I strongly believe computers will eventually outperform humans in most, perhaps all, endeavours. At the same time AI prognosticators have a long track history of making wildly optimistic claims about when that is going to happen.
AI has just gotten good enough to fake understanding of a document when searching for it (using techniques that were unheard of ten years ago, btw). It took 15 years and massive amounts of data to get us there and entirely new angles of approach. I think it will be another 20 years before the computer can (fake) write an original document. This is but one cog in the edifice of strong AI. Fifty years still sounds optimistic.
This already happened during the industrial revolution. Machines took over most of the jobs. Short term it caused massive unemployment, long term it is responsible for shortening the work week from 80-100 hours a week down to 40 in all advanced societies. I assume it will be similar with robots. Twenty hour work weeks won't be uncommon in 40 years. Skinner already observed that 20 hours at a fast pace are nearly as productive as 40 hours at the sustainable-but-more-leisurely pace in use nowadays.
I'm not angry at all, though I can see why it might have come across that way. Look, one can look from the outside and observe, that, say, housing is overvalued and due for a correction, even if "it is valuable if someone is willing to buy it".
The example of the Friedman's "Styrofoam cup with lady bug" which I used elsewhere was chosen purposely since last I checked its value had gone down significantly.
Dali claimed he himself was a fake at times to meet the demands of the market. He claimed that some of his paintings were art, and others were whatever crap he could put together in to sell to art collectors willing to buy anything signed by Dali.
Your picture proves that Duchamp had skills, so I don't see how this supports your argument that skill is irrelevant. Tom Stoppard said it best "imagination without skill gives us contemporary art."
"Get over yourself" yourself. People can smell a scam when they see one. As n artist you should know that the art world is full of posers and that pretentious art collectors create a market for junk. If you think this statement is borne out of art ignorance, then you must have think Dali does not know art, since he is the one who said it.
I can handle an abstract piece of art, and if you take the time to explain one to people they often "get it" and gain new appreciation of it. This in no way precludes the fact that there is a lot of junk out there pretending to be art when it isn't, like Friedman's "Styrofoam coffee cup with lady bug".
As Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out, you can have very simple geometric forms, but the materials and finishes must be very well chosen.
Modern art so lacks workmanship. I recall a piece at the MoMA (I think) made of some candle holders with light bulbs instead of candles. Altogether the idea wasn't bad, but I just couldn't get past the inferior soldering and the wires protruding all over the place.
It used to be that for an object to be considered art it had to speak to you aesthetically. Today, it's considered "art" if it speaks to you using a somewhat encrypted or shocking message, even if it doesn't move you aesthetically.
Many don't agree with this shift, but that is where "art" seems to be right now.
Because humor is usually either mocking yourself or those who are in power. Everything else is generally considered in poor taste---unless you select the one ethnicity that each country is allowed to hate. In the USA it used to be the "Pollacks", nowadays the French seem to be it.
People in power always gets their fair share or barbs and Obama as the current president is no exception.
However you are on to something: as society becomes more integrated and less racist, mock-the-whites humor becomes less funny and more just an expression of bigotry.
If you think traditional hardware patents cannot be as trivial as those, you are in for a surprise. The biggest problem on software patents is not so much their triviality, but their generality. A trivial hardware patent protects a very specific instantiation of the invention, software patents protect all such instantiations in any language, with any algorithm regardless of efficiency. Think one-click buy patent.
I'm out of date. I guess gone are the days when iTunes would downconvert all your music to low sample rate AAC before you even had a time to see what was going on. By the way CD quality isn't that good either. WAV files from high quality vinyl are superior, though they sure are space hogs.
How is it that even after Apple comes out with its products that its competitors' ripoff copies often look so second-rate by comparison?
I don't know. A sansa player, for one, seems to outperform the latest generation of iPods: it's cheaper, and not locked to Apple low quality audio standard/iTunes software.
I still don't see what bulk billing has to do with providing free services. Bulk billing is paid by medicare. Where exactly are the free services there? No need to feign ignorance, your comment simply makes no sense.
* I'll join the Red Cross/St. John Ambulance when my doctor start providing free treatments.
* I'll volunteer at the soup kitchen when restaurants start giving free food.
* You hopefully get my point
Actually I don't. You listed organizations that help poor people. OSS helps some of the richest corporations on the planet: Yahoo, Google and IBM run on Linux.
Call me when you volunteer to work for free for WalMart.
I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine.
Vista is slower than XP on my machine. Opening an office document freezes the screen for a few seconds and sometimes for up to half a minute.
In terms of stability within the first three months of usage I had more blue of screens of death than in my entire Win2K+WinXP experience spanning eight years. Sometime in late October/early November Windows Update downloaded a whole bunch of updates and it hasn't blue screened me since then. For the record this is more than eighteen months after Vista was first released.
The real motivation behind Nexus One is the fear of Google of being locked out by cell phone providers. If any other provider follows suit, I can pretty much guarantee that Google will give Nexus Ones away for free.
The purpose of creating a program really is to instruct the computer what to do. Not to explain other human beings what we want the computer to do.
This is a very common misconception, we do want other humans to know what we want the computer to do, namely the poor saps who end up maintaining your crappy code.
So if you think about it, there are two consumers of code: the compiler and the fellow who will maintain it for the next ten years. If you program with just one or the other in mind you are doing a darn poor job at writing code.
One should, however, try to make his code as readable and elegant as he possibly can without sacrificing precision in the message to the computer.
The computer doesn't complain if it has to work twice as hard to properly parse your code. So in the tradeoff between human and computer readability we must favor the human. Of course if we end up with incorrect code in the name of readability we have gone too far. I have yet to see code like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly believe computers will eventually outperform humans in most, perhaps all, endeavours. At the same time AI prognosticators have a long track history of making wildly optimistic claims about when that is going to happen.
AI has just gotten good enough to fake understanding of a document when searching for it (using techniques that were unheard of ten years ago, btw). It took 15 years and massive amounts of data to get us there and entirely new angles of approach. I think it will be another 20 years before the computer can (fake) write an original document. This is but one cog in the edifice of strong AI. Fifty years still sounds optimistic.
This already happened during the industrial revolution. Machines took over most of the jobs. Short term it caused massive unemployment, long term it is responsible for shortening the work week from 80-100 hours a week down to 40 in all advanced societies. I assume it will be similar with robots. Twenty hour work weeks won't be uncommon in 40 years. Skinner already observed that 20 hours at a fast pace are nearly as productive as 40 hours at the sustainable-but-more-leisurely pace in use nowadays.
Does the Boeing 747 show artificial flight or is it just good engineering? As a passenger sitting in a transatlantic flight would one even care?
You seem angry that things 'pretend to be art'.
I'm not angry at all, though I can see why it might have come across that way. Look, one can look from the outside and observe, that, say, housing is overvalued and due for a correction, even if "it is valuable if someone is willing to buy it".
The example of the Friedman's "Styrofoam cup with lady bug" which I used elsewhere was chosen purposely since last I checked its value had gone down significantly.
Dali claimed he himself was a fake at times to meet the demands of the market. He claimed that some of his paintings were art, and others were whatever crap he could put together in to sell to art collectors willing to buy anything signed by Dali.
For sure. I should have qualified my statement as "modern art generally lacks skill". There are some very talented and skillful artists out there.
Your picture proves that Duchamp had skills, so I don't see how this supports your argument that skill is irrelevant. Tom Stoppard said it best "imagination without skill gives us contemporary art."
"Get over yourself" yourself. People can smell a scam when they see one. As n artist you should know that the art world is full of posers and that pretentious art collectors create a market for junk. If you think this statement is borne out of art ignorance, then you must have think Dali does not know art, since he is the one who said it.
I can handle an abstract piece of art, and if you take the time to explain one to people they often "get it" and gain new appreciation of it. This in no way precludes the fact that there is a lot of junk out there pretending to be art when it isn't, like Friedman's "Styrofoam coffee cup with lady bug".
As Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out, you can have very simple geometric forms, but the materials and finishes must be very well chosen.
Modern art so lacks workmanship. I recall a piece at the MoMA (I think) made of some candle holders with light bulbs instead of candles. Altogether the idea wasn't bad, but I just couldn't get past the inferior soldering and the wires protruding all over the place.
It used to be that for an object to be considered art it had to speak to you aesthetically. Today, it's considered "art" if it speaks to you using a somewhat encrypted or shocking message, even if it doesn't move you aesthetically.
Many don't agree with this shift, but that is where "art" seems to be right now.
Whatever scam you can get away with.
--Andy Warhol
Why is shit like this tolerated?
Because humor is usually either mocking yourself or those who are in power. Everything else is generally considered in poor taste---unless you select the one ethnicity that each country is allowed to hate. In the USA it used to be the "Pollacks", nowadays the French seem to be it.
People in power always gets their fair share or barbs and Obama as the current president is no exception.
However you are on to something: as society becomes more integrated and less racist, mock-the-whites humor becomes less funny and more just an expression of bigotry.
If you think traditional hardware patents cannot be as trivial as those, you are in for a surprise. The biggest problem on software patents is not so much their triviality, but their generality. A trivial hardware patent protects a very specific instantiation of the invention, software patents protect all such instantiations in any language, with any algorithm regardless of efficiency. Think one-click buy patent.
Resources spent on car safety this year: trillions of $-worth? (in car production, car design, roads, education, extra fuel burnt due to weight...
Trillions? Not even $100 billion.
Resources spent fighting cancer this year: trillions of $-worth?
Again less than a trillion and we are talking about a disease that kills tens of millions of people a year. So what's your point?
Number of people failing to comprehend basic statistics: hundreds of millions
You can safely count yourself among these.
I'm out of date. I guess gone are the days when iTunes would downconvert all your music to low sample rate AAC before you even had a time to see what was going on. By the way CD quality isn't that good either. WAV files from high quality vinyl are superior, though they sure are space hogs.
How is it that even after Apple comes out with its products that its competitors' ripoff copies often look so second-rate by comparison?
I don't know. A sansa player, for one, seems to outperform the latest generation of iPods: it's cheaper, and not locked to Apple low quality audio standard/iTunes software.
I still don't see what bulk billing has to do with providing free services. Bulk billing is paid by medicare. Where exactly are the free services there? No need to feign ignorance, your comment simply makes no sense.
Huh?
* I'll join the Red Cross/St. John Ambulance when my doctor start providing free treatments.
* I'll volunteer at the soup kitchen when restaurants start giving free food.
* You hopefully get my point
Actually I don't. You listed organizations that help poor people. OSS helps some of the richest corporations on the planet: Yahoo, Google and IBM run on Linux.
Call me when you volunteer to work for free for WalMart.
I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine.
Vista is slower than XP on my machine. Opening an office document freezes the screen for a few seconds and sometimes for up to half a minute.
In terms of stability within the first three months of usage I had more blue of screens of death than in my entire Win2K+WinXP experience spanning eight years. Sometime in late October/early November Windows Update downloaded a whole bunch of updates and it hasn't blue screened me since then. For the record this is more than eighteen months after Vista was first released.
what brings users to taco bell: tacos or toys? what brings users to Yahoo: search or some type of manual directory (lookup usage figures)?
I'll work on an open source project when my lawyer and my doctor start providing free consultations.
This is like saying that Taco Bell is not a taco company because they buy their taco shells from a third party provider.
Really, think about it...
The real motivation behind Nexus One is the fear of Google of being locked out by cell phone providers. If any other provider follows suit, I can pretty much guarantee that Google will give Nexus Ones away for free.
The purpose of creating a program really is to instruct the computer what to do. Not to explain other human beings what we want the computer to do.
This is a very common misconception, we do want other humans to know what we want the computer to do, namely the poor saps who end up maintaining your crappy code.
So if you think about it, there are two consumers of code: the compiler and the fellow who will maintain it for the next ten years. If you program with just one or the other in mind you are doing a darn poor job at writing code.
One should, however, try to make his code as readable and elegant as he possibly can without sacrificing precision in the message to the computer.
The computer doesn't complain if it has to work twice as hard to properly parse your code. So in the tradeoff between human and computer readability we must favor the human. Of course if we end up with incorrect code in the name of readability we have gone too far. I have yet to see code like this.
veered wildly to the obscene left,
with the occasional column from someone from the obscene right "for balance", which of course is bonkers.
Salon, how about getting a few people making intelligent comments instead of simply carrying the water for the RNC/DNC?