(November 4, 2016 at 2:57 pm)abaris Wrote:(November 4, 2016 at 1:15 pm)Mathilda Wrote: I need to relax. The assumptions he makes are staggering. I'll respond later when I have calmed down and can type properly without risk of mashing my keyboard into bits.
Well, Harris does that to you. On most every topic he feels like running his mouth on. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan.
As far as my understanding of AI goes, we are still miles away from creating something remotely deserving the name. I might have lost track and I may be wrong and maybe there's the big breakthrough in the near future. So it's rather moot to discuss it right now without knowing what it really turns out to be.
Right now it's just machines learning from and adapting to their environment.
As someone who has literally devoted my life to AI, who has seen plenty of other opportunities in other scientific fields and who sees very little work in this area, it really is galling when someone like Sam Harris and other self promoting so called experts (in other field) steps on the foetus of this field before it even gets a chance to get underway. People who have benefitted from funding and opportunities to make a name for themselves but with no practical experience, qualification or understanding of AI. There has been so little progress yet the challenge is so great. I haven't even described here yet what kind of a challenge it is. Yet they're the ones who get the Ted Talks. Why him? Why not someone who actually works in the area? Because what they say isn't titillating enough.
He makes me seethe. Yet there are real problems in store for us. He talks about 50 years ahead. Well maybe he should talk about 100 hundreds years ahead. That's how many harvests we have left. Maybe he should talk about global climate change, the chance of a pandemic destroying our increasingly fragile social order, the need for asteroid mining due to the exponential curves of increase demanding and increasing depletion of resources (which would greatly benefit from AI by the way)
