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

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

#231

Post by edgyquant »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #189
PoignardAzur wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I literally append "site:reddit.com" Stop saying that! The more people repeat that on HN, the more we risk advertisers realizing it and doing reddit-targeted SEO and reddit will be useless too! (I'm only half joking) Also, it's funny, I was just reading the thread about malaria eradication and DDT-resistant mosquitoes; the problem of SEO is eerily similar (any countermeasure is eventually defeated by evolution).

You are 10 years too late for that concern. I often wonder if there are any real people commenting, submitting, or upvoting left on Reddit.

There’s real people for sure, but most of them are children and teenagers who are easily susceptible to corporate propaganda. I often wonder when a competitor will arise so that I can leave Reddit, and it’s rolling release of bad UX, for something better. At this point I would pay a monthly fee for a decent Reddit.

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

#232

Post by kingsuper20 »

cletus wrote: post #126
soarfourmore wrote: post #49

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" > and that >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives…

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring. To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on. But what made Google a money-printi…

My main problem with advertising and the technologies surround it, aside from the obvious privacy issues and their misuse, is that it seems to suck all the air out of the room.

The birth and dominance of the online advertising business model looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering talent in the history of humanity.

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

#233

Post by edgyquant »

tolbish wrote: post #76
emptyfile wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did a bad job then, since they still work.

They still use the flags, just not in every instance. I recall the quotes for inclusion of strings and the "-site" flag failing for me as early as last year.

Yes they do ignore those but at this moment they don’t ignore site: queries. Google also suffers heavily from old content, and even changing the date under the tools section doesn’t work for some reason. I think because it goes by when the page was last updated and sites like Reddit update them automatically very frequently

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

#234

Post by Borrible »

wildermuthn wrote: post #122
Borrible wrote: post #12

Since Dartmouth AI looks like a story of naive visions, exaggerated promises, massive disappointment, recurrent divisionary tactics, rebranding and snak oil sale. Until finally a light on the horizon became visible and academically camouflaged wishful thinking could be materialized into usable products. A groping in the dark, nothing more. There are probably good reasons why the blind watchmaker needed billions of ye…

As convoluted as this comment is, props for pointing out that evolution (and the formation of the solar system) took billions of years to produce intelligence. Can humanity do it in less time? Because biological evolution’s is oriented toward propagation of DNA rather than intelligence, we can ask what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to intelligence. Under what scenarios does higher intelligence lead to higher su…

"An intelligent spider would have no significantly greater chance of survival."

Just for a moment, consider your spider as the embodyment of a special form of intelligence.

And even dare to construct the term intelligence to include the web of the spider.

And not just as a tool of the spider.

As a problem-solving competence for a special problem category.

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

#235

Post by IggleSniggle »

cptskippy wrote: post #72
arbitrage wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even Reddit no, reddit? i'm shocked /s your implication seems to be that reddit should somehow be resistant to parasitic capitalism. reddit has been compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the beginning.

> reddit has been compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the beginning. reddit today is very different from reddit of early days, its practically unrecognizable.

Exactly. HN of today is a very similar experience to what Reddit used to be. The King is dead. Long live the King!

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

#236

Post by anticristi »

hajile wrote: post #3

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon. Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get…

I ended up with "site:bbc.com" and "site:svt.se" to get to actual news instead of click-baits. Why the search function of these sites is crap, to the point where it's easier to hack Google, is beyond me.

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

#237

Post by jacquesm »

cblconfederate wrote: post #37

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…

Anything you measure gets destroyed at scale.

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

#238

Post by Aunche »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #111
selfhoster11 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.

> I literally append "site:reddit.com" Stop saying that! The more people repeat that on HN, the more we risk advertisers realizing it and doing reddit-targeted SEO and reddit will be useless too! (I'm only half joking) Also, it's funny, I was just reading the thread about malaria eradication and DDT-resistant mosquitoes; the problem of SEO is eerily similar (any countermeasure is eventually defeated by evolution).

I find that Reddit is mostly useful for things with a small audience like local restaurants, so they're unlikely for recommendations to be fake.

For consumer goods, I find that trustworthy Youtube channels, like America's Test Kitchen, do a much better job with reviewing things anyways.

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

#239

Post by xyzzy21 »

Well, yeah.

Because "machine AI" has NOTHING much in common with how our biological brains work. And we aren't smart enough to know what intelligence really is when we can't even define it for ourselves or in animal models.

And 99.999% of everyone working on machine AI has never taken a biology class let alone a class related to anatomy, neurology or experimental psychology so it's nothing more than "flinging shit on the wall and hoping it sticks" in terms of odds of success!

Not that that would help because academia as it exists today frowns upon "getting out of your lane" or "challenging orthodoxy" so "knowledge hybridization" of two distinct silos is strictly forbidden.

Basically the methodology of AI today is NO DIFFERENT than AI 1.0 from the 1960s and 1970s which was based on the assumption that all intelligence was merely predicate calculus and a fact store.

The scientific and economic model was for that AI (and is still the model for AI today!) is nothing more than the Garden Gnome Business Plan:

1. Create a cute-but-sellable singular heuristic technique misnamed and misinterpreted as "intelligence" in the small

2. Sell the idea to implement the same thing 1000x, 1 000 000x, etc. in parallel

3. ????

4. Success! We now how "strong AI" (which never comes because step #3 is bullshit and faith-based at best; fraud at worst)

The problem is that's also IDENTICAL to the plan to create a 747 jet by putting all the parts into a shipping hold and shaking with the expectation that you'll have a fully-formed 747 pop out when you open it.

Evolution is far smarter than us and has tested all the combinations) that take us generations to check. Evolution might well have taken longer per test but it's had a longer time. The best hope is to slavishly copy nature paying extreme attention to how nature pulls it off.

That's NEVER BEEN DONE with AI!!

So it's a VERY EASY technology to short in the long run because the fundamentals of assumptions and methodology are always such Epic Fail.

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

#240

Post by uoaei »

daenz wrote: post #164
sudosysgen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was decommodified. Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed, though.

>your product In a hypothetical world where I don't benefit from a competitive advantage, in what sense do I own the product / company?

Consider firms which are wholly owned by either 1) every single employee (worker-owned firm), 2) every employee and every customer who opts in (consumer co-op), or 3) literally every citizen of a government (publicly owned).

You own it in partnership with the other people who own it.

This is, in the strictest definition, the socialism that people are so scared of.

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