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What We Get Wrong About Technology

timharford.com

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Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#71

Post by grondilu »

ape4 wrote: post #38
Animats wrote: post #12

The article mentions "Jennifer", which is the real-world implementation of Marshall Brain's "Manna 1.0". Here's a video of it in action.[1] This is another example of "machines should think, people should work.". The computer is the boss. That may be the future. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-ReBX0icU

I can see people absolutely hating Jennifer.

I don't know. Consider Personal navigation assistants[1]. I totally feel like I've put my brain in storage when I use those things, yet I kind of like it. It's relaxing.

We'll be to machines what horses are to their riders. I'm not sure horses hate their riders.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_navigation_assistant

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#72

Post by jernfrost »

waivek wrote: post #37
randomdrake wrote: post #6

> Jennifer and the many other programmes like her are examples of a “voice-directed application” — just software and a simple, inexpensive earpiece. Such systems have become part of life for warehouse workers: a voice in their ear or instructions on a screen tell them where to go and what to do, down to the fine details. If 13 items must be collected from a shelf, Jennifer will tell the human worker to pick five, the…

Furthermore, if you look at the kind of automation that was developed, you see precisely what workers in the early labor movement were complaining about: being turned into mindless tools of production. I mean, automation could have been designed in such a way as to use the skills of skilled machinists and to eliminate management—there’s nothing inherent in automation that says it can’t be used that way. But it wasn’t…

If you read about the Toyota production system and compare it to the ford system you will see a lot of this difference. The Japanes system emphasized human skill while the ford system made humans into monkeys reapeating the same dumb operation over and over.

As a Norwegian I've seen this difference between Scandinavian and American work culture. In the US there tends to be deep levels of management where the people at the bottom have almost no autonomy or power. Yet this is again far worse in many developing countries. There is an excellent piece by an American military officer about why arab armies are so bad. People at the bottom have no decision power.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#73

Post by dalbasal »

KGIII wrote: post #55
dalbasal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we over-emphasize elements that seem more “technological,” overestimate their importance. The printing press example is great. We credit the press because it’s mechanical and complex, but not the paper (or ink or literacy or religion). For peaches in winter, most people think of botany, refrigeration, airplanes… science. Fewer people would think of joint stock companies or shipping containers as important ena…

From the Industrial Revolution, we got interchangeable parts and standardization. I think those really had some of the largest impacts on society.

Absolutely.

It’s a good example of weird/unintuitive causation. Standardisation is a byproduct of industrialisation & mass production.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#74

Post by dEnigma »

titzer wrote: post #59

FTA: "Why not unbundle the task and give the conscious thinking to the computer, and the mindless grabbing to the human?" The article was pretty good overall, but this one's a pet peeve of mine. We're offloading our thinking to computers and this magical "AI" in hopes that all that hard work (and possibility for error!) is going to be avoided. But we're going to find out--or perhaps not, as we slip below the dumbness…

Deep L translation:

"Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen."

Not quite there yet, but pretty good in my opinion. (German native speaker)

https://www.deepl.com/

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#75

Post by dEnigma »

dEnigma wrote: post #74
titzer wrote: post #59

FTA: "Why not unbundle the task and give the conscious thinking to the computer, and the mindless grabbing to the human?" The article was pretty good overall, but this one's a pet peeve of mine. We're offloading our thinking to computers and this magical "AI" in hopes that all that hard work (and possibility for error!) is going to be avoided. But we're going to find out--or perhaps not, as we slip below the dumbness…

Deep L translation: "Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen." Not quite there yet, but pretty good in my opinion. (German native speaker) https://www.deepl.com/

Also, the other way around works even better in my opinion. That is, translation from German into English. I tried it with a few excerpts from a philosophy text book and the results were impressive.

Your point that the AI doesn't "understand" the text still stands though.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#76

Post by loup-vaillant »

_mhr_ wrote: post #10
taeric wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that was a thread in I, Robot. My favorite is how the robots on the space colony don't believe the humans could have created them, due to how sophisticated they are.

I believe this is the story with Cutie (nickname for QT-1) who invents a religion to justify its existence. The amusing thing was that the rituals of its religion consisted of making sure the space colony functioned properly, so the humans decided to leave the robot's faith alone. And the robot thought that the humans were mindless religious fools for believing in Earth: """The robot approached softly and there was s…

Wait a minute, doesn't the first law requires Cutie to prevent humans to dissolve themselves?

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#77

Post by caseymarquis »

adrianN wrote: post #36
lordnacho wrote: post #35

I wonder if the great leap he mentions (1870-1970) is mostly from the discovery of electromagnetism. It would seem to be magical. Here's this thing that allows you to move huge amounts of power over vast distances, but deposit it in whatever tiny portions you like, in whatever room you want, and it's so easy you run the wires along your existing walls. The same force allows you to send both signal and power through t…

Quantum computers are still in the "we have discovered the basic science, but the engineering is lacking" phase. If we'd manage to make them work as amazingly well as classical computers we could do some things we're currently struggling with much better. Foremost anything that has to do with quantum mechanical simulations, for example designing new drugs, creating useful protein nanomachines, predicting material pro…

That sounds a bit dangerous to the lay person...

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#78

Post by jrimbault »

rakete wrote: post #51
donw wrote: post #9

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…

Seems weird to me to include snapchat in a list together with antibiotics and cars. And I think it kind of demonstrates your own point. You did not name any specific antibiotic products, or car manufacturers, because those are not really that significant. The underlying inventions though are the real technological leaps forward that, as you say, are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. Snapchat is…

>Snapchat is just a product, I think the real invention that you overlooked is the internet.

When I think about, I suppose it would be almost simpler to explain Snapchat than the Internet to a 18th century person.

Though, like you, I think I would try first to explain the Internet.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#79

Post by jameshart »

duncanawoods wrote: post #60
legulere wrote: post #34

> plausible that LA would look much the same This is actually something I liked in contrast to earlier futurism. If I look around me here in Europe I see that buildings rarely get removed once they stand. The last time the face of cities here changed was after the Second World War. If I look at pictures from the 60s rarely anything changed, except maybe the introduction of some pedestrian zones.

That seems overly broad - a surviving old city tourist area might be well preserved but elsewhere, post-war city rebuilding programs were cheap, rushed and ugly. Even later development is unloved because "high-design" of the time was infected by Brutalism. These already troubled urban centres were then hollowed-out by economic troubles in the 70s leading to areas of dereliction. Over the past few decades, urban regen…

We don't keep those buildings because we value their architecture, we keep them because we are using them.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#80

Post by rwallace »

lordnacho wrote: post #35

I wonder if the great leap he mentions (1870-1970) is mostly from the discovery of electromagnetism. It would seem to be magical. Here's this thing that allows you to move huge amounts of power over vast distances, but deposit it in whatever tiny portions you like, in whatever room you want, and it's so easy you run the wires along your existing walls. The same force allows you to send both signal and power through t…

> Now that we've discovered EM, have we exhausted the basic knowledge about the world?

I don't know whether there is more basic science to be discovered, but even if there isn't, there is plenty of technology to be invented within the scope of existing science. Atomically precise manufacturing, for example: we know about atoms, but our ability to work with them is still crude in the extreme.

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