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Ray Kurzweil joins Google

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Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#111

Post by mtgx »

nnq wrote: post #96
mtgx wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of visionaries are misunderstood because they can "see" things the others can't at the time, and it doesn't make sense to them, which is why they think they are "weird" or "crazy". From that point of view, Richard Stallman was also a visionary, even if it took 2-3 decades before his visions of states or companies putting backdoors in your proprietary software became true.

Manager to programmers: "Hey that weird free software guy thinks we put "backdoors" in our software, whatever that means. Maybe he's right and our competitor do this already!! ...Quick, code a backdoor into our system too, we don't want to fall behind!"

Yes, that's probably exactly what the Skype managers said. "Let's do it first before our Chinese competition does it".

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#112

Post by grepherder »

slacka wrote: post #104
cschmidt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. I can't see this working out well for Google, unless they just want a famous figurehead.

> I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. The problem with Peter Norvig is that he comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While they have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI. Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have be…

Obviously Google translate is not error free, nor is any statistical translation system going to be comparable to a human translator in the very near future, but you're underestimating the current development of statistical translation. Granted, I'm not a native speaker but I think "I need to meet up" is not even a sentence with proper grammar. Underlying model probably predicted something like meeting (satisfying) requirements due to the lack of an object in the sentence and context. Situations like this where the input is very short and noisy is obviously going to be a weakness of statistical systems for a long time to come, but looking at technologically how far we are from mastering biological systems, I think it's safe to say this is going to be the way of doing it for a while, and will be very successful in translating properly structured texts if proper context can be provided. Currently statistical translations have (almost) no awareness of context beside some phrase-based or hierarchical models. Many people are probably not factoring in the fact, that with exponentially more data, and exponentially higher computing power, a model can utilize the context of a whole book while translating just a sentence from that book - which is actually still much less than what human translators utilize in terms of context. While translating a sentence, I might even have to utilize what was on the news the night before to infer the correct context. We are currently definitely far from feeding this kind of information to our models, so I'd say this kind of criticism towards statistical translation is very unfair.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#113

Post by nazgulnarsil »

nonsequ wrote: post #2

Can anyone shed some light on what 'Director of Engineering' might mean at Google? It sounds rather unassuming for a person of his stature.

Signaling is important in the maintenance and direction of culture. Whoever made this decision is making a statement about what sorts of projects they want google to work on in the future.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#114

Post by philh »

shawn-butler wrote: post #48
philh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The impression I certainly got was that his approach is to theorize about something, then design experiments to test out his theory. As opposed to running a bunch of experiments and then figuring out a theory that would explain the collected data. There's nothing wrong with this, as you've written it. (There might be a problem with his implementation.) All else being equal, I trust a theory which has made ten accur…

You would be making a mistake unless the predictions had a high degree of "unexpectedness" or the ten prior observations lacked coherence.

If one person develops a theory and makes ten predictions which turn out to be true; and if a second person observes the same ten things, and then develops a theory without knowing the first; then I consider this stronger evidence in favor of the first theory than of the second. (The second might e.g. be more elegant, in which case I might prefer it anyway.)

This is true whatever the observations are. If they're unsurprising, then we already had a good theory, in which case I question the need for the two new ones, but that applies to both equally.

It may be that Kurzweil is falling into the trap of misinterpreting his results to fit his theory, but that can be done just as well when you try to base a theory off existing data. On the other hand, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy can only happen if you collect data before coming up with your theory.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#115

Post by swombat »

Tenoke wrote: post #106
rpm4321 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to pick on you (and I certainly didn't downvote you), but you seem like a posterboy for just how easy it is to take inventions and innovation for granted after the fact. I find it instructive to occassionally go to Youtube and load up commericals for Windows 95, 3.1, the first Mac, etc., or even to dust off and boot up an old computer I haven't touched for decades. Not to get too pretentious, but it's a…

TLDR, he exhibits hindsight bias

That's the DR bit.

The TL-Did-actually-read-and-am-summarising-this-for-people-who-won't is exactly the opposite of what you've just stated.

He exhibits foresight bias.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#116

Post by swombat »

jere wrote: post #85
orangecat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The singularity reeks of religious concepts. If by that you mean that scientists are attempting to achieve what religions have been falsely promising, then ok, but so what? Before we had medicine, people could only pray to try to heal the sick. Then physicians actually started studying the body and figuring out how to cure disease, fortunately not abandoning the idea because religions had failed to deliver. He litera…

I think it's pretty obvious, but let me quote Neal Stephenson: >I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind. Poll Americans (…

An interesting set of questions to follow up this fair hypothesis are:

Is it better or worse than existing religions? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Is it better or worse than no religion? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Religion is arrogant, for sure. And it all started when some of our very distant ancestors decided to bury their dead instead of leaving them in a pile of trash. Which, interestingly, is considered one of the defining points where we became "humans" rather than just intelligent monkeys.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#117

Post by Osmium »

macarthy12 wrote: post #84
Osmium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, that's how good quotes usually work: they tend to be retold time and again and adopted for other purposes until it's no longer clear who said it originally. So I wouldn't be too quick to call fowl on this one. I'm not sure one can "steal" a quote...

foul?

haha, thanks for the correction :) that does change the meaning a bit doesn't it? homophones always seem to slip by me...

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#118

Post by jacquesm »

raverbashing wrote: post #107
slacka wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. The problem with Peter Norvig is that he comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While they have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI. Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have be…

" the use of statistical models that have no biological basis." this is irrelevant This is like saying a computer using an x86 processor is different, from the point of view of the user than an ARM computer, beyond differences in software Or like saying DNA is needed for "data storage" in biological systems and not another technology Sure, you can get inspiration from biology, but doesn't necessarily mean you have to…

I think that the google translator did pretty good on that fragment.

Garbage in, garbage out! If you use 'I' in a sentence fragment when you mean to use 'We' then you can't really blame the translator for getting it wrong.

'We need to meet up' is a sentence with a completely different meaning from the incorrect and semantically confusing 'I need to meet up', it really does sound as if you need to meet up to some expectation.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#120

Post by Confusion »

swombat wrote: post #115
Tenoke wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR, he exhibits hindsight bias

That's the DR bit. The TL-Did-actually-read-and-am-summarising-this-for-people-who-won't is exactly the opposite of what you've just stated. He exhibits foresight bias.

I'm not sure whether you two are referring to the same 'he'.
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