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Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
171–180 of 234 posts
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-driving is never going to happen, and its also sitting in some sort of informational blind spot for the people working on it - I have no idea why. There is no such thing as "driving" there is no physical force, or particle. There is no force preventing you from driving in the opposite direction of traffic, or through glass panes. "Driving" is entirely a social phenomnon, the confluence of societal self impositio…
I don't understand the leap from "it's difficult and there are many special circumstances" to "it's never going to happen". I don't get why you think that any of these problems are unsolvable given enough time.
Because no matter how much time you give it, there are social problems that need to be solved first; and said social problems are not the kind that are amenable to mere technical solutions.
Literally the case of: If the technically perfect implementation existed tomorrow, we still would not be ready to flip the switch because of how drastic the reorg of societal norms would be. It'd be a complete refactor.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's common to project resentment towards individuals onto someone who expresses dissatisfaction with systemic issues. We want to think on our small human scale, but our societies got so big that we can't make sense of them in those terms anymore.
> It's common to project resentment towards individuals onto someone who expresses dissatisfaction with systemic issues. Perhaps, but it's also quite common for people who are really doing quite well to pretend to argue on behalf of actually marginalized groups when struggling for power with their opponents. The way to tell the difference between those who genuinely want to help marginalized groups and those who just…
There's no struggle for power between an overworked corporate bee, and a billionaire. The latter is hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the former.
You're right though, a lot of the time folks with office jobs don't really care about the marginalized (and who could blame them with their entire energy drained by their jobs). Your heuristic to tell the difference is... dubious.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#174Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#175Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…
It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?
It's an oxymoron, that highlights elite's dismissive attitudes towards the working class. You might stumble upon oxymorons in all kinds of non-technical literature in various languages.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?
It's an oxymoron, that highlights elite's dismissive attitudes towards the working class. You might stumble upon oxymorons in all kinds of non-technical literature in various languages.
Can you explain how that is an 'oxymoron'? because I'm having trouble squaring the intended meaning with the dictionary definition.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The concept of anyone being the boss of anyone else is extremely recent. My guts tell me it's as old as humankind. Citation?
> The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of pr…
Thanks for the citation, interesting, especially as this book is on my to-read-list.
On the other hand eeh... nice words but I don't buy this. Even animal groups has leaders and leaving/abandoning community probably meant death, not freedom. There is a reason why we think so much about what others think about us. One of the greatest survivor skill is to be able to fit into your community.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#178The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…
Self-driving is never going to happen, and its also sitting in some sort of informational blind spot for the people working on it - I have no idea why. There is no such thing as "driving" there is no physical force, or particle. There is no force preventing you from driving in the opposite direction of traffic, or through glass panes. "Driving" is entirely a social phenomnon, the confluence of societal self impositio…
This comment is pretty funny in the context of a world where there are currently cars driving millions of miles without human intervention in a variety of conditions. I don't think anyone cares whether it meets your personal definition of "self driving".
Reminds of the Chinese proverb: “Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.”
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In many countries - you have to regularly deal with drivers going full tilt, on the wrong side of the road. I don't agree with most of your comment but this point is worth examining. I think it's not an argument against self driving for a few reasons: 1. There's lots of places in the world where people driving on the wrong side of the road is uncommon. We can start with self driving there. You can apply this to man…
Therein lies the rub Movement, is animal like - perceiving self, environment and understanding movement through it. - Movement is universal. Its the application of physics. Thats not driving. Driving is a social construct. It is the application of physics while navigating a social world. Driving is observing the law, observing social constructs (that differ regionally), adapting to new constructs based on location an…
> Driving is a social construct. It is the application of physics while navigating a social world.
Interesting way of looking at it. In the countries where people tend to drive at high speed on the wrong side of the road, I'm inclined to agree with you.
In countries where people follow the rules of the road, I think it's the opposite. There, it's primates who evolved to follow and react to a complex social and physical environment being forced to follow a simple and rather tedious set of rules, which require constant vigilant attention. This is something we humans are not good at - we're designed for short bursts of attention in situations where rules need to be interpreted intuitively, not driving for three hours while strictly following the rules of the road.
> observing social constructs (that differ regionally)
Well, the social constructs around driving also different temporally and are changing all the time. Self driving, even partially implemented, is sure to have profound effects on these cultures all over the world.
>perceives a tsunami coming from ahead of it.
In extreme cases like tsunami, floods, or fires, there are solutions. In the short (and probably medium) term the cars will still have human controls, so the human can instantly take over. In the long term, well maybe there can be a "panic button" that allows a human to shout voice controls. Either way, it's just another solvable technical issue, and probably much easier than many other issues that need to be solved.
BTW it's not like researchers haven't considered to these things
https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1122534_self-driving-c...
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an atheist, but this is what I learned in school (by Protestant Christian Socialist teachers): Matthew 19:23-26 American Standard Version (ASV) And Jesus said unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones. As in, in catholic ones rich people aren't seen as model of virtue and everybody knows that "hard work" won't get you there.
> In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones.
I think you're misunderstanding the "hard work" part. Unlike (perhaps) in the US, the work ethic part of northern/Germanic countries is not about working super hard to get rich, but rather to do the job with the integrity and effort that is reasonable, given your health and abilities.
The typical reward is not to get super rich quickly. But if you uphold the ideal, you deserve respect, even if you're cleaning staff or the janitor.
Similarly, NOT living up to the ethical standards will be damning regardless of social status. Cheating and corruption comes with harsh social punishment, especially for those near the top.
Remember that we're talking about the part of the world that pratically invented both Social Democracy and the Nordic Model.
Now, I also have family and contacts in various places in Southern Europe and South East Asia, some of which as very wealthy. What these ALL have in common is that various types of corruption and plutocracy are just facts of life that are taken for granted, and nobody cares.
Now my own hypothesis is that religion plays only a small role in this difference, and that this is mostly a consequence of the difficulty of surviving as a farmer in Northern Europe during the medieaval era, and especially in Scandinavia.
People used to live on isolated farms or in small villages, where the farms would barely produce enough food to sustain the family of the farmer. Those who did not work at least moderately hard usually would not survive, and there was little left over to give to either the poor or the nobility.
This led to an egalitarian outlook, where people who wanted to live off the produce of others were not tolerated easily, regardless of whether they were beggars, thieves or barons. And since production was low, there was little to tax or steal, anyway.
In warmer climates, farm yields were much greater, which caused success to be much more about social relationships than hard work at the farm.