Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 343 posts

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#331

Post by scottlocklin »

virgilp wrote: post #330
scottlocklin wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please characterize the amazing improvements the last 20 years have brought to these fields. Your analogy is faulty: Haber Bosch was obviously something very different and new. Nothing in use today differs appreciably in accuracy or capability in speech to text or machine translation as it was 20 years ago.

Care to tell me one single speech to text product that had at least a horrible 50% accuracy for Romanian 20 years ago? Because today I can dictate my messages to Google - that, plus the occasional correction, is faster than typing.

My apologies for not knowing the details of Romanian speech to text gizmos, but for English, Spanish and other more popular languages speech to text worked adequately, using contemporary hardware even back in the 1980s when Romania was still part of the Warsaw Pact. The fact that google or whatever has gotten around to training a vector quantizer on Romanian now isn't really a sign of actual technological progress. It's just last mile.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#332

Post by virgilp »

virgilp wrote: post #330
scottlocklin wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please characterize the amazing improvements the last 20 years have brought to these fields. Your analogy is faulty: Haber Bosch was obviously something very different and new. Nothing in use today differs appreciably in accuracy or capability in speech to text or machine translation as it was 20 years ago.

Care to tell me one single speech to text product that had at least a horrible 50% accuracy for Romanian 20 years ago? Because today I can dictate my messages to Google - that, plus the occasional correction, is faster than typing.

No, it did not work adequately, not even close, not even in English. Maybe if you gave it good conditions (god forbid any background noise!) and spoke clearly you could get some decent results. But that's not "adequate". How many people did you know using speech to text 20 years ago?

It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repeatable enough to be actually available in practice, to everyone".

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#333

Post by scottlocklin »

virgilp wrote: post #332
virgilp wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to tell me one single speech to text product that had at least a horrible 50% accuracy for Romanian 20 years ago? Because today I can dictate my messages to Google - that, plus the occasional correction, is faster than typing.

No, it did not work adequately, not even close, not even in English. Maybe if you gave it good conditions (god forbid any background noise!) and spoke clearly you could get some decent results. But that's not "adequate". How many people did you know using speech to text 20 years ago? It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repea…

Lol, OK dude. Rabiner is still a classic and useful textbook on this topic, and it was published in 1978.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#334

Post by bryanlarsen »

scottlocklin wrote: post #318
raducu wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you guys even arguing about this? IF ML works great, yeah it could have a big positive impact, but not much for the average person so far, meanwhile it does work for the chinese dictatorship, hedge funds, the military, the scummy corrupt politicians to influence ellections; self driving cars will be a HUGE benefit, but guess who will take the lion's share of that benefit -- the 0.5% that will own the tech; ma…

I guess we're arguing because I deny that there has been appreciable progress. Most of what passes for "progress" in tech and ML is simply adoption of old ideas, or improvements in lithography. Along with forgetting vastly more important ideas. IMO the most important real world idea in ML in current year, defined as "being used and changing how people solve problems" is not deep learning (God Bless Yann), it is Boost…

Appreciable progress often comes through the adoption of old ideas. Something that only works in the lab if you squint at it carefully isn't useful; something that only 3 people know about isn't useful; but something that works reliably in the field is useful, even if their are no appreciable differences between them.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#335

Post by virgilp »

scottlocklin wrote: post #333
virgilp wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it did not work adequately, not even close, not even in English. Maybe if you gave it good conditions (god forbid any background noise!) and spoke clearly you could get some decent results. But that's not "adequate". How many people did you know using speech to text 20 years ago? It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repea…

Lol, OK dude. Rabiner is still a classic and useful textbook on this topic, and it was published in 1978.

So are all the stats books. What exactly is that supposed to prove? Basic things seldom change, and remain useful.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#336

Post by scottlocklin »

virgilp wrote: post #335
scottlocklin wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, OK dude. Rabiner is still a classic and useful textbook on this topic, and it was published in 1978.

So are all the stats books. What exactly is that supposed to prove? Basic things seldom change, and remain useful.

I guess I'm always shocked and amazed how hypnotized people are by their ipotatoes, and how little technological perspective people actually have.

I was there back in 1990s using speech recognition software which worked just like it does today, with vastly more than 50% accuracy. Dunno where you were. Romania I guess.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#337

Post by viklove »

mech1234 wrote: post #274
viklove wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that just because more people are opting to live with their parents because they can't afford their own rent?

No. Household sizes have been getting smaller, not larger, over time. It would be pretty far-fetched for the combinatorial effects of mixed-income households to boost the median in spite of this.

Well, people are having less children now than ever before. That doesn't mean those children are moving out when they reach adulthood.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#338

Post by virgilp »

scottlocklin wrote: post #336
virgilp wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are all the stats books. What exactly is that supposed to prove? Basic things seldom change, and remain useful.

I guess I'm always shocked and amazed how hypnotized people are by their ipotatoes, and how little technological perspective people actually have. I was there back in 1990s using speech recognition software which worked just like it does today, with vastly more than 50% accuracy. Dunno where you were. Romania I guess.

Yes. Romania. What you think software didn't run in Romania?

What did you use, Dragon Speech? Maybe it worked better for you? I can assure you for non-native speakers it was pure crap. Also, what was the usage in western world? I know they had _some_ sales, but I don't remember it exactly taking off.

Lastly - you're obviously willfully ignoring progress, like translation for instance works so much better with RNNs and attention. The basics of RNN were indeed there (LSTM was just published - though e.g. GRU is more recent), but attention was not. And attention is critical. That's just one of the things that's not "basically the same" and "worked just as well 20 years ago".

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#339

Post by scottlocklin »

virgilp wrote: post #338
scottlocklin wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm always shocked and amazed how hypnotized people are by their ipotatoes, and how little technological perspective people actually have. I was there back in 1990s using speech recognition software which worked just like it does today, with vastly more than 50% accuracy. Dunno where you were. Romania I guess.

Yes. Romania. What you think software didn't run in Romania? What did you use, Dragon Speech? Maybe it worked better for you? I can assure you for non-native speakers it was pure crap. Also, what was the usage in western world? I know they had _some_ sales, but I don't remember it exactly taking off. Lastly - you're obviously willfully ignoring progress, like translation for instance works so much better with RNNs an…

Yeah, we had a guy at LBNL who was a big OS2 fan. Worked fine for me, and I do have a fairly heavy coastal accent. Mind you it worked in a big, loud industrial facility.

I thought the previous KNN based approaches worked better than the RNN based ones. Which is more or less my point here. The main piece of "progress" we got was the result of a giant corporation having a large corpus of data. The actual technology hasn't improved or changed a whole hell of a lot.

I'm eventually going to write a history of technological progress documenting this. Progress is very obviously slowing down other than the improvements in lithography which are now fading out. Throw away anything with a screen in your household and life is basically identical to what it was 20, even 40 years ago. That wasn't true within my lifetime: there were huge strides made in technology in decades gone by -in my lifetime even. We're at the point where a lot of "progress" is just changes in fashion; KNN versus neural approaches. People buying the latest iphone (which is really no more capable than the early iphones); wondering at the facial recognition IR thingee. Oh sure, DL can do some tricks that were not possible before, but their actual real world impact is marginal, and sometimes, it's not even an improvement over other techniques.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#340

Post by virgilp »

scottlocklin wrote: post #339
virgilp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Romania. What you think software didn't run in Romania? What did you use, Dragon Speech? Maybe it worked better for you? I can assure you for non-native speakers it was pure crap. Also, what was the usage in western world? I know they had _some_ sales, but I don't remember it exactly taking off. Lastly - you're obviously willfully ignoring progress, like translation for instance works so much better with RNNs an…

Yeah, we had a guy at LBNL who was a big OS2 fan. Worked fine for me, and I do have a fairly heavy coastal accent. Mind you it worked in a big, loud industrial facility. I thought the previous KNN based approaches worked better than the RNN based ones. Which is more or less my point here. The main piece of "progress" we got was the result of a giant corporation having a large corpus of data. The actual technology has…

Knn works better with little data, rnn with lots of data. But we do have lots of data - that, too, is part of the progress. Also progress is non-linear; and the real world impact is huge, though we may not always like it (social media & content algorithms have literally changed the world, influenced elections and sparked literal revolutions). Driverless trucks would be a huge shift, and it’s not unconcievable that we’ll have them. RPA is threatening a lot of repetitive white collar jobs; sure it’s boring technology, but that’s exactly what makes it disruptive in my mind. Image understanding _did_ get a lot bettter (face recognition along with it) and we still haven’t fully processed the implications of that.

You have grounds to be skeptical about the future and to believe it is dark; but IMO you don’t have grounds to claim that there was no progress.

Post reply on HN