will come from the Google Book Settlement, into which I've "opted in." Call me naive but I don't see how it would benefit me or anyone else to see those books remain in their static state, unavailable save as used books, from which sales I never see a dime. IANA Lawyer but I don't see why Google couldn't break this up into waves, wherein all of us who've opted in can get our checks now and start earning any "royalties" available through search, and leave the disputed rights and claimants for another day.
In the West, you can substitute "Islam" with "Ayn Rand" and see the same fanatical attraction to an all-encompassing, all-answering philosophy at work, especially in the mindsets of those (engineers or not) who crave a perfect order which just happens to put them at the top of it.
Maybe more to the point, business people do not mind *their businesses/employers* paying for content, or, for the self-employed, deducting it as a business expense. So in the end, it is still free to the end user.
A lot of Jeopardy questions are wordplay-dependent, something AI doesn't have the hang of yet (unless IBM has been toiling in secret on something truly amazing). Categories like "Rhyme Time" and questions like "Qhat does a Pharoah need when he has a cold?" (Answer: an Egyptian Prescription) are beyond the ken of a data search.
Many Jeopardy "answers" have the key to the answer within the question, though in some cases it may be enough to throw the program off. IE in a category like "Musicals" an answer like "Unlike his other hits, this musical wasn't 'the cat's meow' on Broadway." Raw data crunching will pair musicals, Broadway and "cats" but won't know where to go with "unlike." Only an aficionado will know that Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Starlight Express" tanked on Broadway.
So the writers, given any knowledge of the limitations of AI, can set a challenge which will be nearly impossible for current AI to meet. John Henry will live another day.
No, but they had patrons, popes and emperors and Margraves and the like. The article is wrongheaded (starting with the guardrails analogy; guardrails exist to protect the driver, not the car company) but there has to be some economic state through which a person can create full-time and not starve.
This makes me think of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels - in "Use of Weapons," the main character is introduced to the Culture, where AI and robots can do everything for people, leaving them free to learn and play and evolve. He meets a guy who's volunteering to bus tables at a cafe; the guy is a xenolinguist or some such and says, in my profession there's never an end, the information on new societies keeps coming in, modifying my theories and forcing us to rethink everything - but when I wipe a table, it's wiped, it's done. I like to take a break from my real job and do this, even though a robot can do it "better."
As P. W. Singer noted in Wired for War, there are instances where a computer running, for instance, a missile defense system can launch in the precious seconds it would take a human to be aware of incoming danger. Admittedly this is defensive rather than offensive action, but it could end up being lethal, justified action if it takes out the source of the attack.
Because they make a bazillion dollars on concert tickets and t-shirt sales. The only authors who appear on t-shirts are dead. So the income stream for the living ones might get a little low when the only saleable product, the book, is free. I'm not against open access/copyleft/etc., but I object to a cavalier attitude that somehow being "good" is in some unspecified way going to be enough to monetize your work.
Agreed - I discovered this after Choire Sicha on Gawker announced its greatness. Since I was indeed totally not gettinig it just "dropping in" on that day's strip, I went back to the beginning and spent some wonderful days getting lost in a fully realized world. These days, any day Chris "fails" to post sucks for me.
I've also bought two t-shirts - support artists where it counts - with your $$!
Robert Caro's 2nd volume on LBJ details how LBJ stole his 1948 election to the Senate, with nary a computer in sight. The computer looks these days like it may make it easier to steal elections, but it's not as if it's creating the problem.
This is how this was written up in The Atlantic. It struck me that some of this could be said of Ron Paul supporters as well, who also advocate a messianic "destroy all legacy systems and start fresh" revolution:
Now that the stereotype of the poverty-stricken terrorist has been dispelled by studies showing that militancy and high levels of education go hand in hand, a new Oxford study tries to explain why so many violent Islamic radicals are... engineers. The authors gathered data on 404 militants from 31 countries, and among the 178 whose principal academic focus could be determined, engineering was by far the most popular subject. Seventy-eight had pursued an engineering degree, compared with 34 in Islamic studies, 14 in medicine, and 12 in economics or business studies. The authors couldn't find evidence to support the idea that radical groups seek out engineers for their skills. Instead, they speculate that something in the engineer's mind-set--the emphasis on structure and rules, and on finding singular solutions to complicated problems--may fit neatly with Islamist notions of the ideal society. (In support of this hypothesis, the authors cite surveys from America, the Middle East, and Canada indicating that engineers are more likely than other professionals to be religious and right-wing.) They also note that engineers tend to be high-achievers who rise by merit, which may make them more likely to be frustrated by their interactions with corrupt bureaucracies in the Middle East and North Africa and thus receptive to radical messages.
The article covers *rats*, and it explains what happens to a small, limited rat brain when it can't dream. And yes, it explains *some* human dreaming. But, what is going on in my human head when I dream of dead loved ones? What does that prepare me for? Are my dreams of being naked in public just training ground to remind me to get dressed every morning? Or do they reflect buried insecurities or anxieties? Maybe dreams started as a way for our primitive, simple brains to train themselves to survive, but their reason for being today, in our more advanced brains, is still a mystery.
I've been misquoted myself, by a reporter looking to sensationalize something that I thought was already dramatic enough. I think the ideal system would be one where a reporter/news agency automatically provides you with a verification key, which you can use online in the event you have to append your own correction/rebuttal to their story after it hits the wires/net. The key ensures that it's really you responding and not some nutjob. Of course, that kind of oversight would require faithful transcription of interviews, fact checking, and a whole lot of additional work for certain lazy reporters. In my town, they can't even get the sports listings right, when all it would take is a simple Internet sesrch, so how can we expect them to get the news right?
As a commenter indicated, it's easier for us to adapt to computers than to adapt them to us. Long term question: as we adapt to our computers, using handfuls of keywords instead of sentences, how will it affect the language itself? Change in language comes from technology now, c.f. "w00t" as word of the year or the most popular txtmsg acronyms.
Will we be reduced to the news people in that beer commercial who sum it all up in 10 seconds so they can go drink? It could have a positive effect in stripping language of fuzziness; if you were to Google 'initiating mobilizing synergistic dynamics to maximize total quality excellence,' you wouldn't get much, because it's b.s., whereas 'build better mousetrap' would give you hard data. Meetings would certainly get shorter if we were forced to communicate in searchable terms.
On the other hand, storytelling would suffer. "Boy girl meets gets loses" is ideal search terminology, but doesn't exactly pull the heartstrings.
I work with HIV/AIDS agencies helping them use a federally-provided software package to track the care they deliver to their clients and report on that care to the feds for funding justification. This is the kind of information that's so confidential and sensitive that it needs to be locally stored, to the point where most people should only be able to access it inside the agency building, and anyone needing access to it through a VPN has got to have good security in place. There are still some very backwards places in this country where the release of that information could literally be fatal to a client, and I've seen cases where people have been driven out of their homes when their HIV status became known. (And don't forget that HIV services are funded by the Ryan White CARE Act, named after the boy whose house was burnt down when the neighbors found out he had AIDS.) I'm sure others can come up with plenty of other fields and cases where they wouldn't want their information "in the cloud."
Remember when Microsoft was the big bad wolf? Every script kiddie in the world devoted himself to creating a Windows virus. If Google becomes the major player in data storage, breaking in to their servers and wrecking stuff will become the hacker's holy grail.
Show of hands: how many of us have fallen in love with someone based on illusions? Fooled either by our own desires for who we want the love object to be, superimposed on someone who isn't and can't and doesn't want to be that person, or by someone else's false presentation of him/herself when their real self turns out to be nothing like the person they first seemed...
Imagine a partner who really does share your interests, is full of useful and interesting information on those interests, can access information that can help it (yes, it) discover new things for the two of you to learn and do together. Who really is what you desire physically, and really shares your, um, tastes. Who *is* exactly who it seems to be. What is stunted about a relationship that is, at least, honest?
| Robots will never be be able to match the musical abilities of some humans.
What defines that level of ability? First, we look for sheer technical perfection - the ability to play the notes correctly every time. This can be achieved more easily by a machine than a person, and duplicated in machines which can play and tour endlessly without fatigue or mistake.
Then, we add the art: We have databases in the form of innumerable performances as well as critical responses to them (many of which are easily translated to a table from their 1-5 star format), sales figures on CDs and concert tickets (and illegal download figures) for our selected artists, the number and popularity of blogs and sites devoted to those artists and the amount of "signal" devoted to particular recordings. Select the most enduring recordings by the most popular and critically acclaimed artists, and we have our primary database of what music "should sound like."
We can then "data mine" what are adjudged the the best/most affecting notes or passages or other qualities of phrasing, and we have the building blocks of a "great performance." Moreover, we can even combine the talents of several geniuses, each of whom may have a particular "sweet spot" in a performance, to create a synthesis of their work.
Add to that the use of digitized films of the physical movements an artist uses (in a violinist, the fingering, the bow movement, even the body language that subtly changes the physical force applied to the instrument and therefore the sound itself) and program the robot's movements accordingly to make the duplication perfect.
Then, release the result to the public - probably anonymously, to prevent prejudgment on the basis of Luddism. Or, use a focus group to do a "blind taste test." If the product/performance is well-received, release it, and send the robot on tour. Or, retool the performance to be "greater." You can even reprogram the robot to perform certain passages differently in different acoustic environments, in different countries with different tastes, etc. To react to the level of applause and "mood" of the room (heat sensors, fidget detectors, whisper/cough rate analysis). In short, exactly what any great performer does, using the databases within.
Slashdot Mirror
will come from the Google Book Settlement, into which I've "opted in." Call me naive but I don't see how it would benefit me or anyone else to see those books remain in their static state, unavailable save as used books, from which sales I never see a dime. IANA Lawyer but I don't see why Google couldn't break this up into waves, wherein all of us who've opted in can get our checks now and start earning any "royalties" available through search, and leave the disputed rights and claimants for another day.
In the West, you can substitute "Islam" with "Ayn Rand" and see the same fanatical attraction to an all-encompassing, all-answering philosophy at work, especially in the mindsets of those (engineers or not) who crave a perfect order which just happens to put them at the top of it.
Maybe more to the point, business people do not mind *their businesses/employers* paying for content, or, for the self-employed, deducting it as a business expense. So in the end, it is still free to the end user.
A lot of Jeopardy questions are wordplay-dependent, something AI doesn't have the hang of yet (unless IBM has been toiling in secret on something truly amazing). Categories like "Rhyme Time" and questions like "Qhat does a Pharoah need when he has a cold?" (Answer: an Egyptian Prescription) are beyond the ken of a data search.
Many Jeopardy "answers" have the key to the answer within the question, though in some cases it may be enough to throw the program off. IE in a category like "Musicals" an answer like "Unlike his other hits, this musical wasn't 'the cat's meow' on Broadway." Raw data crunching will pair musicals, Broadway and "cats" but won't know where to go with "unlike." Only an aficionado will know that Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Starlight Express" tanked on Broadway.
So the writers, given any knowledge of the limitations of AI, can set a challenge which will be nearly impossible for current AI to meet. John Henry will live another day.
No, but they had patrons, popes and emperors and Margraves and the like. The article is wrongheaded (starting with the guardrails analogy; guardrails exist to protect the driver, not the car company) but there has to be some economic state through which a person can create full-time and not starve.
This makes me think of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels - in "Use of Weapons," the main character is introduced to the Culture, where AI and robots can do everything for people, leaving them free to learn and play and evolve. He meets a guy who's volunteering to bus tables at a cafe; the guy is a xenolinguist or some such and says, in my profession there's never an end, the information on new societies keeps coming in, modifying my theories and forcing us to rethink everything - but when I wipe a table, it's wiped, it's done. I like to take a break from my real job and do this, even though a robot can do it "better."
As P. W. Singer noted in Wired for War, there are instances where a computer running, for instance, a missile defense system can launch in the precious seconds it would take a human to be aware of incoming danger. Admittedly this is defensive rather than offensive action, but it could end up being lethal, justified action if it takes out the source of the attack.
>I don't know how Metallica can pay the rent
Because they make a bazillion dollars on concert tickets and t-shirt sales. The only authors who appear on t-shirts are dead. So the income stream for the living ones might get a little low when the only saleable product, the book, is free. I'm not against open access/copyleft/etc., but I object to a cavalier attitude that somehow being "good" is in some unspecified way going to be enough to monetize your work.
>There are several ways to achieve this
What are they? I'm writing a novel about the development of an AI (orlandoutland.wordpress.com)
Agreed - I discovered this after Choire Sicha on Gawker announced its greatness. Since I was indeed totally not gettinig it just "dropping in" on that day's strip, I went back to the beginning and spent some wonderful days getting lost in a fully realized world. These days, any day Chris "fails" to post sucks for me.
I've also bought two t-shirts - support artists where it counts - with your $$!
O.
"Good prose is like a window pane." - G. Orwell
Robert Caro's 2nd volume on LBJ details how LBJ stole his 1948 election to the Senate, with nary a computer in sight. The computer looks these days like it may make it easier to steal elections, but it's not as if it's creating the problem.
This is how this was written up in The Atlantic. It struck me that some of this could be said of Ron Paul supporters as well, who also advocate a messianic "destroy all legacy systems and start fresh" revolution:
... engineers. The authors gathered data on 404 militants from 31 countries, and among the 178 whose principal academic focus could be determined, engineering was by far the most popular subject. Seventy-eight had pursued an engineering degree, compared with 34 in Islamic studies, 14 in medicine, and 12 in economics or business studies. The authors couldn't find evidence to support the idea that radical groups seek out engineers for their skills. Instead, they speculate that something in the engineer's mind-set--the emphasis on structure and rules, and on finding singular solutions to complicated problems--may fit neatly with Islamist notions of the ideal society. (In support of this hypothesis, the authors cite surveys from America, the Middle East, and Canada indicating that engineers are more likely than other professionals to be religious and right-wing.) They also note that engineers tend to be high-achievers who rise by merit, which may make them more likely to be frustrated by their interactions with corrupt bureaucracies in the Middle East and North Africa and thus receptive to radical messages.
Now that the stereotype of the poverty-stricken terrorist has been dispelled by studies showing that militancy and high levels of education go hand in hand, a new Oxford study tries to explain why so many violent Islamic radicals are
The article covers *rats*, and it explains what happens to a small, limited rat brain when it can't dream. And yes, it explains *some* human dreaming. But, what is going on in my human head when I dream of dead loved ones? What does that prepare me for? Are my dreams of being naked in public just training ground to remind me to get dressed every morning? Or do they reflect buried insecurities or anxieties? Maybe dreams started as a way for our primitive, simple brains to train themselves to survive, but their reason for being today, in our more advanced brains, is still a mystery.
I've been misquoted myself, by a reporter looking to sensationalize something that I thought was already dramatic enough. I think the ideal system would be one where a reporter/news agency automatically provides you with a verification key, which you can use online in the event you have to append your own correction/rebuttal to their story after it hits the wires/net. The key ensures that it's really you responding and not some nutjob. Of course, that kind of oversight would require faithful transcription of interviews, fact checking, and a whole lot of additional work for certain lazy reporters. In my town, they can't even get the sports listings right, when all it would take is a simple Internet sesrch, so how can we expect them to get the news right?
Why don't you Google it? :)
http://research.sun.com/people/william.woods/
As a commenter indicated, it's easier for us to adapt to computers than to adapt them to us. Long term question: as we adapt to our computers, using handfuls of keywords instead of sentences, how will it affect the language itself? Change in language comes from technology now, c.f. "w00t" as word of the year or the most popular txtmsg acronyms.
Will we be reduced to the news people in that beer commercial who sum it all up in 10 seconds so they can go drink? It could have a positive effect in stripping language of fuzziness; if you were to Google 'initiating mobilizing synergistic dynamics to maximize total quality excellence,' you wouldn't get much, because it's b.s., whereas 'build better mousetrap' would give you hard data. Meetings would certainly get shorter if we were forced to communicate in searchable terms.
On the other hand, storytelling would suffer. "Boy girl meets gets loses" is ideal search terminology, but doesn't exactly pull the heartstrings.
I work with HIV/AIDS agencies helping them use a federally-provided software package to track the care they deliver to their clients and report on that care to the feds for funding justification. This is the kind of information that's so confidential and sensitive that it needs to be locally stored, to the point where most people should only be able to access it inside the agency building, and anyone needing access to it through a VPN has got to have good security in place. There are still some very backwards places in this country where the release of that information could literally be fatal to a client, and I've seen cases where people have been driven out of their homes when their HIV status became known. (And don't forget that HIV services are funded by the Ryan White CARE Act, named after the boy whose house was burnt down when the neighbors found out he had AIDS.) I'm sure others can come up with plenty of other fields and cases where they wouldn't want their information "in the cloud."
Remember when Microsoft was the big bad wolf? Every script kiddie in the world devoted himself to creating a Windows virus. If Google becomes the major player in data storage, breaking in to their servers and wrecking stuff will become the hacker's holy grail.
Show of hands: how many of us have fallen in love with someone based on illusions? Fooled either by our own desires for who we want the love object to be, superimposed on someone who isn't and can't and doesn't want to be that person, or by someone else's false presentation of him/herself when their real self turns out to be nothing like the person they first seemed...
Imagine a partner who really does share your interests, is full of useful and interesting information on those interests, can access information that can help it (yes, it) discover new things for the two of you to learn and do together. Who really is what you desire physically, and really shares your, um, tastes. Who *is* exactly who it seems to be. What is stunted about a relationship that is, at least, honest?
| Robots will never be be able to match the musical abilities of some humans.
What defines that level of ability? First, we look for sheer technical perfection - the ability to play the notes correctly every time. This can be achieved more easily by a machine than a person, and duplicated in machines which can play and tour endlessly without fatigue or mistake.
Then, we add the art: We have databases in the form of innumerable performances as well as critical responses to them (many of which are easily translated to a table from their 1-5 star format), sales figures on CDs and concert tickets (and illegal download figures) for our selected artists, the number and popularity of blogs and sites devoted to those artists and the amount of "signal" devoted to particular recordings. Select the most enduring recordings by the most popular and critically acclaimed artists, and we have our primary database of what music "should sound like."
We can then "data mine" what are adjudged the the best/most affecting notes or passages or other qualities of phrasing, and we have the building blocks of a "great performance." Moreover, we can even combine the talents of several geniuses, each of whom may have a particular "sweet spot" in a performance, to create a synthesis of their work.
Add to that the use of digitized films of the physical movements an artist uses (in a violinist, the fingering, the bow movement, even the body language that subtly changes the physical force applied to the instrument and therefore the sound itself) and program the robot's movements accordingly to make the duplication perfect.
Then, release the result to the public - probably anonymously, to prevent prejudgment on the basis of Luddism. Or, use a focus group to do a "blind taste test." If the product/performance is well-received, release it, and send the robot on tour. Or, retool the performance to be "greater." You can even reprogram the robot to perform certain passages differently in different acoustic environments, in different countries with different tastes, etc. To react to the level of applause and "mood" of the room (heat sensors, fidget detectors, whisper/cough rate analysis). In short, exactly what any great performer does, using the databases within.