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

theatlantic.com

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101–110 of 163 posts

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

#101

Post by pprd »

snowwrestler wrote: post #95
canttestthis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

This response has nothing to do with anything. The singularity as Kurzweil is describing it is marked by tangible events like the development of a true AI or atleast a machine learning algorithm capable of discovering and proving its own concepts. I have no idea how this relates to your very abstract singularity (a trick of perspective?).

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

#103

Post by finnw »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #33

Note to future self: we can probably neutralize indefinitely any malicious AI by directing it to start consuming tvtropes.com.

No, then it will see the evil overlord list, and we'll be doomed

(http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList)

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

#104

Post by im3w1l »

We have tried building educated gentlebots capable of playing chess and other noble pursuits. It didn't lead to GAI.

Maybe an uneducated scumbot would be better? Swearing and cursing because its peers do. Full of prejudice and bigotry because of weak anecdotal evidence. Vengeful. Impulsive. Using questionable grammar . Easily addicted. Cognitively biased. Wishfully thinking. Superstitious. Believing in fallacious logic. Thinking with the little head. Anti-intellectual and believing in conspiracy theories. Gossiping, slandering. Enjoying tv-shop.

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

#105

Post by snowwrestler »

pprd wrote: post #101
snowwrestler wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

This response has nothing to do with anything. The singularity as Kurzweil is describing it is marked by tangible events like the development of a true AI or atleast a machine learning algorithm capable of discovering and proving its own concepts. I have no idea how this relates to your very abstract singularity (a trick of perspective?).

Kurzeil attempts to privilege certain technological milestones as substantively "different" from other technological milestones (e.g. "true" AI)--and thus claim their consequences for human culture are uniquely unpredictable.

My point is that this is just an assertion, not a prediction. Every future development to some extent obscures our ability to predict the future of human culture. Look far enough into the future along any line of inquiry (legal, artistic, religious, energy, biology, etc.) and there is a singularity beyond which we cannot predict. It's just a function of trying to predict the future in general, not some special property of AI.

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

#106

Post by 46Bit »

unimpressive wrote: post #94
gnaritas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mind if I adopt that as my standard way of making people leave me alone?

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

#107

Post by cmelbye »

unimpressive wrote: post #94
gnaritas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally think that sentence is just as bad as the business jargon sentence.

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

#109

Post by jasonkostempski »

Poor Watson, his education is going to hindered by his immature meat bag handlers. The words are just words, people use them, it's part of reality. The thing isn't spitting out children's books directly to store shelves.

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

#110

Post by Daniel_Newby »

snowwrestler wrote: post #105
pprd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This response has nothing to do with anything. The singularity as Kurzweil is describing it is marked by tangible events like the development of a true AI or atleast a machine learning algorithm capable of discovering and proving its own concepts. I have no idea how this relates to your very abstract singularity (a trick of perspective?).

Kurzeil attempts to privilege certain technological milestones as substantively "different" from other technological milestones (e.g. "true" AI)--and thus claim their consequences for human culture are uniquely unpredictable. My point is that this is just an assertion, not a prediction. Every future development to some extent obscures our ability to predict the future of human culture. Look far enough into the future…

We may not be able to predict future developments in musical composition, but we can predict that song writers will probably not convert the entire mass of the solar system into musical instruments over a two week period.

The same cannot be said of self-improving AIs. Kurzweil's Singularity is not about the difficulty of long term predictions, it is that the progress function may become so steep that even short term predictions become impossible.

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