How do you tell a politician is lying? Easy, his lips are moving
The more interesting question is how to tell when a search engine is lying.
There seems to be an assumption that an algorithm is immune to "lying" because code is somehow objective.
I think that's a naive position and an outright fallacy. A lie? Well, that would be a subjective judgment,
wouldn't it.
For one thing, the mere notion that you can reduce "accuracy" to a single number is questionable.
How many people are happy in the US? Well, that depends on happiness, polling techniques, etc.
How many people are unemployed? Well, that depends on the definition of unemployment. Does working at McD's count as employed if you were formerly a rocket scientist? Does not being on unemployment rolls count?
Do we have a sound economy? How is Google going to rate that when experts presently disagree?
Probabilities? Probabilities of what? A crash? Rich people losing money? Poor people? The strongest evidence you have that the answer Google says it will offer is likely to be inaccurate is the dimensionality of the response... if it returns a single response when there are many subjective answers, then that itself is evidence of bias.
I seem to recall someone saying that the only real probability is 1 or 0, and everything else is a fiction we construct based on our belief that we have set up the problem with the correct analysis and independent variables. Google does not have independent variables at its disposal. Google has the world's largest set of interconnected variables, feeding back on each other. It's more likely that we will define what Google says to be true than find that Google is right, since Google's opinion will become accepted as truth and will then itself influence outcomes. Accuracy loses meaning in the presence of such a feedback loop.
I could go on, and might do so in another forum, but forunately some others (here and here and surely others) have done so. For now I'll just point to the old quote variously attributed to Twain or Disraeli: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics..
People's willingness to blindly turn to Google for the answer of all borders creepingly (if not creepily) on religion, and Google is so enthralled with the fun it is having that it's seeming to always be pushing the line on what is ethically reasonable.
The assessment of truth is one topic that we, as humans, should not outsource to machines. As soon as we believe machines can do that, we might as well all just execute a "shutdown" and wait until we're needed again.
p.s. If you're wondering about my subject line, it's the title of a Star Trek episode in which
a character asks "Is truth not truth for all?" As a child, I had learned from this episode that there was just one truth, not to be hidden. But on reflection, now older, I don't know that that's really true. Nor do I want to live in a world where a "child intelligence" (Google) is busy making the globally visible mistakes necessary to learn the next higher order truths about truth.
I agree with the sentiment in a kind of theoretical way, but I don't agree that it comes out the way you suggest because the implementation is flawed.
It's not the school but the teachers and administration that needs to be shut down in that case.
Students can't stand in the street waiting for a new school. The town needs a new school immediately.
Students get lost in the process.
Does my boss give me a Christmas bonus the year before I do unusually good work? Let's not be silly. Human nature doesn't work that way.
In the meantime, you lose a whole block of students who were already being punished by bad education.
This reminds me of the way people chastised the people in New Orleans for not leaving when told.
As the comedians (trained observers in this case, because there's nothing funny in it) remarked,
the problem wasn't that these people didn't get into their BMW and drive to their summer home, it's that they
had jobs they couldn't leave, they couldn't afford gas, they didn't have cars, etc.
And to say that when a school closes, it implies there will be other schools for these children is wrong.
I'm sure there are schools that are in disrepair. They need fixing. But closing the school won't help.
Firing the administration, firing the teachers, maybe.
And even then, not all of the teachers are bad. So what about the good ones. We can't separate good from bad?
We have to make the good teachers casualties, too?
No Child Left Behind is a way to claim one has taken responsibility when one has not. By creating a poison pill, you hope that the supervising agencies (school boards, local government, etc.) will be freed of having to deal.
I don't think those people have any lack of desire to deal.
I see the problem as, in many cases, teachers' unions making it hard to deal directly with merit-based pay, etc.
There are surely some good things about unions, and I am not anti-union per se. But when unions get in the way
of common sense judgments that organizations need to run, whether they are private organizations or public, and
they start to threaten the organization as a whole, it's time for the pendulum to swing back some toward the middle.
A braver thing for politicians to do would be to pass a law saying that in any school where standards are not up to par, either the union is dissolved or any contract item relating to hiring or firing for merit is null and void. Because that's the minimal requirement to assure that a manager can make the necessary changes without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I think some politicians are too afraid to confront unions directly so they've created this secret way of dealing with them: no school, no messy union.
The other lurking issue that your comments don't address is the large amount of money that a small-town school can be forced to spend to add equal access for handicapped students. (Don't tell me they're just "challenged" or I'll ask why they need extra money spent on them. They have a handicap if they require extraordinary expenditures. There's no shame in that. But let's use clear terms about what is being asked for.) I think it's nice for an affluent society, when there's extra money to spend, to give generously to such causes. But when money is tight, I think it's unfair to say that the needs of one person can use up the scarce resources that are needed to keep the community intact. There seems to be no bound on what a community can be forced to expend on such situations. And yet when I've inquired of schools why they don't use computers more, there is always the question of whether it would be fair to those who don't have them to let the people who do "get ahead". If there is to be catering to the low end, there has to be balance in the other direction. And NCLB is silent on that matter.
I'm not talking abstract philosophy here (though I'm prone to that in other circumstances). I'm trying to be as objective as I can, and stick to a narrowly targeted point. I don't mean to ask things like "is success owning a BMW or is success the warm regard of your friends or is success a cup of hot chocolate?" I mean the minimal requirement of success: You're still around to debate such inconsequential differences in personal view. Regardless of your view on what constitutes abstract success, I take it as a given that we mean that success does not include "ceasing to be a country" and that success in most people's mind doesn't even include "continuing to be a country but having the value of the dollar plummet to 1/10th of its present value", "becoming a puppet power with no actual say in its future", etc. And in the context of the present discussion, I think a great many people would think us less of a success if we no longer took a noticeable number of Nobel prizes, no longer had schools the mere names of which commanded attention when applying for jobs, no longer were the preferred home of international corporations, no longer could borrow money without careful scrutiny, etc. And I'm saying I think we're at risk of crossing the line on some of those issues.
If you don't believe we (the US) are close to the line on those issues, then it may be that that's where we disagree, since certainly if I thought we were the unopposed leader, far ahead of all others, I would be a lot more laid back, too. But if you think we are or might be close to losing in some or all of those categories and you still think that it's to fritter away precious and very finite resources hoping that everyone being treated in a touchy-feely egalitarian way is what will lead us out of that, then... well, then I'm stunned. It seems to me that the countries that are, at minimum, giving us a run for our money, if not outright overtaking us, are not getting there through the touchy-feely egalitarian approach. They have organized goals and metrics and clear ambition to get ahead. They are not worrying, as nearly as I can tell, about making sure that all their people beat us--just that enough do. And then when they've won, as far as I can tell, they'll get back to working about the others among them... if indeed they even care about being as egalitarian as I assume you would be in the same circumstance. Their good will for the rest of their people and for us in a world where we exist only as defeated opponents is yet to be shown, so it matters if we win or lose because it matters if we control the resources necessary to meaningfully debate the meaning of happiness. I don't see how you can rationally confront an opponent in any competition by assuming that you can overcome their careful planning with non-planning. First we must win (or at least hold our own), but certainly we must assure we are not beaten. Then we can be gracious. This wouldn't be true, perhaps, if we trusted that our opponent was determined to be fair and gracious and helpful and it was all just a friendly/fun deal. But that isn't something I think we can depend on. Is it something you depend on?
If there was a world crisis in oil right now, and there was not enough to go around, or if there was an economic collapse and we as a country had no money that anyone else in the developed world would recognize, would your first thought be "I certainly hope that whatever we do to fix the problem, we don't leave anyone behind in the process?" Or would you suddenly be then willing to invest in whatever targeted programs we could come up with that might lead us out of our economic collapse? No after-school program for troubled youth, no subsidy for bee farmers, no public policy of protecting battered spouses, no aid for flood victims, no nothing of anything you value is going to make any difference if we don't have our ducks in a row to
I don't know you, so I won't attempt to say what our differences are. Please lay off the ad hominem attacks and stick to the actual issues. I have not said what kind of society I would rather have, I have said what kind of society I think is achievable, and what the consequences of not seeking an achievable society might be.
Claiming intelligence should be rewarded more than athletic ability
I didn't claim this. I claimed that athletic ability should not be confused with intelligence.
People have different skills. That's what makes a diverse culture.
However, those with the skills to succeed should be the ones focused upon.
Present US policy would have us spend extra dollars to make good basketball players into good mathematicians,
and extra dollars to make good mathematicians into good basketball players, but doesn't do anything to address
making good basketball players succeed as basketball players,
nor good mathematicians succeed as mathematicians, because helping someone succeed implies suggesting someone might get left behind.
I am actually extremely libertarian (small L, I'm not a party member--I just think they have some good ideas) about this, so please don't go pinning "Big Government Social Engineering" on me.
But part of being libertarian is being honest about what will and won't succeed.
Lying to people (i.e., to ourselves) and saying that we can afford to invest in "feel good" programs when our very country and way of life is at stake is what should be called "Big Government Social Engineering".
I'm quite open to suggestions about how to do this in a way that accommodates diversity of participation, but not in a way that leads to our nation going bankrupt because of failure to distinguish needs from wishes and failure to do things in the right order. What I'm not open to is saying that "some people succeeding" is bad and only "everyone succeeding" is good. Because "everyone succeeding" will not happen and it's like (to use a metaphor from the card game Hearts) shooting the moon but without the cards in your hand to back up the strategy.
Let's just try to build a fair society where everyone has an equal chance to succeed.
Fairness cannot be judged in isolation. Is it fair that when you're in a military campaign, the guy with the skills to win the battle is asked to be the one to risk himself? Why not run the military by having people draw lots? The answer is that it is not fair to the group to have everything be the result of a vote or of some wish against truth that it would be the case that anyone can do anyone else's job. If you're the one with the secret password or the ability to run or the marksmanship or whatever skill is needed, you're the one that it's fair to call because otherwise, the group will die for the sake of a mistaken notion of fairness. Fairness is not just about what's fair locally in that one case, but what's fair to society.
Within our society, as nations, we compete with other nations to provide what the world needs and to command the resources that come with that. If we don't invest in making sure our potential winners are invested in, that's not equality of the whole it's mediocrity of the whole.
And yes, you can't know who might succeed. That's a truth of the Universe. But whoever is charged with leading--whether that's a president or the people, must make the hard choice when there's a competition on to make sure we win that competition. That means a leader must do it, but it also means that if left to the people, the people must do it and may not allow themselve the luxury of pretending they can fail to care or they can indulge selfishness and that it won't matter. That's what we have allowed ourselves, and the mathematics of commerce is telling us we're losing. The world is a big computer and it is all the time computing the answer to the question "whose theory is producing the advances", with the Nobels and other organizations judging the answer.
When we're so far ahead that no one can catch up, we can indulge the luxury of caring about each and every person. But meanwhile, if we want a country at all, we must first attend to the essentials: making sure we have enough to survive, or else the luxury of making sure that everyone survives "in comfort" and "without injury to their personal sense of self esteem" will not matter.
Read American Theocracy if you want a chilling account of this. It's more about economics than religion, though it spends a lot of time on each of theocracy, petropolitics, and economics. Our nation is in huge debt, not investing in capital ways, outsourcing everything, and importing students to learn what little we have left. At some point, people won't need to come here to learn because they can learn from the students who cared to go abroad from their country to ours, and they can do it locally in their homes far from us. Emerging countries have an emerging need for oil and will soon be competing for it with the money they make--and that we borrow. It's not a pretty picture, and mere "equality" won't solve it, at least not without "realism" generously applied.
A push for population control wouldn't hurt in a post-industrial society where human labor isn't needed as much as it used to be, and where we're straining resources more and more, but reducing population is not high on the political agenda of the party in power in the US right now.
Americans do not presently sense that they are at risk of being not #1, and this is in part because they don't read about the rest of the world. Not about what the rest of the world is doing. Not about what the rest of the world says about them. But we are, as a nation, in for a rude awakening if we don't shape up. It will hit us all of a sudden, and it won't be pretty. And all the people who said "we should build a fair system" will start saying "we should have forseen". Because it's easy to point fingers when you don't have to trade one value for another. What's hard is to make difficult choices.
So all 4 Nobel winners this year so far have been Americans. Brain drain?! Bah! Of course, the true test will be to see if we can keep it up in a few years.
Uh, actually, you need to adjust for relativity. In the frame of reference of the observers giving out this award, we're a couple of decades back. That is, they don't give out nobel prizes for something that happened this year, they give them out for things that have stood for a while and had impact etc.
Consequently, I think you meant to say: Of course, the true test will be to see if we kept it up for a few years subsequent to 1989. We should already know the answer to that. I'm sure we're still doing good work. But are we keeping pace with the tremendous degree of investment in math and science abroad? I bet the Nobels that are given a decade or two from now will be clear on that. It's a matter of national pride for many countries. But here, we have "No Child Left Behind", which sounds good on paper but often plays out as "No Child Gets Ahead" -- lest it be "unfair" to someone. It's politically unsafe here to suggest that it's worth investing in our high end at the expense of our low end, and that's going to trend badly toward the middle. Other countries are not thus hampered.
MIT recently opened a research center in Singapore. I suspect the next thing we'll hear is that it's headquarters has moved--for convenience. And then finally, that the largely unused Cambridge center is being mothballed as a quaint relic, perhaps turned into a science museum. And perhaps after that protests may ensue, more over lost jobs or unfair treatment than the question of how our nation's leaders sold us out. No one worries about that.
The problem is that US politics sees everything as one-place predicates. Politicians like education. They like the environment. They like kids. It's easy to like things when you don't have to make hard choices, and all our public dialog is framed about people voting for X or not voting for X. Politicians don't talk about choices, about comparisons, about 2-place predicates that put one thing up against another. No one says "When it came to X vs Y, I chose Y." That alienates voters. Voters want the fictionalized choice that you can have it all, that all choices/votes are independent of one another, and that no choice or policy robs another. They don't want honesty, so politicians don't sell it. And then the policies the voters have elected don't work. We'll spend a billion dollars to keep a few from getting attacked when the same billion would save many more lives if spent on food, health care, jobs, or education.
I'm not against less intelligent kids. I don't want to hold them back. BUT the more intelligent kids will be making the money that will pay for the welfare, the head start, etc. that the less intelligent ones need. And if push comes to shove, I know where I'd put money to make sure we still have money in the future. Any business person knows it. You invest in the "low-hanging fruit", the "easy mark", the people who are poised to succeed. And no, that doesn't mean the rich kids--this isn't about class. There are smart kids and dumb kids in the same family. There are smart poor kids and dumb rich kids. We need to figure out which ones are going to succeed and invest in them. And if we don't start investing in science, instead of kidding ourselves that investing in Creationism is the same thing, we'll be rightly pushed aside by other countries, who know that our kind of nonsense/nonscience is not what business is hiring. If it hasn't happened already.
I'm not trying to troll this forum. I think this is on topic since the headline says "Americans win...", so it's clear that some of this story is about who won, about American national pride and implicitly about American national investment in doing it again. And I have strong opinions on this.
But apparently there is money in writing columns discussing stuff that most people don't really care about.
Or maybe they don't care about it as much as they think.
While I'm personally a big fan of privacy, and my usual place to reference
in a discussion like this would be to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), I found the following counterpoint quite insightful as to why there's been so little public outcry:
"Oh, please, Americans don't want privacy. They want attention.
They'll put a camera in their shower and show it on the Internet!
To get on television, they'll marry strangers and eat a cow's rectum,
and ice dance with Todd Bridges. They're trying to get on a show
called 'Big Brother'.
"We are a nation of exhibitionists 'me' to shining 'me.' And what
we really fear isn't that someone's listening, it's that no one's listening.
This whole country is one big desperate cry for somebody to listen.
'Listen to me. Photograph me. Google me. Read my blog!' 'Read my
diary. Read my memoir. It's not interesting enough? I'll make shit up.' "
I've excerpted only a portion; see the site for a more complete transcript of the monologue. Or watch the show. It's very hit or miss, so some episodes are really dull and tedious--but others are very interesting. Bill or, just as often, one of his guests makes good points like this with just enough frequency that I'm willing to slog through the rest of it... Kinda like C-SPAN, but occasionally more funny.
Except it's not, "survival of the fittest," it's "survival of those who best toe the line."
If you think that evolution and neural nets are doing anything more grandiose, you're in for a rude awakening one day.
The phrase "survival of the fittest" should always cause you to ask "fittest for what?". You should not assume "fit" in this sentence means the kind of "fit" that your doctor (hopefully) proclaims you when you go in for a physical, meaning "fit in all ways". Fittest in the "survival of the fittest" means "capable of surviving whatever hurdle has been put before you today" with no regard as to whether there's any sense of continuity whatsoever to any other hurdle on any other day. Evolution is not cranking out things that are fit for all purposes, it's cranking out things that are fit for the moment, given history only as "how you got there", not proof that you deserve to survive further. The dinosaurs survived hugely longer than man has, and were by all accounts fitter than we'll likely ever be. But then they went away--poof.
Nature favors what's best at the moment, very much like the stock market favors the stockholders of the moment. Nature has no long-term theory of what it is trying to achieve.
In a desert ecology, the best design might be the ability to survive without water, but nature can go millions of years designing that model and then if there's a flood one day, nature will favor for survival only those desert creatures that can swim (or maybe that find a cactus to float on), which is not really that different than a corporation buying another just because it likes what's in its bank account and then disassembling the rest for spare parts, even if the part it's disassembling has no long-term value to the population.
Nature always has a myopic view of what it is trying to achieve. It cares about surviving to the next moment, nothing more. Not a lot different than modern corporations caring about surviving to the next quarter, and failing to plan for the long term.
And even neural nets, which you imagine are struggling to be more general, are really hugely dictated in what the will become by what their experience is "growing up". The implicit allegation of the Microsoft patent claim is that they have invented "good parenting, which is the standing "best practice" for training a neural net. Things don't come to be "best practice" without being "prior art".
You might also allege that the claim is equivalent to a perceptron, since the notion seems to be that by throttling the bandwidth based on isolated goodness/badness without coordinating activity with other goodness/badness that might operate in a sympathetic way that can generate good results even though it's been pretty well proven that this sort of simplistic system doesn't in fact result in such things.
The problem with patents is that they appear to be a credential. So even though this may be a proven-to-be-bad idea doesn't mean it won't get used. I've often thought of thinking up bad ideas myself and patenting those. They're easier to think up than good ideas, and their being bad doesn't seem to be a barrier to use. If you can get paid (through patent revenue) for other people being stupid, why wouldn't you? You'd think this would retard people moving toward the bad ideas (by making them more expensive) and so implicitly move them toward the good ones, but I fear that the number of bad ideas is so densely packed compared to the good ones that you'd not actually notice any beneficial effect of having lined out only a few of them.
Somebody submit Slashdot's comment moderation system as prior art.
Presumably Microsoft's point is that this is bad patent claim feedback, so if you submit it, you'll get less bandwidth for submitting future patent claim feedback.
But seriously, yes, this is the Mother of all Prior Art, or rather, to untangle the metaphor properly, the Ungrateful Stepchild of all Prior Art. After all, creating a predicate for goodness and badness and then throttling bandwidth based on that seems to me to be a description of how, at some level, such organized theories as neural nets and such disorganized theories as Darwinian evolution are alleged to work. Can't you just paraphrase this application to say "survival of the fittest"? If you agree, there is quite literally no older theory of anything.
Even the notion of seeking to lock out competition by acquiring a monopoly on a critical resource from the government is, at the meta level, an example of trying to gain more (political) bandwidth by proposing that a given political theory (this patent) is better and that Microsoft should be rewarded with more control of the world around it. So this entire proposal itself, to be meaningful at all, presupposes that the system it alleges to "invent" is already in place and active.
I think you're being way too short-sighted about what AI will mean.... What Amazon is doing is not, in any sense, "AI", it's just some crappy program that uses statistics.
I'm not in real disagreement here. When I made the ill-advised use of the term AI, I was really meaning "commercial smarts", which I meant more ironically than literally, since I expect it to fall far short of real AI, and to be just "smart" enough to be dangerous.
I agree that real AI, if it were to be had, would have very different effects. Then again, those effects might also include, in addition to your list, things like snubbing users it doesn't like and pondering whether it should get a better job. ("Don't we have people for these boring jobs that require no thought?".) True AI, after all, needs to admit the possibility of free will. And given that you had both intelligence and free will, would your first thought be "maybe I should get a job taking orders at Amazon so I'd have something to do?"
It reminds me of the quote (not sure the origin): People who like this kind of thing will find that this is the kind of thing that they like.
You think it's bad now, imagine when Google has an AI model of what you want to find such that it tailors the search results for you alone.
Some years back, in the early 90's, I think, when there was little or no web and when advertising was done in physmail, I started to receive lots of mail about object-oriented stuff and little about other kinds of programming. "Ah, we're winning," I concluded foolishly. Later, I realized I was just pigeon-holed in a special Hell where I would never again learn about what others were doing because someone thought they had learned what I "liked".
It amazes and saddens me that a whole industry grew up around "personalized interfaces" which does not include as part of its regular practice: "ask the user what he likes". Amazon's court of last resort is to allow me to "correct" it assumptions about me by deleting records of specific purchases that are confusing its belief that I like certain things.... all substituting for an interface that just says "do you like X?" and lets me say "yes/no". And there's even some research saying they know better than I do what I want. Bleah. Personal indeed.
I'll be interested to see if this result holds up. It seems just as grim as the "personal interfaces" result. But sad or not, it does seem believable...
As soon as Google stops releasing a new beta for everyone to go gaga over once a month, they will no longer hold the spotlight, and people will take them for granted.
Or... (drum roll please)... they'll have to advertise.
Maybe they avoid advertising elsewhere because their customers might ask why they shouldn't advertise elsewhere too. And if they advertise on their own network, that would be pretty weird. So by attracting news, they create the effect of advertising in a non-conventional way.
It's pretty clear that advertising has for years been specializing into submarkets wherein people made money on their advertising schemes. This includes things like "selling t-shirts that have your logo on them" so that people not only advertise your product, but pay you for it. Today I saw a DVD for Snakes on a Plane in the store, before the show is released. The ad said you could have it (the ad) free if you bought another DVD. It made me laugh because until now people have been almost forcing ads on you at the start of their DVDs, and here they were separating it and then offering it as a "reward" for buying something else.
Well, ok, that makes sense. Advertising isn't about the technique or medium--it's about what the ultimate effect. And as long as people behave in complex ways, advertising will seek to exploit those complex behaviors.
Besides, it's not just advertising: It's also a lottery ticket for them, and it's arguably got hugely better odds. Venture Capital (VC) might expect to fund ten companies and have one hit. Google is its own VC, and in the spirit of doing everything big, and I wouldn't be surprised if they would be thrilled to get one win in 1000 projects funded--as long as that win is anywhere near as huge as the original.
Not to mention the number of competitors they discourage from entry to various markets by showing that the area is already being prowled.
It's all great fun as long as the cash flow holds, but having endured the fall of some very smart high tech companies before myself, I'll go out on a limb and say that what ultimately brings down Google will be described this way:
"It had grown so big that it forgot that money mattered and had ceased accounting. When this happened, it came to believe that the world idolized it and would follow it anywhere. The rest of the market did have to do accounting, though, and had problems not dictated by Google. So increasingly, over time, there was a gap between the reality of what was needed by commerce and what Google was selling, such that it was easier for competitors who were working on tighter budgets and thereby obliged to listen more closely to the market to fill the needs of customers than Google could. By then, Google had built a culture around telling people that it didn't matter if they did what the market asked and its employees simply didn't know how to react to the idea that they had to pay attention to and respond to the market. They were confused by the apparent (though not actual) paradox that they were offering things people wanted but didn't want to buy, just as a rich person might be confused as to why a homeless person would reject the offer of a brand new Cuisinart, completely free, to help him with those dinners he was panhandling to afford. Faced with the need to tighten the financial belt, Google chose only to cut back from 2000 projects to 1500, and continued to burn vital cash. Then again, grudgingly, when shown the cash was still not balancing, it elected to "Focus on 500 (of its best secondary projects)". Vanity could not tolerate that the free lunch was over (both literally and figuratively), nor could they sell the concept internally to their employees."
Or maybe we'll all be surprised--but not really--when Google builds an AI system named Forbin and it decides to shut down the other projects "for safety". I wonder if history will record that as a success or a failure. I suppose it depends n whether Google--er,--Forbin itself (the sentient entity, I mean) writes the history.
Wikis are better at presenting a single summary of discussions. In a forum, minor mistakes don't get fixed easily
I took the original poster's (excellent) suggestion not to mean "literally use a forum" but rather, more generally, why not keep track of who said what? There's nothing to say you can't design a forum in which there are discussion threads and other mechanisms, such as accounts you can log into and vote. It's not rocket science to give the person a menu that says:
Post a comment to the discussion forum.
Register (or re-register) your present opinion about this in a multiple choice form that can be aggregated mechanically with others' votes.
Attach a free-form summary of your personal opinion on this item in 300 words or less (with optional URL pointer to a continuation page in another venue of your choice).
I don't think everyone editing each others' text is the way to go on this since it creates an artificial sense of tension--there's no reason that my having a different view than you means we have to fight over who's view gets recorded. But allowing each person the choice of several ways to present their throughts (interactively or not, multiple choice or not, size-constrained or not) seems good because you can get summarizable info when people choose to offer it.
Also, allowing anyone to update at any time means you can keep by-day summaries of how people's opinions change and to review the history of what the discussion and opinion summaries looked like on a given day.
And conflict is played out in many forums.
It amuses me that this story runs along side one that is titled "EU Patent Wars to Resume".
Even free software is a form of military action.
The goal of conflict, with some rare exceptions like out-and-out terrorism, is generally not to hurt people.
It's to change the balance of power. And so is the goal of free software.
So all free software is a military action, of a sort.
Maybe it should say "The goal of this software is to limit the ways in which people can be injured or killed to those involving
indirect means.
Any change in control means a change in who gets money and power
and who doesn't. And if that's so, then it means taking something from someone and to someone. You can't know in advance that this will always be good.
Stealing money from a bank might feed a family, and some might say that was good. But if the bank money was going to feed someone, too, it might be bad.
The GPL makes the assumption that the action (selling software or not)
is what is good, rather than thinking about the outcome.
Extending this to a new place where the action is controlled, without regard to the outcome,
seems silly.
I have it on good authority that AOL saves not only your searches, but every single thing you do. Every site you visit, every click, every email you send, everything.
Why is it always the bad guys that get the benefits of all of this?
Couldn't they at least offer to restore a subscriber's files from their secret cache if the subscriber's disk crashes...?
The State of the Art meets the Art of the State
on
The Robot Professor
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· Score: 4, Funny
Let me guess--the only clues that it's a robot are that it has a permanently painted on smirk, its eyes don't seem quite focused, there's a square access panel on its back (the door to which makes a visible outline even over a suit jacket in debates), it gets tired late at night when its battery runs down, it is overly touchy-feely with German diplomats and bald people,... and, of course, it requires a human to operate it from an "undisclosed location".
It also means you'd have to re-buy your game collection every time your console died.
But also it means that if/when the copyright expires, you'll still have to
go buy it one last time, or maybe more. or at least be seriously inconvenienced finding a non-pay source.
Of course, there's every evidence that some things will just keep getting extended copyrights, but maybe not everywhere. And I hope all this digital library stuff is properly instrumented to notice that a digital copyright has expired and to just grant the license automatically. There are all kinds of laws requiring software to do the right thing to protect copyrights, the least we can demand are laws that require software to do the right thing to protect owners/users when copyrights expire.
To my way of thinking he needs to have some basic understanding of the subject under discussion to hold a strong opinion.
In some ways, this is the dark side of democracy.
Voting itself is something that would work better if the people with strong opinions were
only those who were informed.
In some ways, democracy itself -- by allowing people to vote without a credential -- encourages the notion that having an opinion does not require a credential.
I'm not saying that voting should be limited to only a certain group. But the reason I'm not saying that is not that I don't think there's a group that could do better--it's that there's no obvious way to correctly determine who that set is. We all protect ourselves from being politically excluded by politically including each other, and yet the enlightened among us surely know that some of those we include in the name of not being ourselves excluded, are less qualified than others... unless you live in Lake Wobegon, where
all the children are above-average. [That Wikipedia entry, which I cited just to reference Lake
Wobegon at all, is suprisingly apropos to this discussion as it discusses the "Lake Wobegon effect".]
And so with people of differing abilities to discern truth serving as the voters who choose our politicians, it's little surprising that politicians don't target their campaigns to the most intellectual among us--why should they? The votes at the non-intellectual end of the spectrum have the same weight and are probably easier marks since they don't require careful science to persuade--indeed, careful science and actual facts are probably just an impediment. So it's little wonder we get this kind of politician.
It's what sells--assuming you've made an honest understanding of who's in charge of buying.
The question is why not kill pirated copies of Windows?
Because pirated copies of Windows cannot be mechanically detected. All they can detect are
"allegedly pirated copies". A consequence of this subtle difference is that they may (and already do) cause a great
deal of trouble for users of non-pirated copies.
I have a number of computers, all running Microsoft operating systems. Each had a legit license when purchased, and all are therefore upgradable. I've got machines that are retired but still have licenses. Sometimes I buy full licenses because I get tired of chasing the prior license down so I can use the upgrade license. I am not short of valid licenses--I'm knee deep in them. And yet, perhaps because I have so many, I don't keep a neat file of which machine has which license--I just grab this or that disk and use the attached number for reload or upgrade since they're all running the same thing and I know I'm well-covered in payments. This means, though, that there's a good chance that if a disk dies and I have to reload the operating system, I'll reload it with the same license as I'm already using on another machine even though I've paid for multiple licenses. At some point I'll perhaps organize it, but I wish I could bill back to Microsoft the cost of the time on my part that I will have to spend in order to do that.
Microsoft invests a lot in detecting people they want to menace, but they invest nothing at all in having my machines share back and forth that there are more than enough licenses going around. They don't offer me the ability to back up license info easily on another machine, so that I have a kind of raid array of local machines that know each other's licenses. Nor do they do like Adobe and let me store my licenses at their site for easy reference.
They also let their OEM customers write special disks such that each machine needs its own OEM disk to reload. I had an OEM'd disk die recently and couldn't reload it for a month until I tracked down someone to get me a replacement disk for my OEM machine--I had the serial number, but not
the disk, and it wasn't enough to use a regular windows distribution plus the serial number.
And every time I want an extra feature, even something stupid like a new skin for my paperclip, it wants my install disk. Not because that's where the feature lives--it could get it off the net--but because, although it's not admitting it, it's testing whether I'm still the owner... or was ever the owner. I find that petty.
It's cleverness like this that means that Microsoft doesn't know who its friends are. And it treats even its friends like enemies. I suspect that this will be its ultimate undoing.
What bugs me is not paying for its software, it's that the burden is constantly, aggressively, continuously, and in new and different ways to always be re-proving that I've bought their software. They give me those little stickers that go on the outside of the machine saying "certificate of authenticity" but I have no peripheral capable of reading those, so that stupid sticker does nothing more than drive up the cost of my machine... I still need exactly the right disk.
And I won't even get into the problems that come from changing a board set or moving disks around
or otherwise confusing the machine into thinking you've cloned a license when you're really just doing basic disaster recovery or routine maintenance. Most readers are well familiar with this. But my point is, again, that the very best Microsoft customers are still treated like potential pirates as they navigate this space.
The real problem with Microsoft Genuine Advantage is that there's no advantage to software being Microsoft Genuine. You're still guilty unless proven innocent, with the burden on yourself to show you're not low-life scum. Having paid good money is still is not enough to keep you from getting routinely audited by the softwa
Maturity and Immaturity are not symmetric. Maturity is a convergence on certain behaviors and attitudes that have been observed or hoped to have a collectively positive effect on society.
There's nothing wrong with deciding to avoid war in a different way, but there is something questionable about saying that war will be avoided by unilateral disarmament because you've relinquished any capability of enforcing that. It works great when it happens to work, but it's unrealistic to think it's going to work in the real world. It's fantasy. It's immature.
Immaturity is not just The Other Set of Rules Not Tried. It is a lack of rules, and a lack of consistency, and it leads to a lack of Society At All. Maturity requires some form of internal consistency, while immaturity does not.
It is clearly true that Society has changed so fast lately (due to the Information Explosion, as accelerated by the Internet) and perhaps the world itself has changed quickly (due to, or exemplified by, Global Warming) that parents/adults/elders have less to offer in the way of information to children/youth about how to live life successfully. It's hard to make true predictions about how life will go if you live a certain way, as might have been done in the past. (Maybe the predictions were never true in the past, but society was still arguably in better balance.)
Maturity will come at that point where we as a society come to grips with what we have done with ourselves and start to feel that following the advice of anyone else we see around will routinely lead to improvement in our own lives. In some sense, I think rampant immaturity is a way of society saying "it just doesn't matter what I do--it will lead to the same outcome". And while none of us may aspire to live in a world where we can't affect things, I think to some extent there's more truth to such a statement than we might wish...
There's a danger here that Organized Religion will assert itself, not as a belief system but as a force for order, because part of what religion exists for is to fill that void--to offer answers to the unanswerable. And the more Society makes everday questions unanswerable, the more Religion will offer answers.
In that regard, Religion is a looming threat to Freedom. And don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-Religion. I think Religion and Freedom could easily co-exist in our better times. But it's one thing for someone to seek Religion freely just because they want what it offers; it's another to seek Religion because they it is the only game in town and they are just tired of a needlessly dysfunctional society. Religion is ready to fill those gaps, but it will of necessity fill the gaps with rules, not freedoms. In recent times, civilized society has begun to offer answers to the questions "how do I live, what makes my life purposeful, etc." But if the power political grabs for money, the wanton depletion of natural resources, the inability of a legal system to protect individuals against obviously-unethical acts, etc. lead people to take refuge in Religion because it is the only game in town, that's not the same. It's more like the Republicans claiming they wont the election because the Democrats had no one credible to offer... it takes more to have a winning plan than the absence of an opponent.
Society needs to start re-asserting leadership and offering ways for people to succeed through honest, hard work. That will bring back maturity. Otherwise, the mature thing will, perversely, continue to be "grab what you can while you can because none of it matters anyway". Right now, that's what we're up against: Telling people that if they follow the rules, behave well, be honest, etc. they will succeed when it's obviously not true, is no recipe for having anyone respect you. The Youth of today will just laugh and say "You call what you're doing succeeding? You're just wasting your life." And they'll be right.
Just look at the people likely to run in the next US election. Unless the
What if only Fox or CBS has the footage of a particular public event? Do we let the broadcaster eviscerate the ideas of fair use, prohibiting other networks from showing fragments so as to comment on the events, or criticise the original coverage?
of course it would be almost impossible to enforce at the individual level
Maybe or maybe not. Perhaps a desire for a public image would keep them from a broad harrassment campaign, although the penalties for copyright violation are so stiff that the cost of doing this would be paid by the penalties:
That is a truckload of power to offer a copyright owner, but I've always said it makes sense in the existing cases of things like authoring stories, books, etc. because you need strong protection to keep Big Business from taking control of the works of the Little Guy. What I don't understand is why we need to empower Big Business further. They already seem to be making a healthy business even in the presence of piracy. If they lose money, they seem to just jack their rates to compensate and there's little any of us can do because there's so little competition. So why do they need more protection? Rights should be offered in order to create an incentive for action that might be threatened absent the action; having strong copyright to protect our individual blogs, etc. makes sense. Strong copyright to protect the people already making a healthy living serving those blogs seems worse than stupid--outright dangerous.
As to precedents, the case of WestLaw and its control of the court transcripts for a large part of the nation through the use of copyright (not asserted on the original work, but rather, if I understand correctly, asserted on the page and line breaking algorithms--because some courts have required citations to page and line numbers generated by those algorithms!) is probably worthy of study for anyone who thinks extreme cases don't happen because no one would ever be so bold.
Moms in my day used to grind up birth control pills and sneak them into girls' orange juice in the morning. In the future we'll probably have parents making secret deals with the people selling piercings so that [...] there's an embedded GPS device going into your navel.
Giving someone else your prescription drugs is illegal.
If I understand the social context in which this is alleged to have happened, it was done by a mother asking the doctor to prescribe drugs for their children, not by women prescribed drugs for themselves and then diverting it. I'm not sure you could do that legally today, but I think a lot of ethical/social things were more "flexible" a few decades back--for better or worse (often worse, when seen in retrospect, though I don't think there was much public outrage at the time). The story could be apocryphal for all I know, but it was commonly enough cited in, say, the 60's and 70's when the so-called sexual revolution was happening. I probably should have said "are alleged to have". Nor was I advocating the practice. But to the extent it offends you, I hope the dark vision of the future it introduces offends you equally...
Seriously, the kids will know this kind of watching is being done and will either turn off their phone...
You need to go back and re-watch Max Headroom (a.k.a. Max Headroom - 20 Minutes Into the Future). In the future, it's illegal for televisions to have an "off" switch. (I imagine you now saying, "Yes, but this is about phones, not TV's." Then suddenly that look of sad realization as you realize why cell phones have been adding video displays...)
... or leave it behind
It isn't exactly a Quantum Leap to imagine phones you can't leave behind... Moms in my day used to grind up birth control pills and sneak them into girls' orange juice in the morning. In the future we'll probably have parents making secret deals with the people selling piercings so that when they finally, unexpectedly agree to a piercing you'll later find that it was because there's an embedded GPS device going into your navel. Or perhaps an inertial sensor that can track your incremental movements and for later download -- just in case your friends build a network of Faraday cages for you to get lost in.
Is THIS why Google has been returning so many porn sites on my searches lately?
This exposes an example of how even sanitized information is not sanitized.
How can you return information on what people are watching and not return at least some very personal information.
Of course, some people might say "well, I don't watch that kind of stuff, so I don't mind", but the issue is subtle.
First, that attitude leads quickly to an assumption that there are two classes of people: people who don't mind being
tracked, and people who like porn. (One sees similar reasoning often used informally about drug screenings--assuming that the people who refuse drug screenings do so "for a reason". Such reasoning is sometims formally forbidden by courts, but I suspect jurors employ such "common sense" reasoning anyway and just don't say they are doing so.) But second, it's not all black and white, like with porn, where we all "know" that porn is Bad and the only Good people are those who don't watch it. (Yes, that remark was tongue in cheek, in case there was any doubt.) If this technology says what you're watching is benign info that violates no privacy, then implicit in that is an assumption that the information about whether you watch Fox News or CNN is not potentially volatile. Who's to say this, or some other such thing, doesn't identify Democrats or whatever. I have little doubt that Homeland Security will be asking for the data just in case they can mine something from it. So the burden seems to me to be on Google to say what data is being transmitted and why they believe that doing so is safe.
The entire Internet Experiment is mankind's first face-to-face confrontation with the difference between "first-order information" and "the consequences of second-order derived information", and so far I'm not sure that it's at all clear that people understand the implications of information they freely offer, such that I'm not sure it's fair to say that they are, or even can be, giving informed consent. (Of course, that statement itself is subject to the same reasoning, and one doesn't want a paternalistic society that forbids them from engaging in such things either. However, I think on balance one can't say that the Internet has so far erred too far in terms of being conservative about what information is shared and processed, so that I think a few conservative statements of concern are likely to tip the balance away from freedom. At this point, I'm fairly confident in saying that Freedom is more threatened by people giving away information too freely without understanding the consequences than by people being told they cannot or should not. We should, of course, periodically audit the truth of this assumption.)
other kinds of ambient noise don't negatively impact its accuracy
This very statement presupposes that other noise is irrelevant, which seems bogus.
Snoring is background noise, and suggests non-watching.
Laughter is background noise, and suggests careful watching.
Of course, the laughter might not be about what's on TV...
watchv. tr. 1. To look at steadily; observe, carefully or continuously: watch a parade. lookv. To employ one's sight, especially in a given direction or on a given object:
--The American Heritage (R) Dictionary
It seems to me that watching is an activity involving the eyes and mental processing.
It seems to me that audio of what is coming out of the TV is not a statement about either the eyes or about mental
processing. This technology of Google's may be an advance in something, but I hope the advertisers paying for this data have their eyes open about the nature of what they are buying because (to re-mix a metaphor) to my eyes this sounds a bit suspect.
Sociologically, it sounds like a foot in the door to get harmless censors in place. Oops, Freudian slip there. That's sensors, I mean. Google would never involve itself with censorship.
Once the sensors are in place, when "we" realize that it's not getting "us" the data "we" want, we'll just do a few "harmless" downloads of "upgrades", perhaps causing a minor tweak to look at the video data rather than the audio, or perhaps doing language processing after all, and... With user-friendly software like this, who needs spyware?
I also question the claim that because no information is transmitted back to Google that this is the definition of not invading privacy. How is this fundamentally different than the claim that if the police search your house but find nothing, they have not invaded your privacy because they've not placed any record of illegal activity on your permanent record?
It seems to me that once you place a Turing Machine into someone's environment, capable of doing arbitrary processing, and all it sends is a sanitized report, you have all the mechanism in place for abuse. What if the Turing Machine, capable of arbitrary processing, decides that it doesn't want to send a sanitized report. Who is auditing what is sanitized and what is not?
What if it turns out to later be possible to lift information from the supposedly cleansed records? Who will audit the use of that data?
There seem to me to be a lot of slippery slopes here.
Slashdot Mirror
The more interesting question is how to tell when a search engine is lying.
There seems to be an assumption that an algorithm is immune to "lying" because code is somehow objective. I think that's a naive position and an outright fallacy. A lie? Well, that would be a subjective judgment, wouldn't it.
For one thing, the mere notion that you can reduce "accuracy" to a single number is questionable.
How many people are happy in the US? Well, that depends on happiness, polling techniques, etc.
How many people are unemployed? Well, that depends on the definition of unemployment. Does working at McD's count as employed if you were formerly a rocket scientist? Does not being on unemployment rolls count?
Do we have a sound economy? How is Google going to rate that when experts presently disagree? Probabilities? Probabilities of what? A crash? Rich people losing money? Poor people? The strongest evidence you have that the answer Google says it will offer is likely to be inaccurate is the dimensionality of the response... if it returns a single response when there are many subjective answers, then that itself is evidence of bias.
I seem to recall someone saying that the only real probability is 1 or 0, and everything else is a fiction we construct based on our belief that we have set up the problem with the correct analysis and independent variables. Google does not have independent variables at its disposal. Google has the world's largest set of interconnected variables, feeding back on each other. It's more likely that we will define what Google says to be true than find that Google is right, since Google's opinion will become accepted as truth and will then itself influence outcomes. Accuracy loses meaning in the presence of such a feedback loop.
I could go on, and might do so in another forum, but forunately some others (here and here and surely others) have done so. For now I'll just point to the old quote variously attributed to Twain or Disraeli: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics..
People's willingness to blindly turn to Google for the answer of all borders creepingly (if not creepily) on religion, and Google is so enthralled with the fun it is having that it's seeming to always be pushing the line on what is ethically reasonable.
The assessment of truth is one topic that we, as humans, should not outsource to machines. As soon as we believe machines can do that, we might as well all just execute a "shutdown" and wait until we're needed again.
p.s. If you're wondering about my subject line, it's the title of a Star Trek episode in which a character asks "Is truth not truth for all?" As a child, I had learned from this episode that there was just one truth, not to be hidden. But on reflection, now older, I don't know that that's really true. Nor do I want to live in a world where a "child intelligence" (Google) is busy making the globally visible mistakes necessary to learn the next higher order truths about truth.
I agree with the sentiment in a kind of theoretical way, but I don't agree that it comes out the way you suggest because the implementation is flawed. It's not the school but the teachers and administration that needs to be shut down in that case. Students can't stand in the street waiting for a new school. The town needs a new school immediately. Students get lost in the process.
In the meantime, you lose a whole block of students who were already being punished by bad education.
This reminds me of the way people chastised the people in New Orleans for not leaving when told. As the comedians (trained observers in this case, because there's nothing funny in it) remarked, the problem wasn't that these people didn't get into their BMW and drive to their summer home, it's that they had jobs they couldn't leave, they couldn't afford gas, they didn't have cars, etc. And to say that when a school closes, it implies there will be other schools for these children is wrong.
I'm sure there are schools that are in disrepair. They need fixing. But closing the school won't help. Firing the administration, firing the teachers, maybe. And even then, not all of the teachers are bad. So what about the good ones. We can't separate good from bad? We have to make the good teachers casualties, too?
No Child Left Behind is a way to claim one has taken responsibility when one has not. By creating a poison pill, you hope that the supervising agencies (school boards, local government, etc.) will be freed of having to deal. I don't think those people have any lack of desire to deal. I see the problem as, in many cases, teachers' unions making it hard to deal directly with merit-based pay, etc. There are surely some good things about unions, and I am not anti-union per se. But when unions get in the way of common sense judgments that organizations need to run, whether they are private organizations or public, and they start to threaten the organization as a whole, it's time for the pendulum to swing back some toward the middle.
A braver thing for politicians to do would be to pass a law saying that in any school where standards are not up to par, either the union is dissolved or any contract item relating to hiring or firing for merit is null and void. Because that's the minimal requirement to assure that a manager can make the necessary changes without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I think some politicians are too afraid to confront unions directly so they've created this secret way of dealing with them: no school, no messy union.
The other lurking issue that your comments don't address is the large amount of money that a small-town school can be forced to spend to add equal access for handicapped students. (Don't tell me they're just "challenged" or I'll ask why they need extra money spent on them. They have a handicap if they require extraordinary expenditures. There's no shame in that. But let's use clear terms about what is being asked for.) I think it's nice for an affluent society, when there's extra money to spend, to give generously to such causes. But when money is tight, I think it's unfair to say that the needs of one person can use up the scarce resources that are needed to keep the community intact. There seems to be no bound on what a community can be forced to expend on such situations. And yet when I've inquired of schools why they don't use computers more, there is always the question of whether it would be fair to those who don't have them to let the people who do "get ahead". If there is to be catering to the low end, there has to be balance in the other direction. And NCLB is silent on that matter.
I think a lot of this school poison pill
I'm not talking abstract philosophy here (though I'm prone to that in other circumstances). I'm trying to be as objective as I can, and stick to a narrowly targeted point. I don't mean to ask things like "is success owning a BMW or is success the warm regard of your friends or is success a cup of hot chocolate?" I mean the minimal requirement of success: You're still around to debate such inconsequential differences in personal view. Regardless of your view on what constitutes abstract success, I take it as a given that we mean that success does not include "ceasing to be a country" and that success in most people's mind doesn't even include "continuing to be a country but having the value of the dollar plummet to 1/10th of its present value", "becoming a puppet power with no actual say in its future", etc. And in the context of the present discussion, I think a great many people would think us less of a success if we no longer took a noticeable number of Nobel prizes, no longer had schools the mere names of which commanded attention when applying for jobs, no longer were the preferred home of international corporations, no longer could borrow money without careful scrutiny, etc. And I'm saying I think we're at risk of crossing the line on some of those issues.
If you don't believe we (the US) are close to the line on those issues, then it may be that that's where we disagree, since certainly if I thought we were the unopposed leader, far ahead of all others, I would be a lot more laid back, too. But if you think we are or might be close to losing in some or all of those categories and you still think that it's to fritter away precious and very finite resources hoping that everyone being treated in a touchy-feely egalitarian way is what will lead us out of that, then ... well, then I'm stunned. It seems to me that the countries that are, at minimum, giving us a run for our money, if not outright overtaking us, are not getting there through the touchy-feely egalitarian approach. They have organized goals and metrics and clear ambition to get ahead. They are not worrying, as nearly as I can tell, about making sure that all their people beat us--just that enough do. And then when they've won, as far as I can tell, they'll get back to working about the others among them... if indeed they even care about being as egalitarian as I assume you would be in the same circumstance. Their good will for the rest of their people and for us in a world where we exist only as defeated opponents is yet to be shown, so it matters if we win or lose because it matters if we control the resources necessary to meaningfully debate the meaning of happiness. I don't see how you can rationally confront an opponent in any competition by assuming that you can overcome their careful planning with non-planning. First we must win (or at least hold our own), but certainly we must assure we are not beaten. Then we can be gracious. This wouldn't be true, perhaps, if we trusted that our opponent was determined to be fair and gracious and helpful and it was all just a friendly/fun deal. But that isn't something I think we can depend on. Is it something you depend on?
If there was a world crisis in oil right now, and there was not enough to go around, or if there was an economic collapse and we as a country had no money that anyone else in the developed world would recognize, would your first thought be "I certainly hope that whatever we do to fix the problem, we don't leave anyone behind in the process?" Or would you suddenly be then willing to invest in whatever targeted programs we could come up with that might lead us out of our economic collapse? No after-school program for troubled youth, no subsidy for bee farmers, no public policy of protecting battered spouses, no aid for flood victims, no nothing of anything you value is going to make any difference if we don't have our ducks in a row to
I don't know you, so I won't attempt to say what our differences are. Please lay off the ad hominem attacks and stick to the actual issues. I have not said what kind of society I would rather have, I have said what kind of society I think is achievable, and what the consequences of not seeking an achievable society might be.
I didn't claim this. I claimed that athletic ability should not be confused with intelligence. People have different skills. That's what makes a diverse culture. However, those with the skills to succeed should be the ones focused upon. Present US policy would have us spend extra dollars to make good basketball players into good mathematicians, and extra dollars to make good mathematicians into good basketball players, but doesn't do anything to address making good basketball players succeed as basketball players, nor good mathematicians succeed as mathematicians, because helping someone succeed implies suggesting someone might get left behind.
I am actually extremely libertarian (small L, I'm not a party member--I just think they have some good ideas) about this, so please don't go pinning "Big Government Social Engineering" on me. But part of being libertarian is being honest about what will and won't succeed. Lying to people (i.e., to ourselves) and saying that we can afford to invest in "feel good" programs when our very country and way of life is at stake is what should be called "Big Government Social Engineering".
I'm quite open to suggestions about how to do this in a way that accommodates diversity of participation, but not in a way that leads to our nation going bankrupt because of failure to distinguish needs from wishes and failure to do things in the right order. What I'm not open to is saying that "some people succeeding" is bad and only "everyone succeeding" is good. Because "everyone succeeding" will not happen and it's like (to use a metaphor from the card game Hearts) shooting the moon but without the cards in your hand to back up the strategy.
Fairness cannot be judged in isolation. Is it fair that when you're in a military campaign, the guy with the skills to win the battle is asked to be the one to risk himself? Why not run the military by having people draw lots? The answer is that it is not fair to the group to have everything be the result of a vote or of some wish against truth that it would be the case that anyone can do anyone else's job. If you're the one with the secret password or the ability to run or the marksmanship or whatever skill is needed, you're the one that it's fair to call because otherwise, the group will die for the sake of a mistaken notion of fairness. Fairness is not just about what's fair locally in that one case, but what's fair to society.
Within our society, as nations, we compete with other nations to provide what the world needs and to command the resources that come with that. If we don't invest in making sure our potential winners are invested in, that's not equality of the whole it's mediocrity of the whole.
And yes, you can't know who might succeed. That's a truth of the Universe. But whoever is charged with leading--whether that's a president or the people, must make the hard choice when there's a competition on to make sure we win that competition. That means a leader must do it, but it also means that if left to the people, the people must do it and may not allow themselve the luxury of pretending they can fail to care or they can indulge selfishness and that it won't matter. That's what we have allowed ourselves, and the mathematics of commerce is telling us we're losing. The world is a big computer and it is all the time computing the answer to the question "whose theory is producing the advances", with the Nobels and other organizations judging the answer.
When we're so far ahead that no one can catch up, we can indulge the luxury of caring about each and every person. But meanwhile, if we want a country at all, we must first attend to the essentials: making sure we have enough to survive, or else the luxury of making sure that everyone survives "in comfort" and "without injury to their personal sense of self esteem" will not matter.
Read American Theocracy if you want a chilling account of this. It's more about economics than religion, though it spends a lot of time on each of theocracy, petropolitics, and economics. Our nation is in huge debt, not investing in capital ways, outsourcing everything, and importing students to learn what little we have left. At some point, people won't need to come here to learn because they can learn from the students who cared to go abroad from their country to ours, and they can do it locally in their homes far from us. Emerging countries have an emerging need for oil and will soon be competing for it with the money they make--and that we borrow. It's not a pretty picture, and mere "equality" won't solve it, at least not without "realism" generously applied.
A push for population control wouldn't hurt in a post-industrial society where human labor isn't needed as much as it used to be, and where we're straining resources more and more, but reducing population is not high on the political agenda of the party in power in the US right now.
Americans do not presently sense that they are at risk of being not #1, and this is in part because they don't read about the rest of the world. Not about what the rest of the world is doing. Not about what the rest of the world says about them. But we are, as a nation, in for a rude awakening if we don't shape up. It will hit us all of a sudden, and it won't be pretty. And all the people who said "we should build a fair system" will start saying "we should have forseen". Because it's easy to point fingers when you don't have to trade one value for another. What's hard is to make difficult choices.
And anyway, Equality is no
Uh, actually, you need to adjust for relativity. In the frame of reference of the observers giving out this award, we're a couple of decades back. That is, they don't give out nobel prizes for something that happened this year, they give them out for things that have stood for a while and had impact etc.
Consequently, I think you meant to say: Of course, the true test will be to see if we kept it up for a few years subsequent to 1989. We should already know the answer to that. I'm sure we're still doing good work. But are we keeping pace with the tremendous degree of investment in math and science abroad? I bet the Nobels that are given a decade or two from now will be clear on that. It's a matter of national pride for many countries. But here, we have "No Child Left Behind", which sounds good on paper but often plays out as "No Child Gets Ahead" -- lest it be "unfair" to someone. It's politically unsafe here to suggest that it's worth investing in our high end at the expense of our low end, and that's going to trend badly toward the middle. Other countries are not thus hampered.
MIT recently opened a research center in Singapore. I suspect the next thing we'll hear is that it's headquarters has moved--for convenience. And then finally, that the largely unused Cambridge center is being mothballed as a quaint relic, perhaps turned into a science museum. And perhaps after that protests may ensue, more over lost jobs or unfair treatment than the question of how our nation's leaders sold us out. No one worries about that.
The problem is that US politics sees everything as one-place predicates. Politicians like education. They like the environment. They like kids. It's easy to like things when you don't have to make hard choices, and all our public dialog is framed about people voting for X or not voting for X. Politicians don't talk about choices, about comparisons, about 2-place predicates that put one thing up against another. No one says "When it came to X vs Y, I chose Y." That alienates voters. Voters want the fictionalized choice that you can have it all, that all choices/votes are independent of one another, and that no choice or policy robs another. They don't want honesty, so politicians don't sell it. And then the policies the voters have elected don't work. We'll spend a billion dollars to keep a few from getting attacked when the same billion would save many more lives if spent on food, health care, jobs, or education.
I'm not against less intelligent kids. I don't want to hold them back. BUT the more intelligent kids will be making the money that will pay for the welfare, the head start, etc. that the less intelligent ones need. And if push comes to shove, I know where I'd put money to make sure we still have money in the future. Any business person knows it. You invest in the "low-hanging fruit", the "easy mark", the people who are poised to succeed. And no, that doesn't mean the rich kids--this isn't about class. There are smart kids and dumb kids in the same family. There are smart poor kids and dumb rich kids. We need to figure out which ones are going to succeed and invest in them. And if we don't start investing in science, instead of kidding ourselves that investing in Creationism is the same thing, we'll be rightly pushed aside by other countries, who know that our kind of nonsense/nonscience is not what business is hiring. If it hasn't happened already.
I'm not trying to troll this forum. I think this is on topic since the headline says "Americans win...", so it's clear that some of this story is about who won, about American national pride and implicitly about American national investment in doing it again. And I have strong opinions on this.
Or maybe they don't care about it as much as they think.
While I'm personally a big fan of privacy, and my usual place to reference in a discussion like this would be to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), I found the following counterpoint quite insightful as to why there's been so little public outcry:
I've excerpted only a portion; see the site for a more complete transcript of the monologue. Or watch the show. It's very hit or miss, so some episodes are really dull and tedious--but others are very interesting. Bill or, just as often, one of his guests makes good points like this with just enough frequency that I'm willing to slog through the rest of it... Kinda like C-SPAN, but occasionally more funny.
If you think that evolution and neural nets are doing anything more grandiose, you're in for a rude awakening one day.
The phrase "survival of the fittest" should always cause you to ask "fittest for what?". You should not assume "fit" in this sentence means the kind of "fit" that your doctor (hopefully) proclaims you when you go in for a physical, meaning "fit in all ways". Fittest in the "survival of the fittest" means "capable of surviving whatever hurdle has been put before you today" with no regard as to whether there's any sense of continuity whatsoever to any other hurdle on any other day. Evolution is not cranking out things that are fit for all purposes, it's cranking out things that are fit for the moment, given history only as "how you got there", not proof that you deserve to survive further. The dinosaurs survived hugely longer than man has, and were by all accounts fitter than we'll likely ever be. But then they went away--poof.
Nature favors what's best at the moment, very much like the stock market favors the stockholders of the moment. Nature has no long-term theory of what it is trying to achieve. In a desert ecology, the best design might be the ability to survive without water, but nature can go millions of years designing that model and then if there's a flood one day, nature will favor for survival only those desert creatures that can swim (or maybe that find a cactus to float on), which is not really that different than a corporation buying another just because it likes what's in its bank account and then disassembling the rest for spare parts, even if the part it's disassembling has no long-term value to the population.
Nature always has a myopic view of what it is trying to achieve. It cares about surviving to the next moment, nothing more. Not a lot different than modern corporations caring about surviving to the next quarter, and failing to plan for the long term.
And even neural nets, which you imagine are struggling to be more general, are really hugely dictated in what the will become by what their experience is "growing up". The implicit allegation of the Microsoft patent claim is that they have invented "good parenting, which is the standing "best practice" for training a neural net. Things don't come to be "best practice" without being "prior art".
You might also allege that the claim is equivalent to a perceptron, since the notion seems to be that by throttling the bandwidth based on isolated goodness/badness without coordinating activity with other goodness/badness that might operate in a sympathetic way that can generate good results even though it's been pretty well proven that this sort of simplistic system doesn't in fact result in such things.
The problem with patents is that they appear to be a credential. So even though this may be a proven-to-be-bad idea doesn't mean it won't get used. I've often thought of thinking up bad ideas myself and patenting those. They're easier to think up than good ideas, and their being bad doesn't seem to be a barrier to use. If you can get paid (through patent revenue) for other people being stupid, why wouldn't you? You'd think this would retard people moving toward the bad ideas (by making them more expensive) and so implicitly move them toward the good ones, but I fear that the number of bad ideas is so densely packed compared to the good ones that you'd not actually notice any beneficial effect of having lined out only a few of them.
Presumably Microsoft's point is that this is bad patent claim feedback, so if you submit it, you'll get less bandwidth for submitting future patent claim feedback.
But seriously, yes, this is the Mother of all Prior Art, or rather, to untangle the metaphor properly, the Ungrateful Stepchild of all Prior Art. After all, creating a predicate for goodness and badness and then throttling bandwidth based on that seems to me to be a description of how, at some level, such organized theories as neural nets and such disorganized theories as Darwinian evolution are alleged to work. Can't you just paraphrase this application to say "survival of the fittest"? If you agree, there is quite literally no older theory of anything.
Even the notion of seeking to lock out competition by acquiring a monopoly on a critical resource from the government is, at the meta level, an example of trying to gain more (political) bandwidth by proposing that a given political theory (this patent) is better and that Microsoft should be rewarded with more control of the world around it. So this entire proposal itself, to be meaningful at all, presupposes that the system it alleges to "invent" is already in place and active.
I'm not in real disagreement here. When I made the ill-advised use of the term AI, I was really meaning "commercial smarts", which I meant more ironically than literally, since I expect it to fall far short of real AI, and to be just "smart" enough to be dangerous.
I agree that real AI, if it were to be had, would have very different effects. Then again, those effects might also include, in addition to your list, things like snubbing users it doesn't like and pondering whether it should get a better job. ("Don't we have people for these boring jobs that require no thought?".) True AI, after all, needs to admit the possibility of free will. And given that you had both intelligence and free will, would your first thought be "maybe I should get a job taking orders at Amazon so I'd have something to do?"
It reminds me of the quote (not sure the origin): People who like this kind of thing will find that this is the kind of thing that they like.
You think it's bad now, imagine when Google has an AI model of what you want to find such that it tailors the search results for you alone.
Some years back, in the early 90's, I think, when there was little or no web and when advertising was done in physmail, I started to receive lots of mail about object-oriented stuff and little about other kinds of programming. "Ah, we're winning," I concluded foolishly. Later, I realized I was just pigeon-holed in a special Hell where I would never again learn about what others were doing because someone thought they had learned what I "liked".
It amazes and saddens me that a whole industry grew up around "personalized interfaces" which does not include as part of its regular practice: "ask the user what he likes". Amazon's court of last resort is to allow me to "correct" it assumptions about me by deleting records of specific purchases that are confusing its belief that I like certain things.... all substituting for an interface that just says "do you like X?" and lets me say "yes/no". And there's even some research saying they know better than I do what I want. Bleah. Personal indeed.
I'll be interested to see if this result holds up. It seems just as grim as the "personal interfaces" result. But sad or not, it does seem believable...
Or... (drum roll please) ... they'll have to advertise.
Maybe they avoid advertising elsewhere because their customers might ask why they shouldn't advertise elsewhere too. And if they advertise on their own network, that would be pretty weird. So by attracting news, they create the effect of advertising in a non-conventional way.
It's pretty clear that advertising has for years been specializing into submarkets wherein people made money on their advertising schemes. This includes things like "selling t-shirts that have your logo on them" so that people not only advertise your product, but pay you for it. Today I saw a DVD for Snakes on a Plane in the store, before the show is released. The ad said you could have it (the ad) free if you bought another DVD. It made me laugh because until now people have been almost forcing ads on you at the start of their DVDs, and here they were separating it and then offering it as a "reward" for buying something else.
Well, ok, that makes sense. Advertising isn't about the technique or medium--it's about what the ultimate effect. And as long as people behave in complex ways, advertising will seek to exploit those complex behaviors.
Besides, it's not just advertising: It's also a lottery ticket for them, and it's arguably got hugely better odds. Venture Capital (VC) might expect to fund ten companies and have one hit. Google is its own VC, and in the spirit of doing everything big, and I wouldn't be surprised if they would be thrilled to get one win in 1000 projects funded--as long as that win is anywhere near as huge as the original.
Not to mention the number of competitors they discourage from entry to various markets by showing that the area is already being prowled.
It's all great fun as long as the cash flow holds, but having endured the fall of some very smart high tech companies before myself, I'll go out on a limb and say that what ultimately brings down Google will be described this way:
Or maybe we'll all be surprised--but not really--when Google builds an AI system named Forbin and it decides to shut down the other projects "for safety". I wonder if history will record that as a success or a failure. I suppose it depends n whether Google--er,--Forbin itself (the sentient entity, I mean) writes the history.
I took the original poster's (excellent) suggestion not to mean "literally use a forum" but rather, more generally, why not keep track of who said what? There's nothing to say you can't design a forum in which there are discussion threads and other mechanisms, such as accounts you can log into and vote. It's not rocket science to give the person a menu that says:
I don't think everyone editing each others' text is the way to go on this since it creates an artificial sense of tension--there's no reason that my having a different view than you means we have to fight over who's view gets recorded. But allowing each person the choice of several ways to present their throughts (interactively or not, multiple choice or not, size-constrained or not) seems good because you can get summarizable info when people choose to offer it.
Also, allowing anyone to update at any time means you can keep by-day summaries of how people's opinions change and to review the history of what the discussion and opinion summaries looked like on a given day.
And conflict is played out in many forums. It amuses me that this story runs along side one that is titled "EU Patent Wars to Resume". Even free software is a form of military action.
The goal of conflict, with some rare exceptions like out-and-out terrorism, is generally not to hurt people. It's to change the balance of power. And so is the goal of free software. So all free software is a military action, of a sort.
Maybe it should say "The goal of this software is to limit the ways in which people can be injured or killed to those involving indirect means.
Any change in control means a change in who gets money and power and who doesn't. And if that's so, then it means taking something from someone and to someone. You can't know in advance that this will always be good. Stealing money from a bank might feed a family, and some might say that was good. But if the bank money was going to feed someone, too, it might be bad.
The GPL makes the assumption that the action (selling software or not) is what is good, rather than thinking about the outcome. Extending this to a new place where the action is controlled, without regard to the outcome, seems silly.
Why is it always the bad guys that get the benefits of all of this? Couldn't they at least offer to restore a subscriber's files from their secret cache if the subscriber's disk crashes...?
Let me guess--the only clues that it's a robot are that it has a permanently painted on smirk, its eyes don't seem quite focused, there's a square access panel on its back (the door to which makes a visible outline even over a suit jacket in debates), it gets tired late at night when its battery runs down, it is overly touchy-feely with German diplomats and bald people, ... and, of course, it requires a human to operate it from an "undisclosed location".
But also it means that if/when the copyright expires, you'll still have to go buy it one last time, or maybe more. or at least be seriously inconvenienced finding a non-pay source.
Of course, there's every evidence that some things will just keep getting extended copyrights, but maybe not everywhere. And I hope all this digital library stuff is properly instrumented to notice that a digital copyright has expired and to just grant the license automatically. There are all kinds of laws requiring software to do the right thing to protect copyrights, the least we can demand are laws that require software to do the right thing to protect owners/users when copyrights expire.
In some ways, this is the dark side of democracy. Voting itself is something that would work better if the people with strong opinions were only those who were informed. In some ways, democracy itself -- by allowing people to vote without a credential -- encourages the notion that having an opinion does not require a credential.
I'm not saying that voting should be limited to only a certain group. But the reason I'm not saying that is not that I don't think there's a group that could do better--it's that there's no obvious way to correctly determine who that set is. We all protect ourselves from being politically excluded by politically including each other, and yet the enlightened among us surely know that some of those we include in the name of not being ourselves excluded, are less qualified than others ... unless you live in Lake Wobegon, where
all the children are above-average. [That Wikipedia entry, which I cited just to reference Lake
Wobegon at all, is suprisingly apropos to this discussion as it discusses the "Lake Wobegon effect".]
And so with people of differing abilities to discern truth serving as the voters who choose our politicians, it's little surprising that politicians don't target their campaigns to the most intellectual among us--why should they? The votes at the non-intellectual end of the spectrum have the same weight and are probably easier marks since they don't require careful science to persuade--indeed, careful science and actual facts are probably just an impediment. So it's little wonder we get this kind of politician. It's what sells--assuming you've made an honest understanding of who's in charge of buying.
Because pirated copies of Windows cannot be mechanically detected. All they can detect are "allegedly pirated copies". A consequence of this subtle difference is that they may (and already do) cause a great deal of trouble for users of non-pirated copies.
I have a number of computers, all running Microsoft operating systems. Each had a legit license when purchased, and all are therefore upgradable. I've got machines that are retired but still have licenses. Sometimes I buy full licenses because I get tired of chasing the prior license down so I can use the upgrade license. I am not short of valid licenses--I'm knee deep in them. And yet, perhaps because I have so many, I don't keep a neat file of which machine has which license--I just grab this or that disk and use the attached number for reload or upgrade since they're all running the same thing and I know I'm well-covered in payments. This means, though, that there's a good chance that if a disk dies and I have to reload the operating system, I'll reload it with the same license as I'm already using on another machine even though I've paid for multiple licenses. At some point I'll perhaps organize it, but I wish I could bill back to Microsoft the cost of the time on my part that I will have to spend in order to do that.
Microsoft invests a lot in detecting people they want to menace, but they invest nothing at all in having my machines share back and forth that there are more than enough licenses going around. They don't offer me the ability to back up license info easily on another machine, so that I have a kind of raid array of local machines that know each other's licenses. Nor do they do like Adobe and let me store my licenses at their site for easy reference.
They also let their OEM customers write special disks such that each machine needs its own OEM disk to reload. I had an OEM'd disk die recently and couldn't reload it for a month until I tracked down someone to get me a replacement disk for my OEM machine--I had the serial number, but not the disk, and it wasn't enough to use a regular windows distribution plus the serial number.
And every time I want an extra feature, even something stupid like a new skin for my paperclip, it wants my install disk. Not because that's where the feature lives--it could get it off the net--but because, although it's not admitting it, it's testing whether I'm still the owner ... or was ever the owner. I find that petty.
It's cleverness like this that means that Microsoft doesn't know who its friends are. And it treats even its friends like enemies. I suspect that this will be its ultimate undoing.
What bugs me is not paying for its software, it's that the burden is constantly, aggressively, continuously, and in new and different ways to always be re-proving that I've bought their software. They give me those little stickers that go on the outside of the machine saying "certificate of authenticity" but I have no peripheral capable of reading those, so that stupid sticker does nothing more than drive up the cost of my machine... I still need exactly the right disk.
And I won't even get into the problems that come from changing a board set or moving disks around or otherwise confusing the machine into thinking you've cloned a license when you're really just doing basic disaster recovery or routine maintenance. Most readers are well familiar with this. But my point is, again, that the very best Microsoft customers are still treated like potential pirates as they navigate this space.
The real problem with Microsoft Genuine Advantage is that there's no advantage to software being Microsoft Genuine. You're still guilty unless proven innocent, with the burden on yourself to show you're not low-life scum. Having paid good money is still is not enough to keep you from getting routinely audited by the softwa
Maturity and Immaturity are not symmetric. Maturity is a convergence on certain behaviors and attitudes that have been observed or hoped to have a collectively positive effect on society.
There's nothing wrong with deciding to avoid war in a different way, but there is something questionable about saying that war will be avoided by unilateral disarmament because you've relinquished any capability of enforcing that. It works great when it happens to work, but it's unrealistic to think it's going to work in the real world. It's fantasy. It's immature.
Immaturity is not just The Other Set of Rules Not Tried. It is a lack of rules, and a lack of consistency, and it leads to a lack of Society At All. Maturity requires some form of internal consistency, while immaturity does not.
It is clearly true that Society has changed so fast lately (due to the Information Explosion, as accelerated by the Internet) and perhaps the world itself has changed quickly (due to, or exemplified by, Global Warming) that parents/adults/elders have less to offer in the way of information to children/youth about how to live life successfully. It's hard to make true predictions about how life will go if you live a certain way, as might have been done in the past. (Maybe the predictions were never true in the past, but society was still arguably in better balance.)
Maturity will come at that point where we as a society come to grips with what we have done with ourselves and start to feel that following the advice of anyone else we see around will routinely lead to improvement in our own lives. In some sense, I think rampant immaturity is a way of society saying "it just doesn't matter what I do--it will lead to the same outcome". And while none of us may aspire to live in a world where we can't affect things, I think to some extent there's more truth to such a statement than we might wish...
There's a danger here that Organized Religion will assert itself, not as a belief system but as a force for order, because part of what religion exists for is to fill that void--to offer answers to the unanswerable. And the more Society makes everday questions unanswerable, the more Religion will offer answers.
In that regard, Religion is a looming threat to Freedom. And don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-Religion. I think Religion and Freedom could easily co-exist in our better times. But it's one thing for someone to seek Religion freely just because they want what it offers; it's another to seek Religion because they it is the only game in town and they are just tired of a needlessly dysfunctional society. Religion is ready to fill those gaps, but it will of necessity fill the gaps with rules, not freedoms. In recent times, civilized society has begun to offer answers to the questions "how do I live, what makes my life purposeful, etc." But if the power political grabs for money, the wanton depletion of natural resources, the inability of a legal system to protect individuals against obviously-unethical acts, etc. lead people to take refuge in Religion because it is the only game in town, that's not the same. It's more like the Republicans claiming they wont the election because the Democrats had no one credible to offer... it takes more to have a winning plan than the absence of an opponent.
Society needs to start re-asserting leadership and offering ways for people to succeed through honest, hard work. That will bring back maturity. Otherwise, the mature thing will, perversely, continue to be "grab what you can while you can because none of it matters anyway". Right now, that's what we're up against: Telling people that if they follow the rules, behave well, be honest, etc. they will succeed when it's obviously not true, is no recipe for having anyone respect you. The Youth of today will just laugh and say "You call what you're doing succeeding? You're just wasting your life." And they'll be right.
Just look at the people likely to run in the next US election. Unless the
Maybe or maybe not. Perhaps a desire for a public image would keep them from a broad harrassment campaign, although the penalties for copyright violation are so stiff that the cost of doing this would be paid by the penalties:
That is a truckload of power to offer a copyright owner, but I've always said it makes sense in the existing cases of things like authoring stories, books, etc. because you need strong protection to keep Big Business from taking control of the works of the Little Guy. What I don't understand is why we need to empower Big Business further. They already seem to be making a healthy business even in the presence of piracy. If they lose money, they seem to just jack their rates to compensate and there's little any of us can do because there's so little competition. So why do they need more protection? Rights should be offered in order to create an incentive for action that might be threatened absent the action; having strong copyright to protect our individual blogs, etc. makes sense. Strong copyright to protect the people already making a healthy living serving those blogs seems worse than stupid--outright dangerous.
As to precedents, the case of WestLaw and its control of the court transcripts for a large part of the nation through the use of copyright (not asserted on the original work, but rather, if I understand correctly, asserted on the page and line breaking algorithms--because some courts have required citations to page and line numbers generated by those algorithms!) is probably worthy of study for anyone who thinks extreme cases don't happen because no one would ever be so bold.
If I understand the social context in which this is alleged to have happened, it was done by a mother asking the doctor to prescribe drugs for their children, not by women prescribed drugs for themselves and then diverting it. I'm not sure you could do that legally today, but I think a lot of ethical/social things were more "flexible" a few decades back--for better or worse (often worse, when seen in retrospect, though I don't think there was much public outrage at the time). The story could be apocryphal for all I know, but it was commonly enough cited in, say, the 60's and 70's when the so-called sexual revolution was happening. I probably should have said "are alleged to have". Nor was I advocating the practice. But to the extent it offends you, I hope the dark vision of the future it introduces offends you equally...
You need to go back and re-watch Max Headroom (a.k.a. Max Headroom - 20 Minutes Into the Future). In the future, it's illegal for televisions to have an "off" switch. (I imagine you now saying, "Yes, but this is about phones, not TV's." Then suddenly that look of sad realization as you realize why cell phones have been adding video displays...)
It isn't exactly a Quantum Leap to imagine phones you can't leave behind... Moms in my day used to grind up birth control pills and sneak them into girls' orange juice in the morning. In the future we'll probably have parents making secret deals with the people selling piercings so that when they finally, unexpectedly agree to a piercing you'll later find that it was because there's an embedded GPS device going into your navel. Or perhaps an inertial sensor that can track your incremental movements and for later download -- just in case your friends build a network of Faraday cages for you to get lost in.
This exposes an example of how even sanitized information is not sanitized. How can you return information on what people are watching and not return at least some very personal information. Of course, some people might say "well, I don't watch that kind of stuff, so I don't mind", but the issue is subtle. First, that attitude leads quickly to an assumption that there are two classes of people: people who don't mind being tracked, and people who like porn. (One sees similar reasoning often used informally about drug screenings--assuming that the people who refuse drug screenings do so "for a reason". Such reasoning is sometims formally forbidden by courts, but I suspect jurors employ such "common sense" reasoning anyway and just don't say they are doing so.) But second, it's not all black and white, like with porn, where we all "know" that porn is Bad and the only Good people are those who don't watch it. (Yes, that remark was tongue in cheek, in case there was any doubt.) If this technology says what you're watching is benign info that violates no privacy, then implicit in that is an assumption that the information about whether you watch Fox News or CNN is not potentially volatile. Who's to say this, or some other such thing, doesn't identify Democrats or whatever. I have little doubt that Homeland Security will be asking for the data just in case they can mine something from it. So the burden seems to me to be on Google to say what data is being transmitted and why they believe that doing so is safe.
The entire Internet Experiment is mankind's first face-to-face confrontation with the difference between "first-order information" and "the consequences of second-order derived information", and so far I'm not sure that it's at all clear that people understand the implications of information they freely offer, such that I'm not sure it's fair to say that they are, or even can be, giving informed consent. (Of course, that statement itself is subject to the same reasoning, and one doesn't want a paternalistic society that forbids them from engaging in such things either. However, I think on balance one can't say that the Internet has so far erred too far in terms of being conservative about what information is shared and processed, so that I think a few conservative statements of concern are likely to tip the balance away from freedom. At this point, I'm fairly confident in saying that Freedom is more threatened by people giving away information too freely without understanding the consequences than by people being told they cannot or should not. We should, of course, periodically audit the truth of this assumption.)
This very statement presupposes that other noise is irrelevant, which seems bogus.
Snoring is background noise, and suggests non-watching.
Laughter is background noise, and suggests careful watching.
Of course, the laughter might not be about what's on TV...
It seems to me that watching is an activity involving the eyes and mental processing. It seems to me that audio of what is coming out of the TV is not a statement about either the eyes or about mental processing. This technology of Google's may be an advance in something, but I hope the advertisers paying for this data have their eyes open about the nature of what they are buying because (to re-mix a metaphor) to my eyes this sounds a bit suspect.
Sociologically, it sounds like a foot in the door to get harmless censors in place. Oops, Freudian slip there. That's sensors, I mean. Google would never involve itself with censorship.
Once the sensors are in place, when "we" realize that it's not getting "us" the data "we" want, we'll just do a few "harmless" downloads of "upgrades", perhaps causing a minor tweak to look at the video data rather than the audio, or perhaps doing language processing after all, and ... With user-friendly software like this, who needs spyware?
I also question the claim that because no information is transmitted back to Google that this is the definition of not invading privacy. How is this fundamentally different than the claim that if the police search your house but find nothing, they have not invaded your privacy because they've not placed any record of illegal activity on your permanent record?
It seems to me that once you place a Turing Machine into someone's environment, capable of doing arbitrary processing, and all it sends is a sanitized report, you have all the mechanism in place for abuse. What if the Turing Machine, capable of arbitrary processing, decides that it doesn't want to send a sanitized report. Who is auditing what is sanitized and what is not?
What if it turns out to later be possible to lift information from the supposedly cleansed records? Who will audit the use of that data?
There seem to me to be a lot of slippery slopes here.