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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

#411

Post by marcusverus »

heterodoxxed wrote: post #288
marcusverus wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that this criticism is offered in good faith, and that you're in need of good, solid Wiki articles about the tens of millions of victims of Communist regimes--well, I'm happy to get you started! Here's an article about the Soviet terror-famine (known as the Holodomor) which killed 4 million Ukranians. No worrisome notifications on this article, so I assume it meets your rigorous standards: https://en.wikiped…

I don't know if you want to open the can of worms that is "accidental deaths from mismanaged resource distribution" under capitalism. Global deaths from hunger result in one great leap forward every 5 years.

The fact that Capitalism has not (yet) solved the global issue of extreme poverty is hardly an argument against it. Particularly when it is the transition to capitalism which has done the most to solve the problem!

After all, it's a simple matter of fact that the accelerating decline of global poverty since 1990 was the result of the transition to capitalism in formerly Communist/Socialist countries in Asia, including the CCP's own particular flavor of state capitalism.[0]

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

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

#412

Post by michaelmrose »

dheera wrote: post #363
dkarras wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you made women pay, the pool of women would shrink considerably and there would not be enough women for men to message to. Ideologies of gender equality aside, simple observation shows that dating is a women's market. Not even just with humans as biologically, women have a lot more to risk (risk of pregnancy, risks associated with being physically weaker etc.) so they choose while men present themselves an…

... until the men who woefully find out that there aren't enough women get off the platform and find a ton of available women? Or until the women find out that all the men are online and figure out that maybe they need to get an account too? I mean, the numbers are still close to 1:1 so ultimately it should work out if you treat men and women equally. If you make men pay you are only propagating stereotypes that men…

Any online dating site that had the fantasy that women had to join their site to get a date would trivially and quickly be disabused of this delusion. The site is following not creating the gender dynamic this is especially true where multiple dating sites all cater to the existing dynamic.

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

#413

Post by wildermuthn »

Borrible wrote: post #374
shkkmo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the role that human "instincts" play in the development of intelligence in our brain is very important. Social behavior is a key part of that. We do see high levels of intelligence in non-mammal species, like crows, but they tend to also be very social creatures. The main counter example I can think of would be the octopus. I think that even if we crack "general intelligence" and can make something that…

Yes, Octopi are beautiful minds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_th... I stopped eating them some 20 years ago. The time I realized, they are quite intelligent and probably the most tragic intelligence on this planet. Given just such a short life time and most of it loners. Yet their body and nervous system have such great potential. Yes, I know it's sentimental humanizing, but I love Elora…

You might really enjoy the science fiction novels Children of Time and Children of Ruin, if you haven’t already. Or hell, based on your comments, maybe you wrote them! Either way, they are spectacular and thought-provoking.

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

#414

Post by wildermuthn »

shkkmo wrote: post #256
wildermuthn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that the role that human "instincts" play in the development of intelligence in our brain is very important. Social behavior is a key part of that. We do see high levels of intelligence in non-mammal species, like crows, but they tend to also be very social creatures. The main counter example I can think of would be the octopus. I think that even if we crack "general intelligence" and can make something that…

The book “Sapiens” does a great job of exploring how culture enabled us to evolve apart from changes to our DNA. I couldn’t agree more.

On instincts: the neocortex is built on top of all the other more instinctual parts of the brain (vision, movement, etc). But this may just be an artifact of being embodied. Is there much difference between a RL agent that gets its data by processing pixels or directly from a simulator? I wouldn’t say there is, except that these non-pixel-parsing agents would have a hard time doing anything outside a simulator that was doing the processing for them.

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

#416

Post by dqh »

robertlagrant wrote: post #408
dqh wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be because men unfortunately, as a group, disproportionately misbehave in these situations. Sending unwelcome dick pics, sending aggressive messages to people who don’t show any interest in them etc. I’ve wondered myself if charging us to send messages might rein in the antisocial behaviour a bit.

This isn't why, at all.

Care to elaborate on your certainty? Have you ever spoken with women about their experiences with online dating?

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

#417

Post by Breza »

dheera wrote: post #134
sseagull wrote: post #109

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…

Dating websites are the one category where either having an amazing site or a truly terrible site both lose you subscribers.

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

#418

Post by Breza »

extraAccount wrote: post #364
AngryData wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't go that far. There are tons of real people on it. A big problem problem though is the user base is so large and concentrated that it disguises the massive amounts of bots and "hidden" advertisement posts that get mixed in. And that low quality content drags the entire community down as "legitimate" posts are forced to compete for views/karma which was not their end-goal in the first place. Reddit works whe…

When using reddit, you need to stay away from the default subs. They are a timesink and repetitive, and because of the volume of users, the comments all start looking the same. People who were introduced through the mobile app usually make a lot of use of them. You need to stick to the topic oriented subreddits. r/homelab for example.

I totally agree that the niche subreddits often have the best discourse.

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

#419

Post by dredmorbius »

simonh wrote: post #197
Zelphyr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Past 50 years, really? "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith, 1776

Smith had very few good things to say of joint-stock (shareholder-owned) corporations. They were comparatively scarce at the time. Most businesses of his time, including the "baker and butcher" line you quite, were sole proprietorships or family-owned and operated.

The interests he writes of are those of the butcher and baker to themselves. Not to their shareholders.

"Shareholder value" is a recent error attributed to Milton Friedman.

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

#420

Post by cratermoon »

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…

> "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

Late to the party, but I want to say here the answer is "maybe". However, the idea that the solution to every problem or need is to buy something is pretty regressive and is kind of at the core of the problem with consumerism and rapacious capitalism.

For a person to buy something, that something has to have been manufactured, shipped, sold, shipped again, etc. All that is extractive and depends on externalities that are too-often finite.

Also, the person buying has to have money, which they made through some kind exchange for labor, possibly fairly, possibly not. For capitalism, incentivizing people to treat a want or need as an opportunity for a financial transaction is essential, even when there are other solutions. Remember, for example, that the Listerine company essentially "invented" bad breath as a problem requiring a product to solve. Not that people didn't legit deal with bad breath before, just that they weren't sold a pre-packaged "cure".

So the question "how do I sleep on an airplane" has many answers other than "buy something".

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