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Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

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Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#41

Post by theoh »

nyolfen wrote: post #36
campground wrote: post #33

This is similar to a thought I've had for some time now; That artificial intelligence is most likely to emerge - rather than be explicitly designed - from our increasingly complex, interconnected, self-regulating systems and institutions. We will be no more aware of, or able to converse with it, than the bacteria in our guts are aware of us. Also, artificial intelligence is the wrong term. We have artificial intellig…

It's not difficult to conceptualize globalized capitalism in this way, and indeed some have -- Nick Land springs to mind.

Yeah, but what does Nick Land actually know about the likely structure of AI software or interconnected control systems. Or even economics for that matter. He's a renegade philosopher, which conveniently requires no qualifications.

"accelerationism" otoh is a clear and interesting concept.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#42

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

mwfunk wrote: post #15

He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it. For me at least, that's not the primary…

The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop.

"You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]."

It looks like an innocent service. But it's devastating to real exploration, because it makes it much less likely you'll ever discover Band/Artist Z whom you'd never normally listen to but love anyway.

This is why thoughtless customer profiling is a dumb idea, and certainly not the sure fire insta-profit marketing panacea it's sometimes supposed to be.

It has some uses, but you're reducing customers to stimulus/response robots with a limited behavioural repertoire, and that's an excellent way to miss a lot of opportunities.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#43

Post by jononor »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #42
mwfunk wrote: post #15

He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it. For me at least, that's not the primary…

The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop. "You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]." It looks like an innocent service. But it's devastating to real exploration, because it makes it much less likely you'll ever discover Band/Artist Z whom you'd never normally listen to but love anyway. This is why thoughtless customer profiling is a dumb idea, and c…

If you however do succeed in reducing humans to stimulus/response bots, it will likely be good business. Which is the scariest aspect, cause that drives lots of decisionmaking today...

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#44

Post by PeCaN »

brobinson wrote: post #29
timboisvert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Haskell mention would've completed the HN trifecta.

I think Phoenix/Elixir has dethroned Haskell.

Or Go or Rust.

But Phoenix/Elixir does seem to be the new thing. Not that I mind, always happy for the Erlang platform to get more attention.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#45

Post by Rauchg »

For different versions of this argument see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect.

Bostrom said: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labelled AI anymore".

Finally, the problem with all these articles is the lack of precise definition for the terminology involved (it reminds me of debates about "consciousness").

Recipe: make a slight twist on the interpretation of the already-vague definition of the term and a new essay emerges.

In this case, the author is equating "AI" to "Abstraction". All the things he mentions he doesn't understand, he could understand by looking them up and talking to the experts, but he doesn't have to, because the appropriate simple interfaces are in place. That's intelligence in its general form, where's the artificial part?

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#47

Post by JumpCrisscross »

> I read once that human brains began shrinking about 10 thousand years ago and are now as much as 15% smaller than they were then.

Timeline's a bit off, but the science is still a shocker:

> Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#48

Post by cobbzilla »

seems like an issue of semantics - he's taking something most of us would just call "human culture" and naming it "AI" - which is an interesting idea, but true artificial intelligence is something that involves some amount of self awareness of the system to itself.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#49

Post by kordless »

sixQuarks wrote: post #10

I don't see the correlation. The author is talking more about systems. The difference with AI is that it will have all of the knowledge within a system and thus be able to make incredible connections between disparate fields of knowledge. On a separate note, I had an interesting thought about AI as I was looking at a cool architectural photo. I would love to design a building, but I don't know a thing about it. It wo…

Why does AI have to have access to all information? Seems a bit wasteful, resource wise, if you ask me.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#50

Post by grahamburger »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #42
mwfunk wrote: post #15

He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it. For me at least, that's not the primary…

The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop. "You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]." It looks like an innocent service. But it's devastating to real exploration, because it makes it much less likely you'll ever discover Band/Artist Z whom you'd never normally listen to but love anyway. This is why thoughtless customer profiling is a dumb idea, and c…

> The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop.

> "You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]."

So far I've found the opposite. Pandora has exposed me to music that I never would have sought out on my own. In fact I can think of several artists that I would have judged by their cover, so to speak, and never given a chance even if I had stumbled on them on my own, instead of coming to awareness mid-song that "I don't know what this is, but I kind of like it."

My wife teases me about this a little bit when she finds me listening to music that she says isn't 'me' or doesn't seem like something I'd like. She's right, but I guess Pandora knows my tastes better than she does (and better than I do, to be fair.)

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