Posts by sebt

No

Just no. Recognition of emotion is a human ability, based on the ability of the person recognising it to feel emotion themselves. It's not yet another fricking terra nullius for techers to try to annex, for no purpose except to sell ways of making money to people who already have money, or to impose a spurious, aggregated "reality" of general sentiment onto human beings.

I'd love to let this "AI" loose on some Nietzsche. Or Saki. Or Swift. See how it rates them on its reductive, one-dimensional scale.

IANALA, but...

might I advise Dreamhost to refer the US government to the reply given in the case of Arkell vs Pressdram?

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/08/arkell-v-pressdram.html

... adding in "and the horse you rode in on too".

Great and correct decision

Leaving only the question: how is this going to be spun as "ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE"?

ENEMIES OF THE SHAREHOLDERS, perhaps?

Seriously....

“$COMPANY takes privacy and security of its customers very seriously."

This is becoming a familiar refrain. Along with the next sentence, which is always thought, rather than said:

"That's why we don't give your data to anyone unless they cough up serious money"

The ICO's decision is probably right here.

However, nothing, not even a politician lying, can change the fact that Virgin, along with the rest of the bunch of spivs involved in the UK rail industry (and their lobbying outfit the "Rail Delivery Group", are nothing but monopolists making profits out of a politically-constructed, and insanely structured, privatised railway system.

Holier than thou

... is typical of free-market fundamentalism. Which, as you say, is as anti-realist a cult as communism.

"instead we get a flat "non-profit is bad, look people are doing it for political reasons" whilst singing the praises of how efficient the alternative is."

That special use of "political" is another typical move. Anything other than privatising everything that isn't nailed down, and a good deal of what is, is supposedly "political" in a bad sense. But privatising everything is somehow pure and above mere "politics".

Twat

He told Press Gazette: “At a time when many media outlets are experiencing commercial pressures, RADAR will provide the news ecosystem with a cost-effective way to provide incisive local stories, enabling audiences to hold democratic bodies to account.

“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but RADAR allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.”

--------

I'm no "skilled human journalist", but would this Fabulous bot-based system be able to rewrite this statement to tell what it actually means?

Viz:

“At a time when many media outlets are experiencing commercial pressures because big money is not interested in real journalism which might upset the advertisers, RADAR will shamelessly bend over and spread'em to these "commercial pressures", and pollute the news ecosystem even more brainless spam than it contains already, (but here I put the word "local" in there because it's good PR), with a cost-effective way to provide a platform for more adverts, enabling democratic bodies to evade accountability because there's no-one with an enquiring mind in the loop to question their press releases.

“Skilled human journalists will be completely redundant to this process but I can't come out and say that because I'm a slimy PR-droid. RADAR allows us to harness artificial stupidity to scale up to a volume of spam that no-one will bother reading and no-one with a brain could ever be bothered to write”.

FTFY

"A robot could be great if it improves the quality of life for an elderly person as a supplement for frequent visits and calls with family. Using the same robot as an excuse to neglect elderly relatives would be the inverse."

That's a good summing up of the difference between intent (which I'm using for something very human) and function (something a machine can have).

A human can use all kinds of tools/measures/strategies to neglect their elderly relatives - but can be taken to task for it. In other words, the human can think beyond the specified goal or function, and place it in a wider context. The fact that humans don't always think of ethical implications, or often ignore ethical criticism, is no counter-argument whatsoever. The important thing is that they should (whether they do in practice or not - it's an aspiration). The machine can only serve the function, and be judged on how it does this. Intent and meta-thinking is not relevant to it.

(As an aside, the ethical imperfection of humans is one of the most brazenly hollow and self-serving arguments coming out of Silicon Valley fanboys to justify replacing them with machines).

Using this intent/function distinction, a bigggg problem with AI becomes clear. AI, far from being neutral, always carries a hidden payload of intent in it: the intent of those who designed it, those who market it, those who make money from it and those who use it. It's not the machine's fault in any sense that it carries this payload, and it's no flaw from the machine's (fitness for function) point of view. But until we get true strong AI, AI will always carry this hidden intent.

This is very different with humans. Although parents are sometimes blamed when someone does something terrible, no-one would ever describe conception of a child as a design process, over which parents have control. Even upbringing (which has more of an influence) is very different from the design of a machine.

A-ha!!

"and innovative financing to create an inclusive economy"

NOW I understand. I always thought that PFI was a way to splurge taxpayers' money on incompetent monopolists, guaranteeing them returns for decades while avoiding public scrutiny.

But I was wrong. It's "innovative financing to create an inclusive economy". And since it's in the remit of the Ministry of Fun, it must be fun as well.

I'm all in favour of it now.

Agents...

Who call you saying "I've got my CV in front of you...", and then try to interest you in a D#/Z++/EbMinor/SumatraScript permanent position in Hartlepool.

When I know none of these technologies from nothing, and my CV clearly says I'm looking for contract positions in datawarehousing in the Southwest.

Misuse

What, yet another downside of WiFi?

Meanwhile, the only worthwhile application of WiFi - Beer by Wifi - is still not rolled out. In spite of being on the Two-Tailed Dog Party's manifesto (in Hungary).

Icon - do you need to ask?

What's the point?

... apart from to make money for big tech companies?

As an antidote to the whole ridiculous hype, look up the Dutch road-traffic engineer who made various places safer by making them _more_ difficult and complicated to drive through. The effect was to make drivers pay attention. (Or, look him up if you can remember his name, which I can't).

With driverless cars, what are we supposed to do instead of driving?

Inevitable answer: watch the @#$*&£" adverts which will be part of every driverless car "to help us provide a value-for-money service to our lovely customers".

The whole curent tech hype is directed at hijacking human attention, and monetising it. Time for a few digital clogs thrown into datacentre hard-drive enclosures.

Sounds like fascinating research

... which will be eagerly read by the arseholes who have taken over the Internet, turned upside down and used to slurp even more of our data.

A bit of Luddite smashing of datacentre hard-drives is what's needed.

Can't say I'm surprised

Terrorist attack? Followed within days by idiotic government reaction, with the implication that if you just shut up and do what they say then they can prevent this ever happening again. As night follows day.

I'd call it a kneejerk reaction, if it was. What it in fact is is the habit of governments to use anything, whatever it might be, as an excuse to ram through more, unjustified increases in their power.

Hello hackers?

This kind of enforced "entertainment" really needs subversion. As I don't have the skillz, all I can do is suggest alternative "corporate edutainment" recordings:

1. The 5-year-old next door playing (I mean... attempting to play) "Indian Wardance", or whatever pre-Grade 1 piece it is he's been stuck on for the last 6 months. ("is he going to get that bit right this time? ... is he...? Wait for ittttt.... No, of course he isn't....).

2. Sounds of fire alarms, people running about screaming, followed by an out-of-breath voice shouting "OMG THE CALL CENTRE'S ON FIRE!!!! HELP CALL THE FIRE BRIGADE! I'M BURNINNGGGGG...."