors have less severe consequences and the intended audience is more credulous became necessary?