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The AI Misinformation Epidemic

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201–210 of 286 posts

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#201

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.

>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 Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?

Very much so.

More and more i feel that he PC and smartphone has just been about recreating the mainframe using smaller components.

The laser may well have been the last really new thing to come about.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many coal mines or tar sands fields are there in europe?

You can take a look at Germany[1]. And see the results of “Energiewende”[2] [1] http://euracoal2.org/download/Public-Archive/Library/Charts-... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/germany-j... Your point being?

The US (and Canada and Australia) are bad on climate change because they have entrenched interests in fossil fuels which leads to political lobbying.

Europe doesn't have those specific problems, but it has others.

Politicians will do whatever has political benefits to them. Economic benefits, or even reality, are purely secondary. You might get the occasional exceptionally altruistic politician, but the average one will act on his incentives.

This is why you see stuff like the Reinhart & Rogoff paper, which never passed peer review, touted for austerity politics even long after it was retracted. Austerity is popular with a part of the population and politicians will use whatever to justify whatever they're trying to do.

Judging anything on its political success is nonsense

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that 1% is essential to the purpose of the app, it seems reasonable no matter what % of the code of the app it represents.

Going along with my racecar example...the side view mirrors are essential...so does that make the Ford Escort a racecar?

The analogy doesn't work, because "racecar" isn't a technology used in the side mirrors.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#204

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.

sigh singularity hypothesis requires no "accelerating change" any eventually upward slope will do.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#205
post #108

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…

hackathons prizes are bullshit, didn't you know

I wasn't at the hackathon for the prize, but to find enthusiastic developers to recruit for employment, those that aren't usually found through traditional searches.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#206
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. But it may be that some people with enough information and time to watch the stock and relevant data on it literally second by second could make a killing. And some people might be in a position to influence the time of the turning point and stimulate an avalanche of a fall. Broadly, no way do I believe that many people, not even fleets, especially not individuals, will put up with the charging time of a battery…

> Broadly, no way do I believe that many people, not even fleets, especially not individuals, will put up with the charging time of a battery powered car. It's just so darned much more convenient to fill up a 20 gallon tank with gasoline. This may not hold true in the near future. With charging stations capable of putting out 350kW, we will have drastically reduced charging times. [0] > Finally, I'm guessing that Mus…

Sure, the grid can provide the power for fast charging, but charging a battery heats the battery, and charging it too fast heats it too much. That's my concern. If Tesla can make the charging time short enough to be convenient enough, then I'm wrong.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#207

This is a very offensive epithet and I demand you rescind it immediately. Just because you have your own language does not mean you can make up hurtful words in English.

Please don't.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13975970 and marked it off-topic.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freez…

> I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income Dude, no offense, but you're talking about the center of an empire that's literally the biggest that the world has ever seen. That your country is wealthy and can provide for your basic necessities has more to do with this little historical fact than it does with technological advances.

Former empire. Yes it's still rich, yes the boundary of the bottom 15% of the UK is the same as the top 9.7% of the world, but most of the former empire violently rejected the UK in the second half of the 20th century (and most of the rest before then). This collapse caused economic damage that was solved in part by joining the EU, so yay irony for bringing up the long-gone Empire just as my leaders are trying to get it back. ;P

For the rest of the world… In the last 70 years, Ebloa and HIV were not only discovered but so were partial treatments; Smallpox has gone from "a vaccine exists" to "wiped out"; Rinderpest didn't have a vaccine and has been wiped out; Polio has gone from no-vaccination-possible to almost eradicated (37 cases in 2016); Guinea worm — mostly affecting the poor — has gone from multiple millions of cases per year to 25 individual cases.

For wider medicine: the first organ transplants were kidney in 1950, pancreas in 1966, heart and liver both in 1967, ovary in 2005, penis in 2014; DNA has gone from "???" to fully readable and partially editable; ultrasound, pacemakers and IVF were invented, and antidepressants have improved.

In industry, robotics relies on computer power, so I disagree with anyone who dismisses the development of computing power; likewise, telecommunications have gone from "phone calls within your town are expensive" to "let's have a live video chat across 8-time zones".

The entirety of high-temperature superconductors happened after I was born, never mind going back as far as 70 years; Kevlar, Nomex, and carbon nanomaterials were all made for the first time in the last 70 years.

The poor of the world don't have everything we have, with the exception of vaccines for illnesses we wish to eliminate, but even the stuff we discard often contains things that could not be bought at any price 70 years ago.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?

Very much so. More and more i feel that he PC and smartphone has just been about recreating the mainframe using smaller components. The laser may well have been the last really new thing to come about.

Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it.

I think he is right.

PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#210
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To reuse a point brought up quite often in this context, making predictions about when and if AGI might arrive based on extrapolations of current technological trends is like trying to predict when the atom bomb would have been created based on a chart of conventional explosive yields leading up to 1940. Undiscovered discoveries are not predictable, certainly not by extrapolating from the current progress. This appli…

> most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important

I dispute that this is because they don't poses intelligence. Whenever we find an animal displaying some ability we had said required intelligence — language, tool use, self-awareness, solving abstract puzzles, driving a car — we seem to change our definition of intelligence. Just like we have done with A.I., although probably because we want to eat the former and make slave labour of the latter. ;)

(Am vegetarian, please don't eat me, oh robot overlords!)

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