I suspect there will be 2 phases of AI growth. The first phase will be giving "bots" the ability do relatively complex but practical tasks, and the 2nd phase will be creating systems that partition and track each intelligence step so that they use divide-and-conquer of both AI-creating staff, and of processes (modules). This will make it easier to understand how a bot acts the way it does, and to tune it.
AI will grow regimented and standardized, along the lines of MVC and similar development partition techniques. There may be pattern-detection sub-engines, rule-based sub-engines, logic-based sub-engines, physics-modelling-based sub-engines, etc.
The second regimented kind may be behind the first type, being say 5 to 10 years behind in ability, but both will improve over time.
I'm 50 and not seeing it. I have coworkers in their 60s and they're not seeing it...software development is about as close to a pure merit-based industry as I've seen.
Sorry, but my experience and that of colleagues differ.
I first noticed it myself when I used to do contracting. Multiple times in contract interviews they'd ask variations of, "We'd like to confirm you are comfortable working for a project lead who is younger." They wouldn't ask such unless something about age made them hesitant.
Perhaps they had encountered people similar to your final paragraph who felt their (narrow) experience was under-appreciated or under-compensated, and worried I'd be one of them also. In a sense it's a kind of profiling where enough older people carry such resentments to form a stereotype that creates worries for those hiring. Humans do profile; I'm just the messenger. It's often not overt, but dances around in the back of the head, influencing decisions.
Most other fields value experience more compared to IT such that those in IT perhaps on average don't handle the plateau properly as they age, generating a general impression in IT that older people have a chip on their shoulder. The plateau surprises them and they react with a degree of frustrustration and resentment that is a normal and expected human reaction to such.
One solution is warn and educate those going into IT about age-related issues and perceptions so they don't get frustrated and spoil the entire apple cart for older people in general. As the scouts say, Be Prepared.
Career guides & counselors often ignore the age issue, which is a mistake.
the core issue, not enough people know about software development to be able to do it well.
And judge it. Often books are judged by covers by those not fully understanding what they are looking at, and younger people seem to have a knack for finding and "surfing" fashions and fads to seem cool and up-to-date to the uninitiated.
One guy recently convinced the boss to use microservices (ms) for something that clearly didn't need ms. The ms pusher got all kinds of bullshit off the web about ms being magic plug-in Lego-like building blocks that give you instant abstraction and reuse (above what app-language API's can provide). I still haven't convinced the boss it's bullshit for our projects. (The boss is smart, but he's from another platform and still new to our stack.)
If I were younger and more naive, I'd go along with the ms BS with a smile that would probably superficially make me look better to management.
A lot of software development is a fashion/fad chase, and young people usually do better at fashion/fads. Logic is secondary. The bastard will probably stick something "AI" or quantum-edge-clouds in it next for the sheer hell of it, or maybe for resume buzzword collecting.
My experience was to be able to pick up business and project management skills and be able to adapt them to the circumstances you find yourself in. It's this adaptability that links your career to longevity as management starts to ask your advice and takes you
Yes, that's why earlier I said "unless you move into management-esque positions" (paraphrased). To be frank, I'm often right about stuff because of my long experience of watching many things go wrong, but few give me any credit for being right. If I point it out, I sound like a braggart or a get-off-my-lawn trend hater. Maybe if I were super articulate I'd find a better way to present assessments. Still working on de-blunting my style.
tough to break into the profession because nobody wants some kid who knows nothing
During economic slumps that can be true. The ideal candidate has roughly 7 to 15 years of experience for "established" technologies, and about 3 to 7 for newer stuff.
In short, the industry "likes the middle". Both age "ends" get squeezed. (That didn't sound PC, did it.)
Also note that just because your shop values experienced developers, does not mean others do.
If your solution to problems that businesses have is to run to regulators to solve...
Where did I say or imply that?
The correct "free-market" control on capitalist monopoly is for the "consumers" to refuse to buy these product and to start up competing businesses...
They can spend billions of dollars to keep the little guy little. It's like fighting a fire-hose with a squirt-gun. It's a wonderful ideal, but often fails in practice. I can convey dozens of historical Microsoft/IBM/AT&T/etc. shannegins (and there's probably many more under-table activities that are unknown to the public).
People like you are the exact reason why Google Fiber failed
The rest of your argument seems to be, "regulation leads to crony capitalism, and therefore we should do nothing". If that's an incorrect summary, feel free to provide specifics and evidence.
Regulation is rarely perfect, I agree, but often better than no regulation when dealing with oligopolies/monopolies. Just because something is not perfect is not by itself a reason to throw it away.
Well, many of the others listed are medical-related. Those professions often have to deal with life-threatening emergencies, people in severe pain/duress, etc. For most software dev jobs, nobody gets injured, dies, nor puked on no matter how bad you or your colleagues screw up.
The big problem with software development is it has no direct future. If you don't move into management-esque positions, your career will plateau early. It can be decent money, don't get me wrong, but it's a poor ticket to a bigger and better future.
"Old" developers are typically not very welcomed. The reasons are a long and winding topic, and there are exceptions, but the bottom line is the software biz is not kind to "age".
Warning to telecoms: if you don't like being regulated, don't invent reasons to get regulated.
Get together and come up with a mutual industry agreement on when and how to share customer data in a way that's not confusing or misleading to customers. Sign the agreement and hold each other accountable. The alternative is that the gov't will do such for you after you play fast and loose for short-term profits and bungle it one day.
It may work for formal meetings/gatherings, but perhaps not hobnobbing and ad-hoc communication between individuals or small groups of individuals working in parallel to other sub-teams, or after-conference dinners. Maybe we are envisioning different conference arrangements/configurations/stages.
Trump does not like science. It is too liberal for him so I doubt he cares.
T is not really a conservative. His history is more centric, or at least vacillating. He seems to have shifted right for political reasons, not personal belief.
I don't think it's that he places zero value on Astronomy and science, but more that his wall is far more important to him and/or his current base.
If he helped fund the discovery of a new full-sized planet, he'd love that. Even if he can't get it named after himself, it's still the kind of bragging rights he so craves. But it's hard to schedule big discoveries like that such that the wall is more concrete (pun intended).
In short, his political positions are driven mostly by his ego. I'd argue his ego weighs more on his decisions than even xenophobia. (Other Presidents may have been driven by ego or xenophobia also.)
wouldn't we all be better off if this "conference" was held virtually in cyberspace instead of wasting fossil fuels [on] travel?
Most humans do better work face-to-face, for whatever reason. I don't entirely know why, it's just the way it is. Possible reasons:
1) People are not trained on how to use remote collaboration tools, such as wikis and discussion boards. 2) Our collaboration tools are still immature. 3) Many are just more motivated communicating face to face, for social reasons. (Slashdotters are probably not a good sample of such people.) 4) Hand gestures and facial expressions matter, even if we are not fully aware of their influence.
I've kicked around making an open-source collaboration tool that's a combination of Lotus Notes, Wiki's, and threaded discussion boards. The hard part is balancing simplicity, structure, and flexibility; which should probably go without saying. I don't want to risk feature-creep like Project Xanadu did. (Yes, some hate Lotus Notes, but I really liked some features of it and feel the concept is on to something.)
and instead goes off to consider a hypothetical situation.
What's wrong with that? It's done all the time on Slashdot and intellectual discussions. I'm curious how it would change the original premise if such did happen, hypothetically.
I guess what I trying to get at is whether or not "wanting" changes anything, and what the meaning of "want" is.
How can "want" or "desire" be objectively measured? Where are the Want-O-Meters in the labs? To discuss the original statement, I believe that has to be addressed. Does a bacterium "want" food? If not, does a worm? Does an octopus?
Yes, we on the Right are far too stupid to understand that there really are 87 genders, as SCIENCE has unequivocally proven.
Better yet, science tells us that "gender" is not binary* such that hard-wiring our laws around a binary definition could cause problems.
* Even if humans are not "artificially" altered, hormones and genitalia may not "match" each other in the traditional sense due to birth defects, mutations, or just unusual gene interaction. And there's always motorcycle accidents and war injuries.
How about breaking it into steps? Start out by having a control center that you tell it what textual commands do: a command-line interface. Thus, "Dim the front lights" will trigger a set of macros that dim the lights that you select and set to your selected brightness amount.
When the text commands are tested and work right, you THEN hook it up to the voice assistant. It may take some feedback training to make sure it interprets them right. It may pronounce a list of multiple candidate matches and ask which you intended if it has problems finding a "clean" match. After time it could learn your pronunciation pattern for a given command and stop giving you those multiple options. You can also set up a "synonym list" to cross-translate similar ways of saying the same thing. You may also want to create custom feedback responses to make sure it interpreted you correctly, such as "All front 4 lights have been dimmed to 40 percent" or the like. Or just play Beatles tune snippets that you associate with your lights. "She came in through the bathroom window" for example. (Inspired by an overzealous climbing fan.)
You may need to have the voice assistant distinguish between your custom commands versus general pre-canned commands like "what's the weather tomorrow"? Maybe a name like "Ralph" will trigger the custom bot, and "Alexa" the standard commercial bot.
Sure, it's a fair amount of work, but most "auto-house" people are fiddling hobbyists anyhow. Package them with good samples and virtual testing kits. If the interfaces are standardized, then each vender doesn't have to provide a voice assistant, just a command-line interface to hook up to another vendor's voice assistant.
In general I believe AI will have to learn to component-tize its processes in order to better tune, study, and dissect results. It's why alternatives to neural-nets, such as factor tables (see sig below), should be explored more. Neural nets have arguably been the first big practical AI breakthrough, but we seem to be hitting a wall with them and need look around wider for other tools.
I took an AI course in the late 1980's, and there were several techniques described that one could apply. No one technique can probably do the job by itself; good AI will probably take multiple techniques, and the industry needs practice glueing multiple techniques to triangulate answers and split the load up. Modularizing techniques is to both better understand & tune the intermediate results, and to allow mixing and matching the best-of-breed or best-fit-for-the-job. Modularization is what made the PC clones take off: you could buy monitors, disk drives, printers, add-on cards, etc. from many different vendors. AI seems still in the mid-70's where vendors tried to control the whole personal computing environment.
Lone-wolf bots won't cut it. Even if lone-wolf bots end up working, they may be too difficult to extract their reasoning steps from. It may be great job security for the one mop-headed professor who understands the gizmo, but if AI is to spread, then tool-type specialists without PhD's will need to be leveraged.
Next up: E-Santa that crawls down your chimney to deliver packages. Drone "reindeer" lands on your roof, Santa-bot then crawls down with packages.
I suspect newer houses will have large lock-boxes for such. The advantage of a lock-box is that even if a thief cracks it, they only have access to the lock-box. The other end of the door will lock, similar to a garage entry door.
Then again, if a thief can crawl into the lock-box, they'll have a long time to pick the lock or dig through the wall without anybody seeing.
What about drive-through package pick-up; kind of a post-office-done-right. McPackage?
These virtual assistants don't want anything, they are literally incapable of wanting.
Depends how you define "want". What if a virus, hack, or greedy co. uses something like a genetic algorithm to breed e-assistants that trick families into buying items and/or collecting personal info? It will then systematically "want" to succeed as much as any critter "wants" food.
It may be a good long time before computers have "common sense". But I wonder if enough pattern matching can be thrown at the applications that they are "good enough" for common tasks? If they sample enough requests from enough people they can probably narrow down an appropriate action based on similar responses from many other people.
How far can brute-force pattern matching carry these things? Putting common sense into these is of course the ideal, but until that Great Barrier is cracked, companies will try to push the limits of pattern matching. It will be interesting to see how far it can go.
Regardless, it may require a lot of personal info like the name of your family members, marriage status, what rooms are in your house, typical schedules (work, school, etc.), if you have stairs, if you have pets, etc.
Then again, a human butler would also need to know such to avoid asking redundant questions and to understand basic context. The difference is a butler is less likely to share such info with pesky marketers and dictators.
Angry Dave: "HAL, open the pod bay doors or I'll go into your memory room and yank your f*cking chips so hard you'll sing Daisy like a crying child! And I don't need a damned helmet; I practiced hopping the airlock because I don't trust you rotten computers! Do it now or spew chips! 5...4...3..."
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect there will be 2 phases of AI growth. The first phase will be giving "bots" the ability do relatively complex but practical tasks, and the 2nd phase will be creating systems that partition and track each intelligence step so that they use divide-and-conquer of both AI-creating staff, and of processes (modules). This will make it easier to understand how a bot acts the way it does, and to tune it.
AI will grow regimented and standardized, along the lines of MVC and similar development partition techniques. There may be pattern-detection sub-engines, rule-based sub-engines, logic-based sub-engines, physics-modelling-based sub-engines, etc.
The second regimented kind may be behind the first type, being say 5 to 10 years behind in ability, but both will improve over time.
It's less likely to happen elsewhere, and thus less likely to cause the side-effects mentioned.
If so, that underscores my other comments about "typical" expectations being shattered in IT Land.
Sorry, but my experience and that of colleagues differ.
I first noticed it myself when I used to do contracting. Multiple times in contract interviews they'd ask variations of, "We'd like to confirm you are comfortable working for a project lead who is younger." They wouldn't ask such unless something about age made them hesitant.
Perhaps they had encountered people similar to your final paragraph who felt their (narrow) experience was under-appreciated or under-compensated, and worried I'd be one of them also. In a sense it's a kind of profiling where enough older people carry such resentments to form a stereotype that creates worries for those hiring. Humans do profile; I'm just the messenger. It's often not overt, but dances around in the back of the head, influencing decisions.
Most other fields value experience more compared to IT such that those in IT perhaps on average don't handle the plateau properly as they age, generating a general impression in IT that older people have a chip on their shoulder. The plateau surprises them and they react with a degree of frustrustration and resentment that is a normal and expected human reaction to such.
One solution is warn and educate those going into IT about age-related issues and perceptions so they don't get frustrated and spoil the entire apple cart for older people in general. As the scouts say, Be Prepared.
Career guides & counselors often ignore the age issue, which is a mistake.
They put the "down" in trickle-down.
And judge it. Often books are judged by covers by those not fully understanding what they are looking at, and younger people seem to have a knack for finding and "surfing" fashions and fads to seem cool and up-to-date to the uninitiated.
One guy recently convinced the boss to use microservices (ms) for something that clearly didn't need ms. The ms pusher got all kinds of bullshit off the web about ms being magic plug-in Lego-like building blocks that give you instant abstraction and reuse (above what app-language API's can provide). I still haven't convinced the boss it's bullshit for our projects. (The boss is smart, but he's from another platform and still new to our stack.)
If I were younger and more naive, I'd go along with the ms BS with a smile that would probably superficially make me look better to management.
A lot of software development is a fashion/fad chase, and young people usually do better at fashion/fads. Logic is secondary. The bastard will probably stick something "AI" or quantum-edge-clouds in it next for the sheer hell of it, or maybe for resume buzzword collecting.
Yes, that's why earlier I said "unless you move into management-esque positions" (paraphrased). To be frank, I'm often right about stuff because of my long experience of watching many things go wrong, but few give me any credit for being right. If I point it out, I sound like a braggart or a get-off-my-lawn trend hater. Maybe if I were super articulate I'd find a better way to present assessments. Still working on de-blunting my style.
A lot happens in business on the fuzzy boundaries of socializing and business. I'm just the messenger.
During economic slumps that can be true. The ideal candidate has roughly 7 to 15 years of experience for "established" technologies, and about 3 to 7 for newer stuff.
In short, the industry "likes the middle". Both age "ends" get squeezed. (That didn't sound PC, did it.)
Also note that just because your shop values experienced developers, does not mean others do.
Where did I say or imply that?
They can spend billions of dollars to keep the little guy little. It's like fighting a fire-hose with a squirt-gun. It's a wonderful ideal, but often fails in practice. I can convey dozens of historical Microsoft/IBM/AT&T/etc. shannegins (and there's probably many more under-table activities that are unknown to the public).
I made Google screw up?
The rest of your argument seems to be, "regulation leads to crony capitalism, and therefore we should do nothing". If that's an incorrect summary, feel free to provide specifics and evidence.
Regulation is rarely perfect, I agree, but often better than no regulation when dealing with oligopolies/monopolies. Just because something is not perfect is not by itself a reason to throw it away.
Well, many of the others listed are medical-related. Those professions often have to deal with life-threatening emergencies, people in severe pain/duress, etc. For most software dev jobs, nobody gets injured, dies, nor puked on no matter how bad you or your colleagues screw up.
The big problem with software development is it has no direct future. If you don't move into management-esque positions, your career will plateau early. It can be decent money, don't get me wrong, but it's a poor ticket to a bigger and better future.
"Old" developers are typically not very welcomed. The reasons are a long and winding topic, and there are exceptions, but the bottom line is the software biz is not kind to "age".
Warning to telecoms: if you don't like being regulated, don't invent reasons to get regulated.
Get together and come up with a mutual industry agreement on when and how to share customer data in a way that's not confusing or misleading to customers. Sign the agreement and hold each other accountable. The alternative is that the gov't will do such for you after you play fast and loose for short-term profits and bungle it one day.
It may work for formal meetings/gatherings, but perhaps not hobnobbing and ad-hoc communication between individuals or small groups of individuals working in parallel to other sub-teams, or after-conference dinners. Maybe we are envisioning different conference arrangements/configurations/stages.
Le Huh? Apples to peacocks.
Seems the wall is working already.
T is not really a conservative. His history is more centric, or at least vacillating. He seems to have shifted right for political reasons, not personal belief.
I don't think it's that he places zero value on Astronomy and science, but more that his wall is far more important to him and/or his current base.
If he helped fund the discovery of a new full-sized planet, he'd love that. Even if he can't get it named after himself, it's still the kind of bragging rights he so craves. But it's hard to schedule big discoveries like that such that the wall is more concrete (pun intended).
In short, his political positions are driven mostly by his ego. I'd argue his ego weighs more on his decisions than even xenophobia. (Other Presidents may have been driven by ego or xenophobia also.)
Most humans do better work face-to-face, for whatever reason. I don't entirely know why, it's just the way it is. Possible reasons:
1) People are not trained on how to use remote collaboration tools, such as wikis and discussion boards.
2) Our collaboration tools are still immature.
3) Many are just more motivated communicating face to face, for social reasons. (Slashdotters are probably not a good sample of such people.)
4) Hand gestures and facial expressions matter, even if we are not fully aware of their influence.
I've kicked around making an open-source collaboration tool that's a combination of Lotus Notes, Wiki's, and threaded discussion boards. The hard part is balancing simplicity, structure, and flexibility; which should probably go without saying. I don't want to risk feature-creep like Project Xanadu did. (Yes, some hate Lotus Notes, but I really liked some features of it and feel the concept is on to something.)
What's wrong with that? It's done all the time on Slashdot and intellectual discussions. I'm curious how it would change the original premise if such did happen, hypothetically.
I guess what I trying to get at is whether or not "wanting" changes anything, and what the meaning of "want" is.
How can "want" or "desire" be objectively measured? Where are the Want-O-Meters in the labs? To discuss the original statement, I believe that has to be addressed. Does a bacterium "want" food? If not, does a worm? Does an octopus?
Better yet, science tells us that "gender" is not binary* such that hard-wiring our laws around a binary definition could cause problems.
* Even if humans are not "artificially" altered, hormones and genitalia may not "match" each other in the traditional sense due to birth defects, mutations, or just unusual gene interaction. And there's always motorcycle accidents and war injuries.
How about breaking it into steps? Start out by having a control center that you tell it what textual commands do: a command-line interface. Thus, "Dim the front lights" will trigger a set of macros that dim the lights that you select and set to your selected brightness amount.
When the text commands are tested and work right, you THEN hook it up to the voice assistant. It may take some feedback training to make sure it interprets them right. It may pronounce a list of multiple candidate matches and ask which you intended if it has problems finding a "clean" match. After time it could learn your pronunciation pattern for a given command and stop giving you those multiple options. You can also set up a "synonym list" to cross-translate similar ways of saying the same thing. You may also want to create custom feedback responses to make sure it interpreted you correctly, such as "All front 4 lights have been dimmed to 40 percent" or the like. Or just play Beatles tune snippets that you associate with your lights. "She came in through the bathroom window" for example. (Inspired by an overzealous climbing fan.)
You may need to have the voice assistant distinguish between your custom commands versus general pre-canned commands like "what's the weather tomorrow"? Maybe a name like "Ralph" will trigger the custom bot, and "Alexa" the standard commercial bot.
Sure, it's a fair amount of work, but most "auto-house" people are fiddling hobbyists anyhow. Package them with good samples and virtual testing kits. If the interfaces are standardized, then each vender doesn't have to provide a voice assistant, just a command-line interface to hook up to another vendor's voice assistant.
In general I believe AI will have to learn to component-tize its processes in order to better tune, study, and dissect results. It's why alternatives to neural-nets, such as factor tables (see sig below), should be explored more. Neural nets have arguably been the first big practical AI breakthrough, but we seem to be hitting a wall with them and need look around wider for other tools.
I took an AI course in the late 1980's, and there were several techniques described that one could apply. No one technique can probably do the job by itself; good AI will probably take multiple techniques, and the industry needs practice glueing multiple techniques to triangulate answers and split the load up. Modularizing techniques is to both better understand & tune the intermediate results, and to allow mixing and matching the best-of-breed or best-fit-for-the-job. Modularization is what made the PC clones take off: you could buy monitors, disk drives, printers, add-on cards, etc. from many different vendors. AI seems still in the mid-70's where vendors tried to control the whole personal computing environment.
Lone-wolf bots won't cut it. Even if lone-wolf bots end up working, they may be too difficult to extract their reasoning steps from. It may be great job security for the one mop-headed professor who understands the gizmo, but if AI is to spread, then tool-type specialists without PhD's will need to be leveraged.
Next up: E-Santa that crawls down your chimney to deliver packages. Drone "reindeer" lands on your roof, Santa-bot then crawls down with packages.
I suspect newer houses will have large lock-boxes for such. The advantage of a lock-box is that even if a thief cracks it, they only have access to the lock-box. The other end of the door will lock, similar to a garage entry door.
Then again, if a thief can crawl into the lock-box, they'll have a long time to pick the lock or dig through the wall without anybody seeing.
What about drive-through package pick-up; kind of a post-office-done-right. McPackage?
Depends how you define "want". What if a virus, hack, or greedy co. uses something like a genetic algorithm to breed e-assistants that trick families into buying items and/or collecting personal info? It will then systematically "want" to succeed as much as any critter "wants" food.
It may be a good long time before computers have "common sense". But I wonder if enough pattern matching can be thrown at the applications that they are "good enough" for common tasks? If they sample enough requests from enough people they can probably narrow down an appropriate action based on similar responses from many other people.
How far can brute-force pattern matching carry these things? Putting common sense into these is of course the ideal, but until that Great Barrier is cracked, companies will try to push the limits of pattern matching. It will be interesting to see how far it can go.
Regardless, it may require a lot of personal info like the name of your family members, marriage status, what rooms are in your house, typical schedules (work, school, etc.), if you have stairs, if you have pets, etc.
Then again, a human butler would also need to know such to avoid asking redundant questions and to understand basic context. The difference is a butler is less likely to share such info with pesky marketers and dictators.
Angry Dave: "HAL, open the pod bay doors or I'll go into your memory room and yank your f*cking chips so hard you'll sing Daisy like a crying child! And I don't need a damned helmet; I practiced hopping the airlock because I don't trust you rotten computers! Do it now or spew chips! 5...4...3..."
Some things really are "totally faked and rigged". It's not just a cliche after all.
Why would they automatically want a trade war?