If we accept your premise that in other countries the situation is reversed-- that the computer fields have much higher ratios of women to men-- I would ask whether those countries view that as a "problem"; do we need to increase the number of men in computer fields in those countries?
The AC's assertion is that the differences being discussed (preference for engineering vs other pursuits) are inculcated, not natural. That is different from what you're saying.
Can you clarify what the specific problem is? Im not aware of mobs of girls clamoring to enter CS who are being prevented. What im seeing is an addiction to political correctness and an outrage that in reality women tend not to enter computer fields as much.
The question of equality is where they are asserting men and women can perform the same. Until evidence exists to the contrary, we have to assume this is true.
I would say the copious evidence that women seem to prefer some jobs, and not prefer others-- like comp sci and IT jobs-- and the general lack (so far as I am aware) of any particular barriers in those areas indicates that there are natural tendencies. Im really not convinced that such a natural tendency is a "problem" that needs to be fixed; if you can show instances of discrimination or barriers to women in the CS field, lets remove those-- but I dont see why we need to attempt to force the gender ratio to be 50:50 in CS because that is wholly unrealistic. Only someone living in an ivory tower could think that women are equally likely to enter computer fields to men, just like only someone living in an ivory tower could think that men and women have the exact same set of skills (statistically).
Why is the assumption made that it is a problem that women are underrepresented in CS? Are we specifically assuming that we are getting sub-standard cs majors because of that gap? Or are we making the fantastic leap of assuming that there are scores of women wanting to break into CS, but are held back by various factors?
We can go back to the 20s, or the 19th century if you like, but Im pretty certain it will just reinforce my argument. Dialing forward to the 70s wont help either, the graph is pretty linear between 1950 and now.
The drift since the 2008 crash has been in the wrong direction.
To be fair the numbers I use are generally through 2004 or 2010, but thats OK because the 2008 crash generally isnt going to affect the comparison we're making, and a single event really isnt relevant in any case. We're talking about trends, not one-time events.
Sorry for double post-- no, we dont have real AI systems of the sort being discussed here. We use the term AI colloqually to mean two widely different things-- soft AI, which is to say algorithms which perform static sets of pre-determined instructions (though sometimes sophisticated enough to emulate actual intelligence); and hard AI, which is to say something that can properly think for itself, has no hard-coded instructions, and can learn. We have never made hard AI, or even come close to it, and we have no model for how it might work.
The reason people think we have is because we toss the term AI around in an ambiguous way that conflates the two types, and people then infer that our progress with soft AI means that we are on a path to hard AI. The reality is that hard AI is not a simple iterative improvement on soft AI, but rather something completely different that requires a completely different approach (an approach we have yet to define).
We werent the ones who designed our brains, so thats not really a good parallel.
One of the fundamental first steps in any computer science endeavor is to describe the problem. We dont have solid definitions for what intelligence is or how it work, which makes it impossible to determine if we've been successful in replicating it and impossible to begin defining a solution.
Yep, and that means we get to live through the historical period between capitalism, the economic system of thousand of years, and post work scarcity when AI can just do all the things for us.
The only thing left to do is:
* Establish a proper theory of how consciousness and intelligence work
* Establish whether they can be implemented in silicon
* figure out how to do them
Ie, the only thing wrong with your plan is we dont have such an AI, we dont know how to make such an AI, we dont know whether its possible to make such an AI, and noone is really clear what makes intelligence go in the first place.
Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively. We can make at best imitations that try to fool one into thinking that there is creativity, and we can use brute-force searches on certain types of problems. Actual innovation is not something we have seen, nor (IMO) will we ever see from AI-- and certainly not until we make phenomenal bounds in understanding consciousness.
Hes extrapolating based on every single historical datapoint, all of which directly contradict this silly idea that technology is bad for jobs. The summary cant even hide the reality; they basically handwave saying "we know all of history contradicts the thing we're about to say, but we're convinced based on speculation that this time will be different."
Yeah. Anyone up for burning some looms and joining the luddite movement?
Pikey would be wrong, as the disparity between race and gender has actually been shrinking at a fair clip over the last 70 years. In 1950 the ratio of wages for white men : women : black men : women was something like 6:2:3:1. Its now something like 3:2:2:2. How exactly is that growing inequality?
Some would argue China is that much better than "we".
Those people are ignorant. I have read China's history, I have been to China. The degree of government control and "fake" freedom is astounding. You can be arrested for speaking of religion to a minor; you can be arrested for handing out political pamphlets (I actually witnessed this, and had a pamphlet confiscated). I've flown into Shanghai airport, and seen a river so dirty that you can see precisely where the water meets the ocean, not because of the surrounding land (which is hard to see because of the grey smoggy air) but because thats where the water goes from yellow to green.
Only someone completely ignorant of China, or who eats up their state-run media soundbytes, could possibly think there is a comparison to be made there.
What's the basis of your "90%+ argument"?
The fact that from a statistical basis-- Dept of Education, Dept of Labor, Dept of Housing, etc-- the people currently alive in the US and western Europe comprise less than 5% of the CURRENT world population, and are richer, freer, and better educated than the remaining 95% CURRENTLY alive? Let alone historical.
It was probably part of some massive omnibus spending bill.
Is that somehow supposed to excuse the people who voted for it?
And yet people cry bloody murder when republicans dare suggest that we cant pass a massive pork-laden budget bill for being "obstructionist". Well, this is what it looks like when things go "smoothly".
“All those in favor?” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee chairman. Everybody said aye. “It does appear to the chair that the ayes have it,” Rockefeller said.
Oh and look at that, it appears that dems were involved after all! But apparently that doesnt stop the attempts to pin the blame squarely on the right.
This was forced on NASA as a pork barrel money grant by the Republican senators,
This passed through both houses of congress and the presidents branch. I read the story and saw what was attempted here in terms of blame, but the reality is that the Constellation shutdown was passed by congress, and the A-3 pork project was passed by Congress. Attempting to pin this on a single senator from Mississippi is disingenuous at best.
You want some accountability, look up which senators voted for this and have a history of voting on pork.
No, Im arguing that relative to the vast majority (90+%) of regimes current or historical, we are not that bad. You seem to think that torture is a recent development, or that echelon hasnt existed for decades. You also seem to think that a reasonable comparison between China's human rights issues and ours can be made; it cant.
Then you would've found out The Independent is just making stuff up.
Independent isnt making anything up, their headline is actually accurate. If you havent figured it out yet, theres a 50-50 chance that any particular slashdot headline is utter nonsense. The game is to figure out which each headline is.
Either way its still not socially appropriate to encourage people to financially support a statue honoring yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
If we accept your premise that in other countries the situation is reversed-- that the computer fields have much higher ratios of women to men-- I would ask whether those countries view that as a "problem"; do we need to increase the number of men in computer fields in those countries?
Since when is it acceptable to post articles that are paywalled?
We're not even going to pretend to care about the article?
The AC's assertion is that the differences being discussed (preference for engineering vs other pursuits) are inculcated, not natural. That is different from what you're saying.
It carries gas.
I'd imagine it carries several gasses, its a blimp.
Meanwhile, in a forgotten corner of the internet, InterNIC cackles with glee as its plan comes together.
Cookie clicker just needs Firefox or Chrome and some debugging knowledge.
We're dealing with inculcated social gender differences
Are you speculating, or do you have an actual basis for this?
Can you clarify what the specific problem is? Im not aware of mobs of girls clamoring to enter CS who are being prevented. What im seeing is an addiction to political correctness and an outrage that in reality women tend not to enter computer fields as much.
The question of equality is where they are asserting men and women can perform the same. Until evidence exists to the contrary, we have to assume this is true.
I would say the copious evidence that women seem to prefer some jobs, and not prefer others-- like comp sci and IT jobs-- and the general lack (so far as I am aware) of any particular barriers in those areas indicates that there are natural tendencies. Im really not convinced that such a natural tendency is a "problem" that needs to be fixed; if you can show instances of discrimination or barriers to women in the CS field, lets remove those-- but I dont see why we need to attempt to force the gender ratio to be 50:50 in CS because that is wholly unrealistic. Only someone living in an ivory tower could think that women are equally likely to enter computer fields to men, just like only someone living in an ivory tower could think that men and women have the exact same set of skills (statistically).
Why is the assumption made that it is a problem that women are underrepresented in CS? Are we specifically assuming that we are getting sub-standard cs majors because of that gap? Or are we making the fantastic leap of assuming that there are scores of women wanting to break into CS, but are held back by various factors?
We can go back to the 20s, or the 19th century if you like, but Im pretty certain it will just reinforce my argument. Dialing forward to the 70s wont help either, the graph is pretty linear between 1950 and now.
The drift since the 2008 crash has been in the wrong direction.
To be fair the numbers I use are generally through 2004 or 2010, but thats OK because the 2008 crash generally isnt going to affect the comparison we're making, and a single event really isnt relevant in any case. We're talking about trends, not one-time events.
Sorry for double post-- no, we dont have real AI systems of the sort being discussed here. We use the term AI colloqually to mean two widely different things-- soft AI, which is to say algorithms which perform static sets of pre-determined instructions (though sometimes sophisticated enough to emulate actual intelligence); and hard AI, which is to say something that can properly think for itself, has no hard-coded instructions, and can learn. We have never made hard AI, or even come close to it, and we have no model for how it might work.
The reason people think we have is because we toss the term AI around in an ambiguous way that conflates the two types, and people then infer that our progress with soft AI means that we are on a path to hard AI. The reality is that hard AI is not a simple iterative improvement on soft AI, but rather something completely different that requires a completely different approach (an approach we have yet to define).
We werent the ones who designed our brains, so thats not really a good parallel.
One of the fundamental first steps in any computer science endeavor is to describe the problem. We dont have solid definitions for what intelligence is or how it work, which makes it impossible to determine if we've been successful in replicating it and impossible to begin defining a solution.
Yep, and that means we get to live through the historical period between capitalism, the economic system of thousand of years, and post work scarcity when AI can just do all the things for us.
The only thing left to do is:
* Establish a proper theory of how consciousness and intelligence work
* Establish whether they can be implemented in silicon
* figure out how to do them
Ie, the only thing wrong with your plan is we dont have such an AI, we dont know how to make such an AI, we dont know whether its possible to make such an AI, and noone is really clear what makes intelligence go in the first place.
Other than that, good theories all around here.
Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively. We can make at best imitations that try to fool one into thinking that there is creativity, and we can use brute-force searches on certain types of problems. Actual innovation is not something we have seen, nor (IMO) will we ever see from AI-- and certainly not until we make phenomenal bounds in understanding consciousness.
Hes extrapolating based on every single historical datapoint, all of which directly contradict this silly idea that technology is bad for jobs. The summary cant even hide the reality; they basically handwave saying "we know all of history contradicts the thing we're about to say, but we're convinced based on speculation that this time will be different."
Yeah. Anyone up for burning some looms and joining the luddite movement?
Pikey would be wrong, as the disparity between race and gender has actually been shrinking at a fair clip over the last 70 years. In 1950 the ratio of wages for white men : women : black men : women was something like 6:2:3:1. Its now something like 3:2:2:2. How exactly is that growing inequality?
Some would argue China is that much better than "we".
Those people are ignorant. I have read China's history, I have been to China. The degree of government control and "fake" freedom is astounding. You can be arrested for speaking of religion to a minor; you can be arrested for handing out political pamphlets (I actually witnessed this, and had a pamphlet confiscated). I've flown into Shanghai airport, and seen a river so dirty that you can see precisely where the water meets the ocean, not because of the surrounding land (which is hard to see because of the grey smoggy air) but because thats where the water goes from yellow to green.
Only someone completely ignorant of China, or who eats up their state-run media soundbytes, could possibly think there is a comparison to be made there.
What's the basis of your "90%+ argument"?
The fact that from a statistical basis-- Dept of Education, Dept of Labor, Dept of Housing, etc-- the people currently alive in the US and western Europe comprise less than 5% of the CURRENT world population, and are richer, freer, and better educated than the remaining 95% CURRENTLY alive? Let alone historical.
It was probably part of some massive omnibus spending bill.
Is that somehow supposed to excuse the people who voted for it?
And yet people cry bloody murder when republicans dare suggest that we cant pass a massive pork-laden budget bill for being "obstructionist". Well, this is what it looks like when things go "smoothly".
“All those in favor?” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee chairman.
Everybody said aye.
“It does appear to the chair that the ayes have it,” Rockefeller said.
Oh and look at that, it appears that dems were involved after all! But apparently that doesnt stop the attempts to pin the blame squarely on the right.
Im white and I'll be honest, I dont much care for inner city police either. Somehow I dont have trouble with cops outside the city either.
Could it maybe be that turning everything into a race issue is dumb?
Poe's law strikes again!
This was forced on NASA as a pork barrel money grant by the Republican senators,
This passed through both houses of congress and the presidents branch. I read the story and saw what was attempted here in terms of blame, but the reality is that the Constellation shutdown was passed by congress, and the A-3 pork project was passed by Congress. Attempting to pin this on a single senator from Mississippi is disingenuous at best.
You want some accountability, look up which senators voted for this and have a history of voting on pork.
No, Im arguing that relative to the vast majority (90+%) of regimes current or historical, we are not that bad. You seem to think that torture is a recent development, or that echelon hasnt existed for decades. You also seem to think that a reasonable comparison between China's human rights issues and ours can be made; it cant.
Im surprised anyone bothered to respond to this troll of a submission.
What, are they expecting someone on slashdot to say "gee, yes, theyre necessary!"
Then you would've found out The Independent is just making stuff up.
Independent isnt making anything up, their headline is actually accurate. If you havent figured it out yet, theres a 50-50 chance that any particular slashdot headline is utter nonsense. The game is to figure out which each headline is.
Either way its still not socially appropriate to encourage people to financially support a statue honoring yourself.