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IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
151–160 of 163 posts
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#152As an aside, the best treatment of taboo I've ever read is law professor Christopher Fairman's paper, "Fuck".
It explores that word through the lens of jurisprudence, which I think is a fascinating and unusual approach to taboo. It's exceptionally well-written and manages to be witty, absurdist, informative, and thought-provoking in equal measure.
At issue are the 4th Amendmnent, self-censorship, sexual harassment, education, and broadcasting.
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends how you define upload. Why couldn't a computer just simulate a persons outputs based on recordings of their life. Does virtualization of life really need to have consistent consciousness? Maybe rip would be a better word than upload.
You can't extract all the information contained in a brain non-destructively. You'd need reproduce the neural graph, 10ˆ11 neurons with an average of 7000 synapses (connections), along with the type of neurons, the dendritic trees, the strength of the synapses, the map of active genes in each cell, and most probably other cellular parameters, like the state of the cytoskeletton. Probably even more. It would require s…
Hmm, on your last point, assuming the serial computation is done by calculating brain state for each time slice, would this end up being functionally equivalent (if slower) than the parallel brain process? Since from the "brain's" perspective, everything is getting updated in parallel?
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hea…
I don't consider confusing the potential customer to be honest marketing.
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Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#155Out of all the possible risks of the Singularity we decide to prevent profanity and cynicism first.
Not a good start.
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not have Watson kill people? They are just carbon molecules strung together.
Are you saying being unable to whore out to good, clean and 100% trivial family entertainment, is actually equivalent to killing people? Why not have Watson investigate murder cases? Or even better, make sense of the words vs. actions of actual people holding power and influence right now? Why am I not holding my breath for this? Because it's hard, or because it's not ever going to be a priority in a million years? P…
No, I was just responding to the parents reductionist attitudes.
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you disagreeing with? It sounds like you're demonstrating the point: You find it distasteful to be told a bunch of stuff that was already true.
The point is that the urban dictionary is full of bullshit joke/shock-value definitions that are basically not used. To call it as a whole 'true' is rather misleading.
I'm skeptical. My expectation is that the majority of definitions on Urban Dictionary are in fact attested uses of slang-- mainly on the basis that however many people are out there spending their time coming up with "bullshit" slang, there are billions of people making real slang every day. Whatever kind of crazy made-up definition you come up with, someone will come along tomorrow and use an even sillier-sounding word to mean something even weirder.
Keep in mind that that a piece of slang is attested does not necessarily make what it describes real. To choose a rather mundane example, "dick in a box" is defined as a gift-wrapped box with a hole cut in one side, into which a man's penis is inserted, which is then presented as a gift. I'm sure since the term was coined a few people have tried it out, but in general it's not a real thing, just something from a TV show; regardless, that is what a dick in a box is.
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#158Nothing that Watson learned from the Urban Dictionary could possibly be any dirtier than what I hear from enterprise people all the time: "We use our deep subject matter expertise to deliver value through actionable advice that enables our clients to harness the power of best practices in order to shift their paradigms and achieve 10X deltas against competitive industry metrics."
Eh. Every field has its jargon. Techies who mock business lingo live in exceedingly fragile glass houses.
You know what's worse than field specific jargon ?
Company specific jargon.
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that the urban dictionary is full of bullshit joke/shock-value definitions that are basically not used. To call it as a whole 'true' is rather misleading.
I'm skeptical. My expectation is that the majority of definitions on Urban Dictionary are in fact attested uses of slang-- mainly on the basis that however many people are out there spending their time coming up with "bullshit" slang, there are billions of people making real slang every day. Whatever kind of crazy made-up definition you come up with, someone will come along tomorrow and use an even sillier-sounding w…
Right, but you get very misleading impression if you try to treat a word used by a handful of people as a 'normal' word. If you adjust each one down 10000x to factor in how many people would actually use them then you no longer have this horrible distasteful revelation by reading urbandictionary. You only have a couple distasteful words, per region, but each region has a unique set.
Re: IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why can't the same be said of self-improving AIs? This seems to me like the sort of awesome-sounding but unsupported assertion that leads people to roll their eyes at the Singularity crowd.