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The AI Misinformation Epidemic

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Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#181

Post by bischofs »

mljoe wrote: post #159
bischofs wrote: post #137

Stop calling it "Machine Learning" and "Neural Networks" if you don't want the attention. Do we refer to code or computers as "Machines?". That kind of language is just begging for skynet references. Any sort of elaborate processing network could be called "Neural" or maybe even a fancy linked-list . Something more reasonable like a learning network would keep the sensationalism down. Im sure we can come up with bett…

How about "statistical inference"? This is not an uncommon term for ML techniques in the statistical community.

"Terminator 4: uncontrolled statistical inference"

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#182

Post by justin66 »

bischofs wrote: post #153
justin66 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we refer to code or computers as "Machines?" I do, sometimes. I don't know where I picked up the habit, to be honest, but it might date back to the eighties or nineties. (I know I'm not the only one)

Fair enough, but take anything in computers and replace it with "Machines" and it illustrates the point. ram could be called "Machine memory" or a network could be called a "Machine communication matrix" or in the reverse "Terminator 3: rise of the computers"

Yeah, I won't try to defend the "machine learning" moniker, except to point out that it's not nearly as dorky as "deep learning."

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#183

Post by coldtea »

meri_dian wrote: post #154
coldtea wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure I'd consider stuff like the vast majority of human knowledge sitting in my pocket to be less useful than the dishwasher because it has fewer moving parts or most people can afford to fly to be less of an achievement than the megarich can fly 50% faster. Not sure anybody told you to consider that. What they did ask you to consider is that technological progress, outside of the digital realm, has been slowed…

The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace. While 'slowed down' or 'sped up' are difficult to quantify, the fact that 3 billion human beings have gained access to smartphone technology over the last decade seems to support the ide…

>The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace.

No, it's just a clear indication of market efficiencies and/or better engineering.

It doesn't say anything about what the grandparent asked for: the rate and magnitude of new scientific/technologic discoveries.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#184

Post by flippyhead »

Banthum wrote: post #28
ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

I used to think this way too. And actually I would get a little depressed, as a software engineer, because I worried that I wasn't doing much useful work only creating software all day.

But then one day I had a profound insight: For nearly all of human history, the ONLY agent of change has been software. That is, our bodies have remained exactly the same for the last 80,000 years and the only thing that's changed is our culture, knowledge, languages, etc. We've used those changes in software and information to create new physical tools but the only thing that's taken us from the beginning to today is slow, steady improvements in software and "information processing".

I actually think that it is a high leverage phenomenon that most of our innovation is now focused much more significantly on pure information. It's hard to understand how this can't be causing acceleration in change.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#185

Post by coldtea »

iwintermute wrote: post #150
coldtea wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our means of travel have also gotten vastly more efficient. Hardly vastly. At best within an order of magnitude better, but not even close to that.

It has gotten twice as cheap (if you look at average ticket prices adjusted to inflation) from 70 to now. Also point about concorde - it's more fuel efficient to fly slower (look at drag coefficient [1]) So from point of view of affordability and mobility for general public - it's good progress. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transport#/media/Fi...

>It has gotten twice as cheap (if you look at average ticket prices adjusted to inflation) from 70 to now.

Which is consistent with the gp's point that progress has slowed down.

It had gotten 100 to 1000 times cheaper, faster, more efficient to e.g. travel intercontinentally between the 1900 to 1970 that it has between 1970 to now.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#186

Post by prvnsmpth »

ramblerman wrote: post #121
TuringNYC wrote: post #48

Here is my annoyance with AI Hype: people seeking extra tailwinds pitch their startups as "ML companies" even with the most tangential usage of ML. It drowns out real ML companies. Most people cannot tell the difference. At a hackathon recently, someone pitched their app as an "ML-driven app" though the only ML in there was some 1-line language translation feature they were consuming off Watson REST services for a ta…

Your focus on "effort" and "real" sounds a bit exclusive at the behest of your own job security. The ML boom (specifically DL) is so interesting because of the applications. Computers recognising images better than humans for instance. Surely outside of academia its a means to an end like anything else. If Team A wires together some high level Keras components with 30 lines of code, and does something really cool wit…

If said team uses Keras as just a black-box, I would argue that it is. Not having intimate knowledge of the complex algorithms that you employ to build your services is not exactly an ideal situation to be in. If things doesn't work as expected, you can't just look it up on Stack Overflow, for instance.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#187

Post by coldtea »

talmand wrote: post #157
coldtea wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the above are new technologies (last decade(s) or so) developments -- except those that concern computers (which is in accordance to what the parent said).

So, we don't consider efficiency gains and other improvements as being successful new developments?

We can consider them "successful new developments" or whatever else we want.

We just can't consider them important new discoveries in the sense that the creation of things like steam engine, air travel, jet engines, etc were (to stay with transportation).

If you wish, the former are basically incremental engineering/efficiency improvements upon the latter.

What the parent observed as lacking/slowing was non-incremental improvements.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#188

Post by Chris2048 »

Author says (in comments) in support of Singularity being nonsense:

> Technology is not a quantity

Er, yeah, "technology" is a complicated thing, but it can be considered a quantity. Computing power grows, so does automation and material knowledge. Dismissing a useful concept as religion because it isn't mathematically rigorous isn't very objective.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#189

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

>Once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in info tech and finance

And medicine, and materials, and semiconductors (this board in particular loves to forget that these computers we all use are built on top of something), and antennas; the list goes on. What was once highly theoretical phd knowledge is now a byline in a junior level microelectronics course; the cutting edge having evolved to be unrecognizable to a person 60 years ago. It took us 40 years to go from a computer that could play chess to a computer that could win; took less than twenty to go from winning chess to winning Go (and exponential jump in complexity). In the same amount of time we've gone from mapping the human genome to editing it. Rechargeable battery technology that could power a vacuum for 30 minutes to driving a car for 400 miles.

Never forget that exponential change looks linear on the small scale.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#190

Post by Chris2048 »

Banthum wrote: post #28
ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

It's entirely possible that progress is being made in areas not immediately visible to the public.

You see the horses replaced with cars - what do you see of the advances in sewage management, or plastics recycling?

Also, an electric car is still a car, but it's still very different from a combustion engine, or a coal steam-engine, for that matter. Does the fact that a horse is so dissimilar to an electric/petrol car mean the two are relatively similar? That seems to be a fairly superficial distinction of change.

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