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The AI Misinformation Epidemic

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Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#271

Post by ExactoKnight »

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...

Efficiency is something you begin to care about when the original technology itself is no longer providing the wow factor it used to bring.

For efficiency to be considered a huge leap in progress, it needs to be a change on the order of magnitudes....

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#272

Post by ExactoKnight »

areyousure wrote: post #264
ExactoKnight wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything you listed there already started becoming common by the 1960's. Step back and forget about informational technology. Look at the world of atoms, not at the world of bits. Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower , not faster. Man hasn't reached farther out in space than the moon missions of the 1960s. The first half th…

I learned a lot from researching the topics mentioned in this post, and hopefully someone else can also benefit from the following information. tl;dr: Indoor heating significantly predates 1900. Though relevant inventions largely predate 1900, widespread adoption was indeed between 1900 and 1950 for electrification, automobiles, air travel, radio, washing machines, and indoor plumbing. The years after 1950 include mo…

Very fair points. Peter Thiel actually argues the slowdown began in 1970, which would capture nearly every technology mentioned.

The period of comparison is really the start of the industrial revolution until the 1970's. This 100 year period was dramatic, and arguably, we are not matching it right now with our rate of progress outside of information technology.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#273

Post by ExactoKnight »

cm2187 wrote: post #128
paperpunk wrote: post #78

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…

And you can buy a super-computer (Raspberry PI, compared to the 50s or 60s) for some change.

Again, that's information technology. That's one area where the past still moved fast like we are now, while the rest of us I am arguing hasn't (in terms of speed).

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#274

Post by ExactoKnight »

vatsal wrote: post #259
Banthum wrote: 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…

Agreed. The one thing I would add though is that while a lot of the technology we are using now has roots in the first half of the century, the second half has been big in terms refining and making said technology available and accessible to an increasingly higher % of human population across geographies and across economic levels. I think that in itself is a big step forward.

That's the problem. Globalization is merely the copying of existing technology, but many in the west have mistaken it for real progress.

This is one reason why economic growth in the west is stagnant. Technological progress is what fuelled our strong growth half a century ago. Without it, politics becomes a zero sum game.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#275

Post by ExactoKnight »

colmvp wrote: post #175
devdoomari wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

culturally/politically, yes we should be proud... but 'everyone can communicate with anyone' also meant everyone has access to FB, snapchat, worthless videos, and so on for distraction :(

I'm in the camp that abstains from social media, but people are almost always going to find distractions, be it social media, movies, shows, games, novels, or consumables. In moderation, that's perfectly fine. Not everyone wants to work a crazy amount of hours or considers what they are doing from 9-5 fulfilling.

I actually think distraction from our IT devices is a major reason why things are slowing down.

Without our smartphones, spending hours tinkering would be how most people ended up spending their time. It sets one up much more so for a maker mindset over a consumer mindset.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#276

Post by JSoet »

ThomPete wrote: post #115
Fricken wrote: post #17

Welcome to the club. Now you know how Economists, healthcare professionals, skateboarders, basket weavers and anybody else whose domain knowledge runs deeper than the average joe's feels whenever their area of technical expertise becomes the subject du jour for the public at large.

In Danish we have a word "fagidiot" which means idiot of your field. It's the kind of things that make it impossible for someone who's been in the army to enjoy a movie if they don't use the machine gun properly or a designer to appreciate the casting in the end if the typography is not kerned properly. The things that matter to someone who spent a lot of time in any given field are rarely the important things to any…

Similar, but more similar to lots of the people mentioned in the original post is the german phrase "Gefährliches Halbwissen" or 'dangerous half-knowledge': when you know just enough to seem knowledgable about a subject, but actually have a very basic surface knowledge.

(ps. I'm not a native german speaker, so sorry if I misrepresented the phrase, but this is how it was explained to me)

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#277

Post by Quarrelsome »

graycat wrote: post #212
Quarrelsome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give your work a catchy name because you want other people to help develop it, via attention, promotion, word of mouth, etc so other people can find it and fund it. To do so you speak in their terms and their terms are catchy one-liners. Don't be bitter about it, some people just don't have the level of concentration to deal with our specifics.

I can accept Newton's second law of motion and Einstein's general relativity, but so far I'm less accepting of deep learning for finding some coefficients for fitting some data or neural networks for fitting some sigmoid functions to some data. Apparently the sigmoid functions have some nice theoretical properties and can be useful in approximating some complicated data; e.g., IIRC D. Bertsekas at MIT used such fitti…

Oh you don't have to preach here, I am SOOOOOO converted. I spend way too much time pissing against the wind in reddit.com/r/futurology where it seems waitbutwhy is mandatory biblical reading. Then they pretend they like science at the same time :S.

Still, my point is that I think IRRESPECTIVE of how we present it or what we do THEY will always jump to that conclusion. Remember that these are people that think vanilla programming is the work of a "computer" as opposed to it being an echo of the mind of a software engineer.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#278

Post by ericd »

graycat wrote: post #219
ericd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The charging time of the electric car is overnight in your garage, while you're asleep. So the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of people, that's not a relevant concern. On road trips, 30 minute breaks every few hours aren't the end of the world for most people. For self-driving, there's no way that's going to be held back once it's better than a human driver. The demand is going to be incredibly high,…

For charging overnight, my concern is that (A) if drive very much during the day and (B) the house has only a 100 A circuit breaker box, then the charging time will still be too long, that is, that overnight is not long enough. The back of the envelope arithmetic I did on overnight charging at 100 A boiled down to driving a relatively large golf cart not very far or fast. I could be wrong. Yes, a Tesla is a lot bigge…

Well, I think 100A at 120V should theoretically be enough - 12kw. The biggest Tesla battery is 100 kwh, so assuming no charging losses (bad assumption, I know), you should be full in 8ish hours from empty. In reality, you won't want to use your whole rated electrical capacity on one thing, but on the flip side, you can go higher voltage, or upgrade your breaker, assuming your wiring isn't too marginal. Tesla sells a high voltage high amperage charging station for your garage for not too much. I think most charge on a 240V or greater line.

But yeah, charging up mountains at 100 mph will probably give you less than 3 hours :-D

Re driving fun, the torque is great, but I think the biggest thing is 0 throttle lag. Less of a problem with a supercharger than my old twin turbo, but still not instant like this. It's worth taking on a test drive, that's what really convinced me that this was the future. That and the 0-60 times of a 7 seater on par with an M5 (at the time), and the relative mechanical simplicity, and the better marginal economics, etc.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#279

Post by edanm »

mjn wrote: post #260
edanm wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no one "AI and singularity" argument. That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we…

> You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". I wish this were true, but it's gotten a new lease on life with Nick Bostrom's book and the various high-profile people who have been influenced by it (like Elon Musk and Bill Gates), so there's a bit of a boomlet around singularity speculation again.

But that's where I disagree with you. I think Bostrom et al's take on things is correct (at least potentially), and has nothing at all to do with the Kurzweilian norm. Bostrom's argument requires far fewer background assumptions.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#280

Post by debuggerpk »

ben_w wrote: post #208
bad_user wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

excellent perspective. if we take the very narrow computing field, there have been considerable inventions, especially in the field of medical science.
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