161–170 of 180 posts
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>And as most people have at least some capital What? Most people in most Western countries are net-debtors. They literally own negative capital.
What specific statistic are you basing that on? Even in the US where unsecured personal debt is practically a badge of honor, more than 50% of households still have a net worth.
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Hofstadter wrote a nice piece on how an ant colony could be thought to be an entity in itself. My favourite quote pasted from an online source: Anteater: "I reject holism. I challenge you to tell me, for instance, how a holistic description of an ant colony sheds any more light on it than is shed by a description of the ants inside it, and their roles, and their, interrelationships. Any holistic explanation of an ant…
Unfortunately, this argument proves too much. Replace "and colony" with "human" and "ant" with "cell in a human body" - can you explain where the consciousness experienced by a human cell colony arises from? (To avoid debating materialism vs idealism use another creature, say "chimp", instead of "human" - assuming that you agree that chimps have a consciousness.) I am not fond of the holistic / emergent idea but I do…
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I'd argue that Global Civilization is nothing but living!
I read a comment on HN a while back arguing that today's companies are essentially human-powered AIs. It made me think quite a lot -- large companies especially take a lifeform of their own. They tend to mostly care for themselves. Actions are taken "for the company" without any one person being actively aware of why. Higher-ups have some form of backdoor access to the direction the company takes; a symbiotic relatio…
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
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What specific statistic are you basing that on? Even in the US where unsecured personal debt is practically a badge of honor, more than 50% of households still have a net worth.
From a number of years ago: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/07/21/poll-70-pe...
http://www.aarp.org/money/credit-loans-debt/info-07-2009/bul...
Seventy percent of respondents report having some form of debt or loan obligation
Having a balance on your credit card or having a mortgage is very different than being a net debtor.
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Hofstadter wrote a nice piece on how an ant colony could be thought to be an entity in itself. My favourite quote pasted from an online source: Anteater: "I reject holism. I challenge you to tell me, for instance, how a holistic description of an ant colony sheds any more light on it than is shed by a description of the ants inside it, and their roles, and their, interrelationships. Any holistic explanation of an ant…
Unfortunately, this argument proves too much. Replace "and colony" with "human" and "ant" with "cell in a human body" - can you explain where the consciousness experienced by a human cell colony arises from? (To avoid debating materialism vs idealism use another creature, say "chimp", instead of "human" - assuming that you agree that chimps have a consciousness.) I am not fond of the holistic / emergent idea but I do…
Its more complicated with businesses because we are aware of the greater system and attempt to influence it.
As a curious software engineer, I have a basic familiarity on where heating oil comes from (I remember my first sci-pop book with a section on basics of oil processing), where nuts are grown, basics of food industry supply chains, and every other example covered. My knowledge might be rudimentary and without much detail, but I try to cover all bases, and when I discover some area of human knowledge I genuinely know n…
Yeah, I thought that was all kind of funny too. I'm a voracious reader, and have been curious about just about all parts of science and technology at some point. So I too knew at least the basics for everything he mentioned. Magically plop me in a stone-age agrarian society, and we'd be back to at least an 18th-century level of technology in a couple decades.
Execution is key! That you know how it works does not mean you can successfuly build it!
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Contrast that with Spotify, which when given a song or artist that I like goes out of its way to recommend music that is superficially similar but that I hate. Or how it can recommend 80 songs to me a week based on things I have listened to and end up recommending me nothing that I like.
Huh. I've actually found the "Discover Weekly" feature to be remarkably good at picking music that I like. I'd say I affirmatively like about half to three-quarters of the songs per week, with only a couple that I find myself skipping. I wonder if it's better at certain genres than others.
The Discover Weekly algorithm is, as I understand it, based on what songs have been added to other user playlists. So if you're primarily listening to a genre that has a lot of intense people making carefully curated playlists, you're gonna get a better Discovery Weekly.
Tim Urban points out in his AI article that it might be dangerous to expect that the AI that we know now would still be the same AI we will have in the very near future http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... "So as AI zooms upward in intelligence toward us, we’ll see it as simply becoming smarter, for an animal. Then, when it hits the lowest capacity of humanity—Nick Bostrom uses the term “th…
Computers regularly surpass humans in all kinds of stuff that isn't considered AI, but just as much could be (e.g. calculating).
Computers can also surpass humans in things that are currently considered AI, like image recognition ( http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325712)
In the end it's just one other thing that computers can do better than humans. And the results might not be applicable in other sections of artificial intelligence.
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And more generally, I would say it just depends on the quality of the AI. There is no fundamental reason why such a system would have to recommend only similar music. It could try contrasting music, and build a picture of what aspects of the music you like. It could draw conclusions to recommend seemingly different genres which nonetheless share some commonality that might make them appeal to you. It could also occas…
The algorithms used to make musical recommendations do statistical analysis on numerical ratings given by different people to different songs. They typically know nothing about music, as musical knowledge is understood not to improve their results. I wouldn't call them AI - they're neither knowledge-based systems nor neural networks.
Out of curiosity, why are you drawing the AI line at neural networks? Neural networks are just function approximators; there's nothing magical about them except they work really well on problems we're interested in.
Would you really not consider an SVM or a Naive Bayes classifier "AI" since they don't use a very rough, very loose analogy to the brain?