I.e. more fat, more sugar, less agility and less quality everywhere? I think I see where Trump is going with that. He is trying to re-create the success of the fast-food industry in education! Genius!
Yes, in theory, you could use physics and create a complete model of a mouse at the atomic level but the amount of processing required to do so would be astronomical.
That is quite unclear. A statement like that requires proof, and there is far too much emergent behavior in a mouse to claim that this was "obvious".
Indeed. We even have trouble teaching everybody to read and write. These higher skilled jobs will not be accessible to a lot of people, because they require too much abstract knowledge and skills.
One problem here is that most people cannot actually plan for this future. Sure, if you have a lot of experience and a good PhD in a sought-after engineering field, you do not need to worry. But most people cannot get there and planning for it is futile. Even lawyers (the most well established parasites of all time) are starting to get replaced for simpler legal tasks.
He also misses that humans cannot be shifted to higher-skilled jobs indefinitely. Some of that is possible (for example all those jobs that require being literate is such a past shift, but even there we are already losing people), but that can be done only to a very small degree with what automation is starting to be able to do. The number of low-skilled jobs is decreasing at the same time without being replaced in other places. While I think there will be low-skill jobs available for a long, long time, the numbers will just be far too low to get everyone that can only do these one of them. I would expect this drops to 50% in the next 20 years or so and eventually to something like 10...20%. This is just my WAG, though.
And in other news, the actual argument is that this time is different, and that there are some convincing reasons to think so. Requires a bit of actual understanding of what is going on to see that though.
It is. But even Kurzweil seem to have noticed that there is still no AI available or on the horizon that could do a "singularity". To anybody with real AI knowledge, the idea if a "singularity" is completely laughable, of course. And to anybody that understands the psychology, the prediction of a "singularity" is simply a prediction of "God" coming back into the world (after Science has eliminated the idea for anybody actually following the scientific approach to thing), just that it will be implemented by technology. A meaningless fantasy, driven bey a deep urge for a superior authority in many people.
"Futurist" is a special sub-species of "idiot". A smart person understands that the future cannot be meaningfully predicted. A "Futurist" lacks that insight and mistakes his fantasies for "predictions". Ray Kurzweil is a stellar example of that effect. And, as usual, his "predictions" are nonsense. This time around, we have automation that can do as much or more than a large part of the workforce. That means there will likely not be new jobs that these people can fill and this is the first time in history that happens. This is not an event with precedent, unless you count the influx of educated slaves in ancient Rome. However I doubt we can extrapolate from the effects back then, if they are even known.
"Emergent behavior" is a Science-joke. It means "we have no clue what is going on and our model is very likely incomplete". Physics as known today, incidentally, does not allow "emergent behavior".
Well, not really. What they have run into is that training and debugging more sophisticated classificators is already pretty much a nightmare. These things are nowhere near intelligent though. Perhaps the main problem is that you cannot "explain" things to a statistical classificator, you can only show things and what you show might not actually be exactly what you believe you show to it. And the second problem is that if you not carefully synthesize the training data, you do usually miss things, as the fascist-racist-effects in some experiments with real-world data recently have shown.
But yes, this indicates that things are very complicated indeed and anybody expecting rapid progress is just kidding themselves.
I do claim that nobody knows at this time which side is right and that neither side currently has any strong evidence. That, of course, panics quite a few people because they cannot handle the unknown and they come up with the most ridiculous "obvious truths".
You are right about the sides though and while fortunately Minski cannot spout anymore bullshit on the topic, his followers are being hard at work to propagate their fundamentalist belief that OF COURSE they are right and OF COURSE science supports that claim, when nothing like that is true. These people are not looking for truth, they are looking for a religion surrogate. Of course, some factions you find on the other side are not any better. Believing in "Quantum Mysticism", for example, seems to be mainly a sign of excessive use of psycho-drugs.
And then somebody hacks the OS and can compromise the Trust Zone anyways. No, what we need to do is secure the OS, because this is just one more case where anybody that owns the OS owns everything.
That one is older, but nonetheless quite true. It is conveniently ignored by the AI fanatics, in particular those that think simulating a human brain would create AI. If feasible, it would have exactly all these issues and be basically useless.
I Like "FI" (fake intelligence). Because that is what it is: It can fake being intelligent for a limited task. In a sense, it is really good automation. And such a thing is hugely useful, because we are not finding out that many tasks we thought require intelligence actually do not (like playing Go). Many of these tasks are accessible to fake intelligence.
Of course, the other thing we find these days (even though many cling to a desperate belief it is otherwise) is that we do not even have a hint of general intelligence in anything computers can do and we have looked really, really hard.
I like that term. It accurately describes what is going in. Now, there still will be some stupid people claiming that human brains are doing nothing but statistics and hence intelligence and consciousness happen when you pile enough statistics on top of each other, but there is always an ample supply of smart-stupid people with selective blindness. At least psychology knows their number, namely that these people are not able to live with uncertainty, so they make up sophisticated-looking pseudo-explanation and just ignore all inconvenient facts.
No, actually there is zero evidence in the other direction too. Physicalism is just a fundamentalist quasi-religious belief, it is not grounded in fact. In fact, what you people would need to do is to stop claiming that neural nets are _sufficient_ to produce intelligence and consciousness, until you have some actual evidence for that. All you have at this time is unproven assumptions (a very beloved "proof" technique in religious circles) that basically say "everything is physical, hence consciousness and intelligence is physical, hence neural nets must be able to do it". That is not science. That is an insult to anybody that actually understands science. "Everything is physical" (with regards to known Physics) is about as valid scientifically as saying "everything was created by God".
The actual state of things is that nobody knows. Stop claiming you know. You just look like morons praying to a surrogate god.
Oh and side-note: From now 60 years of research into neural networks, it does not look at all like your quasi-religion is any more valid than all the other fundamentalist beliefs.
Indeed. People were stupid back then and wanted cheap slaves, they are still stupid today and still want those cheap slaves. At the same time, they do not understand one bit what is going on and hence are afraid of the cheap slaves. That is about all the substance the current AI craze has.
I recently had a chance to ask somebody high on the engineering side of the Watson project about human like mental skills in machines. His answer was an immediate "not in the next 50 years", which is a polite way of saying "we have no clue whether it is possible". These people have looked very hard. If they cannot see it today, then nobody can. Of course, there are a lot more fantasy-driven people than those driven by a rational mind and hence the AI craze and scare will repeat time and again, despite zero foundation in what is actually done in science and technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I.e. more fat, more sugar, less agility and less quality everywhere? I think I see where Trump is going with that. He is trying to re-create the success of the fast-food industry in education! Genius!
Yes, in theory, you could use physics and create a complete model of a mouse at the atomic level but the amount of processing required to do so would be astronomical.
That is quite unclear. A statement like that requires proof, and there is far too much emergent behavior in a mouse to claim that this was "obvious".
Indeed. We even have trouble teaching everybody to read and write. These higher skilled jobs will not be accessible to a lot of people, because they require too much abstract knowledge and skills.
One problem here is that most people cannot actually plan for this future. Sure, if you have a lot of experience and a good PhD in a sought-after engineering field, you do not need to worry. But most people cannot get there and planning for it is futile. Even lawyers (the most well established parasites of all time) are starting to get replaced for simpler legal tasks.
He also misses that humans cannot be shifted to higher-skilled jobs indefinitely. Some of that is possible (for example all those jobs that require being literate is such a past shift, but even there we are already losing people), but that can be done only to a very small degree with what automation is starting to be able to do. The number of low-skilled jobs is decreasing at the same time without being replaced in other places. While I think there will be low-skill jobs available for a long, long time, the numbers will just be far too low to get everyone that can only do these one of them. I would expect this drops to 50% in the next 20 years or so and eventually to something like 10...20%. This is just my WAG, though.
And in other news, the actual argument is that this time is different, and that there are some convincing reasons to think so. Requires a bit of actual understanding of what is going on to see that though.
Naa, just the most visible in tech circles.
That one is simple: The job-loss happens a) somewhere else and b) in the next steps that follow this upgrade later on.
It is. But even Kurzweil seem to have noticed that there is still no AI available or on the horizon that could do a "singularity". To anybody with real AI knowledge, the idea if a "singularity" is completely laughable, of course. And to anybody that understands the psychology, the prediction of a "singularity" is simply a prediction of "God" coming back into the world (after Science has eliminated the idea for anybody actually following the scientific approach to thing), just that it will be implemented by technology. A meaningless fantasy, driven bey a deep urge for a superior authority in many people.
"Futurist" is a special sub-species of "idiot". A smart person understands that the future cannot be meaningfully predicted. A "Futurist" lacks that insight and mistakes his fantasies for "predictions". Ray Kurzweil is a stellar example of that effect. And, as usual, his "predictions" are nonsense. This time around, we have automation that can do as much or more than a large part of the workforce. That means there will likely not be new jobs that these people can fill and this is the first time in history that happens. This is not an event with precedent, unless you count the influx of educated slaves in ancient Rome. However I doubt we can extrapolate from the effects back then, if they are even known.
"Emergent behavior" is a Science-joke. It means "we have no clue what is going on and our model is very likely incomplete". Physics as known today, incidentally, does not allow "emergent behavior".
Then why do you think the meme of "robots that serve us" (and then possibly revolt and kill us) is refusing to die?
Well, not really. What they have run into is that training and debugging more sophisticated classificators is already pretty much a nightmare. These things are nowhere near intelligent though. Perhaps the main problem is that you cannot "explain" things to a statistical classificator, you can only show things and what you show might not actually be exactly what you believe you show to it. And the second problem is that if you not carefully synthesize the training data, you do usually miss things, as the fascist-racist-effects in some experiments with real-world data recently have shown.
But yes, this indicates that things are very complicated indeed and anybody expecting rapid progress is just kidding themselves.
I do claim that nobody knows at this time which side is right and that neither side currently has any strong evidence. That, of course, panics quite a few people because they cannot handle the unknown and they come up with the most ridiculous "obvious truths".
You are right about the sides though and while fortunately Minski cannot spout anymore bullshit on the topic, his followers are being hard at work to propagate their fundamentalist belief that OF COURSE they are right and OF COURSE science supports that claim, when nothing like that is true. These people are not looking for truth, they are looking for a religion surrogate. Of course, some factions you find on the other side are not any better. Believing in "Quantum Mysticism", for example, seems to be mainly a sign of excessive use of psycho-drugs.
And then somebody hacks the OS and can compromise the Trust Zone anyways. No, what we need to do is secure the OS, because this is just one more case where anybody that owns the OS owns everything.
Ah, I see. You are one of the morons responsible for the current mess with insecure and unreliable software. Great job!
I am pretty much doing that. Calling what is left "C++" would not be accurate anymore though.
That one is older, but nonetheless quite true. It is conveniently ignored by the AI fanatics, in particular those that think simulating a human brain would create AI. If feasible, it would have exactly all these issues and be basically useless.
I Like "FI" (fake intelligence). Because that is what it is: It can fake being intelligent for a limited task. In a sense, it is really good automation. And such a thing is hugely useful, because we are not finding out that many tasks we thought require intelligence actually do not (like playing Go). Many of these tasks are accessible to fake intelligence.
Of course, the other thing we find these days (even though many cling to a desperate belief it is otherwise) is that we do not even have a hint of general intelligence in anything computers can do and we have looked really, really hard.
Ah, Marvin "the idiot" Minsky. I am really glad he is not part of that conversation anymore. He has done immense damage to Science.
I like that term. It accurately describes what is going in. Now, there still will be some stupid people claiming that human brains are doing nothing but statistics and hence intelligence and consciousness happen when you pile enough statistics on top of each other, but there is always an ample supply of smart-stupid people with selective blindness. At least psychology knows their number, namely that these people are not able to live with uncertainty, so they make up sophisticated-looking pseudo-explanation and just ignore all inconvenient facts.
No, actually there is zero evidence in the other direction too. Physicalism is just a fundamentalist quasi-religious belief, it is not grounded in fact. In fact, what you people would need to do is to stop claiming that neural nets are _sufficient_ to produce intelligence and consciousness, until you have some actual evidence for that. All you have at this time is unproven assumptions (a very beloved "proof" technique in religious circles) that basically say "everything is physical, hence consciousness and intelligence is physical, hence neural nets must be able to do it". That is not science. That is an insult to anybody that actually understands science. "Everything is physical" (with regards to known Physics) is about as valid scientifically as saying "everything was created by God".
The actual state of things is that nobody knows. Stop claiming you know. You just look like morons praying to a surrogate god.
Oh and side-note: From now 60 years of research into neural networks, it does not look at all like your quasi-religion is any more valid than all the other fundamentalist beliefs.
Oh, that one is easy and already solved: Just use a really dumb (i.e. average) human and there you are.
Indeed. People were stupid back then and wanted cheap slaves, they are still stupid today and still want those cheap slaves. At the same time, they do not understand one bit what is going on and hence are afraid of the cheap slaves. That is about all the substance the current AI craze has.
I recently had a chance to ask somebody high on the engineering side of the Watson project about human like mental skills in machines. His answer was an immediate "not in the next 50 years", which is a polite way of saying "we have no clue whether it is possible". These people have looked very hard. If they cannot see it today, then nobody can. Of course, there are a lot more fantasy-driven people than those driven by a rational mind and hence the AI craze and scare will repeat time and again, despite zero foundation in what is actually done in science and technology.
Indeed. Calling these "AI" is basically a marketing lie, nothing else.