More Red Pills
After watching the following excellent video:
…I was perusing the 1700 comments, when I encountered an intriguing entry by ‘Daedalus Occidentalis,’ which itself had 45 replies:
Here’s a Red Pill for you… Search the following phrases on Google Images and look at the results:
Using copy/paste, I went through the whole list and was stunned! I’ve turned them into links, to make it easy to try it for yourself.
By the time I got through ‘White American Inventors,’ I figured the search algorithm must be just ignoring the term ‘white,’ so I changed it to ‘Black American Inventors.’ You guessed it – huge difference!
The final one is pretty damn specific. Can anyone explain to me why the results are so absurd?
One of the 45 replies to the thread nailed it:
It’s like watching the ads on TV here in the UK; if you were an alien watching those transmissions, you would be absolutely convinced that the majority of human families consisted of a black guy, a white woman, and asian kids.
It is truly fortuitous that I no longer care a whit about the future of Western civilization, or even mankind itself for that matter. If the Jihadists or North Koreans don’t manage to destroy the internet first, the upcoming Ice Age should cure such utter nonsense rather nicely. ;) ◄Daveâ–º
Very interesting. I’ve got two guesses on this.
One is that they’ve had a lot of time and pressure to neuter their algorithms. Whenever they fire up an AI, they have a holy crap moment when it notices patterns in reality that we’re not socially allowed to notice any more. Google put their AI guy in charge after their AI taught itself to translate Chinese better than the software their team had been building for many years. They don’t really know how it does it, since it doesn’t use dictionaries, and while it was written in software, its actions are no more easily decoded or recoded from that than a person’s opinion on a piece of music could be gleaned or changed from your knowledge of the structure of their ears. Google may very well be forced to use a broad brush to hide words from their software to prevent scandal.
Alternately, since the advent of their image recognition tools, they’ve been catering a lot to designers and shoppers. I’ve often used color terms for both. If you do a search for Caucasian couple, or yellow couple, you’ll see how much the search is actually focusing on photo color rather than race. the white American inventors search makes sense, because it’s going to trigger on a white colored photo of an African American inventor more often than anything else.
Reasonable guesses, Steel. The anecdote about the Chinese translator is fascinating. Did you see where Stephen Hawking recently predicted that AI will eventually replace humanity COMPLETELY? It reminds me of Scott Adams’ compelling theory that we are already just moist robots. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º
It’s been my opinion that Hawking’s intelligence is inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the subject of physics. Scott Adams seems to have a similar problem an neither of them seem to know it, notwithstanding Adams’ transparent attempts at false modesty.
The singularity is coming. It will be the pinnacle of human achievement and also the end of it as we know it. It will not be constrained. At some point it will arise from complexity, usefulness, and technological advancement rather than in an airgapped facility.
I’m with Musk on AI. His plan is twofold. Make humanity a space faring species ASAP, which improves our odds of surviving almost everything, and get to work on wetware. His reasoning is that if we can use our tech to augment our own minds, then perhaps we can rise with it rather than being a mere genitor, left with all the relevance of eggshells after a hatching.
I think it’s important to note that while mental capacity is a function of area, computing speed is inverse to it. There may be limits to how large a singularity can become before it fragments into a plurality when distant portions get ideas faster than the whole can process them. individuality could win out in the end, so long as the playing field isn’t too far out of level. I, for one welcome our future unconstrained plurality.
That has not been my impression at all. I have been following Adams closely for many months now. I enjoy his blog, and tune in to his live Periscope sessions almost daily. I have read several of his books, and am in the middle of his recently released Best Seller “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” (Excellent, BTW)
It has been my experience that while he chooses his language carefully, to maximize his persuasion techniques, in areas where he has competences, such as cartooning, persuasion, writing, or accounting, he is not at all shy to claim them. In other areas, such as investing, AI, or AGW, he will freely state his opinions, while cautioning that he is not an expert, and often directly complementing those who are. He is actually one of the most remarkably congruent individuals I have ever encountered.
I appreciate your well stated position on the future of AI and technology. For perhaps another thoughtful viewpoint, you might enjoy a timely CNSNews article: “Is Ray Kurzweil Right About the Singularity, AI Technological Salvation?” The internal links are well worth following, especially the TechCrunch interview of Rodney Brooks. Enjoy. 😀
As for Musk, since he has young children, I can somewhat understand his concern for the future of humanity. Personally, I don’t particularly share it. What is he proposing to preserve, with the Luddite approach to avoiding the natural advancement of civilization? Why should we care whether the civilized creatures of Earth’s future, are biological or mechanical? Perhaps the mechanical version of humanity 2.0 would be less inclined to destroy the planet with Hydrogen bombs. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º
I’ve noticed that people in the persuasion industry have trouble turning it off. He has excellent thoughts on Trump and the media, but when he veers off into health care or international relations, he’s got some big gaps in his understanding. Granted, he admits this, but he still pours on his persuasion techniques. Given the size of his influence and audience, and the tenuous nature of such issues, I find it irresponsible.
I’ve got no problem with the future creatures of Earth being mechanical, but I get the feeling that how they are born will make a big difference to the end result. It’s hard to say when this will happen. At this point, I believe it’s already possible on a hardware level to make something smarter than ourselves, though it might be strange, slow, and distributed. You can claim to be too old to care, but I think you’re going to be seeing AI becoming rapidly more relevant to your life. I’m actually surprised Hillary hasn’t blamed it for her loss yet.
LOL… but then, the tech industry was backing her, not Trump. 😉
To whom? How? Why? Seriously, so far the advances in tech have all been a plus to my existence. Distributed AI? I just got my Amazon Echo on Tuesday, the CPU of which is in the cloud. It is truly remarkable how well Alexa works. It is so much fun to play with that last night I ordered an IR blaster device so she can also control my TV, sound bar, and dvr/cable box. While I was at it, I even ordered a couple of WIFI enabled LED light bulbs, and a couple of WIFI controlled electrical outlets to play with. 😀
As for Scott Adams, it is important to remember that at his core, he is a pot smoking Lefty graduate of UC Berkeley, who still lives in the Bay Area. Many of his native political/social ideas give me heartburn; but I have learned a lot from the guy, and find his effect on most Leftist trolls entertaining as hell. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º
New tech is often more dangerous in its infancy than once it has matured. AI is inherently a difficult subject because we are potentially speaking about something smarter than ourselves. There are a lot of ways to be dumb though. If intelligence is the ability to solve problems, wisdom is the ability to prevent them. If it doesn’t survive long enough to get some virtual wisdom, it could lead to nothing surviving.
As for who it makes a difference to, it makes a difference to me q:
https://xkcd.com/1807/
Cute cartoon… I’ll have to make a new post featuring it. I had to look up :q in the Urban Dictionary… 😛 â—„Daveâ–º
Interesting. As far as the young lady in the video goes it’s nice to hear of her personal growth. I would describe it as saying that she simply grew up. What most of the rabid SJW’s simply fail or refuse to do.
Google was good when it just searched key words and content. Of course back then they couldn’t show favoritism to those that enhance their bottom line.
I regard her ability to think for herself as the key to that growth, and the description of her metamorphosis was articulate and compelling. I haven’t gotten around to viewing any of her other videos yet; but I intend to. â—„Daveâ–º
I didn’t mean to say it wasn’t good. My comment was more to those who resist what she has accomplished.
She has something to say for sure. When young people talk we should listen whether we agree or not. It’s just easier when we agree. Beside the fact that who wouldn’t want to see more of those big brown eyes. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice. 😉 LOL the SJW’s would have my head. I am the sexist pig they love to hate. 🙂
I suppose something inspired me to watch it in the first place, when it appeared as a recommended followup option. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º