ike I said, to keep it sexy and keep the money flowing, AI researchers have changed the definition of AI to
The definition has been consistent since the 60s. Really, do you imagine universities and tech companies have been trying to create machine consciousness for all this time? What would be the point? They've been working on practical stuff all along.
As an aside, you do know that "quants" don't "predict" anything, right? There's a (or many) formula(e) that determine whether a stock is "undervalued".
No, that's the opposite of what a quant does, as those terms are normally used. Caring about whether a stock is "undervalued" is all about the stock's fundamentals. Value guys use words like "undervalued". But maybe that's just semantics. Quants look at movement of stock prices in the abstract, it's why there are names for every second derivative of the theoretical value of an option. Predictions of change in price or uncertainty of price or price volatility or what-have-you over time, over price, as volatility changes. Every sort of quantitative prediction you can name has been researched to death. James Simons turned his math skills into 14 billion dollars, and the whole industry followed.
Call it what you want, it's what the field of "AI research"... researches. There's no vast research effort to create machine intelligence - but lots of people have been working for decades on much more practical efforts. There's not much difference (yet) between the marketing term and the term of art. This whole "strong AI vs weak AI" - yeah, science fiction.
Quants have made billions predicting changes in valuations. Once it's predictable it shortly thereafter becomes gamed, of course. Algorithmic trading is all trolls trolling trolls these days. But predicting future trends absent market reaction to that very prediction is certainly something software can do, regardless of the terminology.
AI will exist only when we've finally shifted the definition far enough to allow non-AI to be classified as AI.
That stuff you're calling "non-AI" is what AI researchers call "AI". AI is not the quest for machine consciousness - who wants that anyway? AI research is the field that solves problems that seemed at first glance to require consciousness to solve. One of the founders of the field once complained that, to the public "AI is the set of all the problems we haven't solved yet". Pretty much what you just said. But it's the field of AI that solves these "suddenly not AI" problems, and that's always been their goal.
AI means what it's always meant to researchers since the 60s (outside of SciFi): software that solves problems that can't be solved in a straightforward procedural way. E.g., voice recognition and image recognition are "AI problems" that have largely been solved (still some ground to cover in machine vision, but the core work is there).
(Almost) no one has ever worked towards some sort of machine consciousness. That's not what the field of AI does, and why would you? There were always fears it might happen accidentally, of course, and that makes for great fiction, but "AI" as a research field has been delivering useful results since the 80s.
given that self driving cars cannot handle streets that have not been mapped to millimeter precision, or road constructions, or bad weather, or any of a million other real life conditions.
That's... not how self-driving cars work. They rely on onboard sensors to follow the lane and deal with a variety of hazards. They aren't ready yet because the bar is so high, but they already work most of the time, even in bad weather with road construction.
there's no reason to believe anyone alive to day will live to see true self driving cars.
They're already here. Volvo will have 100 around the world this year (a few are already on the road in Sweden). General availability will be a few more years, but Volvo won't release them until they're safe (unlike Tesla). Self-driving functionality is a big chunk of Volvo's "no deaths in a new Volvo in 2020" plan.
When Paving Day comes, pedestrians and bicyclists will be relegated to their proper role as pit slaves, providing fresh road-food and clean bathrooms while the rest of us cruise the Paved Earth in our atomic hypercars under the light of the chromed moon.
"Hoi polloi" means "the people, so "the hoi polloi" is silly. But even my treasured Oxford Style Guild says: give up on this one, it's a lost cause. Much like thankfully and hopefully, even well-edited prose has normalized the once-error.
SF has the worst climate and culture in the world. "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco". SF is the epicenter of everything wrong with America. The next Big One can't come too soon. I'm hoping for "Biblical".
H1B's are not laying down roots, they are not getting married and having kids, they are not buying homes, and they are not making consumer purchases aside from necessities
I've known about 100 H1-B workers in my career - all but two of them were married, had kids, bought homes, made plenty of consumer purchases, eventually got their green card, and are still living here. One exception just had bad luck with his wife being laid off in an economic downturn, and they moved back to India because she really didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom. The other moved to Australia, got married, etc. etc.
A 5-year-odl Honda Civic is far fore reliable than a new 70s Chevy. If you weren't around when 70s American cars were the norm, you have no idea. There's a reason the Japanese makers were able to conquer America, despite starting from their own place of poor reliability.
The used Honda Civic will be a better car in every way than the new 70s Malibu, is the thing.
The real argument here is that "a new car that keeps up with the Jones's" doesn't get cheaper. That's just the thing: status symbols, even small ones like a new family sedan, can never get cheaper, by definition. People complaining about how stuff doesn't get cheaper are usually talking about that. The equivalent car keeps getting cheaper, but that stops being the car that impresses over time.
Yup, no matter what happens with technology, or Socialism, or anything else economic whatsoever, it can never get cheaper to impress your neighbors with your status symbol. The upside is: that's why automation will never leave everyone jobless, as the cheaper it is, the more it fails the status test, so there's always something left to do.
Tehre are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs sitting unfilled in the US. There's a vast labor shortage in all the skilled trades. We're failing as a nation to enable people to take skilled blue-collar jobs. Our obsession with "everyone goes to college" is making high school worthless for half the population. The near absence of quality, reputable vocational training is really sad. But the jobs are there.
A visa program where you get into the US by having a company sponsor you for a professional job is a good thing - it's sold evidence you'll be a net-contributor to the system. But it needs to covert to a green card quickly. If the median H1-B holder got a green card in 1-2 years, it would be fine. But now its, what, 3-5 years depending on whether you have a master's? Too long; allows for too much exploitation.
You're arguing causation from correlation. Stop that. Car cost more because of a tall stack of regulations about safety and emissions. They cost more because we collectively decided it was better that they should cost more. And you can certainly buy a decent used car for $5000 today (and even more so an inflation-adjusted $5000), and that Honda Civic will outperform the 70s Malibu in every way.
Silicone Valley blows goats climate-wise. Only Southern Ca, and a bit of Napa Valley are nice. And, sure Northern Cali has culture - like a Petri dish has culture.
Silly Valley sucks less than the Midwest and the rust belt, no doubt, but that's not saying much.
It's just the network effect. There are very few hubs for tech jobs, because companies want to hire locally if possible, and smart people move to where the jobs are, so you get the normal sort of power law distribution.
Plenty. Less at MS than most tech companies, but when I was there it seemed about 1/3-1/2 (as opposed to about 2/3 at most left-coast tech software companies).
In software development, H1-Bs are just where most talent enters the pool, and as the industry is still so biased towards young talent, most of the workforce is still in the first 5 years of the industry. Most H1-B holders I've known over the years have green cards now, BTW, as the years went on.
Every large company in Silly Valley has a legal team and things nothing of hiring H1-Bs away form competitors. It's not any harder to change jobs - but you make about $10k less than someone not needing sponsorship, because that's the cost of the legal team.
All the problem with H1-Bs are in the consultant body-shops. Simply banning B1-Bs from consulting jobs would fix basically everything, though a $100k minimum would fix it as well.
You're talking about new inventions, which misses the point. Any technology will experience a cost decrease in its beginning but then it levels out. I'm sure before the Ford Model-T came out cars were considered a luxury item for the wealthy, but people were also doing fine without cars. Yet the Chevy Malibu of 1970 when adjusted for inflation was cheaper than a Chevy Malibu of today. There will be no point in time where a new vehicle costs $2000, it just won't happen.
Below a certain price point, people want more features instead of a cheaper product. The Chevy Malibu is not the same product it was in the 70s - it's barely comparable. In terms of safety, reliability, performance, and fuel economy, the modern version (which is pretty bad across the board by today's standards) blows away the 70s version. There's both called the same name, but they aren't equivalent.
There is no connection to the price point of a product and the cost to make it, what matters only is demand.
And, you know, supply. That's why the price levels off at some point: stuff becomes fully commoditized, margins fall to where there's little point in new manufacturers getting involved. But even then, over decades, things change. Washing machines, TVs, and refrigerators are much better product now feature-wise that 60 years ago, even if they don't last as long. (And I don't know what fancy rich enclave you grew up in, but where I grew up most households were single-mother-income, and still TV and fridge were taken for granted).
But that's just it, isn't it? Someone with a 140 IQ and some basic methodology can learn to distinguish between people at various levels below his own, with a little practice. Happens a lot in job interviews. Someone with a 100 IQ would be hard pressed, probably incapable, of distinguishing between people of 140 vs 150 IQ, short of elaborate scientific study with effectively random questions. (Fun fact, most IQ tests top out at ~140, but have poor repeatability above 130).
How do you figure cost of basic goods is going to decline? Cost savings due to technological advances hasn't been passed onto the consumer ever.
Cynicism is not knowledge.
Food used to cost most of the household budget. Shoes and furniture used to cost so much that only the head of household had shoes and a chair. Most people couldn't afford flatware, or glass windows. The list goes on and on.
In the 50s, the American dream was to eventually earn enough to own a washing machine, a refrigerator, and a television.
Cost savings due to technological advances are always passed on to the consumer, eventually. Margins only get smaller over time until something is entirely commoditized.
Demand for personal services increases as cost of basic goods declines. The need for such workers will only continue to increase with automation.
Plus there's a whole category of jobs that can be summarized as "help people have higher social status", from beautician to decorator to wedding planner. Those jobs will boom as automation makes cheaper everything below "social status" on the hierarchy of needs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, you're old. You forgot to shake your fist and tell those streams to get off your lawn, though.
Sure, the company could vanish, but then I had all my music tapes stolen back in the day - risks either way.
ike I said, to keep it sexy and keep the money flowing, AI researchers have changed the definition of AI to
The definition has been consistent since the 60s. Really, do you imagine universities and tech companies have been trying to create machine consciousness for all this time? What would be the point? They've been working on practical stuff all along.
As an aside, you do know that "quants" don't "predict" anything, right? There's a (or many) formula(e) that determine whether a stock is "undervalued".
No, that's the opposite of what a quant does, as those terms are normally used. Caring about whether a stock is "undervalued" is all about the stock's fundamentals. Value guys use words like "undervalued". But maybe that's just semantics. Quants look at movement of stock prices in the abstract, it's why there are names for every second derivative of the theoretical value of an option. Predictions of change in price or uncertainty of price or price volatility or what-have-you over time, over price, as volatility changes. Every sort of quantitative prediction you can name has been researched to death. James Simons turned his math skills into 14 billion dollars, and the whole industry followed.
Call it what you want, it's what the field of "AI research" ... researches. There's no vast research effort to create machine intelligence - but lots of people have been working for decades on much more practical efforts. There's not much difference (yet) between the marketing term and the term of art. This whole "strong AI vs weak AI" - yeah, science fiction.
Quants have made billions predicting changes in valuations. Once it's predictable it shortly thereafter becomes gamed, of course. Algorithmic trading is all trolls trolling trolls these days. But predicting future trends absent market reaction to that very prediction is certainly something software can do, regardless of the terminology.
AI will exist only when we've finally shifted the definition far enough to allow non-AI to be classified as AI.
That stuff you're calling "non-AI" is what AI researchers call "AI". AI is not the quest for machine consciousness - who wants that anyway? AI research is the field that solves problems that seemed at first glance to require consciousness to solve. One of the founders of the field once complained that, to the public "AI is the set of all the problems we haven't solved yet". Pretty much what you just said. But it's the field of AI that solves these "suddenly not AI" problems, and that's always been their goal.
AI means what it's always meant to researchers since the 60s (outside of SciFi): software that solves problems that can't be solved in a straightforward procedural way. E.g., voice recognition and image recognition are "AI problems" that have largely been solved (still some ground to cover in machine vision, but the core work is there).
(Almost) no one has ever worked towards some sort of machine consciousness. That's not what the field of AI does, and why would you? There were always fears it might happen accidentally, of course, and that makes for great fiction, but "AI" as a research field has been delivering useful results since the 80s.
given that self driving cars cannot handle streets that have not been mapped to millimeter precision, or road constructions, or bad weather, or any of a million other real life conditions.
That's ... not how self-driving cars work. They rely on onboard sensors to follow the lane and deal with a variety of hazards. They aren't ready yet because the bar is so high, but they already work most of the time, even in bad weather with road construction.
there's no reason to believe anyone alive to day will live to see true self driving cars.
They're already here. Volvo will have 100 around the world this year (a few are already on the road in Sweden). General availability will be a few more years, but Volvo won't release them until they're safe (unlike Tesla). Self-driving functionality is a big chunk of Volvo's "no deaths in a new Volvo in 2020" plan.
When Paving Day comes, pedestrians and bicyclists will be relegated to their proper role as pit slaves, providing fresh road-food and clean bathrooms while the rest of us cruise the Paved Earth in our atomic hypercars under the light of the chromed moon.
"Hoi polloi" means "the people, so "the hoi polloi" is silly. But even my treasured Oxford Style Guild says: give up on this one, it's a lost cause. Much like thankfully and hopefully, even well-edited prose has normalized the once-error.
San Francisco says hi.
SF has the worst climate and culture in the world. "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco". SF is the epicenter of everything wrong with America. The next Big One can't come too soon. I'm hoping for "Biblical".
H1B's are not laying down roots, they are not getting married and having kids, they are not buying homes, and they are not making consumer purchases aside from necessities
I've known about 100 H1-B workers in my career - all but two of them were married, had kids, bought homes, made plenty of consumer purchases, eventually got their green card, and are still living here. One exception just had bad luck with his wife being laid off in an economic downturn, and they moved back to India because she really didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom. The other moved to Australia, got married, etc. etc.
Are you in "IT" and not software development?
A 5-year-odl Honda Civic is far fore reliable than a new 70s Chevy. If you weren't around when 70s American cars were the norm, you have no idea. There's a reason the Japanese makers were able to conquer America, despite starting from their own place of poor reliability.
The used Honda Civic will be a better car in every way than the new 70s Malibu, is the thing.
The real argument here is that "a new car that keeps up with the Jones's" doesn't get cheaper. That's just the thing: status symbols, even small ones like a new family sedan, can never get cheaper, by definition. People complaining about how stuff doesn't get cheaper are usually talking about that. The equivalent car keeps getting cheaper, but that stops being the car that impresses over time.
Yup, no matter what happens with technology, or Socialism, or anything else economic whatsoever, it can never get cheaper to impress your neighbors with your status symbol. The upside is: that's why automation will never leave everyone jobless, as the cheaper it is, the more it fails the status test, so there's always something left to do.
Tehre are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs sitting unfilled in the US. There's a vast labor shortage in all the skilled trades. We're failing as a nation to enable people to take skilled blue-collar jobs. Our obsession with "everyone goes to college" is making high school worthless for half the population. The near absence of quality, reputable vocational training is really sad. But the jobs are there.
A visa program where you get into the US by having a company sponsor you for a professional job is a good thing - it's sold evidence you'll be a net-contributor to the system. But it needs to covert to a green card quickly. If the median H1-B holder got a green card in 1-2 years, it would be fine. But now its, what, 3-5 years depending on whether you have a master's? Too long; allows for too much exploitation.
The topic at hand is H1-Bs, who do exactly that: live in America. If you can't compete with other talent with American cost of living, git gud.
If you ban H1-Bs, then we're competing with the same people who now have a very low cost of living indeed. No one wins!
You're arguing causation from correlation. Stop that. Car cost more because of a tall stack of regulations about safety and emissions. They cost more because we collectively decided it was better that they should cost more. And you can certainly buy a decent used car for $5000 today (and even more so an inflation-adjusted $5000), and that Honda Civic will outperform the 70s Malibu in every way.
Silicone Valley blows goats climate-wise. Only Southern Ca, and a bit of Napa Valley are nice. And, sure Northern Cali has culture - like a Petri dish has culture.
Silly Valley sucks less than the Midwest and the rust belt, no doubt, but that's not saying much.
It's just the network effect. There are very few hubs for tech jobs, because companies want to hire locally if possible, and smart people move to where the jobs are, so you get the normal sort of power law distribution.
Plenty. Less at MS than most tech companies, but when I was there it seemed about 1/3-1/2 (as opposed to about 2/3 at most left-coast tech software companies).
In software development, H1-Bs are just where most talent enters the pool, and as the industry is still so biased towards young talent, most of the workforce is still in the first 5 years of the industry. Most H1-B holders I've known over the years have green cards now, BTW, as the years went on.
Every large company in Silly Valley has a legal team and things nothing of hiring H1-Bs away form competitors. It's not any harder to change jobs - but you make about $10k less than someone not needing sponsorship, because that's the cost of the legal team.
All the problem with H1-Bs are in the consultant body-shops. Simply banning B1-Bs from consulting jobs would fix basically everything, though a $100k minimum would fix it as well.
You're talking about new inventions, which misses the point. Any technology will experience a cost decrease in its beginning but then it levels out. I'm sure before the Ford Model-T came out cars were considered a luxury item for the wealthy, but people were also doing fine without cars. Yet the Chevy Malibu of 1970 when adjusted for inflation was cheaper than a Chevy Malibu of today. There will be no point in time where a new vehicle costs $2000, it just won't happen.
Below a certain price point, people want more features instead of a cheaper product. The Chevy Malibu is not the same product it was in the 70s - it's barely comparable. In terms of safety, reliability, performance, and fuel economy, the modern version (which is pretty bad across the board by today's standards) blows away the 70s version. There's both called the same name, but they aren't equivalent.
There is no connection to the price point of a product and the cost to make it, what matters only is demand.
And, you know, supply. That's why the price levels off at some point: stuff becomes fully commoditized, margins fall to where there's little point in new manufacturers getting involved. But even then, over decades, things change. Washing machines, TVs, and refrigerators are much better product now feature-wise that 60 years ago, even if they don't last as long. (And I don't know what fancy rich enclave you grew up in, but where I grew up most households were single-mother-income, and still TV and fridge were taken for granted).
But that's just it, isn't it? Someone with a 140 IQ and some basic methodology can learn to distinguish between people at various levels below his own, with a little practice. Happens a lot in job interviews. Someone with a 100 IQ would be hard pressed, probably incapable, of distinguishing between people of 140 vs 150 IQ, short of elaborate scientific study with effectively random questions. (Fun fact, most IQ tests top out at ~140, but have poor repeatability above 130).
How do you figure cost of basic goods is going to decline? Cost savings due to technological advances hasn't been passed onto the consumer ever.
Cynicism is not knowledge.
Food used to cost most of the household budget. Shoes and furniture used to cost so much that only the head of household had shoes and a chair. Most people couldn't afford flatware, or glass windows. The list goes on and on.
In the 50s, the American dream was to eventually earn enough to own a washing machine, a refrigerator, and a television.
Cost savings due to technological advances are always passed on to the consumer, eventually. Margins only get smaller over time until something is entirely commoditized.
"Manual labor" != "unskilled" was my point. There won't be less of it, but the skill threshold will keep increasing.
Demand for personal services increases as cost of basic goods declines. The need for such workers will only continue to increase with automation.
Plus there's a whole category of jobs that can be summarized as "help people have higher social status", from beautician to decorator to wedding planner. Those jobs will boom as automation makes cheaper everything below "social status" on the hierarchy of needs.