
Re: Meet Mr Three Point Five Millimetre
Bravo! Covers everything I wanted to say, and quite a few things I didn't even think of.
100 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2017
Just no. Recognition of emotion is a human ability, based on the ability of the person recognising it to feel emotion themselves. It's not yet another fricking terra nullius for techers to try to annex, for no purpose except to sell ways of making money to people who already have money, or to impose a spurious, aggregated "reality" of general sentiment onto human beings.
I'd love to let this "AI" loose on some Nietzsche. Or Saki. Or Swift. See how it rates them on its reductive, one-dimensional scale.
"If marketeers believe this then they deserve to be taken to the cleaners by Google."
Don't know about you, but I've never met anyone in Marketing (or, as someone wonderfully called it, the "colouring-in with crayons" Department) who wasn't well back in the queue when brains were being handed out.
Google is stealing sweets off a baby here.
Good point. I can't imagine any worse driving experience than having no control, but having some camera watching what I do and beeping annoyingly when I'm not "paying attention".
Even if I did obey the camera, and even if I was an excellent or perfect driver - how good would I (or anyone) be at suddenly assessing a situation and taking responsibility?
I wonder how many more epicycles will have to be added to the driverless-car project to make it look faintly desirable, viable or beneficial. As the first line in the article says, this is clearly a case of technology trying to drive society, rather than the other way round.
"What is really needed is a paradigm shift to 100% driverless technology."
Why? To make driverless technology work? Aren't you begging the question posed right at the start of the article?
"Tech and automotive firms are pushing driverless car technology on society, rather than there being a big demand for it"
However, nothing, not even a politician lying, can change the fact that Virgin, along with the rest of the bunch of spivs involved in the UK rail industry (and their lobbying outfit the "Rail Delivery Group", are nothing but monopolists making profits out of a politically-constructed, and insanely structured, privatised railway system.
... is typical of free-market fundamentalism. Which, as you say, is as anti-realist a cult as communism.
"instead we get a flat "non-profit is bad, look people are doing it for political reasons" whilst singing the praises of how efficient the alternative is."
That special use of "political" is another typical move. Anything other than privatising everything that isn't nailed down, and a good deal of what is, is supposedly "political" in a bad sense. But privatising everything is somehow pure and above mere "politics".
He told Press Gazette: “At a time when many media outlets are experiencing commercial pressures, RADAR will provide the news ecosystem with a cost-effective way to provide incisive local stories, enabling audiences to hold democratic bodies to account.
“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but RADAR allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.”
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I'm no "skilled human journalist", but would this Fabulous bot-based system be able to rewrite this statement to tell what it actually means?
Viz:
“At a time when many media outlets are experiencing commercial pressures because big money is not interested in real journalism which might upset the advertisers, RADAR will shamelessly bend over and spread'em to these "commercial pressures", and pollute the news ecosystem even more brainless spam than it contains already, (but here I put the word "local" in there because it's good PR), with a cost-effective way to provide a platform for more adverts, enabling democratic bodies to evade accountability because there's no-one with an enquiring mind in the loop to question their press releases.
“Skilled human journalists will be completely redundant to this process but I can't come out and say that because I'm a slimy PR-droid. RADAR allows us to harness artificial stupidity to scale up to a volume of spam that no-one will bother reading and no-one with a brain could ever be bothered to write”.
FTFY
I had to do exactly the same thing once when I moved into a place in Glasgow in midwinter. Only it was the mains water supply (unlagged, of course!) which had frozen solid.
And all I had available was a hairdryer. And a long extension lead.
After hours of aiming the hairdryer at the pipe, there was a glugging and a shooshing and a rattling, and the water came back on.
"Fucking "reached out". Fucking idiots."
Anyone uses this obnoxious phrase near me, gets hit with the "comment mallet" mentioned back on Page 1 of the comments.
I like asking people "If I don't know who to reach out to, does that mean I have to reach around?"
Do NOT Google "Reacharound". At least not at work. At least not images.
"A robot could be great if it improves the quality of life for an elderly person as a supplement for frequent visits and calls with family. Using the same robot as an excuse to neglect elderly relatives would be the inverse."
That's a good summing up of the difference between intent (which I'm using for something very human) and function (something a machine can have).
A human can use all kinds of tools/measures/strategies to neglect their elderly relatives - but can be taken to task for it. In other words, the human can think beyond the specified goal or function, and place it in a wider context. The fact that humans don't always think of ethical implications, or often ignore ethical criticism, is no counter-argument whatsoever. The important thing is that they should (whether they do in practice or not - it's an aspiration). The machine can only serve the function, and be judged on how it does this. Intent and meta-thinking is not relevant to it.
(As an aside, the ethical imperfection of humans is one of the most brazenly hollow and self-serving arguments coming out of Silicon Valley fanboys to justify replacing them with machines).
Using this intent/function distinction, a bigggg problem with AI becomes clear. AI, far from being neutral, always carries a hidden payload of intent in it: the intent of those who designed it, those who market it, those who make money from it and those who use it. It's not the machine's fault in any sense that it carries this payload, and it's no flaw from the machine's (fitness for function) point of view. But until we get true strong AI, AI will always carry this hidden intent.
This is very different with humans. Although parents are sometimes blamed when someone does something terrible, no-one would ever describe conception of a child as a design process, over which parents have control. Even upbringing (which has more of an influence) is very different from the design of a machine.
"and innovative financing to create an inclusive economy"
NOW I understand. I always thought that PFI was a way to splurge taxpayers' money on incompetent monopolists, guaranteeing them returns for decades while avoiding public scrutiny.
But I was wrong. It's "innovative financing to create an inclusive economy". And since it's in the remit of the Ministry of Fun, it must be fun as well.
I'm all in favour of it now.
There's a very silly (and enjoyable) free-download game called Pluto's Revenge, which involves exactly that. Pluto has a baseball bat and whacks asteroids at the other planets. Because it's miffed at being downgraded from true planet status.
Also has a deeply weird soundtrack.
"A tractor on a country road on August Bank Holiday?"
Speed of a caravan on the A82?*
**
*In case you're not Scottish, this is the main road from Glasgow to the West Highlands. Almost single-track in places.
**Not just on August Bank Holiday, because a caravan on the A82 takes all summer to get from Dumbarton to Crianlarich.
Who call you saying "I've got my CV in front of you...", and then try to interest you in a D#/Z++/EbMinor/SumatraScript permanent position in Hartlepool.
When I know none of these technologies from nothing, and my CV clearly says I'm looking for contract positions in datawarehousing in the Southwest.
"SwonSong is not a pun nor is it an acronym, and its misspelling serves no marketing purpose whatsoever unless that purpose is to be fucking infantile."
There is a special place in Hell reserved for the twatmeisters who come up with these names.
They are useful in a way though, as a clear signal that whatever it is a bunch of interestingly behaired and bebearded dickwipes are trying to sell under them is guaranteed to be a piece of opportunistic crap of no use to anybody.
I'm just waiting for "apps" called Mynge, SmgMa and KrudFerrit to come along.
On the main subject: there's no need for [[[[[Swonsong]]]]] (brackets for the purposes of hygiene). Just read the comments boards on any UK newspaper, and it's clear that 98% of comments were written by dead people. Or brain-dead, at least.
Icon because I like Beer. No, not BiR. No, not BérR. ByR? ..... hold on, I'm just starting the ThysBotlOverYorHedVeryHard app, it's a bit slow to get going sometimes.
"Can't have Ordinary People diluting Murdoch's power now, can we?"
If I had my Murdoch wouldn't have his power diluted - he'd be forcibly blasted into another universe, preferably one where you can't swing a cat because the dimensions are all crunched up.
But these bots aren't a solution to centralised media power. They're deployed by people exactly like Murdoch (if not by him himself), and trade on the illusion that they are in fact "Ordinary People".
"Didn't know The Daily Fail and The S*n were political bots."
They are, of course. The difference is that they don't pretend to be a mass of individual people all agreeing. At most they pretend to reflect the views of "most people", but the illusion that they actually do is pretty easily dispelled.
So perhaps political social-media bots are just too new. No-one's got used to discounting any on-line commenter's claim to be a real person, in the way that we've got used to discounting the idea that what's in the newspapers is the real truth and only the truth. That would mean that we've got to get used to social media being polluted. I'd rather we didn't have to, personally.
Sorry, no, the facts (unlike the slant given to them) are not relative but absolute.
And a major part of the impact of these propaganda bots lies not in the (generally idiotic) views these bots "hold" and spread, but in the pretence that these are actual individual human beings holding (generally idiotic) opinions, rather than the offspring of a single person or organisation who wants to give the impression of popular support.
It's not a matter of pure disinformation. The target is not readers' knowledge, but their morale: if "everyone" is against them, why bother any more?
A long post, but worth the read. It's a vivid example of how much trouble a bunch of fuckwits with a spreadsheet can cause. Can we introduce some kind of licensing system, like for guns? Even if we have to prise the "metrics" out of the cold, dead hands of the fuckwits who invented them.
I remember when I used to spend my working day developing, testing and supporting clients. Rather than doing some weird kind of improvised contemporary dance routine through the hoops and labyrinths imposed by Process. Or Process Management. Or the Process Management Process.
... apart from to make money for big tech companies?
As an antidote to the whole ridiculous hype, look up the Dutch road-traffic engineer who made various places safer by making them _more_ difficult and complicated to drive through. The effect was to make drivers pay attention. (Or, look him up if you can remember his name, which I can't).
With driverless cars, what are we supposed to do instead of driving?
Inevitable answer: watch the @#$*&£" adverts which will be part of every driverless car "to help us provide a value-for-money service to our lovely customers".
The whole curent tech hype is directed at hijacking human attention, and monetising it. Time for a few digital clogs thrown into datacentre hard-drive enclosures.
I was in Berlin on Friday trying to find a paper with coverage of the UK election.
Bought one with the headline "Luegen, schlicht und einfach", and thought I'd hit the jackpot. Turned out be an equally exciting, but different story. But Lies, Plain and Simple would work just as well as a description of May's campaign.
It's not that revolutionary an idea. How are intrusive ads going to be discouraged, except by some kind of authority? The question is: which authority? Governmental authority (which means that the UK gov in particular need to start their learning curve by buying a few Internet for Dummies books), or Google's own authority, which is technically competent but beyond anyone's control?
I suppose making these tools available but optional is what you're hinting at. Trouble is, how much effect is that going to have on the scum who sling ads round the Internet? The whole Internet ads ecosystem is so (deliberately) fragmented that market pressures just won't work on it.
"ad-blocker in a dominant browser could mean the world's dominant ad network could be filtering out rival ad networks, which has competition implications".
Discouraging intrusive advertising is a good idea. But it's the wrong agency doing it. It should be a governmental responsibility, not left up to Google. I know, I know... but not all governments are as clueless and clumsy as the UK one; nor should the likes of Ruddy Awful be taken as the template for all possible governments.
If Google developed tools for this, and then made money selling them to governments to apply them fairly and across the board, what would not be to like?
Beer because it's Friday.
Just a side note: rock-climbing (like paragliding) is statistically one of the safer sports. But as in paragliding, when you cross that line from "never injured" to "injured", you tend not to do much more of the sport - or of anything.
If any sportspeople should be penalised for increased healthcare costs (not that any should be), it should be a 5-a-side football players. They drop like flies from injuries.
Beer because there's nothing like a beer after a day's climbing.
Every economic and ecological factor says we need to have less people around - i.e. have less children.
But the short-term problem of how to pay for the enormous number of old people pushes against that: to satisfy that need, we need to have _more_ children - or import young people. Who will, in turn, grow (very) old and need looking after.
I wish anyone in charge was engaged in any kind of long-term thinking.
It's essentially about redirecting money. From people who actually do useful work, to box-tickers, bean-counters, form-drafters, policy-slingers and suits. If these parasites end up costing more than they save - no problem, there's always an excuse. Which generally results in MOOARR box-ticking, approval-begging, form-filling etc.
Terrorist attack? Followed within days by idiotic government reaction, with the implication that if you just shut up and do what they say then they can prevent this ever happening again. As night follows day.
I'd call it a kneejerk reaction, if it was. What it in fact is is the habit of governments to use anything, whatever it might be, as an excuse to ram through more, unjustified increases in their power.
Rule 4) Any functionality that depends on a central server, whose status is outside the purchaser's control, must be explicitly stated, and guaranteed (subject to financial penalties) for a specified period.
That would be a disincentive to the current "can't unlock my Smart Front Door because the vendor's server is down" idiocy.
This kind of enforced "entertainment" really needs subversion. As I don't have the skillz, all I can do is suggest alternative "corporate edutainment" recordings:
1. The 5-year-old next door playing (I mean... attempting to play) "Indian Wardance", or whatever pre-Grade 1 piece it is he's been stuck on for the last 6 months. ("is he going to get that bit right this time? ... is he...? Wait for ittttt.... No, of course he isn't....).
2. Sounds of fire alarms, people running about screaming, followed by an out-of-breath voice shouting "OMG THE CALL CENTRE'S ON FIRE!!!! HELP CALL THE FIRE BRIGADE! I'M BURNINNGGGGG...."
Got it in a nutshell.
For other people, it might be Vivaldi that drives them nuts (or drives them to take their business elsewhere).
It's the idea that you can please everyone - in an area like music where tastes differ so much - that drives me nuts. That you can supposedly "induce the same emotions" in anyone who calls, in a way that's entirely under your cynical, LCD, corporate control.
This is the idea that should be killed with fire, shot, killed with fire again, shot again, stamped on, dipped in quicklime, buried in a lonely forest glade wrapped in an old carpet, and then nuked from orbit.
"Hearing is one of our most powerful emotional senses so the sounds customers hear when they call a business will create a long-lasting impression," added Williamson. "Every element of a music track, whether tempo, pitch or instrumentation, will stir different emotions"
What if I don't want to have my "emotions stirred" by this twunt and his manipulative earhole-pollution? Being on hold is empty time. I don't want to be "entertained" by it, I just want to switch off or do something else until a clear signal tells me I'm talking to a real person. And the last thing I want is artificially-matey, always female voices telling me how important my call is to them, or suggesting I piss off to their website instead. Answer to which is: if your website had the information I needed, why would I be putting myself through having to listen to your babbling?
Whatever happened, by the way, to that really useful feature hold systems used to have, where a voice would tell you "You are now number N in the queue"? Probably ousted by intrusive corporate-comms shite courtesy of PHMG and their like.
If I want to have my emotions stirred, I'll go to a concert or put on music I choose.