On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
My father is discrete about his discussions with Ministers. He never gives details or talks about his own politics - but he rated Mrs T because she had a good mind and made decisions based on evidence. Once she took a position she worked out the politics to achieve it. The only failure was the community charge, and that was because she thought people would understand the logic of moving from a wealth based system to a consumption based system (with safeguards for the poor, sick and elderly) - whereas people in reality hate change.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Sometimes it's the same people: see Greg Benford.
I distinctly remember reading an Asimov story in my very early teens in which a spaceship dropped back into normal space in orbit round a planet in another star system, so I thought yes, exactly what will be happening in the next 100 years. Then the hero takes an electronic thingy out of his pocket and starts reading the new planet's news on it. And I thought Yeah, like that will ever happen.
His book 'Timescape' is currently on my to-read shelf. I'll have to promote it up...
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
1 PT 2 Morris Dancer 3 DuraAce? 4 DuraAce? 5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!) 6 Max 7 Malmesbury?/Charles? 8 Malcolm 9 Mr Ed 10 CR? 11 BigG 12 HYUFD
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Observations around and about London over the weekend:
1. Mask wearing on the tube down dramatically, despite TfL announcements saying you have to wear masks. 2. Mask wearing everywhere else just about non-existent. 3. Uber has got to the stage of its business model where, having attempted to drive other players out of the market, has now raised its prices dramatically around 10% difference with black cabs. 4. Everywhere is busy.
Black cans are now the superior option. The price difference is, as you say, now very marginal. So, once you factor in the quality of experience (more room, drivers with superior geography skills), the black cab wins. There's even an app if you prefer to book one Uber style rather than flag one down.
I took a black cab from kings cross to Charing cross as my folding bike had a bust light and needed to make the last train home. took about 20 minutes and cost about £16. Should have braved the tube.
The conventional wisdom in London is black cabs for short journeys and ubers for long ones but as others have mentioned, perhaps that is changing. The other issue is you need to factor in time of day because black cabs charge for time sitting stationary in traffic jams.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
When is the next ice age due? Perhaps global warming will offset it nicely.
Where I live, only a few thousand years ago a mile of ice would have been over my head. Global cooling isn't great either.
The next ice age won't be for a long, long time, if ever. I think it was James Hansen who calculated that the output of a couple of decent-sized coal power stations would have been sufficient to offset the next ice age.
The Earth's climate is a delicate system, with all sorts of feedbacks that cause it to swing wildly in response to the smallest of inputs. We see this historically in its magnified response to the tiny influences of Milankovich cycles. What humans have just done is the equavalent of whacking the Newton's cradle with a hammer.
I am not sure I agree with that. I think that the earth has a lot of naturally balancing features built into it which facilitate life. So, for example, more CO2 in the atmosphere encourages crop and plant growth by which the CO2 is again removed.
The problem is that once we go beyond the capacity of the system to absorb the insult that is being inflicted the system can unwind very rapidly and permanently. This is why I am a "stepper". One possible red flag was when it was shown recently that the Amazon basin had moved from being the lungs of the planet into a net carbon emitter. We are rolling the dice, daily and blindly, and in my view once change really comes it will be savage. At the risk of sounding over dramatic it may already be too late. There may already be more carbon in the system than it can cope with.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Along with the incremental decreases in allowable emissions of various things in manufacturing etc.
In most countries in the "developed" world, this stuff has quietly ticked along, reducing pollution to a staggering degree.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Let's hope it's not Rees-Mogg by name, re-smog by nature.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Observations around and about London over the weekend:
1. Mask wearing on the tube down dramatically, despite TfL announcements saying you have to wear masks. 2. Mask wearing everywhere else just about non-existent. 3. Uber has got to the stage of its business model where, having attempted to drive other players out of the market, has now raised its prices dramatically around 10% difference with black cabs. 4. Everywhere is busy.
Black cans are now the superior option. The price difference is, as you say, now very marginal. So, once you factor in the quality of experience (more room, drivers with superior geography skills), the black cab wins. There's even an app if you prefer to book one Uber style rather than flag one down.
I took a black cab from kings cross to Charing cross as my folding bike had a bust light and needed to make the last train home. took about 20 minutes and cost about £16. Should have braved the tube.
The conventional wisdom in London is black cabs for short journeys and ubers for long ones but as others have mentioned, perhaps that is changing. The other issue is you need to factor in time of day because black cabs charge for time sitting stationary in traffic jams.
Speaking as a regular user of London's public transport network since 1994, the conventional wisdom in London is Bus for short journeys and Tube and/or Train for long journeys.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
Mrs Thatcher also played a part in criminal DNA profiling by overruling the Home Office to provide funding. See ITV 9pm tonight (clashes with New Labour on BBC2).
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
Mrs Thatcher also played a part in criminal DNA profiling by overruling the Home Office to provide funding. See ITV 9pm tonight (clashes with New Labour on BBC2).
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
1 PT 2 Morris Dancer 3 DuraAce? 4 DuraAce? 5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!) 6 Max 7 Malmesbury?/Charles? 8 Malcolm 9 Mr Ed 10 CR? 11 BigG 12 HYUFD
3 is Leon and 4 Topping
Yep. Take these 2 edits to the 1st pass by @noneoftheabove and going firm on Malmesbury not Charles for (7) and we have it.
30% of people don't know or care about climate change, 20% of people care and will make sacrifices, 50% want to do something but also drive around and eat burgers on sun holidays.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 4 Oct
Boris the "winner" of the conference season then?
Not really, +4 was par before the conferences. But usually conferences produce bounces each way before settling back, and it's interesting to consider why not.
I think it's the absence of anything eye-catching at all - people barely noticed they were happening. Starmer gave a speech mostly memorable for bits about himself - very nice, but not relevant to most. johnson gave an after-dinner speech, full of jokes, but not relevant to most. Arguably they both did what they set out to do - Starmer to satisfy people he is a safe choice, Johnson to satisfy people that things are OK really. Voters said meh to both.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
The deadly difficulty is the last point. Facts matter. A possibility is that it is already a practical fact, baked in, that the current levels of CO2+the additional CO2 going into the atmosphere, which is increasing not decreasing in how much extra is going in+ the addition amounts planned by, for example, China's coal fired power programme mean that if the science is right we are already certain to reach apocalypse level, at date X give or take at best a few years.
I think Great Thunberg has already noticed this. If this is correct then amelioration, mitigation, continuing to limit the increase as much as possible and crossed fingers is the only option. But avoidance of the doomsday scenario is, on the data, a non option.
The issue is though that of something must be done, this is something, this must be done.
"Insulate Britain" pricks are calling for half a trillion to be spent on insulation. They've said "a few billion" won't be enough, it needs to be half a trillion. Just on insulation.
Now is insulation a good idea? Yes, why not?
Is insulation the best use of half a trillion pounds? Not necessarily.
Maybe half a trillion invested in new tidal lagoons or new energy generation or mitigation or many other options would do more than half a trillion in insulation.
Especially since our own emissions are rapidly becoming a drop in the ocean then our cash going into mitigation may increasing be the best use of it.
And even if you agree that half a trillion should be spent on insulating homes - these idiots sitting in the middle of the motorway and stopping Stroke stricken grannies from getting to hospital are just destroying their own argument and potentially setting the green cause back years...
If the gormless sociopaths of Insulate Britain had their heads slightly less far up their own anuses, they would have noticed that the £2.6bn insulation and energy efficiency ECO3 upgrade programme which has run from 2018 to March 2022, which in their infinite stupidity they deny exists, is coming to an end soon. And they would notice that now is the time to be lobbying for what they want to happen next.
Rather than spending their worthless, futile lives setting up checkpoints to block ambulances and taking actions that kill hospital patients.
ECO schemes have carried out, I think, approximately 3,000,000 energy efficiency measures. Needs enlarging certainly.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
You're misunderstanding cause and effect. The arrival of immigrants didn't suppress wages, the availability of unlimited migrants did many years ago.
That was the initial factor that broke equilibrium and created a so-called labour shortage, because the price of labour was lowered to below what should have been the market rate for wages, therefore demand for labour was increased.
Once the demand for labour created hundreds of thousands of vacancies, migrants were able to arrive to fill the vacancies, aggregate demand went up and since wages were still capped because of the infinite availability more jobs were created again.
Ten million increase in population later and we were still stuck in an infinite feedback loop. Hence 'vacancies' and net immigration over 300k per annum without ever solving the issue, because we never returned to equilibrium. Because the link between wages and job vacancies were broken because the minimum wage became a maximum wage for many sectors.
Now that the feedback loop has been broken by removing the availability, prices can finally rise and equilibrium can be restored.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
1 PT 2 Morris Dancer 3 DuraAce? 4 DuraAce? 5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!) 6 Max 7 Malmesbury?/Charles? 8 Malcolm 9 Mr Ed 10 CR? 11 BigG 12 HYUFD
3 is Leon and 4 Topping
Yep. Take these 2 edits to the 1st pass by @noneoftheabove and going firm on Malmesbury not Charles for (7) and we have it.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
How does SKS have a worse approval rating than Boris lol?
Because he is a useless nonentity.
So was your heart-throb Corbyn!
What odds would you like on SKS surpassing the 12.8m votes or 40% vote share of 2017?
If Jezza was so useless should be easy money for your boring uncle to surpass that in 2024
I will offer you £20 at 4/1 to charity of winners choice that SKS gets less votes than in 2017.
There's only one minor problem with that analysis. What if your leader is so toxic with a certain percentage of the population that they'll actively vote against him?
Take the US. It may very well be that Trump maximises the Republican share. But he sure as shit maximises the Democratic vote too.
Observations around and about London over the weekend:
1. Mask wearing on the tube down dramatically, despite TfL announcements saying you have to wear masks. 2. Mask wearing everywhere else just about non-existent. 3. Uber has got to the stage of its business model where, having attempted to drive other players out of the market, has now raised its prices dramatically around 10% difference with black cabs. 4. Everywhere is busy.
Black cans are now the superior option. The price difference is, as you say, now very marginal. So, once you factor in the quality of experience (more room, drivers with superior geography skills), the black cab wins. There's even an app if you prefer to book one Uber style rather than flag one down.
I took a black cab from kings cross to Charing cross as my folding bike had a bust light and needed to make the last train home. took about 20 minutes and cost about £16. Should have braved the tube.
The conventional wisdom in London is black cabs for short journeys and ubers for long ones but as others have mentioned, perhaps that is changing. The other issue is you need to factor in time of day because black cabs charge for time sitting stationary in traffic jams.
Speaking as a regular user of London's public transport network since 1994, the conventional wisdom in London is Bus for short journeys and Tube and/or Train for long journeys.
Agreed but Covid has taught me to walk more in London! <45 mins walk and dry, then thats first choice, whereas it would have been <15 mins pre covid.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
1 PT 2 Morris Dancer 3 DuraAce? 4 DuraAce? 5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!) 6 Max 7 Malmesbury?/Charles? 8 Malcolm 9 Mr Ed 10 CR? 11 BigG 12 HYUFD
3 is Leon and 4 Topping
Yep. Take these 2 edits to the 1st pass by @noneoftheabove and going firm on Malmesbury not Charles for (7) and we have it.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
Observations around and about London over the weekend:
1. Mask wearing on the tube down dramatically, despite TfL announcements saying you have to wear masks. 2. Mask wearing everywhere else just about non-existent. 3. Uber has got to the stage of its business model where, having attempted to drive other players out of the market, has now raised its prices dramatically around 10% difference with black cabs. 4. Everywhere is busy.
Black cans are now the superior option. The price difference is, as you say, now very marginal. So, once you factor in the quality of experience (more room, drivers with superior geography skills), the black cab wins. There's even an app if you prefer to book one Uber style rather than flag one down.
I took a black cab from kings cross to Charing cross as my folding bike had a bust light and needed to make the last train home. took about 20 minutes and cost about £16. Should have braved the tube.
The conventional wisdom in London is black cabs for short journeys and ubers for long ones but as others have mentioned, perhaps that is changing. The other issue is you need to factor in time of day because black cabs charge for time sitting stationary in traffic jams.
Speaking as a regular user of London's public transport network since 1994, the conventional wisdom in London is Bus for short journeys and Tube and/or Train for long journeys.
Agreed but Covid has taught me to walk more in London! <45 mins walk and dry, then thats first choice, whereas it would have been <15 mins pre covid. </p>
When I was about 18-19, in the mid 90s, I had a massive panic attack on a Central Line train that was stuck in a tunnel between stations for 15-20 mins, then another a few weeks later on the Piccadilly line going to watch Arsenal. Afterwards I avoided the tube wherever possible, and when I did use it all I could think about was "what if we get stuck?". I was ok on the District Line, as that seemed less claustrophobic
Anyway, when I got a job in Southwark a few years later, I did start getting the Jubilee Line, but I got stuck for 45 mins between Southwark and London Bridge, I remember doing the Standard crossword thinking "by the time I have finished this I'll prob be home" - It took me about 40 mins and we hadn't moved!. After that I decided to walk from Fenchurch St , and it was quite a revelation -it was lovely to explore a bit of London, walk by the Thames every day, and the 30-35 min walk was obviously better for my health than being crammed onto a tube.
I did start getting the tube again for a while, the last of which was the day before 7/7! After that I thought "Never Again", and I dont think I ever have.
Observations around and about London over the weekend:
1. Mask wearing on the tube down dramatically, despite TfL announcements saying you have to wear masks. 2. Mask wearing everywhere else just about non-existent. 3. Uber has got to the stage of its business model where, having attempted to drive other players out of the market, has now raised its prices dramatically around 10% difference with black cabs. 4. Everywhere is busy.
Black cans are now the superior option. The price difference is, as you say, now very marginal. So, once you factor in the quality of experience (more room, drivers with superior geography skills), the black cab wins. There's even an app if you prefer to book one Uber style rather than flag one down.
I took a black cab from kings cross to Charing cross as my folding bike had a bust light and needed to make the last train home. took about 20 minutes and cost about £16. Should have braved the tube.
The conventional wisdom in London is black cabs for short journeys and ubers for long ones but as others have mentioned, perhaps that is changing. The other issue is you need to factor in time of day because black cabs charge for time sitting stationary in traffic jams.
Speaking as a regular user of London's public transport network since 1994, the conventional wisdom in London is Bus for short journeys and Tube and/or Train for long journeys.
It's a bit of a shame that you didn't see the system in the 70s Sunil. Hard to know quite who/where/what etc, but by the 90s the system was much as it is today - pretty decent.
I was in Paris recently - line 5 I think it was reminded me of the old tube. (Paris is going to have to spend some serious money on their system)
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Is that the one from Darlington that came to the rescue when the Kent Electric Mainline was closed by a snowfall? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8428097.stm
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
When I was about 18-19, in the mid 90s, I had a massive panic attack on a Central Line train that was stuck in a tunnel between stations for 15-20 mins, then another a few weeks later on the Piccadilly line going to watch Arsenal. Afterwards I avoided the tube wherever possible, and when I did use it all I could think about was "what if we get stuck?". I was ok on the District Line, as that seemed less claustrophobic
Anyway, when I got a job in Southwark a few years later, I decided to walk from Fenchurch St , and it was quite a revelation -it was lovely to explore a bit of London, walk by the Thames every day, and the 30-35 min walk was obviously better for my health than being crammed onto a tube.
I did start getting the tube again for a while, the last of which was the day before 7/7! After that I thought "Never Again", and I dont think I ever have.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Is that the one from Darlington that came to the rescue when the Kent Electric Mainline was closed by a snowfall? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8428097.stm
(Ah I see not.)
I had hoped to post a video of Tornado but I couldn’t find a suitable one.
NEW: people obsess over vaccine uptake stats, eagerly comparing one country to others to see which has jabbed the highest share of its population, but what if I told you many — perhaps most — of those stats are wrong?
Time for a thread on bad Covid data and how it can cost lives
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
'Yawwwwwwn' would be a perfect Eliza reply.
The 'Turing Test' is not a perfect test of intelligence - as I think Turing himself pointed out. It's also extremely limited, down to a conversation. And with the Internet providing millions of conversations a day, a simple unintelligent spider could produce interesting replies. Turing never predicted that.
As for the 'ten years'; I'm fairly certain that'll end up in the same was as your SeanT's 'no lorry drivers in ten years' prediction ...
When I was about 18-19, in the mid 90s, I had a massive panic attack on a Central Line train that was stuck in a tunnel between stations for 15-20 mins, then another a few weeks later on the Piccadilly line going to watch Arsenal. Afterwards I avoided the tube wherever possible, and when I did use it all I could think about was "what if we get stuck?". I was ok on the District Line, as that seemed less claustrophobic
Anyway, when I got a job in Southwark a few years later, I decided to walk from Fenchurch St , and it was quite a revelation -it was lovely to explore a bit of London, walk by the Thames every day, and the 30-35 min walk was obviously better for my health than being crammed onto a tube.
I did start getting the tube again for a while, the last of which was the day before 7/7! After that I thought "Never Again", and I dont think I ever have.
Same here. Claustro. I don't mind the lines near or on the surface off peak but it'd take a very good reason - eg an emergency meaning I simply have to get across town superquick or an offer of at least £10,000 - to get me on a crowded deep one. I was absolutely fine on this score when I was younger. No probs whatsoever. So it's yet another one of those.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Utterly magnificent and she came past my school in Berwick daily and as a young lad the signalman at Scremerston signal box called me and my mate up into the box and allowed me to pull the levers to signal her through on her way to Edinburgh Waverly
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
The volunteering of the assertion of self-awareness is to my mind more important. However it's no test in that it'd be impossible to understand where that assertion came from in a complex system.
I think you'd also want to see plausible weirdness in the actual goings on of the AI brain. It really might want to post such madness as you or I do Leon, and actually if it doesn't then you'd be worried. (Not that you or I are sensible, but merely that an AI shouldn't immediately have constraints.)
I'm too old now to work on this. I so much wanted to.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Utterly magnificent and she came past my school in Berwick daily and as a young lad the signalman at Scremerston signal box called me and my mate up into the box and allowed me to pull the levers to signal her through on her way to Edinburgh Waverly
She was magic then and is magic today
I wonder how many of us went a delicate shade of green with sheer envy at this post?
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Utterly magnificent and she came past my school in Berwick daily and as a young lad the signalman at Scremerston signal box called me and my mate up into the box and allowed me to pull the levers to signal her through on her way to Edinburgh Waverly
She was magic then and is magic today
I wonder how many of us went a delicate shade of green with sheer envy at this post?
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
imports = part of the market immigration = a distortion of the market
yeah, me neither.
People seem to overlook imports living 4 to a room next door to them, or causing longer NHS waiting lists, more crowded classrooms etc, yet they are annoyed at immigrants for doing exactly the same thing!
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Is that the one from Darlington that came to the rescue when the Kent Electric Mainline was closed by a snowfall? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8428097.stm
(Ah I see not.)
I had hoped to post a video of Tornado but I couldn’t find a suitable one.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
True AI story: back in the early 1990s, I was on a train to Matlock with a local farmer I knew. I was reading a computer magazine (Byte, perhaps), with 'New advances in AI' on the front cover.
He stared at the magazine as I read it, and after a while he asked to read it. He was not into computers, and did not have one, so it was an unexpected request. I handed it over to him, and he flicked through. Eventually he turned to me and asked:
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
30% of people don't know or care about climate change, 20% of people care and will make sacrifices, 50% want to do something but also drive around and eat burgers on sun holidays.
The point is that we don't really have to make too many sacrifices.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Is that the one from Darlington that came to the rescue when the Kent Electric Mainline was closed by a snowfall? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8428097.stm
(Ah I see not.)
I had hoped to post a video of Tornado but I couldn’t find a suitable one.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
True AI story: back in the early 1990s, I was on a train to Matlock with a local farmer I knew. I was reading a computer magazine (Byte, perhaps), with 'New advances in AI' on the front cover.
He stared at the magazine as I read it, and after a while he asked to read it. He was not into computers, and did not have one, so it was an unexpected request. I handed it over to him, and he flicked through. Eventually he turned to me and asked:
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Is that the one from Darlington that came to the rescue when the Kent Electric Mainline was closed by a snowfall? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8428097.stm
(Ah I see not.)
I had hoped to post a video of Tornado but I couldn’t find a suitable one.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
Genuine generalisable AI is probably a long way off; it's still a ghost we can't readily put in a machine.
The thing that's really going to cause trouble is how little intelligence is needed to outsmart most of us by brute force.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
To be fair, an awful lot of us fail those tests from time to time.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
Mrs Thatcher also played a part in criminal DNA profiling by overruling the Home Office to provide funding. See ITV 9pm tonight (clashes with New Labour on BBC2).
9 Oct The estimated wealth of Premier league clubs if the Newcastle takeover goes ahead. The Saudi Public Investment Fund is worth £700 billion. The owners of the richest club, Man City, are worth £23 billion."
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
Genuine generalisable AI is probably a long way off; it's still a ghost we can't readily put in a machine.
The thing that's really going to cause trouble is how little intelligence is needed to outsmart most of us by brute force.
That's going to be a bit embarrassing.
Well, Eliza-level stuff would apparently outsmart Leon ...
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
Yes that's true. Good point.
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
Utterly magnificent and she came past my school in Berwick daily and as a young lad the signalman at Scremerston signal box called me and my mate up into the box and allowed me to pull the levers to signal her through on her way to Edinburgh Waverly
She was magic then and is magic today
Bah. Over-rated LNER rubbish.
Give me anything from Crewe, or preferably Derby, any day...
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
Mrs Thatcher also played a part in criminal DNA profiling by overruling the Home Office to provide funding. See ITV 9pm tonight (clashes with New Labour on BBC2).
That's not AI really though - just machine learning (looking for the best patterns that are predictive). These things are quite different. An AI and a machine-learning algorithm should be different too. If an AI is flying your plane expect to crash because it must be faulty by definition. All this stuff is easy to see, and yet it's not really in the public domain.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
Genuine generalisable AI is probably a long way off; it's still a ghost we can't readily put in a machine.
The thing that's really going to cause trouble is how little intelligence is needed to outsmart most of us by brute force.
When I was about 18-19, in the mid 90s, I had a massive panic attack on a Central Line train that was stuck in a tunnel between stations for 15-20 mins, then another a few weeks later on the Piccadilly line going to watch Arsenal. Afterwards I avoided the tube wherever possible, and when I did use it all I could think about was "what if we get stuck?". I was ok on the District Line, as that seemed less claustrophobic
Anyway, when I got a job in Southwark a few years later, I decided to walk from Fenchurch St , and it was quite a revelation -it was lovely to explore a bit of London, walk by the Thames every day, and the 30-35 min walk was obviously better for my health than being crammed onto a tube.
I did start getting the tube again for a while, the last of which was the day before 7/7! After that I thought "Never Again", and I dont think I ever have.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
To be fair, an awful lot of us fail those tests from time to time.
I seem to encounter far more human beings successfully impersonating answering machines.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts
And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness
And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not
This is going to have momentous effects, especially online
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
Mrs Thatcher also played a part in criminal DNA profiling by overruling the Home Office to provide funding. See ITV 9pm tonight (clashes with New Labour on BBC2).
Her scientific background perhaps?
No doubt. And a chance encounter with Denis. Watch the programme.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
To be fair, an awful lot of us fail those tests from time to time.
I seem to encounter far more human beings successfully impersonating answering machines.
One of the more amusing moments in that exchange between Google Duplex and the hair salon lady, is the bit where the hair salon lady sounds more robotic than the robot
It tather depends on how the questions were asked. We're the questions put on am alternate basis first. If not the polls are tomorrow's fish and chip.paper or worse.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
What we mean by AI is pretty important. Once you can programme a machine to make the first few moves in chess sensibly then it is merely a progression in quantity for it to be able to discuss the works of Boethius in Icelandic.
But is it at any level saying it because it thinks it, intuits it, believes it, knows it, has chosen between equally decent alternatives, or alternatively because it has been given enough data to be able to act as if it thinks it? The first is existentially important. The second less so.
The suggestion above that the Turing Test 'sidesteps philosophy', if true, is merely another way of saying it dispenses with the question of whether AI knows anything. Sidestepping reality would be a better term.
If I had to guess I'd say we're on course for 2-2.5C of warming at its highest point.
That won't be fun and will cause a lot of extreme weather, migration and political disruption (remember: we are already at 1.2C of warming now) and the loss of quite a few marginal species but we won't become "extinct".
We've had more than two centuries of technological advancement which has revolutionised how we work and how we live from the Spinning Jenny right up to the advent of some form of Artificial Intelligence.
Computers were meant to render millions of us unemployed - the old days when the accounts department of a County Council was filled with men (mostly) working on ledgers doing double-entry book-keeping (you can see the ledgers at any local History Centre) are now replaced by a small team entering data onto a management information system which pays the bills (not quickly enough for @NerysHughes of course).
The Segrada Familia in Barcelona is being finished by CAD and technology in a way inconceivable just a few decades ago. In my lifetime (and I'm no Methuselah) the pace of technological innovation has been unbelievable. I've seen the VCR come and go and it now seems likely the satellite dish will go the way of the dodo and @Leon's support of the European Union.
And yet...we still work.
The promised days of unlimited leisure have never quite arrived- indeed, administratively the people I know are working harder and longer than ever before. As I've seen with the PCR test, the capacity for information gathering is endless - it seems organisations can never have enough information just as a Spinning Jenny could never get enough cotton or the factories of the early 20th century couldn't get enough coal.
The Information Age provides as many challenges as the Manufacturing Age before it.
For me, AI means Accumulating Information. In truth, organisations are constipated by information. It was once said Knowledge is Power but we suffer from Information Obesity which renders us unfit to make use of the data we have.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
To be fair, an awful lot of us fail those tests from time to time.
I seem to encounter far more human beings successfully impersonating answering machines.
One of the more amusing moments in that exchange between Google Duplex and the hair salon lady, is the bit where the hair salon lady sounds more robotic than the robot
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
Mrs Thatcher also played a part in criminal DNA profiling by overruling the Home Office to provide funding. See ITV 9pm tonight (clashes with New Labour on BBC2).
This is a classic example of people slapping 'AI' onto something because it's a buzzword that will increase sales/funding/readership etc.
It isn't AI. It's Machine Learning.
In all seriousness: take *anything* that proclaims advances in AI with a Dead Sea's worth of salt at the moment. There's far too much money in it for people not to use it as a buzzword.
Computer scientists and engineers are doing amazing things. They'll continue doing amazing things. But treat anything shouting about advances in AI with the same contempt you would an AI-powered toaster.
NEW: people obsess over vaccine uptake stats, eagerly comparing one country to others to see which has jabbed the highest share of its population, but what if I told you many — perhaps most — of those stats are wrong?
Time for a thread on bad Covid data and how it can cost lives
If a) Rasmussen and b)Trafalgar are removed (a because they are hostile to the Dems and b because Cahaly is hostile to the Dems and a joke pollster) then it becomes a lot less troublesome.
imports = part of the market immigration = a distortion of the market
yeah, me neither.
People seem to overlook imports living 4 to a room next door to them, or causing longer NHS waiting lists, more crowded classrooms etc, yet they are annoyed at immigrants for doing exactly the same thing!
If I had to guess I'd say we're on course for 2-2.5C of warming at its highest point.
That won't be fun and will cause a lot of extreme weather, migration and political disruption (remember: we are already at 1.2C of warming now) and the loss of quite a few marginal species but we won't become "extinct".
Far from it.
The truth is hundreds of millions of people live in coastal cities vulnerable to sea level rise and enhanced storms - will the current Thames Barrier adequately protect London in 20 years?
Add on those whose eco-systems will be adversely affected by regional climate changes and it's a recipe for considerable human dislocation.
I agree we should avoid extinction unless we are incalculably stupid. I tend to the view necessity is the mother of invention and as the crisis unfolds human ingenuity will come to the fore (as it did with the coronavirus) and various mitigating actions will mean the direst of the climate predictions will be avoided but it won't be pleasant for some, indeed many.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
Genuine generalisable AI is probably a long way off; it's still a ghost we can't readily put in a machine.
The thing that's really going to cause trouble is how little intelligence is needed to outsmart most of us by brute force.
That's going to be a bit embarrassing.
Well, Eliza-level stuff would apparently outsmart Leon ...
I can remember when you were adamant that machine translation was a ludicrous pipedream, that never be realised
If a) Rasmussen and b)Trafalgar are removed (a because they are hostile to the Dems and b because Cahaly is hostile to the Dems and a joke pollster) then it becomes a lot less troublesome.
That's already accounted for in the various weightings that Nate Silver applies.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
Genuine generalisable AI is probably a long way off; it's still a ghost we can't readily put in a machine.
The thing that's really going to cause trouble is how little intelligence is needed to outsmart most of us by brute force.
That's going to be a bit embarrassing.
Well, Eliza-level stuff would apparently outsmart Leon ...
I can remember when you were adamant that machine translation was a ludicrous pipedream, that never be realised
Please show me the post where I said it was a 'ludicrous pipedream'.
I believe what I said was that it wasn't as good as *you* claimed. Which is pretty much always the case, as you seem to believe every over-hyped self-serving press release.
Nick Macpherson @nickmacpherson2 · 54m The inexorable rise in bond yields is a reminder that it is as much the markets as central banks which determine the interest rates people pay. Debt interest is likely to be the fastest growing spending programme in the forthcoming spending review. #soundmoney
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts
And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness
And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not
This is going to have momentous effects, especially online
Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.
If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?
That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.
But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.
Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
What we mean by AI is pretty important. Once you can programme a machine to make the first few moves in chess sensibly then it is merely a progression in quantity for it to be able to discuss the works of Boethius in Icelandic.
But is it at any level saying it because it thinks it, intuits it, believes it, knows it, has chosen between equally decent alternatives, or alternatively because it has been given enough data to be able to act as if it thinks it? The first is existentially important. The second less so.
The suggestion above that the Turing Test 'sidesteps philosophy', if true, is merely another way of saying it dispenses with the question of whether AI knows anything. Sidestepping reality would be a better term.
The Turing test is given an unduly easy ride. It's merely a stipulation, it's too easy and already been passed in my case - I got a long way into a chat with a chatbot the other day before I asked it Are you human, and it said I don't understand the question. I'd make it harder and stipulate the AI has to sign up as an online-only undergraduate, fool its tutors for three years and get a 2.1 or better at the end of it. And after all that you still haven't got around the self-awareness problem, because we aren't around that with each other yet. I know I am self-aware, I kind of assume you are too because you are like me in many other respects, but I have no hard evidence you are not just a meat computer in a Chinese room. I don't even know you are made of meat, actually, but even if we met the problem wouldn't go away. I don't really see what the evidence would evn consist of.
"Tory MP James Gray is dropped from role at St John Ambulance 'after saying "They all look the same to me" about Asian ministers Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid' at reception
Tory MP for North Wiltshire James Gray made remark at charity bash Mr Gray, 66, is St John Ambulance commander and was at Parliament reception It was held to recognise 'extraordinary efforts' of volunteers and front-line staff He introduced Mr Zahawi to the stage as the Health Minister but was corrected Mr Gray then was said to comment 'They all look the same to me' to audience He acknowledged it was not appropriate and Mr Zahawi spoke to him privately Last night St John Ambulance said it did not tolerate racism in any form It has now asked him to stand down from all charity activities at once Mr Gray has denied saying remark and insists it was identity mix-up not racism"
If I had to guess I'd say we're on course for 2-2.5C of warming at its highest point.
That won't be fun and will cause a lot of extreme weather, migration and political disruption (remember: we are already at 1.2C of warming now) and the loss of quite a few marginal species but we won't become "extinct".
Far from it.
That would probably be enough warming to trigger a complete melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which would have state-ending consequences for many nations - how does Egypt survive without the Nile Delta?
I'm beginning to doubt whether democracy will survive the expense, hardship and dislocations of the resulting adjustments. Food security in particular should be a major concern for the British government.
Disruption to agriculture will increase and, as we've seen with Covid, the first instinct of many countries will be to hoard supplies and ban exports.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
Actually, we won't.
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
What we mean by AI is pretty important. Once you can programme a machine to make the first few moves in chess sensibly then it is merely a progression in quantity for it to be able to discuss the works of Boethius in Icelandic.
But is it at any level saying it because it thinks it, intuits it, believes it, knows it, has chosen between equally decent alternatives, or alternatively because it has been given enough data to be able to act as if it thinks it? The first is existentially important. The second less so.
The suggestion above that the Turing Test 'sidesteps philosophy', if true, is merely another way of saying it dispenses with the question of whether AI knows anything. Sidestepping reality would be a better term.
Does a virus know anything? Is it conscious on any level? Surely not. Yet it seems alive, and acts with apparent intent, to further its aims
Perhaps a computer intelligence will be something like a virus' "intelligence", which is ominous enough
But let's go up the ladder of creation. Is an amoeba "intelligent"? I'm not sure. I'm even less sure if it is "conscious"
How about a fungus? A primitive mollusc? A tiny insect? An earthworm? A wasp? A cat? A chimp? A human?
Yes of course humans are intelligent and "conscious"; so at some point on that spectrum, between virus and human, consciousness and intelligence emerge, but pinpointing where is extremely hard, and maybe impossible. And I suggest we will have the same problem pinpointing when "intelligence" emerges in machines, or if it ever does.
But they will definitely seem very very intelligent, and that in the end is all that will matter, for most of humanity
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts
And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness
And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not
This is going to have momentous effects, especially online
Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.
If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?
That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.
But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.
Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
"Tory MP James Gray is dropped from role at St John Ambulance 'after saying "They all look the same to me" about Asian ministers Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid' at reception
Tory MP for North Wiltshire James Gray made remark at charity bash Mr Gray, 66, is St John Ambulance commander and was at Parliament reception It was held to recognise 'extraordinary efforts' of volunteers and front-line staff He introduced Mr Zahawi to the stage as the Health Minister but was corrected Mr Gray then was said to comment 'They all look the same to me' to audience He acknowledged it was not appropriate and Mr Zahawi spoke to him privately Last night St John Ambulance said it did not tolerate racism in any form It has now asked him to stand down from all charity activities at once Mr Gray has denied saying remark and insists it was identity mix-up not racism"
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
Yawwwwwwn
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts
And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness
And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not
This is going to have momentous effects, especially online
Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.
If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?
That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.
But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.
Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.
"Tory MP James Gray is dropped from role at St John Ambulance 'after saying "They all look the same to me" about Asian ministers Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid' at reception
Tory MP for North Wiltshire James Gray made remark at charity bash Mr Gray, 66, is St John Ambulance commander and was at Parliament reception It was held to recognise 'extraordinary efforts' of volunteers and front-line staff He introduced Mr Zahawi to the stage as the Health Minister but was corrected Mr Gray then was said to comment 'They all look the same to me' to audience He acknowledged it was not appropriate and Mr Zahawi spoke to him privately Last night St John Ambulance said it did not tolerate racism in any form It has now asked him to stand down from all charity activities at once Mr Gray has denied saying remark and insists it was identity mix-up not racism"
The truth is hundreds of millions of people live in coastal cities vulnerable to sea level rise and enhanced storms - will the current Thames Barrier adequately protect London in 20 years?
I remember seeing a video of a talk by Francis Pryor (archaeologist, prehistoric fens specialist) where he predicted in passing that we'll end up allowing the fens to be reflooded within the next 50 years, because the alternative will be allowing full strength North Sea storm surges to carry on round the coast and flood London. He could be completely wrong, of course, but it it ever happens it would be a pretty dramatic change to the landscape around here...
Comments
There are members to suspend and whistleblowing former staffers to take legal action against
1), 2), 5), )6 and 8) are correct for sure.
I reckon:
4) is Topping
10) Leon
11) BJO
The clean air act 1956 was a landmark piece of legislation
If Jezza was so useless should be easy money for your boring uncle to surpass that in 2024
I will offer you £20 at 4/1 to charity of winners choice that SKS gets less votes than in 2017.
The problem is that once we go beyond the capacity of the system to absorb the insult that is being inflicted the system can unwind very rapidly and permanently. This is why I am a "stepper". One possible red flag was when it was shown recently that the Amazon basin had moved from being the lungs of the planet into a net carbon emitter. We are rolling the dice, daily and blindly, and in my view once change really comes it will be savage. At the risk of sounding over dramatic it may already be too late. There may already be more carbon in the system than it can cope with.
In most countries in the "developed" world, this stuff has quietly ticked along, reducing pollution to a staggering degree.
His performance (or lack thereof) in 2019 is why Labour have such a vast electoral hill to climb.
I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?
The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...
Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.
You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...
(*) However you define that.
You have no faith.
Why you trying to defend him?
See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)
That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
https://youtu.be/uDiTGdlTxww
Too too easy. Grade inflation a real risk.
I think it's the absence of anything eye-catching at all - people barely noticed they were happening. Starmer gave a speech mostly memorable for bits about himself - very nice, but not relevant to most. johnson gave an after-dinner speech, full of jokes, but not relevant to most. Arguably they both did what they set out to do - Starmer to satisfy people he is a safe choice, Johnson to satisfy people that things are OK really. Voters said meh to both.
Rather than spending their worthless, futile lives setting up checkpoints to block ambulances and taking actions that kill hospital patients.
ECO schemes have carried out, I think, approximately 3,000,000 energy efficiency measures. Needs enlarging certainly.
That was the initial factor that broke equilibrium and created a so-called labour shortage, because the price of labour was lowered to below what should have been the market rate for wages, therefore demand for labour was increased.
Once the demand for labour created hundreds of thousands of vacancies, migrants were able to arrive to fill the vacancies, aggregate demand went up and since wages were still capped because of the infinite availability more jobs were created again.
Ten million increase in population later and we were still stuck in an infinite feedback loop. Hence 'vacancies' and net immigration over 300k per annum without ever solving the issue, because we never returned to equilibrium. Because the link between wages and job vacancies were broken because the minimum wage became a maximum wage for many sectors.
Now that the feedback loop has been broken by removing the availability, prices can finally rise and equilibrium can be restored.
Take the US. It may very well be that Trump maximises the Republican share. But he sure as shit maximises the Democratic vote too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM
But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:
"There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."
https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
Anyway, when I got a job in Southwark a few years later, I did start getting the Jubilee Line, but I got stuck for 45 mins between Southwark and London Bridge, I remember doing the Standard crossword thinking "by the time I have finished this I'll prob be home" - It took me about 40 mins and we hadn't moved!. After that I decided to walk from Fenchurch St , and it was quite a revelation -it was lovely to explore a bit of London, walk by the Thames every day, and the 30-35 min walk was obviously better for my health than being crammed onto a tube.
I did start getting the tube again for a while, the last of which was the day before 7/7! After that I thought "Never Again", and I dont think I ever have.
I was in Paris recently - line 5 I think it was reminded me of the old tube. (Paris is going to have to spend some serious money on their system)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8428097.stm
(Ah I see not.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_483
NEW: people obsess over vaccine uptake stats, eagerly comparing one country to others to see which has jabbed the highest share of its population, but what if I told you many — perhaps most — of those stats are wrong?
Time for a thread on bad Covid data and how it can cost lives
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1447617110910382081?s=20
The 'Turing Test' is not a perfect test of intelligence - as I think Turing himself pointed out. It's also extremely limited, down to a conversation. And with the Internet providing millions of conversations a day, a simple unintelligent spider could produce interesting replies. Turing never predicted that.
As for the 'ten years'; I'm fairly certain that'll end up in the same was as your SeanT's 'no lorry drivers in ten years' prediction ...
She was magic then and is magic today
We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.
I think you'd also want to see plausible weirdness in the actual goings on of the AI brain. It really might want to post such madness as you or I do Leon, and actually if it doesn't then you'd be worried. (Not that you or I are sensible, but merely that an AI shouldn't immediately have constraints.)
I'm too old now to work on this. I so much wanted to.
True AI story: back in the early 1990s, I was on a train to Matlock with a local farmer I knew. I was reading a computer magazine (Byte, perhaps), with 'New advances in AI' on the front cover.
He stared at the magazine as I read it, and after a while he asked to read it. He was not into computers, and did not have one, so it was an unexpected request. I handed it over to him, and he flicked through. Eventually he turned to me and asked:
"Where's the article on Artificial Insemination?"
But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.
The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.
Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
Business Class aside, perhaps.
Having an infinite supply of cheap labour distorted the market, yes.
If there were an infinite supply of cheap chicken then people who supply chicken for their living would view that as a distortion.
For those who supply their own labour for a living, having an infinite supply undercutting that was a distortion for them.
The thing that's really going to cause trouble is how little intelligence is needed to outsmart most of us by brute force.
That's going to be a bit embarrassing.
https://www.newscientist.com/article-topic/artificial-intelligence/
@GoodwinMJ
9 Oct
The estimated wealth of Premier league clubs if the Newcastle takeover goes ahead. The Saudi Public Investment Fund is worth £700 billion. The owners of the richest club, Man City, are worth £23 billion."
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1446918171924078594
Give me anything from Crewe, or preferably Derby, any day...
https://twitter.com/LarrySabato/status/1447553871035895815?t=Gls2h5vn8BD-kJtuju08Og&s=19
And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness
And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not
This is going to have momentous effects, especially online
Almost on par with Trump at the end of his term.
It tather depends on how the questions were asked. We're the questions put on am alternate basis first. If not the polls are tomorrow's fish and chip.paper or worse.
But is it at any level saying it because it thinks it, intuits it, believes it, knows it, has chosen between equally decent alternatives, or alternatively because it has been given enough data to be able to act as if it thinks it? The first is existentially important. The second less so.
The suggestion above that the Turing Test 'sidesteps philosophy', if true, is merely another way of saying it dispenses with the question of whether AI knows anything. Sidestepping reality would be a better term.
That won't be fun and will cause a lot of extreme weather, migration and political disruption (remember: we are already at 1.2C of warming now) and the loss of quite a few marginal species but we won't become "extinct".
Far from it.
We've had more than two centuries of technological advancement which has revolutionised how we work and how we live from the Spinning Jenny right up to the advent of some form of Artificial Intelligence.
Computers were meant to render millions of us unemployed - the old days when the accounts department of a County Council was filled with men (mostly) working on ledgers doing double-entry book-keeping (you can see the ledgers at any local History Centre) are now replaced by a small team entering data onto a management information system which pays the bills (not quickly enough for @NerysHughes of course).
The Segrada Familia in Barcelona is being finished by CAD and technology in a way inconceivable just a few decades ago. In my lifetime (and I'm no Methuselah) the pace of technological innovation has been unbelievable. I've seen the VCR come and go and it now seems likely the satellite dish will go the way of the dodo and @Leon's support of the European Union.
And yet...we still work.
The promised days of unlimited leisure have never quite arrived- indeed, administratively the people I know are working harder and longer than ever before. As I've seen with the PCR test, the capacity for information gathering is endless - it seems organisations can never have enough information just as a Spinning Jenny could never get enough cotton or the factories of the early 20th century couldn't get enough coal.
The Information Age provides as many challenges as the Manufacturing Age before it.
For me, AI means Accumulating Information. In truth, organisations are constipated by information. It was once said Knowledge is Power but we suffer from Information Obesity which renders us unfit to make use of the data we have.
It isn't AI. It's Machine Learning.
In all seriousness: take *anything* that proclaims advances in AI with a Dead Sea's worth of salt at the moment. There's far too much money in it for people not to use it as a buzzword.
Computer scientists and engineers are doing amazing things. They'll continue doing amazing things. But treat anything shouting about advances in AI with the same contempt you would an AI-powered toaster.
Middle East or East Scotland?
Add on those whose eco-systems will be adversely affected by regional climate changes and it's a recipe for considerable human dislocation.
I agree we should avoid extinction unless we are incalculably stupid. I tend to the view necessity is the mother of invention and as the crisis unfolds human ingenuity will come to the fore (as it did with the coronavirus) and various mitigating actions will mean the direst of the climate predictions will be avoided but it won't be pleasant for some, indeed many.
https://slator.com/tilde-wins-a-major-contract-to-provide-machine-translation-services-to-the-finnish-government/
https://mashable.com/article/zoom-real-time-language-translation
I believe what I said was that it wasn't as good as *you* claimed. Which is pretty much always the case, as you seem to believe every over-hyped self-serving press release.
Edit: IIRC the conversation was in relation to translator jobs which, like lorry drivers, you said was going to die out in a few years. You might want to see:
https://uk.linkedin.com/jobs/translator-jobs?position=1&pageNum=0
Barney Curley: The man who beat the bookies.
Documentary on RTE1 tonight about how he pulled off his 1975 betting coup. available on the BBC IPlayer afterwards.
Nick Macpherson
@nickmacpherson2
·
54m
The inexorable rise in bond yields is a reminder that it is as much the markets as central banks which determine the interest rates people pay. Debt interest is likely to be the fastest growing spending programme in the forthcoming spending review. #soundmoney
Wheat can be shipped about and popped into storage, it doesn't need a house or create its own aggregate demand.
Nor does wheat get a vote.
If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?
That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.
If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/
But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.
Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
Tory MP for North Wiltshire James Gray made remark at charity bash
Mr Gray, 66, is St John Ambulance commander and was at Parliament reception
It was held to recognise 'extraordinary efforts' of volunteers and front-line staff
He introduced Mr Zahawi to the stage as the Health Minister but was corrected
Mr Gray then was said to comment 'They all look the same to me' to audience
He acknowledged it was not appropriate and Mr Zahawi spoke to him privately
Last night St John Ambulance said it did not tolerate racism in any form
It has now asked him to stand down from all charity activities at once
Mr Gray has denied saying remark and insists it was identity mix-up not racism"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10080777/Tory-MP-James-Gray-said-look-Nadhim-Zahawi-Sajid-Javid.html
I'm beginning to doubt whether democracy will survive the expense, hardship and dislocations of the resulting adjustments. Food security in particular should be a major concern for the British government.
Disruption to agriculture will increase and, as we've seen with Covid, the first instinct of many countries will be to hoard supplies and ban exports.
Perhaps a computer intelligence will be something like a virus' "intelligence", which is ominous enough
But let's go up the ladder of creation. Is an amoeba "intelligent"? I'm not sure. I'm even less sure if it is "conscious"
How about a fungus? A primitive mollusc? A tiny insect? An earthworm? A wasp? A cat? A chimp? A human?
Yes of course humans are intelligent and "conscious"; so at some point on that spectrum, between virus and human, consciousness and intelligence emerge, but pinpointing where is extremely hard, and maybe impossible. And I suggest we will have the same problem pinpointing when "intelligence" emerges in machines, or if it ever does.
But they will definitely seem very very intelligent, and that in the end is all that will matter, for most of humanity
It doesn't.