Programmers produce code. When they stuff up, it don't go. Obvious.
Software Architects produce documents. Lots of them. Pretty ones. But there is no objective test as to whether they make sense or not.
So people that cannot write code that work can become software architects. And people that fail at that can become Enterprise Change Managers.
There is definitely a place for senior engineers that know how to write code to then develop designs, and maybe they will end up not writing much code. But the non-technical architect is the source of many software disasters.
It costs them money to administer, creates lots of bad will, and they rarely get all their money back anyway.
Much better if the customer pulls through, pays lots of interest, and eventually takes out a second mortgage.
But how is the computer overriding people? A foreclosure is a big event, handled by moderately senior people, not bank tellers. These people would have reviewed the situation. And yet, Computer Says NO.
How did they become so bureaucratic that a crappy computer program written by some enterprise IT department can automatically override the judgement of human experts dealing with individual cases.
The Chinese will want Google to adjust its US rankings in order to get more business in China. Google will resist, for a while. It will not be overt, just like the self censorship that stops one upsetting a customer.
However, even the slightest hint of that type of malpractice will damage the Google brand. And an 1% loss of US business is far greater than anything they will actually get out of China.
The other issue is that they will need lots of Chinese speaking employees or partners to make this work. And those people will learn far more about Google than Google will learn about China.
Will Chinese search engines be able to take business in the USA? Not directly, but they may sell a service to other companies that decide to try. There is so much money in search that even someone as small as Duck Duck Go can make money.
I was impressed when Google management said no to China some years ago. A wise, strategic decision.
Once Google starts making money in China, China will have leverage over Google by threatening to restrict Google in China. This means that China will be able to insist that certain terms and pages do not appear anywhere, or at least get very low ranking.
Recall the way that China got all airlines to drop the term Tiawan. In the USA, you will not see it.
It is the job of Google to make money for its shareholders.
Consider, say, the Australian Tax Office in the 1950s when Parkinson wrote his great paper. There would have been no computers at all (possibly some punch card machines). Almost all the work done by hand. Collecting returns, reconciling payments, banking, internal processes, everything.
Consider the Tax Office today, after 60 years of automation. No human hand ever touches the average tax return. What has the efficiency dividend been? Zero. The tax office still consumes about 1% of GDP, just like it did in the 1059s. Note that this is a proportion of GDP, so accounts for growth in the economy, the office has actually grown substantially in absolute terms.
How could this possibly be? So much automation producing so little improvement?
Well, in the 1950s, the tax act fitted into a couple of smallish volumes. Today the act plus regulations and rulings would be too large to print out in any one place. It is orders of magnitude more complex.
The reason that it is more complex is because it can be. In the 1950s, without computers, it would be impossible to administer the current act. So it is actually computers that cause the complexity.
Whether all that complexity actually produces a more efficient and equitable society is, of course, very unclear.
So no, automation will not not reduce employment in government, banks, or any other bureaucracies because the rules will simple become more complex to compensate.
This, incidentally, why I am proud that many of the computer projects that I have been involved in have turned out to be absolute failures. Every project that succeeds just inflicts complexity on third parties.
Automation of manual jobs is another matter entirely. Certainly automation of agriculture in the last century has decimated the number of agricultural workers. Will everyone just end up as being petty bureaucrats? Or do we need to send off a B ark?
Indeed, Taiwan was ruled by Japan before that. Not by China since the 19th century. And it was independent before that.
An important difference with Hong Kong is that HK never became properly democratic under the British -- the HK money did not want to give the masses any power. So there was a vacuum when China moved in. Taiwan has been properly democratic for decades.
But I still think Xi will softly invade Taiwan, and we will look the the other way. Then they will start to put much more soft power on us, particularly when they have a few air craft carriers and a totally controlled domestic population.
Emperor Xi is getting older. He rules China, now it is time to expand.
Xi Jinping has made his ambitions very clear. And we will do nothing to stop it.
This does not require some massive invasion. Just bit by bit, Xi will tighten the screws. Threats will work just fine as the rest of the world abandons Taiwan.
It will be like Hong Kong. At first China will just demand a token governor be appointed, with only ceremonial powers, as symbolic recognition. Then they may give Taiwan a seat on the Chinese politburo, appointed by the Chinese government. Then closer police cooperation.
Taiwan will do what everyone does and self censor. Radicals that want to push back will be censored by the Taiwanese themselves. Bit by bit that governor will become more powerful.
It has about 300 neurons, 1000 cells all up (so about a third are neurons). Its connectome (wiring diagram) has been known for decades, and unlike human brains is identical in each worm. But how it actually thinks remains a mystery.
So good work to understand a fruit fly, and no doubt useful. But do not mistake it for understanding.
While understanding neurons might be helpful for building an AI, I think it is unlikely that an AI will be any direct mapping. Aeroplanes are not built out of feathers.
An all white UI with invisible icons that need to be activated using weird gestures. When you hover the mouse in just the right way some parts of the display become pale grey.
If only I had the time to make it. But then again, maybe Google will do this for me in their next release.
What we need is an AI that can automatically respond to emails with gushing amounts of thanks and apologies that incorporates some of the original messages so that the recipient can know that they are sincere.
(And then we will need another AI that can remove all sincerely sent thank yous from our in boxes.)
Obama had the house and the white house. There is obviously a lot of vote machine rigging, and the republicans are much better at it than the democrats. But Obama did nothing. Wanted to build a consensus.
Once upon a time the the internet was distributed. Nobody owns email, "The Web", Usenet.
But then something went wrong, and now Facebook owns almost all user content. There is no need for that. It should be possible for people to put up content on many different sites and still interoperate.
What is needed is a good Open Social Media protocol. So the content is separate from the aggregation. Needs a bit of open user ids as well.
It should not be up to any company's corporate policy to determine what may and may not be said on the web.
If Goggle had done that, they might have been in a position to take on Facebook.
As robots become smarter and more versatile, will we start so see shorter, slower production lines in which machines do more things at each step?
Having multiple shorter lines would make logistics much easier. Failures would be localized. And production could be distributed nearer to markets.
The idea of a machine (the production line) pushing out something as complex as a car every couple of minutes boggles the mind. The number of things that could go wrong is huge. It is not surprising that it sometimes stops. It is amazing that it ever goes.
The USA reverence for the constitution is interesting, as is its ineffectiveness. It sounds like a great idea, to deliberately constrain governments to ensure freedom from future despots. And maybe it has made the USA a much better place than it would be otherwise.
But the comparison with the UK is stark. The UK abolished slavery 60 years before the USA. There is nothing like Civil Forfeiture in the UK (or any other civilized place). No need for a civil rights movement. UK police are embarrassed when they shoot someone.
Australia, in all things, is halfway between the USA and UK. We have a constitution but it says that the Governor General (Queen's representative) is an absolute despot, which nobody believes. Nothing at all about civil liberties. But lots about State's rights vs Federal. That is because by the time it was written (1901) democracy was well established here and a given, and we wanted to stay friends with Britannia, which ruled the seas. And those Kiwis were reluctant to hand power to Canberra.
For 3,500 million years, life on earth was green slime.
For 1 million years there were humanoids.
For 0.01 million years civilization
For 0.0001 million years, fairly advanced science.
In another 0.0001 million years there will only be robots. (Why would they want us around?)
So the likelihood of stumbling upon little green men just like us is very remote. But it is not so unlikely to find another planet that has green slime, and we my develop tools sensitive enough to detect that.
Remember also that bad things happens to planets. E.g. a passing star swipes them. Over billions of years that becomes more likely.
Also note that soon, intelligence will be robots, and is software. And software can travel in radio waves at the speed of light.
The west and China are not just two different competing empires. One values democracy, free press, civil society. The other is a repressive dictatorship.
The trouble with repressive dictatorships is that when they go off the rails there is no peaceful way to change their leaders. Western democracy is not perfect, but bad leaders go, and are limited. Imagine if Trump ran China, without any of our checks and balances. Xi does run China and wants to make China great again.
The hardest part is to take input data and understand what it means. Games engines actually do a pretty good job of creating that data. It is not substitute for real testing, but it is an essential part. Because you can test much more. And because you can test crash scenarios that would be too dangerous otherwise.
If generating an image from a model is like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, understanding the generated image is like squeezing it back in.
And a good simulator will introduce some noise etc.
You cannot do business in China without doing it the Chinese way. Once Google has a sizable investment there they will want to protect it. And China will make use of that.
It would not matter so much for a car company or a steel company. But Google tells us what to read. We trust it to find information for us. Including about the 3 Ts, Tianamin, Tiawan and Tibet. A little pressure here, a little pressure there.
One saving grace was that Google had a culture of internal debate and openess. But that went with the Damore memo.
There is a big push to retire VBA for the new hot Javascript approach of writing extensions, which is probably what confused the fashion concious PM. But this is actually a disaster.
Consider the one line of VBA
sub CopyVal()
[A1] = [B1] + [C1] end sub
A trivial program that any *NON-PROGRAMMER* can write. Most management accountants can write a bit of VBA which is very useful to them. And then it is trivial to deploy. There is even a macro recorder that can write outline code for you.
This same program requires about 50 complex lines of their Javascript. Not because JavaScript is that much worse a language, but because it is all wrapped up in design patterns -- you need to use futures etc. which are way beyond non-developers and confuse a lot of professional developers when they go wrong. You need to install Visual Studio. And to deploy you need to set up an IIS server and navigate the security model!
It is not about End If vs {} (End If is actually better because miss matched ends are easier to locate). Or even the optional Static typing in VBA that Javascript still lacks. It is about the idea of end user computing that Microsoft is doing its best to destroy. When they eventually succeed, most people might as well use Google Sheets.
Slashdot Mirror
Programmers produce code. When they stuff up, it don't go. Obvious.
Software Architects produce documents. Lots of them. Pretty ones. But there is no objective test as to whether they make sense or not.
So people that cannot write code that work can become software architects. And people that fail at that can become Enterprise Change Managers.
There is definitely a place for senior engineers that know how to write code to then develop designs, and maybe they will end up not writing much code. But the non-technical architect is the source of many software disasters.
Banks hate foreclosures.
It costs them money to administer, creates lots of bad will, and they rarely get all their money back anyway.
Much better if the customer pulls through, pays lots of interest, and eventually takes out a second mortgage.
But how is the computer overriding people? A foreclosure is a big event, handled by moderately senior people, not bank tellers. These people would have reviewed the situation. And yet, Computer Says NO.
How did they become so bureaucratic that a crappy computer program written by some enterprise IT department can automatically override the judgement of human experts dealing with individual cases.
That is the real story here.
The Chinese will want Google to adjust its US rankings in order to get more business in China. Google will resist, for a while. It will not be overt, just like the self censorship that stops one upsetting a customer.
However, even the slightest hint of that type of malpractice will damage the Google brand. And an 1% loss of US business is far greater than anything they will actually get out of China.
The other issue is that they will need lots of Chinese speaking employees or partners to make this work. And those people will learn far more about Google than Google will learn about China.
Will Chinese search engines be able to take business in the USA? Not directly, but they may sell a service to other companies that decide to try. There is so much money in search that even someone as small as Duck Duck Go can make money.
I was impressed when Google management said no to China some years ago. A wise, strategic decision.
Once Google starts making money in China, China will have leverage over Google by threatening to restrict Google in China. This means that China will be able to insist that certain terms and pages do not appear anywhere, or at least get very low ranking.
Recall the way that China got all airlines to drop the term Tiawan. In the USA, you will not see it.
It is the job of Google to make money for its shareholders.
Consider, say, the Australian Tax Office in the 1950s when Parkinson wrote his great paper. There would have been no computers at all (possibly some punch card machines). Almost all the work done by hand. Collecting returns, reconciling payments, banking, internal processes, everything.
Consider the Tax Office today, after 60 years of automation. No human hand ever touches the average tax return. What has the efficiency dividend been? Zero. The tax office still consumes about 1% of GDP, just like it did in the 1059s. Note that this is a proportion of GDP, so accounts for growth in the economy, the office has actually grown substantially in absolute terms.
How could this possibly be? So much automation producing so little improvement?
Well, in the 1950s, the tax act fitted into a couple of smallish volumes. Today the act plus regulations and rulings would be too large to print out in any one place. It is orders of magnitude more complex.
The reason that it is more complex is because it can be. In the 1950s, without computers, it would be impossible to administer the current act. So it is actually computers that cause the complexity.
Whether all that complexity actually produces a more efficient and equitable society is, of course, very unclear.
So no, automation will not not reduce employment in government, banks, or any other bureaucracies because the rules will simple become more complex to compensate.
This, incidentally, why I am proud that many of the computer projects that I have been involved in have turned out to be absolute failures. Every project that succeeds just inflicts complexity on third parties.
Automation of manual jobs is another matter entirely. Certainly automation of agriculture in the last century has decimated the number of agricultural workers. Will everyone just end up as being petty bureaucrats? Or do we need to send off a B ark?
How is this in China's jurisdiction?
Indeed, Taiwan was ruled by Japan before that. Not by China since the 19th century. And it was independent before that.
An important difference with Hong Kong is that HK never became properly democratic under the British -- the HK money did not want to give the masses any power. So there was a vacuum when China moved in. Taiwan has been properly democratic for decades.
But I still think Xi will softly invade Taiwan, and we will look the the other way. Then they will start to put much more soft power on us, particularly when they have a few air craft carriers and a totally controlled domestic population.
Emperor Xi is getting older. He rules China, now it is time to expand.
Xi Jinping has made his ambitions very clear. And we will do nothing to stop it.
This does not require some massive invasion. Just bit by bit, Xi will tighten the screws. Threats will work just fine as the rest of the world abandons Taiwan.
It will be like Hong Kong. At first China will just demand a token governor be appointed, with only ceremonial powers, as symbolic recognition. Then they may give Taiwan a seat on the Chinese politburo, appointed by the Chinese government. Then closer police cooperation.
Taiwan will do what everyone does and self censor. Radicals that want to push back will be censored by the Taiwanese themselves. Bit by bit that governor will become more powerful.
It has about 300 neurons, 1000 cells all up (so about a third are neurons). Its connectome (wiring diagram) has been known for decades, and unlike human brains is identical in each worm. But how it actually thinks remains a mystery.
So good work to understand a fruit fly, and no doubt useful. But do not mistake it for understanding.
While understanding neurons might be helpful for building an AI, I think it is unlikely that an AI will be any direct mapping. Aeroplanes are not built out of feathers.
An all white UI with invisible icons that need to be activated using weird gestures. When you hover the mouse in just the right way some parts of the display become pale grey.
If only I had the time to make it. But then again, maybe Google will do this for me in their next release.
What we need is an AI that can automatically respond to emails with gushing amounts of thanks and apologies that incorporates some of the original messages so that the recipient can know that they are sincere.
(And then we will need another AI that can remove all sincerely sent thank yous from our in boxes.)
Obama had the house and the white house. There is obviously a lot of vote machine rigging, and the republicans are much better at it than the democrats. But Obama did nothing. Wanted to build a consensus.
Nice fellow, that Obama.
Once upon a time the the internet was distributed. Nobody owns email, "The Web", Usenet.
But then something went wrong, and now Facebook owns almost all user content. There is no need for that. It should be possible for people to put up content on many different sites and still interoperate.
What is needed is a good Open Social Media protocol. So the content is separate from the aggregation. Needs a bit of open user ids as well.
It should not be up to any company's corporate policy to determine what may and may not be said on the web.
If Goggle had done that, they might have been in a position to take on Facebook.
What more needs to be said. It is ... different.
Unix shell works on strings. Powershell works on objects. That is an important difference. Especially if the strings have funny characters in them.
As to speed, it is .net, so I presume compiles down to machine code.
Indeed. That is why the censor let the matter be a huge controversy in the first place. Otherwise we would just not hear about it at all.
What is frightening is that ordinary people in the west do not value their democratic freedoms.
As robots become smarter and more versatile, will we start so see shorter, slower production lines in which machines do more things at each step?
Having multiple shorter lines would make logistics much easier. Failures would be localized. And production could be distributed nearer to markets.
The idea of a machine (the production line) pushing out something as complex as a car every couple of minutes boggles the mind. The number of things that could go wrong is huge. It is not surprising that it sometimes stops. It is amazing that it ever goes.
The USA reverence for the constitution is interesting, as is its ineffectiveness. It sounds like a great idea, to deliberately constrain governments to ensure freedom from future despots. And maybe it has made the USA a much better place than it would be otherwise.
But the comparison with the UK is stark. The UK abolished slavery 60 years before the USA. There is nothing like Civil Forfeiture in the UK (or any other civilized place). No need for a civil rights movement. UK police are embarrassed when they shoot someone.
Australia, in all things, is halfway between the USA and UK. We have a constitution but it says that the Governor General (Queen's representative) is an absolute despot, which nobody believes. Nothing at all about civil liberties. But lots about State's rights vs Federal. That is because by the time it was written (1901) democracy was well established here and a given, and we wanted to stay friends with Britannia, which ruled the seas. And those Kiwis were reluctant to hand power to Canberra.
It used to be that to write software, your really needed decent English. How could anyone write a line of code without Stack Overflow?
But it occurs to me that to write a WeChat miniprogram you need to read Mandarin. And well.
The educated Chinese already read English but we do not read Mandarin.
(Indians all speak English for tech work anyway among themselves -- there is often no other common language. The Russians are not so important.)
I use there font Verdana where possible -- the letters all look different.
Th lI is bullshit that every font designer believes in.
For 3,500 million years, life on earth was green slime.
For 1 million years there were humanoids.
For 0.01 million years civilization
For 0.0001 million years, fairly advanced science.
In another 0.0001 million years there will only be robots. (Why would they want us around?)
So the likelihood of stumbling upon little green men just like us is very remote. But it is not so unlikely to find another planet that has green slime, and we my develop tools sensitive enough to detect that.
Remember also that bad things happens to planets. E.g. a passing star swipes them. Over billions of years that becomes more likely.
Also note that soon, intelligence will be robots, and is software. And software can travel in radio waves at the speed of light.
Go read Document 9.
The west and China are not just two different competing empires. One values democracy, free press, civil society. The other is a repressive dictatorship.
The trouble with repressive dictatorships is that when they go off the rails there is no peaceful way to change their leaders. Western democracy is not perfect, but bad leaders go, and are limited. Imagine if Trump ran China, without any of our checks and balances. Xi does run China and wants to make China great again.
That is what is different and concerning.
The hardest part is to take input data and understand what it means. Games engines actually do a pretty good job of creating that data. It is not substitute for real testing, but it is an essential part. Because you can test much more. And because you can test crash scenarios that would be too dangerous otherwise.
If generating an image from a model is like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, understanding the generated image is like squeezing it back in.
And a good simulator will introduce some noise etc.
You cannot do business in China without doing it the Chinese way. Once Google has a sizable investment there they will want to protect it. And China will make use of that.
It would not matter so much for a car company or a steel company. But Google tells us what to read. We trust it to find information for us. Including about the 3 Ts, Tianamin, Tiawan and Tibet. A little pressure here, a little pressure there.
One saving grace was that Google had a culture of internal debate and openess. But that went with the Damore memo.
So we live in insteresting, self-censoring times.
There is a big push to retire VBA for the new hot Javascript approach of writing extensions, which is probably what confused the fashion concious PM. But this is actually a disaster.
Consider the one line of VBA
sub CopyVal()
[A1] = [B1] + [C1]
end sub
A trivial program that any *NON-PROGRAMMER* can write. Most management accountants can write a bit of VBA which is very useful to them. And then it is trivial to deploy. There is even a macro recorder that can write outline code for you.
This same program requires about 50 complex lines of their Javascript. Not because JavaScript is that much worse a language, but because it is all wrapped up in design patterns -- you need to use futures etc. which are way beyond non-developers and confuse a lot of professional developers when they go wrong. You need to install Visual Studio. And to deploy you need to set up an IIS server and navigate the security model!
It is not about End If vs {} (End If is actually better because miss matched ends are easier to locate). Or even the optional Static typing in VBA that Javascript still lacks. It is about the idea of end user computing that Microsoft is doing its best to destroy. When they eventually succeed, most people might as well use Google Sheets.
Very well said.