Big tech products are mostly useless • Hacker News Board

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#131

Post by spronkey » Tue, May 22, 2018, 11:09 AM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #123

ribchinski wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, sorry man. Due to me being a huge computer geek, I refer to most calculators as. "desk calculators," due to my experience with old technology and Unix software. Let's just say that I am part of the earliest Gen Z's. (I came from a second world country, so, maybe that's why I have more experience with older tech.)

Sorry, my point wasn't to call you out - but it's unequivocally faster to call out "Hey Dingbat, what's 7 + 17" than it is to pull out a device, unless that device is already unlocked and in your hand. (Also, howdy fellow second-world country person! Pretty nice to meet someone who knows the term :P)

That's quite untrue for more complex examples of 7 + 17.

"Hey Dingbat, what's 10 percent of 50 times 33 times 125. Oh sorry, 10 percent of open parentheses 50 times 33 times 125 close parentheses".

Even just talking it is substantially slower than typing the number into a calculator. App, desktop, or phone.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#132

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, May 22, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

icc97 wrote: post #98

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem. Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems: Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica) All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.) AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri n…

> AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test...) When we pass the Turing test it means we've got actual AI. But I'm not sure there'll ever be a clear line. So Duplex kind of passes it in a very narrow context. Whether or not the person at the end of the line was actually fooled or not is a slightly different question. They could have just been humouring…

I don't think there's a clear line either. Even the Turing Test is notional - a conversation with a high schooler is going to be easier to fake than a conversation with an English professor.

I can imagine in the future there will be some kind of approximate conversational AI rating analogous to Flesch-Kincaid for text.

But I left a problem off my list, which is that we unconsciously demand AI should be better than average human performance.

If you monitor your conversations with people, you'll find there are regular misses where one person either mishears words, doesn't understand what's said, or misinterprets a subtext.

We cut human conversations a lot of slack. We're used to thinking of humans as independent agents, and there are social conventions about asking for more information and admitting - or sometimes denying - mistakes.

But there's an unconscious expectation that AI should operate at a better-than-human level before it's considered reliable.

We're more likely to think "Stupid machine!" if something isn't understood than we would with a human. So AI will have to cross the Uncanny Turning Valley before we really trust it. And because we're dealing with automated interpretations of human agency, errors will be harder to forgive.

You can already see this with driverless cars, where any accident is considered a failure. Even though statistically an AI may be much safer than the average human, it's not considered good enough unless it can deal with situations that an average human would have no hope of dealing with.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#133

Post by ribchinski » Tue, May 22, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

spronkey wrote: post #131

pavel_lishin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, my point wasn't to call you out - but it's unequivocally faster to call out "Hey Dingbat, what's 7 + 17" than it is to pull out a device, unless that device is already unlocked and in your hand. (Also, howdy fellow second-world country person! Pretty nice to meet someone who knows the term :P)

That's quite untrue for more complex examples of 7 + 17. "Hey Dingbat, what's 10 percent of 50 times 33 times 125. Oh sorry, 10 percent of open parentheses 50 times 33 times 125 close parentheses". Even just talking it is substantially slower than typing the number into a calculator. App, desktop, or phone.

Especially when there are parenthesis. And when you are in the kitchen, well... it is loud. Accents mess the voice recognition + the sound of the kitchen.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#134

Post by icc97 » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #132

icc97 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test...) When we pass the Turing test it means we've got actual AI. But I'm not sure there'll ever be a clear line. So Duplex kind of passes it in a very narrow context. Whether or not the person at the end of the line was actually fooled or not is a slightly different question. They could have just been humouring…

I don't think there's a clear line either. Even the Turing Test is notional - a conversation with a high schooler is going to be easier to fake than a conversation with an English professor. I can imagine in the future there will be some kind of approximate conversational AI rating analogous to Flesch-Kincaid for text. But I left a problem off my list, which is that we unconsciously demand AI should be better than av…

> we unconsciously demand AI should be better than average human performance.

Yeah I agree it's an unfair demand.

Especially given how much more powerful human brains are than computers we should perhaps be having a go a humans for not trying hard enough.

The wins of things like Go and Chess by computers has been down played because humans 'only' learned that stuff 100,000 years ago.

Personally I think that driverless cars work better as passive systems that augment humans for the moment rather than the dodgy crossover that is Autopilot. I think that car AIs can be trained to deal with extreme circumstances by running simulations of crashes millions of times over and then they're capable of taking over if the driver ever becomes unwell or hits black ice.

But this is all temporary, as soon as their vision systems match humans they will only ever improve over what we have. This Stanford self-driving car sliding between four perfect donuts is amazing [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/LDprUza7yT4?t=31m38s

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#135

Post by bertil » Wed, May 23, 2018, 10:37 AM UTC

redial wrote: post #120

bertil wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cars work. It’s not a stretch to understand what will happen as Waymo scales operation -- and it’s not ironic that not just replacing the vast majority of working class job, but making transport virtually free will have a bigger impact that the steam engine had. There is a lot that happens in history with understanding, threats and promisses.

As much as I want it to happen, and as much as I agree with you that in the near future is going to happen, I think you are missing the context. You seem to be forgetting we already have cars. Not only that, we already have planes, bullet trains, spaceships, etc. We even have the bicycle; transport has been "free" for a long time. The only thing equivalent to the steam engine in impact would be teleportation. That is…

Steam engine made operational cost of transport an order of magnitude cheaper (while capital expenditure was two orders of magnitude higher) by using coal instead of oats (and locomotive instead of a horse-driven cart).

Self-driving cars will lower the operational cost of transport by another order of magnitude, but barely raise capital expenditure, actually probably concentrating it dramatically (as Waymo will probably build cars that cost double and can drive ten to a hundred times further).

Self driving car is essentially tele-transportation in your sleep.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#136

Post by sincerely » Wed, May 23, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

hoosieree wrote: post #96

Eridrus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm joking, but only because people are still writing these articles, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/02/elon-mu...

The pessimistic response to articles like that is that making Mars habitable is a more realistic goal than preventing humans from making earth uninhabitable.

If Mars eventually becomes habitable, how long do you think it will take before we make it uninhabitable?

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#137

Post by sincerely » Wed, May 23, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #85

redial wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation Small scale crime might be. White collar crime is adversely correlated, strongly, with poverty. And it sinks entire nations.

What nation has been sunk by white collar crime? I'm not disagreeing that it's bad, but I don't think it's that bad.

Wasn't the global recession caused by white collar crime?

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#138

Post by DylanDmitri » Wed, May 23, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

kei929 wrote: post #124

philipodonnell wrote: post #11

The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly. He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press…

Look at all the hours we get to spend on making voice apps that make phone calls when both sides having access to quickly update the ledger is already a thing: calendars So instead of debating solutions to local needs with neighbors, we fetishize juicing Googles stock price and enabling them to build things that mathematicians already figured out the theory and limits to years ago This is nonsense. It’s one thing to…

While your points on the economy are valid, I disagree with your take on Duplex.

Duplex isn't about scheduling or calendars, it's about robots conversing with humans. It's proof of concept, a stepping stone on the path to general artificial intelligence.