161–170 of 239 posts
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George W Bush proudly didn't use email and called the Internet the "Internets". Pretty big difference.
He left office 8 years ago, things have changed in that time. I also refer to the internet as the internets sometimes too. Why would the most powerful person in the world need to use email anyway?
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Do you have anything to back it up, or is it a supposition?
Just a supposition, but from an American (I'm white). I don't think it's a stretch to say that people who have experienced e.g. anti-black racism will be better able to make technology that addresses it.
Care to share any examples of what technologies is, in turn, a white software engineer more likely to be able to design? Or does this philosophy only work one way : )
Is designing medical software better left to be implemented by software engineers who themselves eg. battled cancer?
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I would argue that it is not just bias. Indeed, not all people of color in the U.S. are experts on racism, but the vast majority of people with a good understanding of racism are people of color.
Yeah, people are generally able to solve a problem only when they understand the problem. Direct experience is a valuable form of learning. Of course it isn't sufficient, but we shouldn't pretend it doesn't matter either. Obviously almost any statement concerning race is a generalization.
I'm sorry, but this is pseudo-reasoning to me. These are logically linked on the surface, yet extremely vague truisms that can only pass for some form of a coherent argument because they're so full of weasel words.
Based on the same principle you could argue that in order to improve car safety, to have a better chance at it, one needs to have had a life-threatening accident. Why not? After all, people generally are able to solve a problem when they understand it... and direct experience is a valuable form of learning... etc.
It really depends on the nature of the problem though, and the nature of this direct experience, and so forth. Painting the situation with such an overly broad brush doesn't lead to any meaningful conclusions.
For starters, first-hand experience is typically caused by symptoms of a problem, the underlying nature of a complex problem isn't readily apparent, or else it wouldn't be complex.
For instance getting sick from air pollution doesn't do anything to help you understand the nature of these pollutants, how they're emitted, what is the economical context and therefore possible countermeasures etc. It just reassures you that the symptoms of such pollution are a bad thing, which isn't that much of a discovery by itself.
Not everything is as simple as an itchy-scratchy situation, and we shouldn't pretend that it is, especially when it leads to racially biased claims.
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Consider a broader timeline. It used to take humans over 500 hours of labor spinning, weaving, and sewing to produce a single shirt. Automating textile production has "put more people out of work" than computers ever will. Do you think for a second we would ever want to go back to how it was? Do you ask the inventor of the sewing machine how they will start giving back? These inventions free humanity for more worthwh…
Well yeah a lot of unemployed textile workers did go into poverty or even starve to death at the time. I've read some speculation that the first industrial revolution was a net negative on society initially, and took many decades to actually improve the average standard of living. There was a reason people gathered in mobs to break the new machines. They were hungry. But still the industrial revolution didn't really…
The industrial revolution dramatically increased both production and consumption. We now own different outfits for every day, dozens of special occasion fashions which must be regularly replaced and updated, etc. Total production, and total wages paid by the industry has dramatically improved.
A shirt a couple hundred years ago would cost $4,500 at minimum wage to produce. But no one paid the equivalent of $4,500 for a shirt. What actually happened is a lot of the work was virtually or actually completely unpaid.
The machines drove a vast increase in productivity and GDP and provide a standard of living today which 200 years ago would have been bad science fiction. The machines drove down cost of production dramatically, increasing consumption and increasing overall employment and wages.
People didn't destroy the machines because they caused poverty, they destroyed them out of fear.
Your analogy with horses is deeply flawed. Horse used declined just like spinning wheel use declined - because they were obsolete.
The latest round of automation does not by any stretch of the imagination make humans obsolete. It will actually make humans more productive and actually more valuable.
As Steve Jobs said, computers are a bicycle for the mind. AI is a motorcycle. Get on, go faster, reach higher, achieve more, live better.
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Just a supposition, but from an American (I'm white). I don't think it's a stretch to say that people who have experienced e.g. anti-black racism will be better able to make technology that addresses it.
Willing ? Or able? You're saying it makes a difference in the ability itself. In either case this argument - well, it's not even much of an argument, merely a belief - is so absurd to me that frankly I can't believe you're serious, no offence. Care to share any examples of what technologies is, in turn, a white software engineer more likely to be able to design? Or does this philosophy only work one way : ) Is design…
2. White software engineers are better at designing racist software (mostly joking). Another half joke: white people are better at designing technology that gets taken seriously by the government and the public (i.e. their technology will be taken more seriously because they are white, not any special ability there). But seriously, white engineers would probably be better at designing technology for teaching other white people about race.
3. Yes, there are absolutely some parts of designing medical software that engineers who have battled cancer would be better at. Imagine you are making one of those medical devices that sits next to a cancer patient's bed post-chemo and shows a bunch of numbers. Now if you fought cancer, you've probably had lots of experience lying in that bed next to those screens, and you could have a much better intuition about how those screens should look and how they should present their visualizations in ways that make a patient more confident. Or imagine the software engineer wants to, you know, talk with some patients or doctors to understand what to make: the engineer who battled cancer will probably be much better understanding what the patients (and doctors) want.
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I'm curious...which President are you saying thought it was "all just black magic"? Let's also remember that Obama is the man that unapologetically expanded covert/illegal surveillance programs to an unprecedented scale, directly costing American technology companies billions of dollars in sales. I'd say his actions reflect neither intelligence nor understanding of the tech industry.
One of the two major candidates for president responds to tech focused questions with some ramblings about 'the cyber part of security' being impossible and how good his ten year old son is with a computer. That's quite the contrast against someone like Obama.
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Willing ? Or able? You're saying it makes a difference in the ability itself. In either case this argument - well, it's not even much of an argument, merely a belief - is so absurd to me that frankly I can't believe you're serious, no offence. Care to share any examples of what technologies is, in turn, a white software engineer more likely to be able to design? Or does this philosophy only work one way : ) Is design…
1. Able. Not that skin color itself affects any sort of intellectual ability, but race--including, importantly, the experiences people have because of their skin color--definitely impacts who you are and what you are good at. 2. White software engineers are better at designing racist software (mostly joking). Another half joke: white people are better at designing technology that gets taken seriously by the governmen…
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A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it. Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserabl…
> At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? You won't have to. If it gets bad enough, they'll come take it.
It's like talking about eucledian geometry and then saying that no physical object is actually a single point, straight lines do not exist and parallel lines would collide due to space-time curvature.
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A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it. Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserabl…
> At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? At the point when you started living in a peaceful and organized society, that depends on not many people having a disastrous future to keep being peaceful and organized.
So let me ask you a question — when we discuss this "back" direction, would you include someone who's been living on this welfare net for all of this life in it? Someone who purposefully declined to contribute anything to the society? The very phrase "to give back" implies that we're giving to someone who gave us something before — and this hypothetical Joe sure as hell didn't give anything to us. *
Since my question is purely rhetorical, let me answer to it to get to the point. I don't think that you would include him in "giving back". And yet, we keep him (or at least, me and you agree that we should try) fed and alive to some degree.
So, this whole notion about "giving back" is something different from keeping this hypothetical Joe alive. What is it, exactly?
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* This paragraph may sound similar to typical right-wing propaganda about lazy people living on welfare. However, it is only a hypothetical example to prove a point. I'm not making any statements about real people in it.
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Sounds like a perfect use for it. I'm understanding his use of it as that the thousand flowers should only bloom in the beginning, and later the field should be much tighter regulated. When you replace people's lives with different AIs, it becomes much less tragic, thankfully.
According to that wiki article, it is a BAD thing. People express themselves and then are imprisoned for it. That's bad. Here's Ai Weiwei's interpretation of the phrase, that was a temporary installation in Alcatraz recently http://www.fubiz.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/blossomaiwei... (Cite: http://stefany-cordedoce.blogspot.com/2014/11/porcelain-bouq... )