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The Artificial Intelligentsia

thebaffler.com

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#41
post #17

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying: > “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their bur…

The piece is just overwrought at the sentence level, as in the example below. I think it's partially inspired by trying to sound like an old-style important newspaper columnist, and partially David Foster Wallace. DFWs long sentences are very readable though, because they are conversational, so you can understand them perfectly if you read them as though hearing them aloud.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#42
post #17

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying: > “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their bur…

Just imagine ... that some day in the future journalism will be AI based, and will generate entire articles tailored to your viewing habits based on extensive psych profiling and AB testing to maximize clicks and screen time! The content need not be true, but at least everyone will be happy with their preferred writing styles.... http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

What if I dont want the content Im most interested in. It'd probably give me the computer scoentost version of tabloid, but I prefer making myself read things that I don't fully grasp.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#44
post #17

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying: > “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their bur…

It's not the style-- it's just not good writing, but it's trying so hard to be. It's the kind of thing that would show up in a college writing workshop and hopefully get workshopped into something more intelligible. As they say, "Show, don't tell." The passage describes a lot but not in a way that helps you actually visualize any of it, thus it's really hard to follow.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine ... that some day in the future journalism will be AI based, and will generate entire articles tailored to your viewing habits based on extensive psych profiling and AB testing to maximize clicks and screen time! The content need not be true, but at least everyone will be happy with their preferred writing styles.... http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

What if I dont want the content Im most interested in. It'd probably give me the computer scoentost version of tabloid, but I prefer making myself read things that I don't fully grasp.

There will be a slider for that.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#48
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't present an honest understanding of his own field, or the field of neuroscience, or the ongoing developments in the technology surrounding his own business, or its implications. Even without extrapolating from the pattern recognition tools we have today, whole classes and ranges of jobs can be fully or partially eliminated. Here is what he says about the state of AI: > Even the most eye-catching successes c…

> He doesn't present an honest understanding of his own field, or the field of neuroscience, or the ongoing developments in the technology surrounding his own business, or its implications. Yes, but I don't think you are, either. The fact is that chess and Go abilities aside, we are probably not even close to insect-level intelligence, and we don't have a clear path of getting there soon -- let-alone anything human-l…

> hardware progress is slowing down quickly) I would be interested to know more about this. I haven't heard yet that the progress of GPUs cores for example is declining quickly ...

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#49
post #17

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying: > “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their bur…

The existence of writing like this is why analytics (and attention) are not good ways of deciding if style and subject are "working". Clearly many people hate it - like Garlic - many people hate Garlic; Garlic fails the attention / analytics test. Pop Tarts pass!

And yet a world of Pop Tarts is sooooooo boring... And no one makes heart stoppingly good fish stew using Pop Tarts.

This fella may not have written the best piece of the week, we may not remember this piece tomorrow - but I think that the fact that he's attempting to create something gives him a chance of actually getting there. Looking at a dashboard completely kills that in my opinion.

Screw the stats! Make what you think is good !

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#50
post #31
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He doesn't present an honest understanding of his own field, or the field of neuroscience, or the ongoing developments in the technology surrounding his own business, or its implications. Yes, but I don't think you are, either. The fact is that chess and Go abilities aside, we are probably not even close to insect-level intelligence, and we don't have a clear path of getting there soon -- let-alone anything human-l…

The Blue Brain project managed something “as big and complex as half of a mouse brain” in 2007, so I think your claims of not-even-insect-level are outdated.

Not so sure that claim is right : http://www.artificialbrains.com/blue-brain-project

Seems like they managed a honeybee (but I am not sure that it ran in real time or how they validated that) but were hoping for a rat brain.

I'm quite sceptical - I don't believe that there is a good understanding of how a single neuron functions, or agreement on the taxonomy of neurons or an understanding or agreement on their interactions and arrangement apart from in a part of the vision system where there do seem to be some good models.

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