"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever…
SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.
This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can underst…
What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo. Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?
It’s a major payoff of a lot of small research advances made by Google over the last few years. In and of itself it’s not a terribly groundbreaking research result, but a bunch of parallel AI, NLP, and systems research had to go into this to take it from toy experience to what will eventually be a robust service. This is the promise of AI in the 2020s: incremental services that chip away at various low-cognition but high-variance/pattern-based tasks that litter our home and professional lives.
This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can underst…
What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo. Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?
Well... I don't particularly agree with everything this guy is saying, but he is right about the internet of things. In my experience, it is quite useless, and it is a danger to privacy. One of the my friends constantly uses Amazon Alexa and Siri for even the most basic questions like, "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. Either I am a person who likes to make things more inconveni…
> "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator.
I seriously doubt that even if we still lived in a world where normal people actually owned calculators. This is just "No wireless. Less space than a nomad." again.
And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to?
Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real person shows up. The business gets an appointment. The receptionist does their job. Where does the ethical question come in?
"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever…
Sure, there will not be another social network or another smartphone, but innovation is still taking place in many other areas. It's often hard to see what game-changers look like ahead-of-time before they are actually recognized as such (otherwise, we'd all be successful VCs).
"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever…
"Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"
And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real…
I saw a funny cloud today, I took a picture of it. I usually don't carry an extra standalone camera with me all day just for moments like that. I can also google up information about light-bulbs when I'm standing at the store wondering if I should get X or Y. Or if some product doesn't specify if it's gluten free or not and the ingredients look a little iffy. There are plenty of tiny improvements. It doesn't revoluti…
A 6 year old phone is still capable of doing that I think Samsung Galaxy was at version 3 or 4 around 2012, Nokia was big before 2007, 11 years ago.
If the case being made is just that we don't need the absolutely latest smartphone, I'm totally onboard.
But there is also a lot of offhand grumpiness about how we don't need all this technology, which I disagree with. Technology improves our lives, but it's not always apparent right away.