Actually, this is still dumb automation that has no clue what it does. The model has just gotten less limited, the model does not have understanding. And there is the little problem that this is about simple language, not complicated thoughts were humans need to think about how to express things. Automation on steroids, agreed, but even one billion monkeys will not ever produce one Mona Lisa. So no, not even a dim glimmer.
Quite to the contrary of the article, some experts (derided as "geeks" in the article) are currently exploring what the blockchain is all _not_ good for or at least not any better than traditional solutions. Unfortunately, that likely includes basically everything, with a slight chance that some variant of the failed "currency" angle ("Bitcoin") may be salvageable if there is a way to reliably curb speculation and create stability.
In fact, I am currently supervising a BA thesis in this area and I expect that a mostly negative result will save the industry-partner a ton of money. I also already told the student that a negative result can certainly get a good grade if argued and justified well (same as a positive result, really). I have a second thesis lined up with a different student and industrial partner. Will be interesting to see what the outcomes are, but I do expect a "not now" or a "not ever unless special conditions are met".
Incidentally, "ethics" in the commercial space these days means "how can we manage to not get caught and still get rich". And please keep out the sociologists and designers, they really are mostly useless with very few exceptions.
Of course, nothing like that is true or even desirable. This story is utter nonsense. Credentials (whether passwords, certificates or seeds for OTP mechnisms) are under company control so their servers can access them easily and so they can revoke them fast. The blockchain has absolutely no place here. Incidentally, when it comes to public identities, the blockchain is about as useful as the PGP server network, albeit more complicated and more expensive, i.e. useless. The one thing that makes these identities worth more is signatures of (at least somewhat) trusted third parties on the public key, but only if they actually verified the identity.
Seriously, stop pumping Bitcoin with utterly stupid stories. Let it crash already and let those greedy and stupid enough to have bought late suffer.
I re-iterate: You massively overestimate what evolutionary optimization can do. Maybe read some literature on the subject before claiming complete nonsense?
Most people do not have a clue. Also, who says you stop existing after death? As far as I can see, not even most religions claim that, although they immediately tell you how it is going to continue and they want your money and support or it will go badly for you. Not even Science is claiming that you stop existing at death. Science is claiming that your physical existence ends at death, but Science does not know how much of the full package that is and does not make any claims to that effect.
We can see a few things in people that come into this life. For example, they do not remember past lives in concrete form when they are old enough to talk about it. That could be because there are none, but it could also be because the first few years are sort of an erasure-phase. It could also be because concrete memories are actually stored physically in the brain and do indeed die with the body. But people come into this world with complex personalities already in place. From the amount most personalities change during a lifetime (very little), to build such personalities from scratch would reasonably be expected to take >> 1000 years. People also come into this life with some actually useful intuitions and some preferences that they cannot have from experiences here. Sure, that could all be random and created in the womb, but I do not buy it. Random processes do not deliver very specific results on mass-scale that are actually useful. Random processes produce mostly unusable results, the more the complex the subject. And what human beings come equipped with into life is far too complex and far too little determined by genetics to be explained completely by evolution.
Elon Must is not an expert in CS. He has a BA in Physics and Economics. He primarily is an entrepreneur. He is not even an engineer and certainly no scientist.
The actual experts say we have zero actual intelligence in machines at this time and we have zero clue how to get there. Throwing more hardware at the problem does accomplish absolutely nothing. We did and do find out that many problems do not actually require intelligence to solve though, and it looks like driving a car (for example) is among them for most practical purposes.
Of course, since reality cannot support any hype or large investments here, many people start do create their own fantasies of how it must obviously be.
He did have an exceptionally good run though, especially as the doctors predicted he would not make it to 30 and nobody predicted he would be one of the best minds in physics, ever. He should stay out of CS though, as he does not even have the basics.
At least that is the only reason I can see why he is spewing dire predictions that are completely baseless and about things he does not even understand a bit. He really should stick to things he is good at (and exceptionally so) and stop disgracing himself.
The actual state of affairs is that the only "AI" we have is weak AI and that is the "AI" without "I". Weak AI is not intelligent at all, not even a dim glimmer. It is automation, and about as intelligent as a book of instructions (or a loaf of bread). In addition, there is _no_ known theory how actual intelligence could be implemented, not even with massively more computing power than we are ever to get. The things get faster and can deal with larger databases, but they are still utterly dumb automation. Throwing more computing power at the problem will accomplish nothing here or we would have seen that very dim glimmer of intelligence already a long time ago. Even the most stupid real intelligence would be exceptionally useful and massively better than automation. It would not have been overlooked. But there is absolutely nothing.
The other thing is that science still can only observe intelligence and consciousness as interface behavior, i.e. from a very long distance. While it is slowly moving closer to the question, what happens is that things get more mysterious. For example, the estimated computing power of a human brain is far too low to do some things that humans can do. And for consciousness, there is absolutely no explanation. Physics, as known today, would say that it is impossible and there would need to be some fundamental extensions to accommodate it. Yet nobody knows what they would look like. At the very least this means things are massively more complicated than the people predicting actual AI can imagine. And it does, of course, mean that actual AI will not be available anytime soon. Even if it can eventually be created, it may take centuries or longer. And then there is the additional problem: Will it have consciousness and free will? How smart will it be? (Could well be human average or below....) Will it work for humans? Will it need to be raised and educated for a decade or longer? Will it be possible to copy it or will it be unique and a copy will not work? Will it have a limited lifetime?
With all that, these doom&gloom scenarios regarding AI are completely moronic.
What is a real threat is automation. It will take a lot of human labor and that _will_ be a problem. Because, as it turns out, for most jobs there are large parts that do not actually require intelligence or a human body to do them. The ones that are safe are entertainers, educators, plumbers, MDs and nurses, emergency services, etc. But any desk-job is threatened and any factory or sales job as well. Sure, many of these will not vanish either, but 1 person will do the work that 10 or more did before and this time, no new jobs will be created unless we go into the space of completely useless work.
Thunderbird? Several things, all very annoying: Finally fix screen updates with large remote calendars. Make it compatible with iPhone-created invites. Stop wiping out entries I am in the process of making.
That is truly astounding. Are they, I don't know, just shoveling the money mostly out the windows? - FF still sucks, despite the speed being better now - Thunderbird, they are not even working on anymore AFAIK - Are they doing anything else that would justify their existence?
Well, the fact remains that the systemd idiots do not understand "Defense in Depth". That makes them unsuitable to develop anything with security impact. Their reaction also clearly shows that they are unwilling to learn and consider them to understand everything quite well. A sure recipe for disaster.
I.e. any "it was overlooked" theory must also include incompetence. "root" is one of a handful of well-known accounts, and of course you try to get into it without giving credentials.
In particular, because neuron-count is not that important. Mu guess would be that cats just did not care to please the experimenter(s) and they are now retaliating by calling cats stupid...
Indeed. All we have is claims by people to have consciousness. We have absolutely no clue what it is, yet it seems every reasonably functional human being finds it has it, or at least claims so. At the same time, there is no mechanism for consciousness in known Physics. For example, pseudo-profound bullshit like "consciousness is an illusion" is circular because an illusion needs consciousness. At the very least we need a fundamental extension of physics to accommodate that, but, as in Physics matter, energy, particles, waves, etc. have no identity, it is also possible that Physics does not even apply and the theory itself is entirely unsuitable to describe consciousness, as that very much seems to be tied to an unique identity. The interesting thing would then be to find out were the interface is, as consciousness in humans can observe and influence Physical reality and a human brain is certainly a physical object. Of course, physics cannot describe living matter at this time either, the problem may already start there.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is still dumb automation that has no clue what it does. The model has just gotten less limited, the model does not have understanding. And there is the little problem that this is about simple language, not complicated thoughts were humans need to think about how to express things. Automation on steroids, agreed, but even one billion monkeys will not ever produce one Mona Lisa. So no, not even a dim glimmer.
Thanks for the warning. About what I expected though...
I know. That is why I think the "currency" angle may be salvageable. Will be interesting to see whether that works or not.
And as somebody that uses certificate-based logins (ssh) regularly, I wonder what problem they are trying to solve....
Quite to the contrary of the article, some experts (derided as "geeks" in the article) are currently exploring what the blockchain is all _not_ good for or at least not any better than traditional solutions. Unfortunately, that likely includes basically everything, with a slight chance that some variant of the failed "currency" angle ("Bitcoin") may be salvageable if there is a way to reliably curb speculation and create stability.
In fact, I am currently supervising a BA thesis in this area and I expect that a mostly negative result will save the industry-partner a ton of money. I also already told the student that a negative result can certainly get a good grade if argued and justified well (same as a positive result, really). I have a second thesis lined up with a different student and industrial partner. Will be interesting to see what the outcomes are, but I do expect a "not now" or a "not ever unless special conditions are met".
Incidentally, "ethics" in the commercial space these days means "how can we manage to not get caught and still get rich". And please keep out the sociologists and designers, they really are mostly useless with very few exceptions.
Of course, nothing like that is true or even desirable. This story is utter nonsense. Credentials (whether passwords, certificates or seeds for OTP mechnisms) are under company control so their servers can access them easily and so they can revoke them fast. The blockchain has absolutely no place here. Incidentally, when it comes to public identities, the blockchain is about as useful as the PGP server network, albeit more complicated and more expensive, i.e. useless. The one thing that makes these identities worth more is signatures of (at least somewhat) trusted third parties on the public key, but only if they actually verified the identity.
Seriously, stop pumping Bitcoin with utterly stupid stories. Let it crash already and let those greedy and stupid enough to have bought late suffer.
I re-iterate: You massively overestimate what evolutionary optimization can do. Maybe read some literature on the subject before claiming complete nonsense?
Hawking has his weaknesses and AI phobia is one of them.
Indeed. And, like most phobias, completely irrational. No AI takeover will happen in his remaining lifetime (or mine or yours), if ever.
Most people do not have a clue. Also, who says you stop existing after death? As far as I can see, not even most religions claim that, although they immediately tell you how it is going to continue and they want your money and support or it will go badly for you. Not even Science is claiming that you stop existing at death. Science is claiming that your physical existence ends at death, but Science does not know how much of the full package that is and does not make any claims to that effect.
We can see a few things in people that come into this life. For example, they do not remember past lives in concrete form when they are old enough to talk about it. That could be because there are none, but it could also be because the first few years are sort of an erasure-phase. It could also be because concrete memories are actually stored physically in the brain and do indeed die with the body. But people come into this world with complex personalities already in place. From the amount most personalities change during a lifetime (very little), to build such personalities from scratch would reasonably be expected to take >> 1000 years. People also come into this life with some actually useful intuitions and some preferences that they cannot have from experiences here. Sure, that could all be random and created in the womb, but I do not buy it. Random processes do not deliver very specific results on mass-scale that are actually useful. Random processes produce mostly unusable results, the more the complex the subject. And what human beings come equipped with into life is far too complex and far too little determined by genetics to be explained completely by evolution.
Elon Must is not an expert in CS. He has a BA in Physics and Economics. He primarily is an entrepreneur. He is not even an engineer and certainly no scientist.
The actual experts say we have zero actual intelligence in machines at this time and we have zero clue how to get there. Throwing more hardware at the problem does accomplish absolutely nothing. We did and do find out that many problems do not actually require intelligence to solve though, and it looks like driving a car (for example) is among them for most practical purposes.
Of course, since reality cannot support any hype or large investments here, many people start do create their own fantasies of how it must obviously be.
You think corporations are intelligent? I see them more as slime-molds slowly digesting a non-resisting pile of trash.
He did have an exceptionally good run though, especially as the doctors predicted he would not make it to 30 and nobody predicted he would be one of the best minds in physics, ever. He should stay out of CS though, as he does not even have the basics.
At least that is the only reason I can see why he is spewing dire predictions that are completely baseless and about things he does not even understand a bit. He really should stick to things he is good at (and exceptionally so) and stop disgracing himself.
The actual state of affairs is that the only "AI" we have is weak AI and that is the "AI" without "I". Weak AI is not intelligent at all, not even a dim glimmer. It is automation, and about as intelligent as a book of instructions (or a loaf of bread). In addition, there is _no_ known theory how actual intelligence could be implemented, not even with massively more computing power than we are ever to get. The things get faster and can deal with larger databases, but they are still utterly dumb automation. Throwing more computing power at the problem will accomplish nothing here or we would have seen that very dim glimmer of intelligence already a long time ago. Even the most stupid real intelligence would be exceptionally useful and massively better than automation. It would not have been overlooked. But there is absolutely nothing.
The other thing is that science still can only observe intelligence and consciousness as interface behavior, i.e. from a very long distance. While it is slowly moving closer to the question, what happens is that things get more mysterious. For example, the estimated computing power of a human brain is far too low to do some things that humans can do. And for consciousness, there is absolutely no explanation. Physics, as known today, would say that it is impossible and there would need to be some fundamental extensions to accommodate it. Yet nobody knows what they would look like. At the very least this means things are massively more complicated than the people predicting actual AI can imagine. And it does, of course, mean that actual AI will not be available anytime soon. Even if it can eventually be created, it may take centuries or longer. And then there is the additional problem: Will it have consciousness and free will? How smart will it be? (Could well be human average or below....) Will it work for humans? Will it need to be raised and educated for a decade or longer? Will it be possible to copy it or will it be unique and a copy will not work? Will it have a limited lifetime?
With all that, these doom&gloom scenarios regarding AI are completely moronic.
What is a real threat is automation. It will take a lot of human labor and that _will_ be a problem. Because, as it turns out, for most jobs there are large parts that do not actually require intelligence or a human body to do them. The ones that are safe are entertainers, educators, plumbers, MDs and nurses, emergency services, etc. But any desk-job is threatened and any factory or sales job as well. Sure, many of these will not vanish either, but 1 person will do the work that 10 or more did before and this time, no new jobs will be created unless we go into the space of completely useless work.
Who cares. Browser speed was never an issue and is becoming even less so.
Well, 600 incompetents have less productivity than one really good one. They apparently decided to hire cheapest possible...
Indeed. Same here. The incompetence is staggering.
Thunderbird? Several things, all very annoying: Finally fix screen updates with large remote calendars. Make it compatible with iPhone-created invites. Stop wiping out entries I am in the process of making.
That is truly astounding. Are they, I don't know, just shoveling the money mostly out the windows?
- FF still sucks, despite the speed being better now
- Thunderbird, they are not even working on anymore AFAIK
- Are they doing anything else that would justify their existence?
Just means that this was either not tested at all or tested incompetently. Any halfway competent pen-tester would have found this.
Well, the fact remains that the systemd idiots do not understand "Defense in Depth". That makes them unsuitable to develop anything with security impact. Their reaction also clearly shows that they are unwilling to learn and consider them to understand everything quite well. A sure recipe for disaster.
I.e. any "it was overlooked" theory must also include incompetence. "root" is one of a handful of well-known accounts, and of course you try to get into it without giving credentials.
You vastly overestimate the quality level of evolutionary optimization.
In particular, because neuron-count is not that important. Mu guess would be that cats just did not care to please the experimenter(s) and they are now retaliating by calling cats stupid...
Indeed. All we have is claims by people to have consciousness. We have absolutely no clue what it is, yet it seems every reasonably functional human being finds it has it, or at least claims so. At the same time, there is no mechanism for consciousness in known Physics. For example, pseudo-profound bullshit like "consciousness is an illusion" is circular because an illusion needs consciousness. At the very least we need a fundamental extension of physics to accommodate that, but, as in Physics matter, energy, particles, waves, etc. have no identity, it is also possible that Physics does not even apply and the theory itself is entirely unsuitable to describe consciousness, as that very much seems to be tied to an unique identity. The interesting thing would then be to find out were the interface is, as consciousness in humans can observe and influence Physical reality and a human brain is certainly a physical object. Of course, physics cannot describe living matter at this time either, the problem may already start there.