Artificial Languages Unit

It often happens that the advent of new technologies is accompanied by fears and catastrophisms: this is indeed the case with the developments in recent years in the field of Machine Learning, which today it is fashionable (and, in our opinion, wrong) to call “Artificial Intelligence”. Emotional reactions however should always be examined, at the risk of finding ourselves influenced by manipulative interests: big tech companies are very motivated to make people think that these are very dangerous technologies that only they can manage and control. Most importantly, they use this fear as a distraction from the application of such technologies in the social context.

Let’s not get distracted: it is necessary to study and understand the limits and potential of Machine Learning, as with any other technology. But conducting this type of research on your own can be complicated and expensive, due to the necessary software and hardware requirements.

We want to change this state of affairs! We intend to create a People’s Machine Learning Laboratory, offering ML-focused hardware and software environments to selected groups and projects, at zero cost.

We do not seek answers from an oracle, but instead, more realistically, we think that these technologies have interesting applications in the fields of research, archiving, and Information Retrieval in general, and we intend to explore them.

We therefore created the Artificial Languages Unit, which as its founding act acquired computational resources and put them online, covering the costs of electricity and network. It is a “domestic” laboratory given the limited resources, nevertheless we believe that there is a useful and exploitable space between what individuals can afford on their own, and the large computational clusters of big tech.

We are addressing similar people, groups or individuals capable of articulate ideas and projects in this space. Initially we will proceed on a co-optive basis, and then possibly expand the call to a wider audience. Obviously, given the nature of our project, we expect that the results of these collaborations will be open and available to everyone, and that any data processed will be public or at least obtained with explicit consent.

Would you like to participate?