diputsmonro

Precisely! I'm much less concerned about super-intelligent AIs and much more concerned with shortsighted, greedy humans using pretty-good AIs (like those we have now) to squeeze out every ounce of profit from our already misaligned systems, at the expense of everyone else. Not to mention the political implications of being able to convincingly fake voices, photos, and videos.

In this sense, I'm pleased to see Open AI claim to be taking a more careful stance, but to be honest I think the genie is already out of the bottle.

There's really no way to be sure that it will.

That's an excellent way to put it. The "paradox" branding has always seemed flawed to me, like it's making the concept more complicated than it needs to be and opening up the position to claims of hypocrisy . But tolerance doesn't work that way - if we become tolerant of intolerance, then we've given up our goal. Tolerance should be an active effort to fight against intolerance, not an indifferent armchair theory.

Why is it so hard to believe that Musk may kind of be a jerk? Why do you have to deflect and find reasons to throw out evidence, especially when there are piles and piles of it?

No, that's why we have labor laws. Being a billionaire doesn't make you a king.

Every company is spending "their own money" to pay employees. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand shareholders or just one. There is still a corporate structure and formal employee relationships. They are employees, not serfs, and they deserve the respect that entails.

AI is a developing technology that stands to be used by powerful businesses and governments for all manner of purposes that will likely drastically impact our lives. It's important to criticize what could become the next industrial revolution, and make sure we can get rid of as many systemic issues as possible before they become too big to fix.

And many people do criticise the biases of legacy media groups on both sides. But this is an article about AI on a site that is generally more concerned with technical innovations than societal issues, so AI is being criticized.

Besides, bad things existing now isn't really a good argument for why we shouldn't prevent bad things from happening in the future.

Your deflection about the media is entirely unrelated to AI, but it only backs up my argument. If giant media corporations are biased, why can't AI researchers be?

Every institution has biases, and blindly trusting a dataset from e.g. a police department is just as bad as blindly trusting data from CNN or Fox News. The collection, aggregation, and sharing of data is a biased operation. If a political or for-profit entity gives you data, it's going to be data that supports their agenda.

It takes active, conscious effort to combat that bias, in the same way that it takes active, conscious effort to not just get all your news from one source. The concern (which has been demonstrated) is that that isn't being done

So what you're really saying is, it's perfectly okay for AI to have negative preconceptions and concrete impacts to certain groups of people, as long as it agrees with you on which groups are bad.

How would you feel about AI models that classify all modern white people as racists based on overwhelming historical data about slavery, the KKK, etc.? Hey man, data doesn't lie.

I completely disagree. You're right that everyone has biases - including the authors of the AI who will therefore choose a biased training dataset. When the tool they are constructing has unparalleled power, and is very likely to negatively impact the lives of those who the authors are biased against (consciously or not), it's entirely fair for those impacted groups to be concerned.

Every dataset has a skew to it, which should be accounted for during training. If the authors don't explicitly account for such things, out of ignorance or bias, then that skew, that bias, will be ingrained in the AI.

For example, if I only train my AI on it's knowledge of chocolate from ads for a particular brand, it's going to have some very opinionated, very wrong ideas about chocolate. This example is silly and obvious, but similar skews happen all the time in real datasets that the authors don't have the time or expertise to recognize.

When people who do have that expertise speak up, we should listen to them and fix it, not just blindly trust "the data" and whatever our fancy algorithm does with it. Garbage in, garbage out.

It's not about food production, it's about capitalism.

If artists could simply ask for food and be given it from the overflowing cornucopia, then yes, this wouldn't matter and in fact would be a net benefit.

Unfortunately though, artists must sell their art to get money, then exchange that money for food. Now, if a robot produces free art that's almost as good, most of those buyers won't pay those artists anymore, and the artists will starve (or stop being artists).

I do believe that job automation will quickly eliminate scarcity for basic life necessities, while also displacing more and more jobs in our economy, and that therefore UBI or some equivalent will be imminently necessary - but that's a much larger topic

But none of that addresses fundamental changes to the market structure. How can a beginner artist possibly get traction in a marketplace where people only pay for premium names or pay dirt for beautiful art that's 90% of what they want. You said yourself most clients are willing to settle if the price is right, and you can't really beat free.

Agreed, and to put it more simply - Shutting down a website that aims to kill people is not at all on the same level of sin as trying to kill people. To argue otherwise is asinine and, frankly, offensively pretentious.

Besides that, I've lost patience with the high-road wait-and-see attitide. Being "good" is not simply to condemn and look down upon the "bad". Being good requires intentional, decisive action to eliminate the world's evils. Anything less is indifference and virtue signaling. All that is required for evil to prevail is for "good" people to do nothing.

I think you're being overly cynical. Of course over time as science advances we will recognize more subtle distinctions between things which we used to perceive as the same. That's how science works. Just because two separate things are similar and sometimes found together doesn't mean they are identical.

Whether something is a "disorder" or not is somewhat subjective and opinionated, for sure. But as someone diagnosed with ADHD, I often find that the expectations of modern society can be debilitating. Whether the disorder lies in me or in an unaccommodating society is an interesting question, but it is a separate one.

"Lousy" also has a definition of being infested with lice (the singular form of which is louse); according to the Etymology Dictionary this may be the original meaning (https://www.etymonline.com/word/lousy)

From there, it seems to have developed as an American slang to describe "infestations" of other kinds.

Generally agree, but I do have to bristle with the "huge losers" sentiment. The fact that furries/weebs have a strong visibility in the professional software/IT space should be a signal that those people aren't losers, and are in fact doing quite well for themselves. And if you're in the industry, then you need to do yourself a favor and remove that label from yourself.

What you call a "flagrantly display", I call a typical, progressive break from meaningless social conventions. People like cute drawings and post them on their websites, so what? And I think it provides good visibility to those communities to demonstrate the skilled and creative people that inhabit it.

Did... did you read the article you're commenting on?

It really is nothing to be suspicious about. Full vote by mail had already been the norm in some US states for years, and most states allowed for it in specific circumstances. The infrastructure, laws, etc., were already there, they just needed to be expanded. Expanding it has always been in the national conversation, it has just been a matter of figuring it out and priority.

So when a global pandemic occurs and we're trying everything we can to isolate and socially distance, that priority changes real quick. People get talking and problems get solved.

Of course, sore losers will complain about anything to justify their loss, and this "new thing" was a prime scapegoat. It was also well known ahead of time that the mail in votes would be largely Democratic (because COVID was VERY politicized and democrats were more likely to follow quarantine guidance and therefore vote by mail). So when the votes came in, they pointed to that imbalance and called it "fraud".

Besides all that, there's no reason to be more suspicious of mail-in ballots than in-person ones. In-person, you mark a paper ballot and then put it in a stack... which then gets mailed somewhere else. If someone is going to be changing mail-in ballots, then they're already in a position to be changing regular ones as well (and every election security professional will tell you that paper ballots are more secure than electronic ones).

Sure, but more lives doesn't mean a net increase in happiness. A trillion people who live in the edge of starvation are probably less happy overall than a few billion who are well fed.

I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?

As with any complicated situation, there are multiple conflicting interpretations that could be possible. Since we can't collapse the uncertainty, we must take the grain of salt.

I do generally trust Snowden, but I can't deny that Russia would likely do everything they could to leverage the information he has against the US. Has he given them NatSec secrets in return for asylum? Unlikely I think, but possible.

IMO, Russia is just keeping Snowden around as a general anti-US voice in the global conversation to air credible dirty laundry of their biggest rival. As an honest patriot, I welcome the tough criticism and aspire to fix the problems he highlights. But it's a fair concern that some of that is potentially embellished or selectively censored for Russian propoganda purposes.

No, the point is that it's an idea that everyone is likely to be familiar with, so it's not particularly novel. Why do you think that became a trope in the first place?

Sure, the blog post is good in that it references specific real world events, but the thesis is not really new information.

Movies often show that the sky is blue, but that doesn't mean that our expectation of a blue sky is irrational. Nevermind the fact that those movie tropes, and much of art in general, is a reflection of real world issues and events. The idea is so pervasive because we already know that it's true.

If our enormous economic engines were devoted towards efficiency rather than profit motive, I think we would be there.

How many appliances do we build to last for a few years and then break? How many economic resources could we save by building fewer products to last longer? If the economic engine were tilted towards quality rather than churn, we could be much more efficient about our use of resources.

Would you like to contribute your knowledge to the conversation then?

It seems like it would be a knee-jerk overreaction to be, but Delta obviously has a lot of management issues and a shortsighted knee-jerk decision from them (or most giant corporations) would not surprise me.

Ideally, sure, but the article makes it seems like a rare ocurrence. And if their plane maintenance is any indication, I'm not sure their application architecture would be following such best practices.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they never expect to sit in. Not everything requires an immediate profit incentive to be a good idea.

The expansion to the IRS will directly alleviate the injustice implied by the headline. But your headline focused on the problem, not the solution which is already underway, so it just seems like misinformation and outrage bait.

Looks like today is your lucky day!

https://youtu.be/ZP7K9SycELA

If we can't believe people who are experts in their field, who can we believe? That mindset damns the entire field of science communication and outreach

Are we supposed to take the lesson that we should simply never believe anything? Just give up on the concept facts and objectivity and give in to the chaotic maelstrom?

Or are we supposed to go out and build our own space telescopes to verify every piece of information for ourselves?

Neither of those are tenable, we have to be able to trust some people some of the time.

Frankly I think tricks like these just erode confidence in science and science communicators. How many people excitedly shared these cool space images with their friends, and now have to deal with the embarrassment of looking like a fool for trusting a legitimate authority? Are those people going to be as excited when the next batch of legit photos come out, or will they withdraw and lose their excitement for fear of being tricked again? You may laugh, but these kinds of experiences do determine people's, and society's, behavior.

The goal of science communication is to educate and excite the public, and by extension, drive funding for new advancements. Smug gotchas like this actively impede that effort.

I believe the idea is that if you stored the result instead, you would have to wait for the promise to resolve the first time. If you made two requests in quick succession, the second request wouldn't see anything in the result map for the first one (as it hasn't resolved yet) and would then need to make its own new request.

If you store the promise, then not only does the second attempt know that it doesn't need to make a new request, but it can also await on the promise it finds in the map directly.

Remember the whole thing about Musk buying Twitter? One if his reasons for doing so was because he believes Twitter is "censoring" conservative speech. But Twitter is a private company, running a private service, so your strict government-focused interpretation of free speech clearly wouldn't apply.

Musk has stated in his own words that he is a "free speech absolutist", and given his complaints about Twitter it seems that his interpretation of that is not limited to government censorship, but all censorship.

The reason it's so prevalent online is because those people are gaming the system to appear prevalent. They talk up themselves and their brand/product to get likes, follows, and "engagement", which the social media algorithms use to rank and display content.

"Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to popular locations (e.g. bars), looking presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out. Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what the most popular person said today -- that is the function of social media (or newspapers).

Of course, social media platforms could be built that don't prioritize content this way, either by using more complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple chronological ranking), or letting the user have more control over the ranking algorithm. But there is currently no simple market incentive for doing so.

That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium" alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more user control and user-centric design.

Of course, more user control means more opportunities for filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no easy solution to anything.