Kozminski Techblog

Deng Xiaoping has introduced chinese people to prosperity and bright future by his reforms. The economic growth was outstanding: ”Since China began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, GDP growth has averaged over 9 percent a year, and more than 800 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty.”-“worldbank” Chinese communist party of that period was cappble of implementing free market essences without damaging the socialist values of People’s Republic of China, although, some experts of the ideology were not happy about it at all: “Deng famously said that to open the economy, the party would have to “let some people get rich first.” This was one of the most creative policies ever advocated by a Communist Party leader, as it was in direct contradiction to the party’s founding aim.”-“Bao Tong”. In my opinon, the ideological part is not very important since we can see that this strategy was successful at improving the lives of the proletariat/workers.

Xi Jinping has been a president for more than 9 years and provided to China a lot but since 2020 we can see the dramatical change in its system. Pandemic struck China like nothing else – more than a million chinese people have died due Covid-19 and the government response was instant: lockdowns, obligatory vacination and other restrictions. What could go wrong? The worst thing that can happen in this situation is that the ruling power would start to exploit its ability to limit people’s freedom in the name of defeating the virus. Xi’s ”zero-Covid” policy makes it impossible for small and average bussinesses to be profitible.

What do you think about China in 2022? Let me know in the comments bellow.

links:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/21/china/china-party-congress-xi-jinping-risks-intl-hnk/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/14/economy/china-party-congress-economy-trouble-xi-intl-hnk/index.html

https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview#1

https://www.jri.co.jp/english/periodical/rim/1999/RIMe199904threereforms/

Let’s ask the small questions first. Have you ever programmed? It’s completely fine if you’ve never touched the surface of coding, but if you program, imagine this.. you are programming hundreds and thousands of lines of code at the tip of your fingertips. You end the day with a big ol’ yawn, get in the shower, and the shower thoughts commence. What if you can implement AI-Technology to make it code for you based on a readable language prompt?

Crazy enough, technology is already 1 step ahead of us. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, along with Github, recently released a self-generating computer code AI, called CoPilot. This innovative technology simply lets you type in any natural language prompt and convert it into lines of code across any programming language. Whether it is python, java, C#, or C++, CoPilot finishes the job you needed to be done. The program as of right now on the GitHub website only charges users $10/month or $100/year, with a bonus of 60 trial-days free of charge. For university students like us, CoPilot is 100% free.

“Early Bird” Statistics

Within only a month after releasing the AI in early June of 2022, Github sparked over 400,000 subscribers for CoPilot. Before that, over 1.2 million signed up during the preview period. According to ciodive.com, within the first few months of release, Microsoft is already aiming at taking a slice of the software market, which is set to grow around 21% by the end of this year (Torres, 2022).

While CoPilot AI is still in its early development stages, writing up to 35%-40% of your code is an immense percentage when programming longer projects. Furthermore, not only does CoPilot generate code based on your prompt, it allows code interpretation, meaning that the AI can explain unusual code in natural language.

What’s Happening?

So, what’s the catch? I’ll let you imagine this as well. Imagine working on your own programming language, working for years on end, and finally being able to publish your program to the public. Everything is going great and you’ve feel like you’re on top of the world, until a big company creates an AI. The AI uses your programming language in the process, and does not give you any credit for any of the original codes you’ve done, how would you feel?

That’s exactly what Matthew Butterick felt, a programmer, about the newly-released AI. Mr. Butterick is a programmer, writer, designer, and lawyer, who is suing the AI founders and filing lawsuits. Mr. Butterick claims that the AI is full of piracy due to their approach of the AI, which was analyzing billions of existing code on the internet. AI is not original, as claimed by Mr. Butterick. Even though on the surface level it seems alright, the AI does not acknlowedge the programmers who built the original code on the internet, in which Mr. Butterick is lawsuiting for. On the other hand, Microsoft’s counter-argument on these reasons was that shortly releasing CoPilot, Github’s chief executive claim’s that the codes that the AI interprets are “fair-use”.

Personally on some aspects I stand on Matthew Butterick’s side due to the fact that programmer’s had actually taken years to fully make their code useable, and just for an AI to fully use it without recognition of the programmer, it ruins their recognition. However, at the end of the day, is anyone really original as they claim to be? Let me possibly ask you and everyone else that programs:

Are you where you are today, a successful programmer, maybe because you’re a natural, or also because of looking/studying other people’s code examples?

My argument against Matthew Butterick’s argument is simple:

if human’s can use other people’s code for personal benefit and without explicit consent, so can AI.

Im highly interested in your thoughts on this. Is CoPilot’s approach on interpreting code morally right? Feel free to counter-argue my opinions, I am eager to read all your opinions on it 🙂

Sources:

“Lawsuit Takes Aim at the Way A.I. Is Built.” The New York Times, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/technology/copilot-microsoft-ai-lawsuit.html#commentsContainer.

Wiggers, Kyle. “Copilot, GitHub’s AI-Powered Programming Assistant, Is Now Generally Available.” TechCrunch, 21 June 2022, techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/copilot-githubs-ai-powered-programming-assistant-is-now-generally-available/.

Torres, Roberto. “GitHub Copilot Adds 400K Subscribers in First Month.” CIO Dive, Aug. 2022, www.ciodive.com/news/github-copilot-microsoft-software-developer/628587/.

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With people being more and more aware of global warming and what impact it already has on our planet, we can observe intensified search for efficient green sources of energy. In fact, we had many interesting solutions for years now, but there is a reason why they are still not the main suppliers of electricity all over the globe. Being dependent on weather conditions is a disadvantage of some of the most popular ones, for example, wind farms and solar panels. In that case in order to be prepared for those cloudy days we need to store somewhere generated energy. The problem is that the basic lithium-ion batteries are degrading and the process of their creation is not really “eco” so we pretty much miss the whole point.

That’s where the sand battery comes in – an innovation introduced by finish company Polar Night Energy. It started to gain popularity and interest around the world thanks to articles published by BBC writers Matt McGrath (July 2022) and Erika Benke (November 2022). With the ongoing war in Ukraine and the recently finished COP27 optimism surrounding this new solution shouldn’t be a surprise for us. But is it really a game changer and does it solve all the problems we are facing now with lithium-ion batteries?
First, let’s understand how a sand battery works. It is nothing more than a silo filled with pipes and hundreds of tons of sand. Thanks to TES (Thermal Energy Storage) technology and amazing physical attributes of sand that with proper isolation can maintain a temperature of 600 degrees Celsius for months, this innovation can store heat produced by electricity from solar panels and wind farms. It can be used to warm up the water during shortages of electricity due to for example weather conditions. It is pretty obvious that this solution is very cheap, eco-friendly, and easy to apply in any part of the world. In fact, it is already being used in the Vatajankoski power plant, where one sand battery provides heat for about 100 homes and a public swimming pool.

There is one issue though that can make us question this innovation. In fact, the term “battery” is misleading because sand batteries cannot store electricity. Transformation of heat energy back to electricity comes with huge losses and is just not cost-effective. Of course, this solution is still very promising and needed especially in countries placed in the northern part of the globe. Nevertheless, until Polar Night Energy finds a way to convert heat to electricity with much more efficiency, it is tough to call their innovation a game changer because it just does not solve one of the main problems. But who knows, maybe it is just a matter of time.

Sand battery is an eco-friendly and budget-friendly technology that should interest facilities and cities around the world which want to become greener and at the same time save money on heating. Though it does not revolutionize the energy industry, it is very encouraging to see that we keep on finding new ways to prevent global pollution. In front of Polar Night Energy now stands a very challenging task of scaling up and It is gonna be very interesting to follow their further development.

Sources:

• BBC News
• BBC
• Undecided with Matt Ferrell
• Polar Night Energy

   Google Maps is a mapping and navigation application, which is one of the most used by people worldwide. Basically, the app shows us how to get from point A to point B, by any possible form of transport like car, bike, train or even by foot. We can choose if we would like to get there as soon as possible, for example using toll roads, avoiding traffic jams or if time does not matter to us as much and we would like to save some money using national roads.

   Recently Google introduced to us a new feature on their app, which is eco-friendly routes. This function helps us to choose the most environmental friendly route based on fuel consumption. All we have to do is to set our destination, then open options in the Google Maps app and look for ,,Prefer fuel-efficient routes” option. After enabling that, we only need to set which type of fuel our car uses, and we’re done. According to Google, this feature is available in almost 40 countries in Europe including Poland and by using it we lower our expenses on fuel, which is expensive at the moment and reduce CO2 emissions like in the United States of America and Canada, where that system was already successful reducing half million metric tons of CO2, which compares to removing 100 thousand cars from the roads. This is not the first time when Google encourages people to go more eco-friendly. They already have complex cycling routes and paths for pedestrians, a system helping to get to our destination using public transport or an option showing us where the closest EV (electrical vehicle) charging stations are located. All of this is a part of the Google campaign for this year which is to make people consider their choices and choose those that are more eco-friendly.

   I think this a superb idea in an important issue. We have to remember that environmental problems are relevant to all of us and every initiative that tries to fix them does matter on a grand scale. I am looking forward to seeing more companies following the same path.

Sources:

https://polska.googleblog.com/2022/09/nowa-funkcja-wyznaczania-tras.html

Development of AI image generators accelerated a lot in recent years, currently, we can choose from various options like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. The level of advancement is incredible, you can create whatever you can imagine moreover these programs potentially can create something which no man could imagine, and here we come to the subject of the article.

On August 25 Jason M. Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition there would be nothing strange about it if it weren’t for the fact that his work has been created by Artificial intelligence. Other participants accused Allen of cheating, arguing that he break the rules, but Allen justified what he had done. A.I. was used to construct his work, which was submitted under the name “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney,” he said, and he denied misleading anybody about its creation.“I won’t apologize for it, he declared, I won and followed all the regulations” but my goal is not to prove the author’s guilt or innocence I would like to focus on what can be considered art these days.

Most of the objections to the author focused on the statement that a computer-generated image cannot be considered art because it was not created by a human being. Similar opinions could be heard at the time when cameras and taking pictures with them became widespread. Many painters recoiled at the invention of the camera, which they saw as a debasement of human artistry. (Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century French poet and art critic, called photography “art’s most mor­tal enemy.”) In the 20th century, digital editing tools and computer-assisted design programs were similarly dismissed by purists for requiring too little skill of their human collaborators. Some artists defended Mr. Allen by arguing that using artificial intelligence (A.I.) to create a piece was identical to using Photoshop or other digital image-manipulation tools and that human creativity was still needed to come up with the appropriate prompts to produce the art.

In my opinion, a lot of people who criticize images generated by AI think that the image generates itself without human help, from a certain point of view this is right, but I would treat such programs as a tool in the hands of the artist just as the chisel is a necessary tool for the sculptor. AI artists are simply the result of technological and cultural developments around the world. But I also see a potential problem with the development of this technology, already artificial intelligence can affect the dissemination of information in the form of deep fakes, which are already indistinguishable to the untrained eye, the same danger exists in the case of images that will be created by artificial intelligence, for example, falsification of photographs forgery of works of art or intellectual works.

In conclusion, I believe that machine-generated images as much as possible can be considered art, it is simply a new, emerging branch of art.

Finally, I would like to show you what can be created with this program in five minutes. below is the text I used to get this image.

“Great Cathedral in which people are located. It is bright, the cathedral is built in a modern style”

Sources:

Midjourney discord

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_art

https://beincrypto.com/ai-art-wins-art-competition-invokes-metaverse-social-media-melts-down/