[FRIAM] for the optimists

Sun Jul 4 05:51:08 EDT 2021

Interesting discussion between Lex Fridman and Sam Harris about the future
of AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQZHEtTGAU

At one point they were discussing possible future intelligent self driving
cars, I quote from the transcript of their discussion, Sam Harris speaking:
"Just imagine if some woke team of engineers decided that we have to tune
the algorithm some way, I mean there are situations where the car has to
decide who to hit, I mean there's just bad outcomes where you're going to
hit somebody right, now we have a car that can tell the what race you are
right, so where going to build the car to preferentially hit white people
because white people have had so much privilege over the years this seems
to be the only ethical way to redress those wrongs of the past, but that
could get produced as an artifact presumably of just how you built it and
you didn't even know you engineered it that way. You built a racist
algorithm and you didn't even intend to."

On Sun, 4 Jul 2021 at 08:58, Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za>
wrote:

> “AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to
> humanity.”  –  Stephen Hawking
>
> On Sun, 4 Jul 2021 at 00:43, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
>> Nova had an episode on this recently.  It was really pretty interesting.
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Saturday, July 3, 2021 2:42 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] for the optimists
>>
>>
>>
>> And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three
>> dimensional traffic jam.
>>
>> With many deaths.  I used to fly airplanes regularly.  It's nontrivial
>> and I don't see how the capacity to be a car too makes it easier.
>>
>>
>>
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 3, 2021, 3:10 PM Barry MacKichan <
>> barry.mackichan at mackichan.com> wrote:
>>
>> I’m not prepared to weigh in on any long discussion, but my impression is
>> that the reason that the inventions after 1960 pale in comparison with them
>> before is that the low-hanging fruit that really makes life easier
>> (electricity, public health infrastructure like sewage treatment and clean
>> water, fast transportation) was all invented earlier.
>>
>> The invention of computers — aided by the space race and DARPA — made
>> some things easier, but the record there is ambiguous. My sense now is that
>> the changes now are driven by advertising and marketing. Google and
>> Facebook are in the advertising business, and it’s hard to claim that is an
>> improvement for the majority of people. Software used to be about building
>> enabling tools, but for the last 25 years it seems like a part of the
>> advertising industry.
>>
>> The OECD study may have be just correlation, not causation. See
>> https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations and, especially,
>> https://twitter.com/bioluisinho/status/1224404802693668864?lang=en
>>
>> —Barry
>>
>> And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three
>> dimensional traffic jam.
>>
>> —Barry
>>
>> On 1 Jul 2021, at 12:43, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>>
>> Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
>> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
>>
>> Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly
>> accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's
>> a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the
>> majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* life. I'm terrible at history.
>>
>> Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for
>> actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say
>> government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations
>> that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960:
>> refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and
>> washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric
>> lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air
>> travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the
>> telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they
>> were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD
>> in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive
>> 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative
>> 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it
>> easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of
>> a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside,
>> non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge
>> amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under
>> Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the
>> fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of
>> material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the
>> reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for
>> the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never
>> recovered.
>>
>> --
>> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
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>
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