There's a wonderful article "The Case Against Credentialism" by James Fallows in the The Atlantic (1985) which reads as if it were written today: http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...
It assesses professional degrees like MBAs as being inherently worth next to nothing, essentially serving a broken agenda in which our highly credentialed leaders know everything about form but nothing about function. Maybe virtual expertise is enough to govern a virtual world?
Too bad the US political parties didn't read this prior to the 2000 election. Maybe the would have fielded worthier candidates (and staff), and the US could have saved about a million lives and a few trillion bucks). Such is the cost of driving under the influence, I guess.
A bullpen makes a lot of sense to me. If coworkers doing exactly the kind of work I do were colocated, we'd all learn quickly what forms of interaction were productive and preferred, so we could avoid getting on each others' nerves. I used to work in a suite containing only team members. We all preferred it greatly to our present cubicle farm.
The principal problem with open offices are the disturbances arising from non-team members, especially the rude few who won't consider the harm their noise inflicts on neighbors.
Etzioni's point is a good one. To date, all AI apps have been designed to passively sit and do nothing until given a specific task. Only then do they act. For Hawking to be proved right, AIs must take the initiative, to choose their own goals. That's a horse of an entirely different color.
Of course, there's no reason why AI agents could not become more autonomous, eventually. Future task specs might become more vague while AIs are likely to become more multipurpose. Given enough time, I'm sure we'll have mobile robots able to do more than sweep floors in a random pattern. But Commander Data is a long way from an iRobot Roomba or Rethink's Baxter, both of which are dumber than my phone.
In the real world, autonomous robots are not going to arise for decades. And when they do, if they drive on the same streets or share the same office spaces, they too will have to obey the same rules of conduct as the rest of us. You won't get special privileges just because your brain is made of silicon.
Editing the historical record sounds awfully like hiding your past. Why isn't this like pretending the Holocaust or Stalins purges just never happened? Wouldn't IBM like to assert (without contradiction) that it never assisted the Nazis in the Death Camps?
This is an initiative only a corporate tool could love.
If you read the court case mentioned, the supreme court ruled that a search warrant was required before police could access the defendant's computer, which they did not do.
Right. With luck this kind of exurban facility will make good use of selective dispensations from the MI DMV to extend their trials off premises and onto roads like you describe.
Dialing up the real world noise is essential to bring these cars up to speed -- missing or obstructed lane markers and signs, poorly marked or uneven road edges, and the introduction of noise like leaves, snow banks, and pools of accumulated rainwater all need to be mastered before automation has any business driving cars, buses, trucks, or passengers in the many parts of the country like the Michigan coutnryside where often "the sun don't shine".
Exactly. Ann Arbor has persistent winter snow and occasional sleet, heavy rain, tornados, and even flooding. Its weather is often a perfect storm for drivers and a far cry from the ideal idyllic settings used so far to test automatic cars.
A2 is the real world. And its mix of academia and auto company proximity make it ideal for this role. Seems like a perfect marriage.
If we were serious about ending criminal acts in the US government, we would:
1) create a fully independent office inside the government to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers, with powers no less than congress' Special Prosecutor (i.e. equal to the presidency)
2) offer whistleblowers generous retirement benefits for life (to escape retribution)
3) give them blanket immunity from prosecution
4) prosecute the gov't wrongdoers all the way up the chain of command, *starting* at top executive levels
But the US government does the opposite. That's the very definition of racketeering and organized crime.
With a theoretical PhD, if you're applying for non-research jobs, you're probably seen as overqualified and suited to the wrong mix of skills. If the years of study toward your PhD don't translate to a capability that the employer values, then they're likely to see it as irrelevant, and see you as having "The Wrong Stuff".
Try describing your PhD research in some way that's more relevant to the company you're applying to. If it's mathematical, describe it as "analytic" or "data intensive" and not "theoretic" or "provably valid". Data mining and machine learning and AI and big data are hot right now. Make your skills sexy.
And be sure to write a cover letter that's tailored to the job, the industry, and the employer. These days, mismatched or over-general applications get tossed almost immediately.
For any R&D company that has a lot of in-house raw data, the Watson Discovery Advisor is likley to generate a lot of interest.
Imagine you're an executive VP in R&D in a board meeting. You receive this challenge from the CEO who hates your guts: "Our R&D productivity continues to decline. What're you doing about this? How are you extracting every last bit of value from our data? Our major competitors are using tools like Watson. Why aren't we?" You damned well better have an answer.
I work for a Fortune 100 R&D company that is *very* interested in improving its R&D ROI. I know for a fact that any opportunity to reevaluate our data to derive additional value (e.g. new prospects) will set off bells among the C suiters. IMHO Watson, and especially Discovery Advisor, is the first system I've seen with that potential.
Of course, IBM is going to have to step up its game in loading and tagging all that data. I suspect that's where most of its new Watson staff will work. I suspect the most fruitful features in data are not readable in natural language (English). Much has been summarized in graphs, or lies in tables, or in addenda. Or it's buried deep in old screening results stored in flat files that were long ago archived to tape. And it's certainly not present in easy-to-access content like online research paper abstracts.
But all it takes is one or two significant new leads to make the millions you spent hiring Watson look like money *very* well spent. And personally, I think that scenario is entirely plausible.
This pattern of ebb and flow in the tech world is nothing new. Every decade brings a computing novelty which invites revolutionaries who rethink the user experience. The universe seems to expand. All the developers get excited, jump on the bandwagon, and revel in the myriad possibilities -- for as long as the high lasts. Now the latest bandwagon has slowed and the Next Next Big Thing seems far far away...
1977 brought us the personal computer. 1984 was GUIs and WYSIWYG computing. 1988 was the network (and email and AOL and Usenet). 1994 was the web. 2008 was smartphones. 2010 was social computing. 2012 was The Cloud.
But 2014 is... dullsville. Sherlock is bored. Get used to it. This is the game that never ends.
I suspect most events like you describe probably would occur too quickly for conventional cameras to capture, but I see your point. It seems to me that kind of mition would have to take the form of a percussive force that arises without visible warning -- like the launch of an explosive powered bullet, and unlike the launch of a golfball being struck by a moving golf club that rapidly approached the stationary ball before making contact. And as you suggest, I doubt the firing of a bullet is the kind of motion seen most often in videos.
I suspect the vast majority of conventional motion sequences follow a path of 1) slow accel followed by slow decel (providing little clue as to directon of time), or 2) slow accel followed by fast decel (something that occurs often in forward moving time sequences, as a moving object is stopped suddenly by an impact). Thus path #2 is probably frequent enough and visible enough to be the anomaly that lets Freeman's group recognize the backward passage of time.
Dr Freeman spoke about this work at CVPR this week. In the videos I saw he identified small markers of temporal transition as indicative of moving forward or backward. Those they labeled as backward appeared to recognize asymmetric movement -- as in gradual acceleration followed by sudden deceleration as uniquely forward flow (as when a hand swings down and strickes a table top) -- an asymmetry that cannot occur in reverse (as in sudden acceleration followed by gradual deceleration).
Dr Freeman did not propose this as the causal phenomenon in question, but that made the most sense to me in light of the motions he identified as evidence for backward motion.
FISA is strictly a federal warrant court. Local police and prosecutions don't use it. This ruling applies principally to local police conduct and evidence, secondarily to federal police conduct and evidence.
Yes, the FBI could still rely on FISA's rubber stamp. But county mounties can't. And it's the sheer number of the latter which pose the greater threat.
Yep. Precisely how many planes has any laser brought down so far? Have lasers become a standard military weapon yet? If so I'd expect to see Al Caida and the Taliban routinely using laser pointers to crash US aircraft. But oddly enough, we don't...
Let's get real. Is a laser pointer a mile away going to disable both of a pilots eyes? AND both of a copilot's eyes? And how long were you blinded when a supermarket checkout scanner laser last caught your eye? Did you crash your shopping cart? Did you call in the FBI?
This mountain is such a molehill. It makes me wonder why the FBI is overselling this schtick so hard. It's easier than working for a living, I guess.
Unless this law explicitly and forcefully disallows bulk warrantless data collection of the public, NSA's top creeps (like Clapper and Alexander) and unprincipled gov't lawyers (like John Yoo) most certainly will crush the Constitution underfoot at their earliest convenience.
Good point. Self destruction of errant (or sabotaged) mobile e-devices seems like a very good idea.
Maybe these bacteria could be programmed with a specific behavior, like follow a signal to travel to a specific part of the body, then measure something or deliver a payload. Then self-destruct.
If e-proteins can augment electronic devices biologically, can they also augment biological systems electronically? They seem like a natural interface between biological and electrical materials -- perfect for constructing a cyborg. Or if made small enough, they could bypass DNA to synthesize (or inhibit) the right proteins at just the right time, thereby curing disease.
You could basically rewire and/or reprogram any part of an organism at any level: subcellular (e.g. metabolic control networks), tissue, immune, neural, etc. You could add intelligent controls where there are none or override controls already present.
This kind of thing also seems an ideal medium for building junctions between nerves and muscles.
The best preparation for becoming a good programmer (or scientist or engineer) is to learn how to organize your thoughts and then address only what is necessary and sufficient to accomplish a given task.
I know no book that teaches clarity of thought better than Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style". Clear writing and great coding share a common wellspring.
If someone wants to escape their past, they need to get a retraction of the DATA itself, not all links to the data.
In the case oif the spaniard who wanted his bankruptcy to go unnoticed, he needs to get the owner of that factoid to remove it. If the fact remains online, then it's most certainly *not* someone else's responsibility to route others around the minefield you've laid.
1) Yes. The decision to fire the weapon and authorize lethal force is discrete and binary. That is indeed well defined. By launching it, arming it, and ordering it to engage the "enemy" you have made the decision to kill. Any human private who kills without prior authorization to engage is in violation of the rules of combat. Authorizing him/her to kill *is* the issue here.
2) ??? The technique of projecting force is irrelevant. It's the *authorization* of of autonomous dispatch of lethal force that's the issue.
3) Yes, of course requiring a human to authorize a kill certainly can be implemented. This isn't part of an arms race. It's just a new aspect of any military's "rules of engagement". It's no different from the Geneva Convention's rules on treatment of prisoners of war, or banning the use of chemical or biological (or nuclear) weapons.
Why is the cost of one of today's (dumb) Tomahawks relevant? It can't order itself to self destruct. And I can't believe any have ever been ordered (by a human) to self destruct, without *somebody* being busted several ranks.
What's more, an fully autonomous Tomahawk is going to cost a good deal more than $1.45 million. Nobody inferior to a colonel is going to pop that cork, and certainly not the missile itself.
This strikes me as a false dichotomy. Nobody is going to launch a million dollar bullet (smart missile) then tell it to self destruct. Until smart bullets drop enormously in cost, this scenario is infeasible.
Assuming the cost of a smart bullet does fall, the initial authorization to fire it is still a decision to kill. The fact that something or someone might later reverse the decision does not mean the initial choice to launch was not a kill.
The goal of this controversy is that no machine should never have the authority to issue the *first* kill command. That responsibility should always lie with a human. With that, I concur.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a wonderful article "The Case Against Credentialism" by James Fallows in the The Atlantic (1985) which reads as if it were written today: http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...
It assesses professional degrees like MBAs as being inherently worth next to nothing, essentially serving a broken agenda in which our highly credentialed leaders know everything about form but nothing about function. Maybe virtual expertise is enough to govern a virtual world?
Too bad the US political parties didn't read this prior to the 2000 election. Maybe the would have fielded worthier candidates (and staff), and the US could have saved about a million lives and a few trillion bucks). Such is the cost of driving under the influence, I guess.
A bullpen makes a lot of sense to me. If coworkers doing exactly the kind of work I do were colocated, we'd all learn quickly what forms of interaction were productive and preferred, so we could avoid getting on each others' nerves. I used to work in a suite containing only team members. We all preferred it greatly to our present cubicle farm.
The principal problem with open offices are the disturbances arising from non-team members, especially the rude few who won't consider the harm their noise inflicts on neighbors.
Etzioni's point is a good one. To date, all AI apps have been designed to passively sit and do nothing until given a specific task. Only then do they act. For Hawking to be proved right, AIs must take the initiative, to choose their own goals. That's a horse of an entirely different color.
Of course, there's no reason why AI agents could not become more autonomous, eventually. Future task specs might become more vague while AIs are likely to become more multipurpose. Given enough time, I'm sure we'll have mobile robots able to do more than sweep floors in a random pattern. But Commander Data is a long way from an iRobot Roomba or Rethink's Baxter, both of which are dumber than my phone.
In the real world, autonomous robots are not going to arise for decades. And when they do, if they drive on the same streets or share the same office spaces, they too will have to obey the same rules of conduct as the rest of us. You won't get special privileges just because your brain is made of silicon.
Editing the historical record sounds awfully like hiding your past. Why isn't this like pretending the Holocaust or Stalins purges just never happened? Wouldn't IBM like to assert (without contradiction) that it never assisted the Nazis in the Death Camps?
This is an initiative only a corporate tool could love.
That's where US R&D dollars have gone. Camelot!
If you read the court case mentioned, the supreme court ruled that a search warrant was required before police could access the defendant's computer, which they did not do.
Anonymity was tangential to the case at best.
Exactly. This announcement marks the official start of the Obama presidency Reality Distortion Phase, where the lame duck madly fabricates an idyllic legacy that he gave a damn for liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Just like Nixon.
Right. With luck this kind of exurban facility will make good use of selective dispensations from the MI DMV to extend their trials off premises and onto roads like you describe.
Dialing up the real world noise is essential to bring these cars up to speed -- missing or obstructed lane markers and signs, poorly marked or uneven road edges, and the introduction of noise like leaves, snow banks, and pools of accumulated rainwater all need to be mastered before automation has any business driving cars, buses, trucks, or passengers in the many parts of the country like the Michigan coutnryside where often "the sun don't shine".
Exactly. Ann Arbor has persistent winter snow and occasional sleet, heavy rain, tornados, and even flooding. Its weather is often a perfect storm for drivers and a far cry from the ideal idyllic settings used so far to test automatic cars.
A2 is the real world. And its mix of academia and auto company proximity make it ideal for this role. Seems like a perfect marriage.
If we were serious about ending criminal acts in the US government, we would:
1) create a fully independent office inside the government to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers, with powers no less than congress' Special Prosecutor (i.e. equal to the presidency)
2) offer whistleblowers generous retirement benefits for life (to escape retribution)
3) give them blanket immunity from prosecution
4) prosecute the gov't wrongdoers all the way up the chain of command, *starting* at top executive levels
But the US government does the opposite. That's the very definition of racketeering and organized crime.
With a theoretical PhD, if you're applying for non-research jobs, you're probably seen as overqualified and suited to the wrong mix of skills. If the years of study toward your PhD don't translate to a capability that the employer values, then they're likely to see it as irrelevant, and see you as having "The Wrong Stuff".
Try describing your PhD research in some way that's more relevant to the company you're applying to. If it's mathematical, describe it as "analytic" or "data intensive" and not "theoretic" or "provably valid". Data mining and machine learning and AI and big data are hot right now. Make your skills sexy.
And be sure to write a cover letter that's tailored to the job, the industry, and the employer. These days, mismatched or over-general applications get tossed almost immediately.
For any R&D company that has a lot of in-house raw data, the Watson Discovery Advisor is likley to generate a lot of interest.
Imagine you're an executive VP in R&D in a board meeting. You receive this challenge from the CEO who hates your guts: "Our R&D productivity continues to decline. What're you doing about this? How are you extracting every last bit of value from our data? Our major competitors are using tools like Watson. Why aren't we?" You damned well better have an answer.
I work for a Fortune 100 R&D company that is *very* interested in improving its R&D ROI. I know for a fact that any opportunity to reevaluate our data to derive additional value (e.g. new prospects) will set off bells among the C suiters. IMHO Watson, and especially Discovery Advisor, is the first system I've seen with that potential.
Of course, IBM is going to have to step up its game in loading and tagging all that data. I suspect that's where most of its new Watson staff will work. I suspect the most fruitful features in data are not readable in natural language (English). Much has been summarized in graphs, or lies in tables, or in addenda. Or it's buried deep in old screening results stored in flat files that were long ago archived to tape. And it's certainly not present in easy-to-access content like online research paper abstracts.
But all it takes is one or two significant new leads to make the millions you spent hiring Watson look like money *very* well spent. And personally, I think that scenario is entirely plausible.
This pattern of ebb and flow in the tech world is nothing new. Every decade brings a computing novelty which invites revolutionaries who rethink the user experience. The universe seems to expand. All the developers get excited, jump on the bandwagon, and revel in the myriad possibilities -- for as long as the high lasts. Now the latest bandwagon has slowed and the Next Next Big Thing seems far far away...
1977 brought us the personal computer. 1984 was GUIs and WYSIWYG computing. 1988 was the network (and email and AOL and Usenet). 1994 was the web. 2008 was smartphones. 2010 was social computing. 2012 was The Cloud.
But 2014 is... dullsville. Sherlock is bored. Get used to it. This is the game that never ends.
I suspect most events like you describe probably would occur too quickly for conventional cameras to capture, but I see your point. It seems to me that kind of mition would have to take the form of a percussive force that arises without visible warning -- like the launch of an explosive powered bullet, and unlike the launch of a golfball being struck by a moving golf club that rapidly approached the stationary ball before making contact. And as you suggest, I doubt the firing of a bullet is the kind of motion seen most often in videos.
I suspect the vast majority of conventional motion sequences follow a path of 1) slow accel followed by slow decel (providing little clue as to directon of time), or 2) slow accel followed by fast decel (something that occurs often in forward moving time sequences, as a moving object is stopped suddenly by an impact). Thus path #2 is probably frequent enough and visible enough to be the anomaly that lets Freeman's group recognize the backward passage of time.
Dr Freeman spoke about this work at CVPR this week. In the videos I saw he identified small markers of temporal transition as indicative of moving forward or backward. Those they labeled as backward appeared to recognize asymmetric movement -- as in gradual acceleration followed by sudden deceleration as uniquely forward flow (as when a hand swings down and strickes a table top) -- an asymmetry that cannot occur in reverse (as in sudden acceleration followed by gradual deceleration).
Dr Freeman did not propose this as the causal phenomenon in question, but that made the most sense to me in light of the motions he identified as evidence for backward motion.
FISA is strictly a federal warrant court. Local police and prosecutions don't use it. This ruling applies principally to local police conduct and evidence, secondarily to federal police conduct and evidence.
Yes, the FBI could still rely on FISA's rubber stamp. But county mounties can't. And it's the sheer number of the latter which pose the greater threat.
Yep. Precisely how many planes has any laser brought down so far? Have lasers become a standard military weapon yet? If so I'd expect to see Al Caida and the Taliban routinely using laser pointers to crash US aircraft. But oddly enough, we don't...
Let's get real. Is a laser pointer a mile away going to disable both of a pilots eyes? AND both of a copilot's eyes? And how long were you blinded when a supermarket checkout scanner laser last caught your eye? Did you crash your shopping cart? Did you call in the FBI?
This mountain is such a molehill. It makes me wonder why the FBI is overselling this schtick so hard. It's easier than working for a living, I guess.
Unless this law explicitly and forcefully disallows bulk warrantless data collection of the public, NSA's top creeps (like Clapper and Alexander) and unprincipled gov't lawyers (like John Yoo) most certainly will crush the Constitution underfoot at their earliest convenience.
Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs...
Good point. Self destruction of errant (or sabotaged) mobile e-devices seems like a very good idea.
Maybe these bacteria could be programmed with a specific behavior, like follow a signal to travel to a specific part of the body, then measure something or deliver a payload. Then self-destruct.
Sounds like "Fantastic Voyage"...
If e-proteins can augment electronic devices biologically, can they also augment biological systems electronically? They seem like a natural interface between biological and electrical materials -- perfect for constructing a cyborg. Or if made small enough, they could bypass DNA to synthesize (or inhibit) the right proteins at just the right time, thereby curing disease.
You could basically rewire and/or reprogram any part of an organism at any level: subcellular (e.g. metabolic control networks), tissue, immune, neural, etc. You could add intelligent controls where there are none or override controls already present.
This kind of thing also seems an ideal medium for building junctions between nerves and muscles.
The best preparation for becoming a good programmer (or scientist or engineer) is to learn how to organize your thoughts and then address only what is necessary and sufficient to accomplish a given task.
I know no book that teaches clarity of thought better than Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style". Clear writing and great coding share a common wellspring.
If someone wants to escape their past, they need to get a retraction of the DATA itself, not all links to the data.
In the case oif the spaniard who wanted his bankruptcy to go unnoticed, he needs to get the owner of that factoid to remove it. If the fact remains online, then it's most certainly *not* someone else's responsibility to route others around the minefield you've laid.
This ruling is censorship, pure and ugly.
1) Yes. The decision to fire the weapon and authorize lethal force is discrete and binary. That is indeed well defined. By launching it, arming it, and ordering it to engage the "enemy" you have made the decision to kill. Any human private who kills without prior authorization to engage is in violation of the rules of combat. Authorizing him/her to kill *is* the issue here.
2) ??? The technique of projecting force is irrelevant. It's the *authorization* of of autonomous dispatch of lethal force that's the issue.
3) Yes, of course requiring a human to authorize a kill certainly can be implemented. This isn't part of an arms race. It's just a new aspect of any military's "rules of engagement". It's no different from the Geneva Convention's rules on treatment of prisoners of war, or banning the use of chemical or biological (or nuclear) weapons.
Why is the cost of one of today's (dumb) Tomahawks relevant? It can't order itself to self destruct. And I can't believe any have ever been ordered (by a human) to self destruct, without *somebody* being busted several ranks.
What's more, an fully autonomous Tomahawk is going to cost a good deal more than $1.45 million. Nobody inferior to a colonel is going to pop that cork, and certainly not the missile itself.
No. That scenario still misfires.
This strikes me as a false dichotomy. Nobody is going to launch a million dollar bullet (smart missile) then tell it to self destruct. Until smart bullets drop enormously in cost, this scenario is infeasible.
Assuming the cost of a smart bullet does fall, the initial authorization to fire it is still a decision to kill. The fact that something or someone might later reverse the decision does not mean the initial choice to launch was not a kill.
The goal of this controversy is that no machine should never have the authority to issue the *first* kill command. That responsibility should always lie with a human. With that, I concur.