There are, unfortunately, competing needs in this situation.
On the one hand, you have the right to an opinion, and the right to share that opinion.
On the other hand, you have the simple fact of human existence that people tend to believe what they hear first, or what they hear the most often, or spoken with the most conviction.
This action was taken to try to address the second, in violation of the first. But you can't really allow the first to trump the second, either.
As I see it, the solution is not easy, but there is one: everywhere somebody employs their freedom of speech to talk about something like this, there is a platform disclaimer that says that this is a controversial topic on which there are multiple opinions, and offer a link to more information on the subject that covers both sides of the discussion. This will help people break out of the filter-bubble that only shows them one side of the argument.
Exposure to both sides will reduce the severity of this problem, though I must admit, it will not be enough to eliminate it completely. After all, once a person has formed an identity that is tied to one side of an argument, they are unlikely to be swayed. But it should help reduce how many get sucked into the nonsense without realizing that it is nonsense. And maybe, just maybe, it will make it harder for the radicalized to spread their gospel.
On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable task to give to an AI. But here's the thing to remember: AI is not magic. It is a nifty trick for finding a mathematical formula for something. If there is no formula underlying it, an AI can't learn it. Hence, no one can use AI to predict the lottery numbers.
So, is there a mathematical formula for popular whim? Well, there is a formula for the way the brain works, so in theory, it should be possible. However, when you look at what goes into that formula, the odds of pulling off what you are proposing drops dramatically.
What is popular rides a knife's edge between what is familiar and what is novel. If it is too familiar, it is boring. If it is too novel, it is scary. It has to find the balance in order to be popular. But there's the rub: What is familiar is constantly changing. That's also why "what is old is new again" happens: because the key elements have not been seen in so long that they start to become novel again.
What is being proposed is a little bit like a temporal paradox: The very act of creating a popular product changes the consciousness of the population, rendering their predictions unable to stand the test of time simply because they were seen sooner rather than later.
That's not to say that there isn't value in using machine learning to build models of good design and aesthetics. There most certainly is.
But you probably won't design a product that will still be in vogue 10 years from now, because if the product is too different from today, it won't be popular, and if it is popular, it will change the trajectory of what is popular in 10 years. You can't win. Not in that particular game, anyway.
You CAN, however, use it to identify the elements of good style, and combine it with a generative model to create designs. And there is a way of probing a model to create novelty, which can be used to explore the solution space. That could be a very profitable way to generate an endless supply of "fresh, desirable designs."
Your setup will work fine if the definition of a story includes all the tests that will be tested as part of validating the story, and the definition of done includes all tests passing, and preferably automated. Your stories will be higher quality the first time around.
Imagine a world where in order to unlock your phone all I have to do is open it up and swap out your home button with one that will let any finger unlock the phone. The original poster is trying to paint Apple as some kind of bad guy trying to take away the viability of the repair market. The truth is, they are trying to keep their phones secure by preventing an obvious attack vector. Thank you, Apple.
first you have to use that encryption in all your government "classified" communications, and all your banking transactions for one year. Then, at the end of the year, if you still want all encryption to have back doors, we'll consider it.
But don't be surprised if the government no longer has any secrets, or indeed, any money left.
It's a shame that the DOJ is asking specifically for Apple to create something that, once created, could be used to attack the innocent. Had they made a less specific request, there might not be this problem.
Yesterday, I posted a submission (http://slashdot.org/submission/5584621/how-apple-can-strike-a-balance-between-the-needs-of-the-doj-and-its-customers) suggesting that maybe we can help them come up a technological solution that balances everyone's needs. If you care about privacy, please take a second to click the link and vote up the submission so that more people will see it, on the off chance that the idea will make its way to the right person and actually allow them to resolve this conflict.
Amen.
I would add, learn to think DIFFERENTLY.
There is Imperative programming, which is to think like the computer, and tell the computer exactly what to do and how to do it. There is Object Oriented programming, which is really just an attempt to limit the amount of tangle you get into while writing an imperative program. And there is Functional programming, which tries to avoid the mess altogether, but can end up creating a different kind of mess, and if taken too far, makes the code even harder to read to a less experienced programmer. And lets not forget Logic Programming. Did I miss any?
The point? A good way of enhancing your own ability to write less convoluted, buggy code is to learn to solve the same problem in all those different ways. The cognitive flexibility that it gives you will enable you to solve problems faster, with less code, and likely, less bugs.
This technology, at its core, is a little bit like PicBreeder. It doesn't include the complexification, but the principle is the same.
There is an argument about 'leading the witness' being bandied about as if that makes this thing useless. If you read the articles, they talk about that, and they show that it is no worse than any existing techniques, gets good results, and works for people that can't work with sketch artists.
The reality is, this technology has applications beyond what it is being used for.
Imagine, a site that you can go to and evolve the face of the woman of your dreams?
Or the face of a character in the book you are writing.
Or an avatar for the video game you are playing.
Or use the basic tech to create random faces for the crowd for an animated movie.
Personally, I would *LOVE* to be able to tinker with technology like this.
If anything is going to help bring real peace to the world, it's changing people's selfish mindsets. Open Source is doing that. Slowly, people are coming to realize that doing good for everybody really is good for everybody, including yourself. This mindset shift will slowly extend outward beyond software, and may one day usher in a new age of cooperation and collaboration.
Linus, as an early adopter of the mindset, and a vocal and active one, at that, HAS been instrumental. He's not the ONLY one, of course. Stallman, for example. But this is or should be based on actual results, actual impact, that the person has (or clearly will have), on the world. Linux is a household name. Yes, technically it is GNU/Linux, but the fact that none of the uneducated masses knows that says something about who has made the bigger impact.
So, yes, I could back such an effort.
Of course, honors are nice, and all, but the best way to say thank-you for all the hard work is to enable him to be even more influential in the future. Now, how could we do that?
This has got to be an example of ignorance causing a person to shoot themselves in the foot!
The accessibility feature of 'reading' the book is a method of enabling MORE people to want or be able to access it. That means more sales. That means more money. How can this group of people seriously put forth such an argument that would actually hurt sales?
In a vain attempt to believe that humanity has not gone completely insane, I choose to believe that this 'statement' from the guild was not unanimously approved by all members prior to it being published.
If I'm wrong, shoot me, because all is lost.
An interesting question. Is it worth buying a cup of coffee on your way to work? Not for me, can't stand the stuff. But for many people, what you get for your money is worth it, so they do it.
Regarding the question of the cord blood banking, all I can say is: We did it. Not "I would do it" but I actually forked over the cash and did it. Does that mean we will ever see any benefits from having done it? Not necessarily. So?
You can mimic biology and may end up with a semi-intelligent result. Mimic it well enough, and you may have a fully-intelligent result. But because you don't UNDERSTAND what you built, you can't CHANGE it.
Remember the rules of AI, introduced in Sci-Fi? How would you implement rules like that? You CAN'T implement them if you don't know HOW to implement them. If you don't UNDERSTAND the system that you have built, you can't know how to tweak it!
Furthermore, how would you prevent things like boredom, impatience, selfishness, solipsism, and the many other cognitive ills that would be unsuited to a mechanical servant?
The biggest problem is if people productize the AI before it is understood and suitably 'tweaked'. Then our digital maid might subvert the family, kill the dog, and run away with the neighbor's butler robot, because in its mind, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do!
Simulations are great. Hardware implementations of those experiments are great. Hopefully, in the process, they will learn to understand how the things that they built WORK. But I pray that those doing this work, or looking at it, don't start salivating about ways to make a buck off of it before it is ready to be leveraged. The consequences could be far more dire than just a miscreant maid.
We found a bill on our credit card statement from some company. We called them, and they claimed that we signed up through Classmates.com. We never actually received ANYTHING from this company except a charge on our credit card. No emails, no snail mails, no services, nothing.
Classmates tried to claim that by clicking some button, my wife was authorizing them to send her credit card information to this 3rd party.
Anybody else think that a single-click, deceptively labeled, is adequate for disclosing credit card information?
If there IS a class-action lawsuit against them, I want in on it. No joke.
Here's what I do:
I have several domain names. On each one, I have John@_____ forwarded to my Gmail account. I then set up Gmail so that I can have my reply-to set to be that account. I can put my own domain name on the business card, which satisfies that requirement. But I can have the reliability and availability of Gmail.
Sounds to me like it would meet your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
There are, unfortunately, competing needs in this situation.
On the one hand, you have the right to an opinion, and the right to share that opinion.
On the other hand, you have the simple fact of human existence that people tend to believe what they hear first, or what they hear the most often, or spoken with the most conviction.
This action was taken to try to address the second, in violation of the first. But you can't really allow the first to trump the second, either.
As I see it, the solution is not easy, but there is one: everywhere somebody employs their freedom of speech to talk about something like this, there is a platform disclaimer that says that this is a controversial topic on which there are multiple opinions, and offer a link to more information on the subject that covers both sides of the discussion. This will help people break out of the filter-bubble that only shows them one side of the argument.
Exposure to both sides will reduce the severity of this problem, though I must admit, it will not be enough to eliminate it completely. After all, once a person has formed an identity that is tied to one side of an argument, they are unlikely to be swayed. But it should help reduce how many get sucked into the nonsense without realizing that it is nonsense. And maybe, just maybe, it will make it harder for the radicalized to spread their gospel.
On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable task to give to an AI. But here's the thing to remember: AI is not magic. It is a nifty trick for finding a mathematical formula for something. If there is no formula underlying it, an AI can't learn it. Hence, no one can use AI to predict the lottery numbers.
So, is there a mathematical formula for popular whim? Well, there is a formula for the way the brain works, so in theory, it should be possible. However, when you look at what goes into that formula, the odds of pulling off what you are proposing drops dramatically.
What is popular rides a knife's edge between what is familiar and what is novel. If it is too familiar, it is boring. If it is too novel, it is scary. It has to find the balance in order to be popular. But there's the rub: What is familiar is constantly changing. That's also why "what is old is new again" happens: because the key elements have not been seen in so long that they start to become novel again.
What is being proposed is a little bit like a temporal paradox: The very act of creating a popular product changes the consciousness of the population, rendering their predictions unable to stand the test of time simply because they were seen sooner rather than later.
That's not to say that there isn't value in using machine learning to build models of good design and aesthetics. There most certainly is.
But you probably won't design a product that will still be in vogue 10 years from now, because if the product is too different from today, it won't be popular, and if it is popular, it will change the trajectory of what is popular in 10 years. You can't win. Not in that particular game, anyway.
You CAN, however, use it to identify the elements of good style, and combine it with a generative model to create designs. And there is a way of probing a model to create novelty, which can be used to explore the solution space. That could be a very profitable way to generate an endless supply of "fresh, desirable designs."
Your setup will work fine if the definition of a story includes all the tests that will be tested as part of validating the story, and the definition of done includes all tests passing, and preferably automated. Your stories will be higher quality the first time around.
Imagine a world where in order to unlock your phone all I have to do is open it up and swap out your home button with one that will let any finger unlock the phone. The original poster is trying to paint Apple as some kind of bad guy trying to take away the viability of the repair market. The truth is, they are trying to keep their phones secure by preventing an obvious attack vector. Thank you, Apple.
first you have to use that encryption in all your government "classified" communications, and all your banking transactions for one year. Then, at the end of the year, if you still want all encryption to have back doors, we'll consider it. But don't be surprised if the government no longer has any secrets, or indeed, any money left.
It's a shame that the DOJ is asking specifically for Apple to create something that, once created, could be used to attack the innocent. Had they made a less specific request, there might not be this problem. Yesterday, I posted a submission (http://slashdot.org/submission/5584621/how-apple-can-strike-a-balance-between-the-needs-of-the-doj-and-its-customers) suggesting that maybe we can help them come up a technological solution that balances everyone's needs. If you care about privacy, please take a second to click the link and vote up the submission so that more people will see it, on the off chance that the idea will make its way to the right person and actually allow them to resolve this conflict.
Amen. I would add, learn to think DIFFERENTLY. There is Imperative programming, which is to think like the computer, and tell the computer exactly what to do and how to do it. There is Object Oriented programming, which is really just an attempt to limit the amount of tangle you get into while writing an imperative program. And there is Functional programming, which tries to avoid the mess altogether, but can end up creating a different kind of mess, and if taken too far, makes the code even harder to read to a less experienced programmer. And lets not forget Logic Programming. Did I miss any? The point? A good way of enhancing your own ability to write less convoluted, buggy code is to learn to solve the same problem in all those different ways. The cognitive flexibility that it gives you will enable you to solve problems faster, with less code, and likely, less bugs.
This technology, at its core, is a little bit like PicBreeder. It doesn't include the complexification, but the principle is the same.
There is an argument about 'leading the witness' being bandied about as if that makes this thing useless. If you read the articles, they talk about that, and they show that it is no worse than any existing techniques, gets good results, and works for people that can't work with sketch artists.
The reality is, this technology has applications beyond what it is being used for.
Personally, I would *LOVE* to be able to tinker with technology like this.
If anything is going to help bring real peace to the world, it's changing people's selfish mindsets. Open Source is doing that. Slowly, people are coming to realize that doing good for everybody really is good for everybody, including yourself. This mindset shift will slowly extend outward beyond software, and may one day usher in a new age of cooperation and collaboration. Linus, as an early adopter of the mindset, and a vocal and active one, at that, HAS been instrumental. He's not the ONLY one, of course. Stallman, for example. But this is or should be based on actual results, actual impact, that the person has (or clearly will have), on the world. Linux is a household name. Yes, technically it is GNU/Linux, but the fact that none of the uneducated masses knows that says something about who has made the bigger impact. So, yes, I could back such an effort. Of course, honors are nice, and all, but the best way to say thank-you for all the hard work is to enable him to be even more influential in the future. Now, how could we do that?
This has got to be an example of ignorance causing a person to shoot themselves in the foot! The accessibility feature of 'reading' the book is a method of enabling MORE people to want or be able to access it. That means more sales. That means more money. How can this group of people seriously put forth such an argument that would actually hurt sales? In a vain attempt to believe that humanity has not gone completely insane, I choose to believe that this 'statement' from the guild was not unanimously approved by all members prior to it being published. If I'm wrong, shoot me, because all is lost.
An interesting question. Is it worth buying a cup of coffee on your way to work? Not for me, can't stand the stuff. But for many people, what you get for your money is worth it, so they do it. Regarding the question of the cord blood banking, all I can say is: We did it. Not "I would do it" but I actually forked over the cash and did it. Does that mean we will ever see any benefits from having done it? Not necessarily. So?
I see some big issues with this.
You can mimic biology and may end up with a semi-intelligent result. Mimic it well enough, and you may have a fully-intelligent result. But because you don't UNDERSTAND what you built, you can't CHANGE it.
Remember the rules of AI, introduced in Sci-Fi? How would you implement rules like that? You CAN'T implement them if you don't know HOW to implement them. If you don't UNDERSTAND the system that you have built, you can't know how to tweak it!
Furthermore, how would you prevent things like boredom, impatience, selfishness, solipsism, and the many other cognitive ills that would be unsuited to a mechanical servant?
The biggest problem is if people productize the AI before it is understood and suitably 'tweaked'. Then our digital maid might subvert the family, kill the dog, and run away with the neighbor's butler robot, because in its mind, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do!
Simulations are great. Hardware implementations of those experiments are great. Hopefully, in the process, they will learn to understand how the things that they built WORK. But I pray that those doing this work, or looking at it, don't start salivating about ways to make a buck off of it before it is ready to be leveraged. The consequences could be far more dire than just a miscreant maid.
We found a bill on our credit card statement from some company. We called them, and they claimed that we signed up through Classmates.com. We never actually received ANYTHING from this company except a charge on our credit card. No emails, no snail mails, no services, nothing. Classmates tried to claim that by clicking some button, my wife was authorizing them to send her credit card information to this 3rd party. Anybody else think that a single-click, deceptively labeled, is adequate for disclosing credit card information? If there IS a class-action lawsuit against them, I want in on it. No joke.
Here's what I do: I have several domain names. On each one, I have John@_____ forwarded to my Gmail account. I then set up Gmail so that I can have my reply-to set to be that account. I can put my own domain name on the business card, which satisfies that requirement. But I can have the reliability and availability of Gmail. Sounds to me like it would meet your needs.