Much interesting question is what happens to the population as the necessity of cheap labor is lost.
The steel plow and McCormick reaper eliminated nearly all farming jobs at a time when 80% of the population worked in agriculture. We survived.
Deep learning automates image recognition and natural language processing at a time when 0.001% of the population work as image recognizers and transcribers. I think we will muddle through.
Most human jobs require general intelligence. This is completely out of reach for current AI, and there is no clear path in that direction. Machines will get much better at image recognition and speech processing. But human level intelligence is still science fiction.
The sad thing is, those of us that really would like to take issues like this seriously wind up getting lumped in with the hysterical Chicken Littles.
Indeed. TFA is Chicken Littleism at its worst. It is based on ridiculous assumptions. It assumes that barley will still be grown in the same fields. Obviously, as the climate changes the "barley belt" will shift northwards. It assumes that using barley as livestock feed will take priority over brewing, which is unlikely. Lastly, it assumes that the cost of barley is a significant factor in the price of beer. The barley in a pint of beer costs less than a cent.
If I'm reading the XKCD correctly, there will be a lot of "AI" jobs for those of us that actually know the underlying math, even if it means we're closer to 41 than 15.
Indeed. Like any other field, AI will bifurcate into "tool builders" and "tool users", with the former being much better paid, and the latter being far more numerous.
To code an AI engine you may need to know how to transpose a Jacobian matrix. To use it, you just import a library.
AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise.
Actually... it doesn't. Deep learning uses a lot of linear algebra, differential equations, and complicated algorithms to deal with regularization and efficiency. But all that is tucked away in libraries. For a real-world AI app, you just slap together a Tensorflow pipeline using Python, and fiddle with the parameters until you get good results. It is more art than science.
My son is 15, and he went to an "AI bootcamp" this past summer. It was a two week course, and he built a pretty snazzy reinforcement learning application, using Python and some canned visualization tools. Later he made a generative NN to create animations. This is a kid that is just starting high school.
It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.
Probably, but because of your attitude, not your age.
I really hate the whole concept of AI because it is putting people out of work
There is zero evidence that AI is "putting people out of work". How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning?
What this sounds like is Late Stage Capitalism.
You should spend more time on professional development, and less time reading The Communist Manifesto.
No. 50 faculty. Add in staff, grad students (who are paid), and postdocs, and you have at least 200 people.
The billion bucks is an endowment, so they can only spend the gains, not the principle. If the return is 4% and they leave 2% in the endowment to compensate for inflation, that is $20M annually, or about $100K per paid position. That is very low once you consider overhead and benefits. Grad students and postdocs aren't paid much, but they will almost certainly need more donations or funding to keep it going.
So... you would rather they released code under a licence that lets licensees deny the same freedoms bestowed upon them when they release a work that uses it?
In many cases, yes. The GPL is often appropriate for full applications. BSD is often better for components, libraries, and interfaces, when you want wide adoption, even by proprietary vendors. TCP/IP (i.e. "The Internet") is a good example of this being successful.
Even the FSF has conceded that the standard GPL is often inappropriate for libraries and components, so they have the "Lesser" LGPL for that purpose.
So if you want to be at the bottom, you need to be an exporter of terrorists.
So who allows visa free access to Afghans? According to Wikipedia, they are Dominica, Haiti, Micronesia, Saint Vincent, North Cyprus, Cook Islands, and Pitcairn Island.
Filing a patent doesn't mean they're going to make anything
Indeed. It actually indicates the opposite. If they were really working on it, they would have filed the patents years ago. When you plan a new project, the FIRST thing you do is nail down the IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Much interesting question is what happens to the population as the necessity of cheap labor is lost.
The steel plow and McCormick reaper eliminated nearly all farming jobs at a time when 80% of the population worked in agriculture. We survived.
Deep learning automates image recognition and natural language processing at a time when 0.001% of the population work as image recognizers and transcribers. I think we will muddle through.
Most human jobs require general intelligence. This is completely out of reach for current AI, and there is no clear path in that direction. Machines will get much better at image recognition and speech processing. But human level intelligence is still science fiction.
The sad thing is, those of us that really would like to take issues like this seriously wind up getting lumped in with the hysterical Chicken Littles.
Indeed. TFA is Chicken Littleism at its worst. It is based on ridiculous assumptions. It assumes that barley will still be grown in the same fields. Obviously, as the climate changes the "barley belt" will shift northwards. It assumes that using barley as livestock feed will take priority over brewing, which is unlikely. Lastly, it assumes that the cost of barley is a significant factor in the price of beer. The barley in a pint of beer costs less than a cent.
Barley is currently selling for about $4 per bushel.
A bushel of barley weighs about 60 lbs.
A pint of beer uses about 1.5 ounces of grain.
$4/bushel / 60 lbs/bushel / 16 ounces/lb * 1.5 ounces = $0.00625.
So the barley in a pint of beer costs a bit less than a cent.
If I'm reading the XKCD correctly, there will be a lot of "AI" jobs for those of us that actually know the underlying math, even if it means we're closer to 41 than 15.
Indeed. Like any other field, AI will bifurcate into "tool builders" and "tool users", with the former being much better paid, and the latter being far more numerous.
To code an AI engine you may need to know how to transpose a Jacobian matrix. To use it, you just import a library.
Disclaimer: I am a lot older than 41.
AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise.
Actually ... it doesn't. Deep learning uses a lot of linear algebra, differential equations, and complicated algorithms to deal with regularization and efficiency. But all that is tucked away in libraries. For a real-world AI app, you just slap together a Tensorflow pipeline using Python, and fiddle with the parameters until you get good results. It is more art than science.
This is how it works.
My son is 15, and he went to an "AI bootcamp" this past summer. It was a two week course, and he built a pretty snazzy reinforcement learning application, using Python and some canned visualization tools. Later he made a generative NN to create animations. This is a kid that is just starting high school.
It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.
Probably, but because of your attitude, not your age.
I really hate the whole concept of AI because it is putting people out of work
There is zero evidence that AI is "putting people out of work". How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning?
What this sounds like is Late Stage Capitalism.
You should spend more time on professional development, and less time reading The Communist Manifesto.
I don't really see it in any product I use? What is products do companies make money from?
RNNs are used in NLP applications, such as grammar checkers. But I can see that you are not familiar with those.
50 employees
No. 50 faculty. Add in staff, grad students (who are paid), and postdocs, and you have at least 200 people.
The billion bucks is an endowment, so they can only spend the gains, not the principle. If the return is 4% and they leave 2% in the endowment to compensate for inflation, that is $20M annually, or about $100K per paid position. That is very low once you consider overhead and benefits. Grad students and postdocs aren't paid much, but they will almost certainly need more donations or funding to keep it going.
The college bubble is going to burst, and soon.
College is a waste of time and money for many people. But those people don't go to MIT.
Heh? Singapore has mostly the same thing going on - but we're friends with them.
Indeed. We are also friends with Saudi Arabia, which has no elections, and where gays are executed.
Meanwhile, in Cuba, gays are not persecuted, and starting in January next year, gay marriage will be legal.
GPP's assertion that America's foreign policy is based on "protecting gays" is absurd.
So do friendly dictators all around the world. What makes the commies so special?
Cuban voters in Florida.
Maybe because the communists imprison gays
Homosexuality has been legal in Cuba since 1979, when it was still illegal in many US states.
America did not decriminalize homosexuality until 2003: Lawrence v. Texas
Russia doesn't have a border with Turkey.
It did in 1961.
That's 15 less than Mexico! Time to build another wall.
To keep out Paraguayans, we can just make the Panama Canal wider.
South Africa is pretty bad.
64 countries allow visa free entry to South Africans, and another 33 issue visas on arrival.
South Africa is near the middle.
Here is the list: Passport rank by country
That's like saying one country is "more free" because they don't restrict people from owning slaves.
Ridiculous hyperbole does not strengthen your argument.
Comparing my refusal to give you source code that I wrote, to enslavement, is absurd.
You might as well just put your code in the public domain at that point.
I have done that many times. "Public domain" is one of my favorite licenses.
So... you would rather they released code under a licence that lets licensees deny the same freedoms bestowed upon them when they release a work that uses it?
In many cases, yes. The GPL is often appropriate for full applications. BSD is often better for components, libraries, and interfaces, when you want wide adoption, even by proprietary vendors. TCP/IP (i.e. "The Internet") is a good example of this being successful.
Even the FSF has conceded that the standard GPL is often inappropriate for libraries and components, so they have the "Lesser" LGPL for that purpose.
I wonder what sort of Bribes are involved in getting a Transnistrian Passport?
For $100k you can buy a St Kitts passport that will give you visa free access to the UK.
25% of St Kitts' GDP comes from selling citizenship.
...as an American citizen, I can be arrested for visiting Cuba, 90 miles away.
It is legal to visit. You just can't spend money there. But enforcement is lax, and nobody really cares.
Britain will have no agreements with any nations so the British passport will be by far the worst passport to have.
Britain has never been part of Schengen, so Brexit will have no effect on visa agreements.
Here is all the water on earth in a sphere.
This raises an interesting question: What is the worst passport to have?
I figured it would be North Korea, but nope, it is Afghanistan.
North Korea isn't even in the bottom 10. Eleven countries allow visa free travel to North Koreas, and 35 more issue visas on arrival.
Here's the bottom ten:
Iran
Ethiopia
Lebanon
Sudan
Yemen
Somalia
Syria
Pakistan
Iraq
Afghanistan
So if you want to be at the bottom, you need to be an exporter of terrorists.
So who allows visa free access to Afghans? According to Wikipedia, they are Dominica, Haiti, Micronesia, Saint Vincent, North Cyprus, Cook Islands, and Pitcairn Island.
Also, the volume of the Pacific Ocean is 714 million km^3.
The volume of the moon is 21.9 billion km^3.
So the moon is bigger by a factor of more than 30.
Filing a patent doesn't mean they're going to make anything
Indeed. It actually indicates the opposite. If they were really working on it, they would have filed the patents years ago. When you plan a new project, the FIRST thing you do is nail down the IP.
And yet, China is pushing for us to get out of South Korea, Japan, Phillipines, middle east, etc.
No they aren't. They object to THAAD in Korea, but not to our military presence.
But every time that we do that, CHina and/or their allies invades those nations.
1. China has no allies.
2. China has never invaded Japan, or the Philippines, or the Middle East.
Even now, CHina is helping North Korea get set up to invade South Korea
China supported the latest UN sanctions on NK.
... support Iran and other nations into supporting fighting in the middle east
China was an active participant in the nuke deal with Iran, and has given Iran no support in Syria or Iraq.
support terrorists groups working against these nations.
China has their own problems with Islamic extremists in Xinjiang. They oppose the Taliban and ISIS.
And CHina is putting troops into Venezuela, along with Nicaragua.
Citation?
I never understood why so many people support, visit, and defend that country
Really? Do you understand how car engines work?
Hint: They aren't powered by the battery.