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We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

calpaterson.com

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Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#221
post #177
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-m…

Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money. T…

> This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive

If the payment is a one-time advance payment, I would imagine this disincentives the business to truly do their best, since they already have your money.

I would think, idealistically, maybe the best model would be an advance payment but with a money-back guarantee of say half the payment if you don't find a match through them.

Legally establishing that you don't find a match could be troublesome though, since the "couple" that actually liked each other could both claim they didn't match, get their 50% back, but you as a business would have no recourse if they got together and lived their lives happily ever after, behind your back. You don't have "rights" to their personal life together as a business.

Unless of course it was a government-run dating service that had marriage, housing, and financial records of everyone. That might work. And for many reasons it's in the best interest of the government to get as many people married as possible.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#222
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-m…

The incentive for the dating app is to keep you unsatisfied, but with some hope, to keep dating and failing over and over. Or I suppose the business models could be either “subscription” based where you keep using it forever or “contract” based where it’s a single fee.

I think the okcupid papers called out how free dating is better aligned with users because they wouldn’t have to compete with the natural tendency to want to make more money through ongoing subscriptions.

Of course, I know friends who are continuously dating and plan on staying that way.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#223
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-m…

You're assuming that everyone uses online dating platforms to find one (1) long-term partner with whom they'll be monogamous, which is not the case.

There are couples looking for other couples or thirds, there is the BDSM scene with people looking for casual play partners, and so on.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#224
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money. T…

IMO the ideal business model from users' perspective could be pay-as-you-go, where you pay for each individual you want to send message to (e.g. $1.99).

That would incentivizing matching people with those whom they want to message but aren't likely to start a relationship with.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#225
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money. T…

IMO the ideal business model from users' perspective could be pay-as-you-go, where you pay for each individual you want to send message to (e.g. $1.99).

Maybe ideally yes, but that's assuming you only had the option to message them through the platform.

You could always message people for free outside the platform, considering any profile worthy of messaging probably lists enough information to find them on, say, LinkedIn or Facebook, and users likely often drop their personal websites or Instagram/Twitter IDs on their dating profiles.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#226

The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. They probably have the…

> "Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer review: websites ranking other websites, and having themselves punished when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was originally)"

This is interesting because I had a class were we all had to write a paper. I received a grade for the paper but it was never graded by the professor. We all had to rank 5 papers from best to worst, and our grade was determined by our paper ranking and how well our ranking matched others. It was pretty reliable

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#227
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).

Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders." The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.

Psychology studies in the past showed people were altruistic. Then psychologist accounted for social capital/good will and worked to remove it from their altruism tests. People stopped being overly altruistic when it stopped benefitting them, likely meaning that what we see as altruism is really a failure to account for all the benefits a person expects to gain and all the negatives they expect to avoid when choosing to perform a certain action.

As for shareholders, I think that comes down to the incentive to avoid the negative outcome of being replaced. Those at the top optimize their actions to avoid being replaced which filters down through each level until it effects every level of a company. There is some variety that results from how a company chooses who to promote, but that is still an outcome of not wanting to be replaced. Promote people who you think will strengthen your own position and not those who will weaken it. This ends up being the primordial pool that spawns corporate culture.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?

Which part of it needs clarification? “Snake oil” is a product that is sold on false promises. The author suggested much of AI has been snake oil historically. They also suggest that the way intelligence was created (natural selection, AKA the “blind watchmaker”) may be the fastest way to do it. And that trying to do it again, in computers, might also take a billion years because the problem is just that hard. But ho…

Not exactly. The not-teleological process of evolution needed billions of years to bring forth human intelligence.

Human intelligence is likely to produce artificial intelligence much more quickly, if that is possible at all. Which is likely. Which is partly a matter of the semantics of the term. Whose fuzziness is the root of a smorgasbord of wishful thinking since 1956. Whenever AI came up against seemingly insurmountable difficulties, they just changed its definition.

It is quite funny to read for example books from philosophers with some interest in artificial intelligence from the 80s/90s like say Paul Churchland. (The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, MIT Press, 1995)

The anecdotes are worth their weight in gold. Especially because they show what was considered artificial intelligence back than in contrast to today.

What human intelligence produces as artificial intelligence will resemble human intelligence in function, but not necessarily in form. Just as nature has brought forth flying differently than man.

Or as Prof.Dr. Katharina Morik, TU Dortmund, Germany once put it on a meetup I attended: "AI is when a machine does something that looks like only humans can do. Artificial intelligence is open as a terminology to accommodate the phenomenon of shifting capability."

You may notice the strong, let me put it mildly, ironic component in her description.

I am only a little more vicious in my judgment.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#229
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO content is a positive feedback loop.

That would imply there isn't an equilibrium.

And in this case, the equilibrium is some amount of AI-bait fluff. There's a limit, beyond which continuing to add more fluff does not produce higher results.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#230
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-m…

Serial daters. Plenty of guys just using these apps for one-timer hookups or FWB. They stick around for a month then onto the next branch like a damn monkey.

This. Before tindr you just had 'dating' sites.
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