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IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

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Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#91

Post by stingraycharles »

gnaritas wrote: post #88
bguthrie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Every field has its jargon. Techies who mock business lingo live in exceedingly fragile glass houses.

Techie jargon is generally meant to enhance communication, while biz jargon is meant to baffle the listener with bullshit. Huge difference.

I think you're confusing biz jargon with marketing. Tech jargon suffers from marketing too; it's just that we're used to so much more "meaningful" jargon that we see that the bullshit ratio is actually pretty low. The same can be said about business jargon, it's just that we don't hear the meaningful jargon a lot. Want to guess how much meaningful tech jargon the average MBA hears? Probably not a lot more than we hear about his world.

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#93

Post by snogglethorpe »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #63
dasil003 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is roflstomp just an everyday verb now?

Apparently so: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roflstomp

The meaning of roflstomp seems obvious enough... but how to pronounce it... (rhyming with "waffle stomp"?)

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#94

Post by unimpressive »

gnaritas wrote: post #88
bguthrie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Every field has its jargon. Techies who mock business lingo live in exceedingly fragile glass houses.

Techie jargon is generally meant to enhance communication, while biz jargon is meant to baffle the listener with bullshit. Huge difference.

Want to come build a distributed social cloud web app with me using node?

The real problem is when the meaning of a word or phrase becomes so broad that it conveys no information, or gets swamped by overuse and becomes a buzzword.

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#95

Post by snowwrestler »

canttestthis wrote: post #53
sp332 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the singularity had a bullshit detector, it would kick Ray Kurzweil out.

Could someone explain the Ray Kurzweil hate to me? Predicting the future is hard.

Everyone knows that predicting the future is hard, but Singularity aficionados try to elevate that fact to a profound prediction in and of itself.

The analogy I always use is a long straight flat desert highway. If you stand in the middle of it and look down its length, it appears to converge to a singularity in the distance. If you can see mileposts, you might even try to estimate how far away that singularity is.

But if you drive toward the singularity, you'll never run into it. It recedes before you. It is just a trick of perspective.

Basically all the talk of how crazy life will be after The Singularity is like trying to explain how crazy life would be on the other side of a rainbow. Fun, but not actually useful.

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#96

Post by yassim »

brudgers wrote: post #11

' "In tests it even used the word bullshit in an answer to a researcher's query." ' I'm not sure which is worse: the singularity with a bullshit detector or without.

What was the query? I'd really like to know if it used bullshit correctly?

Sure could/should/must not be used to advertise the tech, but If I had a pocket watson, I'd have no problems with it calling it like it parses it.

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#98

Post by agpen »

canttestthis wrote: post #53
sp332 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the singularity had a bullshit detector, it would kick Ray Kurzweil out.

Could someone explain the Ray Kurzweil hate to me? Predicting the future is hard.

Like virtually all technology fetishists, he completely ignores the realities of class dynamics and global neoliberal hegemony to pretend that any theoretical singularity will benefit everyone and not just those at the top of the value-extraction pyramid without radical societal upheaval beforehand.

It's like the people hailing social media as the guardian of democratic action and claiming it's responsible for things like the Egyptian uprising when an absurdly low percentage of Egyptians had access to a computer of any kind. The white western middle class blinders are so strong that they are incapable of not projecting their own privileged lifestyle as a global norm.

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#99

Post by pprd »

kansface wrote: post #75
cobrausn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2029, when we are still not able to 'upload our brains' into a computer, I will come back here specifically to call bullshit.

I'd imagine the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem has something to say about a brain upload. Maybe an approximate copy is good enough?

A copy is never good enough. I think the best approach would be to enhance the brain by attaching devices to it directly. This maintains continuity and doesn't raise as many philosophical questions. This also raises other interesting questions like how long can the brain live in a suspended solution and where would all these consciousnesses live...

Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

#100

Post by Cogito »

sp332 wrote: post #81
kansface wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem has something to say about a brain upload. Maybe an approximate copy is good enough?

You might not be able to make a perfect quantum copy, but with iterative refinement you can get arbitrarily close. I think 99.9999999% or so would be good enough.

You might be interested in Greg Egan's [0] story 'The Jewel' [1]. [edit] To clarify, it's actually two stories "Learning to Be Me" and "Closer".

Greg Egan is one of my favourite modern sci-fi writers. He explores interesting and hard ideas about what it means to be human by placing humanity in thought provoking situations.

In 'The Jewel' we have developed an implant that learns how to 'be' the host. At some point your brain is removed and the jewel takes over your functioning. The thing is, what happens when something goes wrong... boom boom booooom!!?!?!

But really, read him if you are into sci-fi.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_(story_collection)

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