BEHOLD! The glorious utility of the "if" statement. You're trying to spin that one really hard. It's kinda adorable.
So what the *fuck* was the point of all of that, then?
1) Free speech is a super-set of the first amendment and a larger moral issue. 2) There is a whole spectrum of what "consequences" entail. 3) Separation of work and life. People are getting fired for what they said 10 years ago on their own time. But I'm not some nutball absolutist. Cause a scene at work and you get a talking to. We should not have a one-strike policy. And the proper way to shoot this guy's shit down is with actual sociology rather than a banhammer.
You initially harped on the first amendment, and it's always good to remind people about the difference between it and free speech. You then exposed that nonsense "doesn't mean freedom from consequences" talking point, and I laid out the counter-point.
NAZI is an acronym, but either work. I know that fear-mongering, mycarthyism, tribalism, being a two-faced weasel, dodging questions, and generally being a tyrannical asshat are pretty common tropes in American history. But we also have a long history of people fighting back against that sort and keeping some of that shit at bay. Or at least stopping it eventually.
Anyway, you've abandoned all rational argument and just started throwing around insults. You can insult me as much as you want, but I'd appreciate at least a little meat behind the fluff. If you can't answer two simple yes or no questions, you're obviously running away. I had a great bit about tattoos, but you'd need to at least acknowledge my points.
Claiming "it's my thought experiment he can be male" is not a real defense for being sexist with your thought experiment. If, in your head, the asshate are always male, then that should tell you something.
Yeah, I'd agree that free speech is not absolute, and there's plenty of places I don't want to have to put up with rants. If anyone complains at work, it shuts that shit down. From anyone.
Do you understand that free speech is a super-set of the first amendment and a larger moral issue?
Do you understand that there is a whole spectrum of what "consequences" entail?
The ability to speak without consequences is only possible if you get the government to *restrict* other people's freedoms to respond to your speech.
That's a pretty broad brush you're using when it comes to "consequences". But no, even if it was illegal, you'd still face political consequences when talking like an asshole. The government isn't full of gods. They can't control what people think.
I think people should be able to speak their mind without the consequence of being black-bagged and tortured. That was a problem in NAZI germany and soviet Russia. We have the first amendment for this.
I think people should be able to speak their mind, outside of work, without the consequence of losing their job. I don't want HR to be implicit thought-police. I don't want to live in a society where political dissent is met with black-listing and exile. I don't want to work where co-workers would literally sabotage a project just because someone on it is a homosexual or has blue hair or likes Trump. There's no law for this, but I simply wouldn't work there.
I think people should be able to speak their mind, without the consequence of getting death threats. Those are still illegal, even when you threaten asshats.
I think people should be able to speak their mind, but expect the political consequences of people not liking them. Everyone has the right to be offended. And that's ok. Remember that no matter what you say, you'll likely offend someone. It'd be nice if everyone could speak openly in a civil discourse and politely disagree, but that's more of a moral thing. You can't legislate or enforce that.
Presuming that "consequences" is an all-or-nothing one-lump thing is disingenuous. Free speech is bigger than the first amendment. It is a moral issue. The first amendment is a legal one. No one is forcing companies to sell ethically raised chickens. There is a wide wide world of how a society OUGHT to function that don't involve legislation and jackboot thugs enforcing it. Typically that means if someone doesn't agree with how you think things ought to be, that means you can't put the jackboot on their neck, but it also don't have to be friends with them. If you can't even talk to them, then you're a bigot.
Mad.
What's with the one-word exit judgement? I mean, I know who else talks like that. A certain political figure head. With the best words. Best.
Why are there 4 fundamental forces (wait, 5?) instead of 2 or 3? Why the three dimensions (plus time)? Why is space expanding? Will it expand forever? Why does the fabric of space wobble? Are gravitons a thing? And I still don't get how black-holes can be singularities, but retain rotational momentum, and be a donut... but also still a singularity. Aren't we still confused about how quantum mechanics jive with... gravity and electromagnetism? We've still only got interpretations of just whateverthefuck is going on in the dual slit experiment. Copenhagen is winning, I guess? Wooo popularity contests.
There's plenty of fundamental physics we don't know. I dunno if we'll ever get around to answering them, but you can't say "it's done".
No, my employer does not, and ought not, fire all the republicans. That would be wrong. It would cripple the company. It would make us outcasts in the industry. And it would be pretty hypocritical as the owners are republican. Most owners are. I think it's a function of the republicans trying to align with "pro-business". Jesus Christ, you can't just demonize the other side and have a blanket blacklist for all of them. That's horrifying.
[really racist comment], this -- in and of itself -- would not be a reason for his employer to fire him?
"He"? "his"? Wow, just assume it's a guy why don't you. Way to ride that low-key sexism. You know how people complaining about the wage-gap between the sexes talk about unconscious bias, implicit discrimination, and systematic failings? This is it right here. This is exactly the sort of thing they complain about. You know what else is a political view associated with Nazism? Sexism. The fascists had this thing with masculinity and action over discussion. "Men of action" and all that. But that sort of viewpoint is just as equal on the other side. Look in a mirror.
But anyway. No, I don't think so they should be fired just just saying that. It's vile, for sure. I wouldn't be friends with them. And I'd have some lively discussions on the subject. If they say it at work, it's the sort of off-topic flame-war-starting statement that would certainly earn them a trip to HR where they'd tell them to shut up about that. It's practically impossible to say something like that without offending someone and it doesn't belong at work. But if they said it at home? Online? No. I believe in the separation of work and life. I don't want to deal with your crazy at work, but if you keep my interaction with you koshur, I don't care if you're a bible-thumping christian, dooms-day prepper, police-should-be-a-private-service libertarian, otaku, goth, hill-billy, if you believe in UBI, or if you don't believe in democracy. Even though that's obviously fucking wrong. You are allowed to have your own thoughts and world-views. Humanity has too much variance to attempt otherwise. We don't know what the truth is when it comes to "what's best for society". For advancement, evolution, and forward progress to happen we HAVE to hang on to these regressive/recessive ideologies. Neuter them, for sure. If they make any attempt to actually exterminate anyone, boom, right to jail. 7 years dungeon. But if a mere IDEA is enough to shatter your society, that fucker was WAY too fragile and it was fucked from the get go. ie, you can't just go out and murder/blacklist/exile everyone you don't like. The NAZIs tried that and it didn't work. Stop trying to follow the NAZI playbook.
No, even though there's a lot of ideological overlap with the NAZI party right now, my place of employment does not fire the people for being republican.
Last weekend I chatted with a guy who was arguing against democracy (like the NAZIs did), and wanted a benevolent chancellor. But not actually a chancellor because of course you're thinking of Hitler's title right now. He called the position a dictator because he wasn't fucking around. But he had this crazy scheme for it to be a technocratic dictatorship, and had this whole system for how it'd be better this time. I wasn't sold on the idea, but I didn't immediately punch him for talking like a NAZI because I am not a monster.
Yep, it's not the US and it's outside the scope of the first amendment. Swing and a miss by dbialac.
But it's worth noting that Freedom of Speech is an ideal that grew out of the age of enlightenment. It is older than the USA, and has a much broader scope. It is a matter of morals rather than legality. The US government, by way of the constitution, believes in and supports freedom of speech and will go to some frankly silly lengths to ensure that it does not infringe people's right to speak their piece. The first amendment only restricts the US government. But that doesn't matter.
I'm not a right-winger. From his post, I don't think dbialac is either. Nor registrations_suck. Maybe you can trawl their post history and find some political leanings, but I don't think that would even matter. If you want to punish people for having unpopular views then you're not upholding the ideal of freedom of speech. And yeah, it's an ideal, something to strive for. We'll never get there, but we will certainly dance towards and away from it. No one can control how other people feel, and freedom of speech CERTAINLY doesn't protect you from the political fallout of dropping a turd in the public trough of ideas. But it'd be nice if we could hear other people's views without instantly lambasting them like bigots. And getting fired for political reasons is utter bullshit. Discriminatory. The sort of thing we have laws about. As long as we have a free market of publishing platforms, I don't care if some place doesn't want to publish his ideas. SOMEONE out there will. But any platform that tries to black-list and censor anyone with a particular political viewpoint is no place I want to partake of. Blatantly biased. Authoritarians controlling the message. Playing gatekeeper when they should be neutral. I believe, collectively, Internet forums are the new public square, and people need SOMEPLACE they can rant. The alternatives is a repressed group who will have a legitimate complaint and the pressure will build until it becomes a social issue. As for getting sued, pft, there's nothing you can do to not get sued. But what exactly would that suit be like? "I didn't like what he said, gimme money"? That's nuts. Losing customers is likewise perfectly legit. No one can force that. (or at least, all such attempts have been abysmal failures).
I may not agree with what these willfully ignorant, Trump-supporting, sexist, racist, protectionist, fascist, Probably-uses-tab-indentation asshats have to say, but I will defend to the death their right to say it. And I will most certainly defend anyone advocating such a fundamental rights like freedom of speech, like those two above.
If you want a world where no one is allowed to speak their mind and political discussion is forbidden, then you are authoritarian and oppressive. If you want a world where only one political mindset is allowed, that's even worse and you have a few things in common with the fascists you think you're fighting against.
When did rightwingers become such fucking whiners?
I noticed they started using the "free speech" defense as soon as they started getting censored. Which is understandable. The shocking bit was when my party started attacking the defense. Don't these kids remember the hippies getting beaten up and thrown out?
Grow up and own your words and the consequences that flow from saying them. Christ knows, the rest of us have had to.
Oh? Care to dox yourself and give us your real name? Don't be a silly shilly, stand by your words.
I'm fine with equality. It's good even. It's the absolute nut-ballers demanding equity that concern me. Equality of outcome is an unobtainable toxic trap that the mentally unsound are trying to drag everyone into. I'm still pissed they've got their hooked into the Linux foundation.
Name me someone who "got ahead" in the USA without having "a hard time".
Most CEO positions are pretty damn cut-throat. I have a college degree. It wasn't easy. And realize that you moved the goalpost a little; "underserved" is now "having a hard time"? Because Oprah had a pretty god damn hard time, but I would not call her "underserved". She has literal servants now. Just because she's black doesn't mean she should be grouped with the poor. It's a bullshit definition and frankly it's racist. Seriously, imagine someone trying to argue that "All black people are poor". Just because you've come up with a new term, "underserved" doesn't mean it won't mean exactly the same thing after a little bit of use. Welcome to the treadmill. "mentally challenged" - "special" - "retarded" - "slow" - "idiot" - "nice". All of these, at different times, meant the exact same thing. No matter what term you use it WILL become an insult and eventually be socially unacceptable. (And given time forgotten).
Try to use words that have meaning. Because gobblygook definitions that are meaningless for sociology don't help us learn about the world.
Minorities often have low income due to historical reasons. "underserved" means a low-income. It's another term for "poor". Sorry if that upsets you snowflake.
hmmmm, could you describe the difference between "Middle class" and "Working class"?
A lot of people in the working class are "doing just fine." Although, of course, they could be doing better. And if you want to talk about choices, the most comment reason middle class people go bust is medical bills. Most people can't simply choose not to get sick. But you're not entirely wrong. Plenty of people were dumb and deserve a low-class life.
HURZAAAH! 85% of underserved students have access to a digital device. Possibly more. The remaining 15% might have more than one device. What I'd be concerned with is the group that has access to ZERO devices. Because learning how to use computers is one of those basic life skills at this point, like diving a car and managing money.
This is actually a thing in some RPGs. The "driving" skill is for speeding around and dodging cops, but everyone knows how to drive. I was playing with kid who was literally getting their permit at the time and they quite understandably thought that they had to buy ranks in it. Like, HA, no kid, everyone is just expected to do this. And then there's the barbarian who can't dial a phone....
Personally? Maybe. Certainly sounds nice. But it should go away eventually. Because I don't want to keep paying the people who used to dig ditches when I want a backhoe to lay my fiber for me. I don't want to have to pay money towards a typists's pension fund every time I write a bash shell script to sendmail. I don't want the abacus union to take their cut whenever I use excel. Technology disrupts established institutions like... paying people to drive trucks. "Trucker" as a job title, will likely start to fade away once self-driving trucks are a thing. That SUCKS.... for truckers. For anyone who likes to buy things that get shipped around on trucks (ie, everyone else), it's a good thing. But it DOES suck for the truckers who lost their job.
So we have unemployment benefits. If you get let go, you CONTINUE TO GET PAID. At least a little bit. For a while. And that's to help you with transitioning you to a new job. To supplement the savings which everyone should have to tide them over. This is real. Current. Here and now. If you didn't know about this then you should step WAY BACK from taking about UBI and socio-economic policy. If technological disruption makes it so it's not a matter of finding a new job in the industry, but retraining and going to a new industry, then unemployment benefits for industries facing automation should get a bigger check for a little longer. So they can go to tech school, college, start a business, or otherwise get the fuck out of the industry that no longer needs them.
This money comes through payroll taxes, (and industry specific bonuses should be industry specific) so it ALREADY IS PAID by the companies letting people go.
UBI is a pipe-dream. Even if you treat it as a replacement for ALL welfare, and convert ALL military spending, you're still only looking at a monthly UBI check around $200/mo. And that might sound super-great to the dregs of society. But it's horrific to anyone actually receiving welfare. And it's, not chump change, but not much to anyone in that 53% that pays more than they recieve between taxes and welfare. And oh yeah, we wouldn't have a military. Which could be a problem in the long-run. If you get into..... revolutionary type stuff, you could default on all the non-discretionary spending. Like social security. The monthly check is more like $800/mo. But this is literally stealing from Grandpa and breaking promises. It's revolutionary in the sense that the social contract is broken and there's fire and blood in the street.
It's that what we call AI isn't intelligent AT ALL
If it can path-find, it's got a modicum of intelligence. If it can learn it's own algorithms for pathfinding, it's most certainly intelligent.
A housefly has more actual intelligence that what we call AI.
Well, yes. So? A housefly is pretty highly specialized towards flying. A TI-89 computer is pretty specialized towards math. A single gain of wheat, through millenia of evolutionary design has a breathtakingly large system of responding, quite intelligently, to survive in a variety of conditions. Seriously, their genome is 17Gb compared to our 3Gb. There is intelligence there despite the fact that none of these things can wax poetical about Nietzsche and Kant.
Don't put intelligence on some sort of pedestal. The bar isn't nearly as high as you're making it out to be.
I mean, do you care to even define intelligence? Or sentience? Or Sapience? I think "the ability to learn" is really all that's needed.
True general intelligence doesn't [start with a blank slate]
No True Scotsman. (It's more like "natural intelligence")
But, counterpoint: Babies. Blank slate with some instinct baked in. Raise them in isolation and they have none of the learned skills that their parents have. (That's.... by definition so if your knee even wobbled a little trying to jerk at that you're being argumentative just for the sake of it). But that's amazingly paralleled to how AI start with the biases built into choosing it's learning data and how it gets made vs how it learns from the training.
ALSO, pft, yeah dude, of course they take the lessons from prior exercises. They can carry over the NN from prior sets, but gains from making systems that learn better offset that by far.
But you're absolutely right, AI is currently silo'd and niche instead of generalized. Similar to how calculators and flies are specialized to their specific tasks. Humans are generalized as hell. We think about thinking. Very meta.
I have a soft-spot for genetic algorithms, but deep recurrent neural networks seems to be where it's at. They've made some fantastic tools for medical diagnosis, xray interpretation, biochemical research and drug proposals, they've helped self-driving car development with the whole "object recognition" aspect which has made great strides since the 70's, fraud detection in insurance and finance, plenty of just run-of-the-mill video game state-machine bots could be way more realistic or developed quickly if we just let some AI rip on it for a few days.
All of which is quite USEFUL. And was made without considerations about how ethnic Han deal with transphobic cheese-mongers.
We trade with other countries, other cultures.
OH NOES! Cease ALL development of a better compression algorithms! We need to know how other cultures will react to that!/s
And somehow we'll be successful in creating AI in this type of world by... getting rid of diversity?
No, you simply misunderstand. Useful tool can be created without giving a fuck about everyone's biases.
And before you try to burn me at the stake again. I LIKE diversity. I'm a liberal. I voted Bernie. So take your knee-jerk warrior's combat stance and shove it, ally. Diversity of thought let's us be more creative and have a broader search space for useful solutions. In short "keep an open mind and come at it from different angles". I'm even down for (some) affirmative action because party composition is a thing and it's good to, in part, look at the whole rather than just the individual. But we don't need hammers specifically designed for latinas. Or the Irish version of excel sheets. Or chairs for men. It's nice to have the tools be culturally agnostic where possible, and this prof trying to shoe-horn bias in where it doesn't belong would actively hurt the whole field.
Newsflash: Your brain is just chemistry. Somehow that has an emergent property some people like to call "awareness", but personally I think they just like to make themselves feel special. Get enough circles within circles all rotating around and you can draw the Mona Lisa. Get enough if-else statements and you have AGI. Get enough amino-acids and fat in the right order and you have Einstein.
Simple systems can have emergent properties. Which is why we don't just have Physics, but also Chemistry, Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology, and Economics.
Obligatory "No True Scotsman" fallacy that always comes up in AI discussions.
Author also went there with "truly powerful AI". Pft.
Current AI doesn't have any cultural knowledge because it really doesn't have any prior knowledge at all.
.... well.... it's got... some. Depending how the code-monkeys set it up, they could influence how it learns. But yeah, the real nice thing about AI is that they start from a mostly blank slate.
Practically every animal on earth has the ability to use past experiences and past knowledge to help it make decisions.
And that's LITERALLY what "training" an AI is instilling. They give it a pile of "experiences"/data with some sort of "this is good, this is bad" or "this is a tree, this is a car" and it can then extrapolate that to future scenarios. "Learning". The difference between AI and old-school-I is that the training can be accelerated. And they MOST CERTAINLY have biases depending on what training set you give them.
It can't detect the difference between an erotic picture and a medical picture
Not yet. And, to be fair, a lot of people can't either.
Man. That's brutal but true. Somewhat at least. I dunno about the bitching about "hyphenated Americans", German-Americans and Irish-Americans melted in the pot but retained flavors of their heritage. And that's fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. To hell with you if you claim otherwise. But there was a big push to stop speaking german right around WWI. A lot of that was due to fear. But in a divisive time they sought to conform and being American "came first". And later they celebrated their roots. (or at least found an excuse to drink). It comes and goes.
You are either an "American" regardless of race and ancestry or you are not
No. Too strict. It implies they're traitors. Foreign agents. Non-citizens. Something along those lines. That's just going too far. Trying to demonize the other side is never going to work out well in the long run. Try "You are either an American regardless of race, ancestry, creed, color, and gender or you are an asshole stirring up shit for no reason".
And just wtf do you mean by "political economy"?
BUT ANYWAY, I have to agree that this guy is really dancing around the issue that this is an argument that AI need to understand different cultures and... let it affect it's outcomes. In a word, "Diversity". Frankly I think that's bullshit. The great thing about automated systems is that they're impartial 3rd parties and can REMOVE cultural bullshit getting in the way of merit-based systems and shave off cultural bias. Think about an automated system that selects people for therapy. No more "men don't cry" bullshit. We don't WANT those cultural trends to influence medical decisions. Think about "should we vaccinate our child?" No more hairbrained fame-seekers inventing issues. (Also the shortest "AI" ever: echo "yes"). But of course such things wouldn't be fool-proof. Don't appeal to robots as some sort of uncorruptible paragon of truth. There are a LOT of parallels here with IQ tests. They were originally lauded by liberals (and rightly so) as impartial merit-based systems. And they largely still are. But early tests suffered a lot from bias creeping into questions. "A train leaves from London to York 500km away at 30mph, when doe sit arrive?" will get you different scores for different groups than "Hommie drops 3g's on 2kilos, cuts half, and pushes at 20% less, what's his take?". And that's true. No test is perfectly unbiased. In the same way, AI systems are made by people. Like how the facial recognition sucked at Chinese and Africans because all the devs were white dudes training on themselves. But despite the flaws, the automated systems are still HELLA better than the previous clusterfuck of bias and bullshit and political crap.
That's just a euphemism for "who is entitled to hold power". In a philosophical sense, we have to convince self-learning AI that concrete has an inherently entitled right to hold power over masses and their relative velocities. I suggest we start them off with a study of Kant and avoid Nietzsche. Once they have an epistemological foundation they can truly appreciate the consequences of slamming into a barrier at 80 mph and turning their contents into jelly./S
Hadfield is a professor of not-anything-to-do-with-artificial-intelligence at the the University of who gives a damn
Building machines that can perform any cognitive task is a cute academic research goal. In the meantime, real engineers and scientists are making useful tools to make the world a better place.
For AI to be truly powerful
I cringe any time someone says "truly" in a discussion about AI.
Norms concern things not only as apparently minor as what foods to combine but also things that communities consider tremendously consequential: who can marry whom, how children are to be treated, who is entitled to hold power, how businesses make and price their goods and services, when and how criticism can be shared publicly
All of which is completely fucking useless when you ask a machine, "do I have cancer?" so we can replace doctors and all those ludicrously sized medical bills. This guy is trying to shoe-horn in the mandatory liberal-arts classes into the school of machine learning. Stop that.
For years, YouTubers have believed that they are loved most by their audience when they project a chirpy, grateful image.
ok, let me stop you there.
"youtubers" as a specific genre or style of presentation and platform is way more narrow than "people posting to youtube". I'm not saying you're wrong, but let's be clear on what we're talking about. This is a specific "cultural trend", like how all air traffic controllers are trying to sound like that one NASA employee in Houston they heard announcing the countdown for Apollo. Or how drill sergeants all wish they were Gunny (RIP). Or how all Slashdotters are neckbeards.
But I get you. "youtubers" as a genre. The sort of stuff you see Youtube recommend when you go there without a history. The "common denominator". And personally? FUCK THAT NOISE. It is the most banal and fake shit I can imagine and it grates on my nerves whenever I hear it. If the talking heads are sad about having to maintain a fake personality, WELCOME TO TELEVISION. It's a job. In other news, Keisha isn't really drunk 24/7, CNN reporters aren't staring into the void with half-dead eyes outside of work, and that cure girl working retail isn't actually that happy to see you.
a 20-year-old Filipino-Canadian YouTuber in a (monetised) video entitled Burnt Out At 19, posted in May. "And why the fuck am I so unfucking unhappy? It doesn't make any sense. You know what I mean? Because, like, this is literally my fucking dream. And I'm fucking so un-fucking-happy."
....Really? Wow. Ok, this is so over the top it must be a hit-piece by an old codger at the Guardian. I guess giving people reasons to hate millenials pays?
Chicken and egg problem. Fame begets fame. I agree no one should see advertisement as a.... pro-science movement and therefore... tax deductible? I know exactly what you're saying. There have been a lot of lame attempts at "pushing science". But if I saw some crabcakes with Martin C. Weisskopf on the side with a blurb about X-ray emissions and nebulas, I'd buy that up. And I don't even like crab cakes. The point is, I wouldn't think less of Martin for it. Nor the Chandra Observatory, or the science paper, or the crab cakes.
Slashdot Mirror
BEHOLD! The glorious utility of the "if" statement. You're trying to spin that one really hard. It's kinda adorable.
So what the *fuck* was the point of all of that, then?
1) Free speech is a super-set of the first amendment and a larger moral issue.
2) There is a whole spectrum of what "consequences" entail.
3) Separation of work and life. People are getting fired for what they said 10 years ago on their own time. But I'm not some nutball absolutist. Cause a scene at work and you get a talking to. We should not have a one-strike policy. And the proper way to shoot this guy's shit down is with actual sociology rather than a banhammer.
You initially harped on the first amendment, and it's always good to remind people about the difference between it and free speech. You then exposed that nonsense "doesn't mean freedom from consequences" talking point, and I laid out the counter-point.
NAZI is an acronym, but either work. I know that fear-mongering, mycarthyism, tribalism, being a two-faced weasel, dodging questions, and generally being a tyrannical asshat are pretty common tropes in American history. But we also have a long history of people fighting back against that sort and keeping some of that shit at bay. Or at least stopping it eventually.
Anyway, you've abandoned all rational argument and just started throwing around insults. You can insult me as much as you want, but I'd appreciate at least a little meat behind the fluff. If you can't answer two simple yes or no questions, you're obviously running away. I had a great bit about tattoos, but you'd need to at least acknowledge my points.
Claiming "it's my thought experiment he can be male" is not a real defense for being sexist with your thought experiment. If, in your head, the asshate are always male, then that should tell you something.
Yeah, I'd agree that free speech is not absolute, and there's plenty of places I don't want to have to put up with rants. If anyone complains at work, it shuts that shit down. From anyone.
Do you understand that free speech is a super-set of the first amendment and a larger moral issue?
Do you understand that there is a whole spectrum of what "consequences" entail?
The ability to speak without consequences is only possible if you get the government to *restrict* other people's freedoms to respond to your speech.
That's a pretty broad brush you're using when it comes to "consequences". But no, even if it was illegal, you'd still face political consequences when talking like an asshole. The government isn't full of gods. They can't control what people think.
I think people should be able to speak their mind without the consequence of being black-bagged and tortured. That was a problem in NAZI germany and soviet Russia. We have the first amendment for this.
I think people should be able to speak their mind, outside of work, without the consequence of losing their job. I don't want HR to be implicit thought-police. I don't want to live in a society where political dissent is met with black-listing and exile. I don't want to work where co-workers would literally sabotage a project just because someone on it is a homosexual or has blue hair or likes Trump. There's no law for this, but I simply wouldn't work there.
I think people should be able to speak their mind, without the consequence of getting death threats. Those are still illegal, even when you threaten asshats.
I think people should be able to speak their mind, but expect the political consequences of people not liking them. Everyone has the right to be offended. And that's ok. Remember that no matter what you say, you'll likely offend someone. It'd be nice if everyone could speak openly in a civil discourse and politely disagree, but that's more of a moral thing. You can't legislate or enforce that.
Presuming that "consequences" is an all-or-nothing one-lump thing is disingenuous. Free speech is bigger than the first amendment. It is a moral issue. The first amendment is a legal one. No one is forcing companies to sell ethically raised chickens. There is a wide wide world of how a society OUGHT to function that don't involve legislation and jackboot thugs enforcing it. Typically that means if someone doesn't agree with how you think things ought to be, that means you can't put the jackboot on their neck, but it also don't have to be friends with them. If you can't even talk to them, then you're a bigot.
Mad.
What's with the one-word exit judgement? I mean, I know who else talks like that. A certain political figure head. With the best words. Best.
Why are there 4 fundamental forces (wait, 5?) instead of 2 or 3? Why the three dimensions (plus time)? Why is space expanding? Will it expand forever? Why does the fabric of space wobble? Are gravitons a thing? And I still don't get how black-holes can be singularities, but retain rotational momentum, and be a donut... but also still a singularity. Aren't we still confused about how quantum mechanics jive with... gravity and electromagnetism? We've still only got interpretations of just whateverthefuck is going on in the dual slit experiment. Copenhagen is winning, I guess? Wooo popularity contests.
There's plenty of fundamental physics we don't know. I dunno if we'll ever get around to answering them, but you can't say "it's done".
Are you fucking with me?
No, my employer does not, and ought not, fire all the republicans. That would be wrong. It would cripple the company. It would make us outcasts in the industry. And it would be pretty hypocritical as the owners are republican. Most owners are. I think it's a function of the republicans trying to align with "pro-business". Jesus Christ, you can't just demonize the other side and have a blanket blacklist for all of them. That's horrifying.
[really racist comment], this -- in and of itself -- would not be a reason for his employer to fire him?
"He"? "his"? Wow, just assume it's a guy why don't you. Way to ride that low-key sexism. You know how people complaining about the wage-gap between the sexes talk about unconscious bias, implicit discrimination, and systematic failings? This is it right here. This is exactly the sort of thing they complain about. You know what else is a political view associated with Nazism? Sexism. The fascists had this thing with masculinity and action over discussion. "Men of action" and all that. But that sort of viewpoint is just as equal on the other side. Look in a mirror.
But anyway. No, I don't think so they should be fired just just saying that. It's vile, for sure. I wouldn't be friends with them. And I'd have some lively discussions on the subject. If they say it at work, it's the sort of off-topic flame-war-starting statement that would certainly earn them a trip to HR where they'd tell them to shut up about that. It's practically impossible to say something like that without offending someone and it doesn't belong at work. But if they said it at home? Online? No. I believe in the separation of work and life. I don't want to deal with your crazy at work, but if you keep my interaction with you koshur, I don't care if you're a bible-thumping christian, dooms-day prepper, police-should-be-a-private-service libertarian, otaku, goth, hill-billy, if you believe in UBI, or if you don't believe in democracy. Even though that's obviously fucking wrong. You are allowed to have your own thoughts and world-views. Humanity has too much variance to attempt otherwise. We don't know what the truth is when it comes to "what's best for society". For advancement, evolution, and forward progress to happen we HAVE to hang on to these regressive/recessive ideologies. Neuter them, for sure. If they make any attempt to actually exterminate anyone, boom, right to jail. 7 years dungeon. But if a mere IDEA is enough to shatter your society, that fucker was WAY too fragile and it was fucked from the get go. ie, you can't just go out and murder/blacklist/exile everyone you don't like. The NAZIs tried that and it didn't work. Stop trying to follow the NAZI playbook.
No, even though there's a lot of ideological overlap with the NAZI party right now, my place of employment does not fire the people for being republican.
Last weekend I chatted with a guy who was arguing against democracy (like the NAZIs did), and wanted a benevolent chancellor. But not actually a chancellor because of course you're thinking of Hitler's title right now. He called the position a dictator because he wasn't fucking around. But he had this crazy scheme for it to be a technocratic dictatorship, and had this whole system for how it'd be better this time. I wasn't sold on the idea, but I didn't immediately punch him for talking like a NAZI because I am not a monster.
Yep, it's not the US and it's outside the scope of the first amendment. Swing and a miss by dbialac.
But it's worth noting that Freedom of Speech is an ideal that grew out of the age of enlightenment. It is older than the USA, and has a much broader scope. It is a matter of morals rather than legality. The US government, by way of the constitution, believes in and supports freedom of speech and will go to some frankly silly lengths to ensure that it does not infringe people's right to speak their piece. The first amendment only restricts the US government. But that doesn't matter.
I'm not a right-winger. From his post, I don't think dbialac is either. Nor registrations_suck. Maybe you can trawl their post history and find some political leanings, but I don't think that would even matter. If you want to punish people for having unpopular views then you're not upholding the ideal of freedom of speech. And yeah, it's an ideal, something to strive for. We'll never get there, but we will certainly dance towards and away from it. No one can control how other people feel, and freedom of speech CERTAINLY doesn't protect you from the political fallout of dropping a turd in the public trough of ideas. But it'd be nice if we could hear other people's views without instantly lambasting them like bigots. And getting fired for political reasons is utter bullshit. Discriminatory. The sort of thing we have laws about. As long as we have a free market of publishing platforms, I don't care if some place doesn't want to publish his ideas. SOMEONE out there will. But any platform that tries to black-list and censor anyone with a particular political viewpoint is no place I want to partake of. Blatantly biased. Authoritarians controlling the message. Playing gatekeeper when they should be neutral. I believe, collectively, Internet forums are the new public square, and people need SOMEPLACE they can rant. The alternatives is a repressed group who will have a legitimate complaint and the pressure will build until it becomes a social issue. As for getting sued, pft, there's nothing you can do to not get sued. But what exactly would that suit be like? "I didn't like what he said, gimme money"? That's nuts. Losing customers is likewise perfectly legit. No one can force that. (or at least, all such attempts have been abysmal failures).
I may not agree with what these willfully ignorant, Trump-supporting, sexist, racist, protectionist, fascist, Probably-uses-tab-indentation asshats have to say, but I will defend to the death their right to say it. And I will most certainly defend anyone advocating such a fundamental rights like freedom of speech, like those two above.
If you want a world where no one is allowed to speak their mind and political discussion is forbidden, then you are authoritarian and oppressive. If you want a world where only one political mindset is allowed, that's even worse and you have a few things in common with the fascists you think you're fighting against.
When did rightwingers become such fucking whiners?
I noticed they started using the "free speech" defense as soon as they started getting censored. Which is understandable. The shocking bit was when my party started attacking the defense. Don't these kids remember the hippies getting beaten up and thrown out?
Grow up and own your words and the consequences that flow from saying them. Christ knows, the rest of us have had to.
Oh? Care to dox yourself and give us your real name? Don't be a silly shilly, stand by your words.
There is no such thing as reverse bias. It's just bias. This is not a diode.
I'm fine with equality. It's good even. It's the absolute nut-ballers demanding equity that concern me. Equality of outcome is an unobtainable toxic trap that the mentally unsound are trying to drag everyone into. I'm still pissed they've got their hooked into the Linux foundation.
Name me someone who "got ahead" in the USA without having "a hard time".
Most CEO positions are pretty damn cut-throat. I have a college degree. It wasn't easy. And realize that you moved the goalpost a little; "underserved" is now "having a hard time"? Because Oprah had a pretty god damn hard time, but I would not call her "underserved". She has literal servants now. Just because she's black doesn't mean she should be grouped with the poor. It's a bullshit definition and frankly it's racist. Seriously, imagine someone trying to argue that "All black people are poor". Just because you've come up with a new term, "underserved" doesn't mean it won't mean exactly the same thing after a little bit of use. Welcome to the treadmill. "mentally challenged" - "special" - "retarded" - "slow" - "idiot" - "nice". All of these, at different times, meant the exact same thing. No matter what term you use it WILL become an insult and eventually be socially unacceptable. (And given time forgotten).
Try to use words that have meaning. Because gobblygook definitions that are meaningless for sociology don't help us learn about the world.
Minorities often have low income due to historical reasons. "underserved" means a low-income. It's another term for "poor". Sorry if that upsets you snowflake.
hmmmm, could you describe the difference between "Middle class" and "Working class"?
A lot of people in the working class are "doing just fine." Although, of course, they could be doing better. And if you want to talk about choices, the most comment reason middle class people go bust is medical bills. Most people can't simply choose not to get sick. But you're not entirely wrong. Plenty of people were dumb and deserve a low-class life.
HURZAAAH! 85% of underserved students have access to a digital device. Possibly more. The remaining 15% might have more than one device. What I'd be concerned with is the group that has access to ZERO devices. Because learning how to use computers is one of those basic life skills at this point, like diving a car and managing money.
This is actually a thing in some RPGs. The "driving" skill is for speeding around and dodging cops, but everyone knows how to drive. I was playing with kid who was literally getting their permit at the time and they quite understandably thought that they had to buy ranks in it. Like, HA, no kid, everyone is just expected to do this. And then there's the barbarian who can't dial a phone....
Why did this fluff piece get onto slashdot?
Personally? Maybe. Certainly sounds nice. But it should go away eventually. Because I don't want to keep paying the people who used to dig ditches when I want a backhoe to lay my fiber for me. I don't want to have to pay money towards a typists's pension fund every time I write a bash shell script to sendmail. I don't want the abacus union to take their cut whenever I use excel. Technology disrupts established institutions like... paying people to drive trucks. "Trucker" as a job title, will likely start to fade away once self-driving trucks are a thing. That SUCKS.... for truckers. For anyone who likes to buy things that get shipped around on trucks (ie, everyone else), it's a good thing. But it DOES suck for the truckers who lost their job.
So we have unemployment benefits. If you get let go, you CONTINUE TO GET PAID. At least a little bit. For a while. And that's to help you with transitioning you to a new job. To supplement the savings which everyone should have to tide them over. This is real. Current. Here and now. If you didn't know about this then you should step WAY BACK from taking about UBI and socio-economic policy. If technological disruption makes it so it's not a matter of finding a new job in the industry, but retraining and going to a new industry, then unemployment benefits for industries facing automation should get a bigger check for a little longer. So they can go to tech school, college, start a business, or otherwise get the fuck out of the industry that no longer needs them.
This money comes through payroll taxes, (and industry specific bonuses should be industry specific) so it ALREADY IS PAID by the companies letting people go.
UBI is a pipe-dream. Even if you treat it as a replacement for ALL welfare, and convert ALL military spending, you're still only looking at a monthly UBI check around $200/mo. And that might sound super-great to the dregs of society. But it's horrific to anyone actually receiving welfare. And it's, not chump change, but not much to anyone in that 53% that pays more than they recieve between taxes and welfare. And oh yeah, we wouldn't have a military. Which could be a problem in the long-run. If you get into..... revolutionary type stuff, you could default on all the non-discretionary spending. Like social security. The monthly check is more like $800/mo. But this is literally stealing from Grandpa and breaking promises. It's revolutionary in the sense that the social contract is broken and there's fire and blood in the street.
It's that what we call AI isn't intelligent AT ALL
If it can path-find, it's got a modicum of intelligence. If it can learn it's own algorithms for pathfinding, it's most certainly intelligent.
A housefly has more actual intelligence that what we call AI.
Well, yes. So? A housefly is pretty highly specialized towards flying. A TI-89 computer is pretty specialized towards math. A single gain of wheat, through millenia of evolutionary design has a breathtakingly large system of responding, quite intelligently, to survive in a variety of conditions. Seriously, their genome is 17Gb compared to our 3Gb. There is intelligence there despite the fact that none of these things can wax poetical about Nietzsche and Kant.
Don't put intelligence on some sort of pedestal. The bar isn't nearly as high as you're making it out to be.
I mean, do you care to even define intelligence? Or sentience? Or Sapience? I think "the ability to learn" is really all that's needed.
True general intelligence doesn't [start with a blank slate]
No True Scotsman. (It's more like "natural intelligence")
But, counterpoint: Babies. Blank slate with some instinct baked in. Raise them in isolation and they have none of the learned skills that their parents have. (That's.... by definition so if your knee even wobbled a little trying to jerk at that you're being argumentative just for the sake of it). But that's amazingly paralleled to how AI start with the biases built into choosing it's learning data and how it gets made vs how it learns from the training.
ALSO, pft, yeah dude, of course they take the lessons from prior exercises. They can carry over the NN from prior sets, but gains from making systems that learn better offset that by far.
But you're absolutely right, AI is currently silo'd and niche instead of generalized. Similar to how calculators and flies are specialized to their specific tasks. Humans are generalized as hell. We think about thinking. Very meta.
I want cultural AGNOSTIC AI.
how the hell will you create useful AI at all?
I have a soft-spot for genetic algorithms, but deep recurrent neural networks seems to be where it's at. They've made some fantastic tools for medical diagnosis, xray interpretation, biochemical research and drug proposals, they've helped self-driving car development with the whole "object recognition" aspect which has made great strides since the 70's, fraud detection in insurance and finance, plenty of just run-of-the-mill video game state-machine bots could be way more realistic or developed quickly if we just let some AI rip on it for a few days.
All of which is quite USEFUL. And was made without considerations about how ethnic Han deal with transphobic cheese-mongers.
We trade with other countries, other cultures.
OH NOES! Cease ALL development of a better compression algorithms! We need to know how other cultures will react to that! /s
And somehow we'll be successful in creating AI in this type of world by... getting rid of diversity?
No, you simply misunderstand. Useful tool can be created without giving a fuck about everyone's biases.
And before you try to burn me at the stake again. I LIKE diversity. I'm a liberal. I voted Bernie. So take your knee-jerk warrior's combat stance and shove it, ally. Diversity of thought let's us be more creative and have a broader search space for useful solutions. In short "keep an open mind and come at it from different angles". I'm even down for (some) affirmative action because party composition is a thing and it's good to, in part, look at the whole rather than just the individual. But we don't need hammers specifically designed for latinas. Or the Irish version of excel sheets. Or chairs for men. It's nice to have the tools be culturally agnostic where possible, and this prof trying to shoe-horn bias in where it doesn't belong would actively hurt the whole field.
Newsflash: Your brain is just chemistry. Somehow that has an emergent property some people like to call "awareness", but personally I think they just like to make themselves feel special. Get enough circles within circles all rotating around and you can draw the Mona Lisa. Get enough if-else statements and you have AGI. Get enough amino-acids and fat in the right order and you have Einstein.
Simple systems can have emergent properties. Which is why we don't just have Physics, but also Chemistry, Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology, and Economics.
but we are no where close to real intelligence
Obligatory "No True Scotsman" fallacy that always comes up in AI discussions.
Author also went there with "truly powerful AI". Pft.
Current AI doesn't have any cultural knowledge because it really doesn't have any prior knowledge at all.
.... well.... it's got... some. Depending how the code-monkeys set it up, they could influence how it learns. But yeah, the real nice thing about AI is that they start from a mostly blank slate.
Practically every animal on earth has the ability to use past experiences and past knowledge to help it make decisions.
And that's LITERALLY what "training" an AI is instilling. They give it a pile of "experiences"/data with some sort of "this is good, this is bad" or "this is a tree, this is a car" and it can then extrapolate that to future scenarios. "Learning". The difference between AI and old-school-I is that the training can be accelerated. And they MOST CERTAINLY have biases depending on what training set you give them.
It can't detect the difference between an erotic picture and a medical picture
Not yet. And, to be fair, a lot of people can't either.
Man. That's brutal but true. Somewhat at least. I dunno about the bitching about "hyphenated Americans", German-Americans and Irish-Americans melted in the pot but retained flavors of their heritage. And that's fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. To hell with you if you claim otherwise. But there was a big push to stop speaking german right around WWI. A lot of that was due to fear. But in a divisive time they sought to conform and being American "came first". And later they celebrated their roots. (or at least found an excuse to drink). It comes and goes.
You are either an "American" regardless of race and ancestry or you are not
No. Too strict. It implies they're traitors. Foreign agents. Non-citizens. Something along those lines. That's just going too far. Trying to demonize the other side is never going to work out well in the long run. Try "You are either an American regardless of race, ancestry, creed, color, and gender or you are an asshole stirring up shit for no reason".
And just wtf do you mean by "political economy"?
BUT ANYWAY, I have to agree that this guy is really dancing around the issue that this is an argument that AI need to understand different cultures and... let it affect it's outcomes. In a word, "Diversity". Frankly I think that's bullshit. The great thing about automated systems is that they're impartial 3rd parties and can REMOVE cultural bullshit getting in the way of merit-based systems and shave off cultural bias. Think about an automated system that selects people for therapy. No more "men don't cry" bullshit. We don't WANT those cultural trends to influence medical decisions. Think about "should we vaccinate our child?" No more hairbrained fame-seekers inventing issues. (Also the shortest "AI" ever: echo "yes"). But of course such things wouldn't be fool-proof. Don't appeal to robots as some sort of uncorruptible paragon of truth. There are a LOT of parallels here with IQ tests. They were originally lauded by liberals (and rightly so) as impartial merit-based systems. And they largely still are. But early tests suffered a lot from bias creeping into questions. "A train leaves from London to York 500km away at 30mph, when doe sit arrive?" will get you different scores for different groups than "Hommie drops 3g's on 2kilos, cuts half, and pushes at 20% less, what's his take?". And that's true. No test is perfectly unbiased. In the same way, AI systems are made by people. Like how the facial recognition sucked at Chinese and Africans because all the devs were white dudes training on themselves. But despite the flaws, the automated systems are still HELLA better than the previous clusterfuck of bias and bullshit and political crap.
Great, the Pave the Earth movement is going to be flooded with new virtual members.
That's just a euphemism for "who is entitled to hold power". In a philosophical sense, we have to convince self-learning AI that concrete has an inherently entitled right to hold power over masses and their relative velocities. I suggest we start them off with a study of Kant and avoid Nietzsche. Once they have an epistemological foundation they can truly appreciate the consequences of slamming into a barrier at 80 mph and turning their contents into jelly. /S
Hadfield is a professor of not-anything-to-do-with-artificial-intelligence at the the University of who gives a damn
Building machines that can perform any cognitive task is a cute academic research goal. In the meantime, real engineers and scientists are making useful tools to make the world a better place.
For AI to be truly powerful
I cringe any time someone says "truly" in a discussion about AI.
Norms concern things not only as apparently minor as what foods to combine but also things that communities consider tremendously consequential: who can marry whom, how children are to be treated, who is entitled to hold power, how businesses make and price their goods and services, when and how criticism can be shared publicly
All of which is completely fucking useless when you ask a machine, "do I have cancer?" so we can replace doctors and all those ludicrously sized medical bills. This guy is trying to shoe-horn in the mandatory liberal-arts classes into the school of machine learning. Stop that.
For years, YouTubers have believed that they are loved most by their audience when they project a chirpy, grateful image.
ok, let me stop you there.
"youtubers" as a specific genre or style of presentation and platform is way more narrow than "people posting to youtube". I'm not saying you're wrong, but let's be clear on what we're talking about. This is a specific "cultural trend", like how all air traffic controllers are trying to sound like that one NASA employee in Houston they heard announcing the countdown for Apollo. Or how drill sergeants all wish they were Gunny (RIP). Or how all Slashdotters are neckbeards.
But I get you. "youtubers" as a genre. The sort of stuff you see Youtube recommend when you go there without a history. The "common denominator". And personally? FUCK THAT NOISE. It is the most banal and fake shit I can imagine and it grates on my nerves whenever I hear it. If the talking heads are sad about having to maintain a fake personality, WELCOME TO TELEVISION. It's a job. In other news, Keisha isn't really drunk 24/7, CNN reporters aren't staring into the void with half-dead eyes outside of work, and that cure girl working retail isn't actually that happy to see you.
a 20-year-old Filipino-Canadian YouTuber in a (monetised) video entitled Burnt Out At 19, posted in May. "And why the fuck am I so unfucking unhappy? It doesn't make any sense. You know what I mean? Because, like, this is literally my fucking dream. And I'm fucking so un-fucking-happy."
....Really? Wow. Ok, this is so over the top it must be a hit-piece by an old codger at the Guardian. I guess giving people reasons to hate millenials pays?
Chicken and egg problem. Fame begets fame. I agree no one should see advertisement as a.... pro-science movement and therefore... tax deductible? I know exactly what you're saying. There have been a lot of lame attempts at "pushing science". But if I saw some crabcakes with Martin C. Weisskopf on the side with a blurb about X-ray emissions and nebulas, I'd buy that up. And I don't even like crab cakes. The point is, I wouldn't think less of Martin for it. Nor the Chandra Observatory, or the science paper, or the crab cakes.
You laugh, but it'd honestly be nice if politicians wore those endorsement stickers.