Facebook gets blamed for everything from what Russia does to what American voters do. But the people who seem to think Mark Zuckerberg and company have superpowers for changing the world are mistaken. Facebook was not able to fend off a damaging hack.
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Back in 2014, it was a “holy grail” machine learning program, developed in Scotland, that would sift through online resumes, using a one-to-five star rating system and cull the top five of 100, saving time and money. Within a year, a problem surfaced: It was “not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.”
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The more that software encompasses the whole of life, the more it needs to take into account the whole of the person using it.
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The brain understands nothing, imagines nothing, sees nothing. It wills nothing. We understand, we imagine, we see, and we will, using our brains.
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His talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors.
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The underlying assumption is surely incorrect. Robots like the Roomba succeed in part because they don’t look or act like people, let alone threaten people. They just do jobs people would prefer not to do or maybe can’t.
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Recently, we’ve looked at a number of complaints about the way Silicon Valley is acquiring too much power over people’s lives, at home and abroad, and reaching deep into the compulsory school system as well. A former employee decided to respond creatively.
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One way of describing the change is that we now live in an attention economy rather than a captive time economy, so far as advertising is concerned.
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Robotics is a business like any other. The individual good idea requires a business plan that can survive savage years in the wilderness before the buyout. That said, we certainly haven’t heard the last of the cobot, which may be one of the ideas that make robotics practical for everyday business.
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For AI to work you need data. The most innovative players in the AI space have learned how to get users to willingly and gladly provide them with data for free.
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Denial of free will, in a culture of pervasive surveillance, is the straightest road to totalitarianism.
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If you are trying to predict the course of a cannonball, Newtonian mechanics are adequate. If you are trying to understand the mind of the guy who fired the cannon, you need to look much deeper.
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Hassabis: “AlphaGo doesn’t understand language but we would like them to build up to this symbolic level of reasoning — maths, language, and logic.
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We should require model interpretability for any machine learning model for which moral responsibility plays a significant role.
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Nancy Pearcey, who is the author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, reminds us that the most popular metaphor for the universe today is a vast machine.
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Robotic skins were developed at Yale for possible uses in space flight or search-and-rescue. But animating ordinary bendable objects is surely a fun way to introduce the idea.
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“The Google dream is a supermind in the sky that knows everything,” Gilder told WND. “My dream is to distribute information as human minds are distributed.”
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Many parents may not be content to let matters rest there; they might prefer to pay taxes for school equipment and have less surveillance in our lives overall.
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Maxwell King: Sesame Street’s pacing “was set to be as fast as the times, with some emulation of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and the television serial Batman.”
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If so, it might not happen in quite the way we are told to fear. U.S. kids spend more than two hours a day looking at screens “perform worse on memory, language and thinking tests than kids who spend less time in front of a device.
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