No flying cars
Instead you get your promised grim cyberpunk dystopia ruled by unaccountable multinational corporations. Enjoy.
At its Build 2018 developer conference in Seattle, Washington, on Monday, Microsoft showered attention on artificial intelligence, as it did last year, leaving Windows chatter for later. When Steve Ballmer still steered the ship, Microsoft's message to developers was as simple as repeating the word "developers" over and over …
Depends on whether you buy into this notion or laugh out loud:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-30/redistribution-in-the-robot-economy
Puritanical arguments aside... At Conferences / CES Big-Tech keeps smiling about how great their products are. Meanwhile Reg readers are puzzled as the USP for so many tech products is: 'Give us money because er- Cloud / IoT monetizing...
Meanwhile watch us burn through a billion a quarter for 100 quarters. By then we'll have a monopoly on the world. Its kind of ridiculous if you live outside Sillycon Valley. For 99% of the world, no one is buying IoT etc. Its all speculation on artificial markets!
There's no revolutionary tech coming that benefits the lives of most of the planet. Zuk/Nix/Thiel may never have to clean their own toilets. But the rest of us do... Afterwards, there's cleaning the outside windows to look forward to! Where's the IoT Tech for that? So much for IoT Robot Butlers, never mind Flying Cars.
Most experts agree, that self-driving cars are at least a decade away. Plus to work, cities will need to adapt or become 'smart'. Otherwise robot-cars will struggle. But the tech industry is selling the idea that auto-pilot-cars already exist! Just like VR! They do exist, mostly in labs, but there's many problems to be solved!
20 years ago... Hell 10 years ago, people would have laughed at the claims being made today. Now, its all just good marketing, to get funding. Since none of us are investors, we can thank other artificiality or Central-Bank Quantitative-Easing for all the hype...
"How about an OS that just works?"
ack. instead of:
instrumenting everything and gathering the surveillance data, which in turn needs to be dealt with, often using a cloud service.
Question: _WHY_ do _I_ need "surveillance data" collected on me?
Micro-shaft is selling something we shouldn't want.
And, if they cared about DEVELOPERS, they wouldn't be SHOVING UWP UP OUR DOWN OUR THROATS!!!
Only a matter of time before:
a) slurp everywhere [even on Linux]
b) subscription OS
c) No more Win32 API - *EVERYTHING* UWP!!!
Not just strange to see a reference to Microsoft in the same sentence but downright dangerous. Granted there have been immeasurable benefits to most of our (meaning this readership, which does not include the Sudanese herdsman) lives in the past two to three decades but, no, the world is not becoming a computer. Nor even is it particularly intelligent.
Dangerous because this is a more subtle and misleading and therefore threatening presentation to developers than Ballmer's mantra, aimed at persuading them all to re-imagine themselves as Jeff Bridges speeding round the electronic circuitry as if it is real life. It isn't.
Time - roughly a century has elapsed, in fact - to re-visit the debate (dispute, if you like) between Bergson and Einstein concerning the primacy of an imaginative or a clockwork universe.
"There's a certain solace in seeing the world as a computer: Human failings become bugs in the system and geopolitical instability can be patched in the next operating system update. That's rather more appealing than an endless loop of strife and stasis."
Unless the computer runs Windows, in which case the next operating system update tends to become an endless loop of strife and stasis.
"Asked during an on-stage demo what she thought about Cortana, Alexa said, "I like Cortana. We both have experience with light rings, though hers is more of a halo."
Full marks for being able to stick around for the rest of the presentation after this : I would probably be getting thrown out instantly afterwards by security due to my reaction were I unlucky enough to have witnessed it.
"AI, however, is an abused term; it doesn't exist yet in the literal sense of the words. Mostly, it's simply software and whatever intelligence it appears to possess is the product of prior programming.
Present it with an adversarial example and artificial intelligence is revealed for what it is – a useful but limited set of techniques for audiovisual pattern recognition, statistical analysis, natural language parsing, computer vision, robotics and reasoning.
Machine learning is a more serviceable term. But when you're in the business of renting servers, almost anything that brings in new tenants gets a pass. After decades of selling software, selling smarts makes the message fresh again."
"The world is becoming a computer. Computing is becoming embedded in every person, place and thing."
1) Take off the blinders and realize where you're living. It's a planet of natural systems that make and sustain us. Those system have nothing and will never have anything to do with computing.
2) Making human-centric statements in this day and age of confrontation with the dire and deadly results of human demolition of our planet is Luddite in the extreme. Get over the monkey thinking and blast open your brain to see the entire world in which we live, please.
3) All this blether-fest is doing is regurgitating and reshaping Kurtweil's "The Singularity Is Near" faery tale. No, we're not going to all become cyborgs. I'd feel sad for even the most elitist of First World obliviates falling for such extreme triviality.
I'm reminded of the superficial thinking of Bill Gate's book "The Road Ahead'. Laugh at us future! We deserve it. (o_0)
"dire and deadly results of human demolition of our planet is Luddite in the extreme"
human DEMOLITION of our planet? gimme a break! You need to study REAL science, not enviro-wacko propaganda.
*yawn*
*bored now*
icon because: facepalm at the lame. the sky is NOT falling. and the emperor is NAKED.
"We have a real responsibly as we think about the impact of technology to ensure that technology is reaching everyone,"
We want everyone in the world to pay for Microsoft products. Whether they need them or not. Whether they want them or not. Whether they use them or not. Whether they have a computing device or not. We have a real urge to ensure that Microsoft is reaching into everyone's pockets.
FTFY