“Deploying and adopting AI remains a hard problem. AI cannot magically solve problems. As AI moves from an elite niche science to a mainstream tool, engineering will be as important as scientific breakthroughs.”
I’ve read the intro, skimmed bits. If it’s more than an exercise in speculative fiction then that’s not leaping off the page. I gotta get me a consulting gig on one of these commissions.
Perhaps a good counterpoint is the manifesto put out by mostly Google people last November. It barely qualifies as technical, and is the most recent in a string of bright lights pointed at the AI emperor’s frequently naked backside. “AI” is hard, but you can brute force yourself “90% of the way” with readily deployed tools and a server room full of spare computers. That makes you look busy, and hopefully the boss doesn’t notice that the last 10% step is a doozy…
I am reminded of the great chemist Fritz Haber, whose method for making fertilizer feeds half the world now, and who after that turned to developing chemical weapons. Because “death is death, no matter how it is inflicted”, it was not less humane than bullets and might hasten the end of the war. His wife evidently disagreed and shot herself after Ypres.
History has not looked terribly kindly on his point of view, but I guess that doesn’t mean we can’t repeat the same every time an exciting new idea for killing people comes up.
If you are privileged in your own life to have the option of choosing less plastic consumption, please consider and thank you in advance.
@boingboingshop @boingboing @jlw
… please stop peddling plastic tchotchkes and other plastic crap when you can aim for higher quality durable alternatives wherever and whenever possible. Please take the time to do the work of digging for better analogous options. “Sustainability” is not a new concept.
We can do better.
We must do better.
bOINGbOING’s still a directory of [mostly or sometimes] wonderful things.
Please reclaim that word “wonderful” and make it mean something more positive, and more compassionate for all the lifeforms, present and future, on our only habitable planet.
And let us not forget, in addition to the environmental cost of the planet, the gewgaws and tech often come from a place of truly awful provenance–the cost of human suffering and human lives:
And every month, fresh reminders that Xinjiang is part of the “supply chain”: that our electronics, covid supplies, and gewgaws are being made by terrorized slaves as part of a wider plan to erase a people:
The responses in the comments just beggar belief and i would add the usual disclaimer to avoid them because i think The Intercept has a “Nazi bar” problem. Yet again what i find utterly dispiriting in the second decade of this century is that when faced with overwhelming evidence of genocide there are those not just not caring but refusing to believe it’s even happening and simply state propaganda.
I haven’t and won’t read the comments, but I am used to the tankies defending any authoritarian state who is remotely left wing. The Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Liberation) believes that there internment camps in China, and I don’t see any reason to think that they are lying even though I don’t usually trust M-Ls.
I think this is the article that I read last year.
We do not have to look further than China’s own documents and its own propaganda organs to recognise that the Chinese State is holding vast numbers of Uyghurs in concentration camps, subjecting the entire Uyghur community both inside and outside the camps to forced indoctrination, surveillance and censorship, and attempting to erase the identity and culture of the Uyghur people. China has been touting its Xinjiang model as a successful model of “counterterrorism” which the world should adopt.
Based on the Intercept’s origins as a Greenwald vehicle, I’d imagine the comments to be a combination of awful pro-Chinese tankie horribleness and awful anti-Chinese Trumpie horribleness
That they want to means test against people who made $50k in 2019, just, where do you start? Above and beyond what is the point of this again?
Our household actually won’t be quite affected by the cutoff (I make more than $50k, my wife is currently managing the house/child), but so far the “stimulus” utility has been limited because I’ve lost more income to wage reduction furloughs and annual cost-of-living raises being frozen than I’ve gained, probably even after this round.
