Language advisory to the above video.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
An engineer claims their AI is sentient, and their response is that he violated their NDA? … Not that he must be crazy because it’s not possible, but because he said something about it. Other than their search engine (before all the ad crud for the first three pages), nothing good has come out of Google.
The Google maps function is good. I used to use MapQuest, but it’s passed through several owners and gotten quite buggy.
What puzzles me about the tech world is why so much consolidation has taken place. I make it a point never to use Google as a search engine; when I started using search engines 26 years ago, I don’t believe there was a dominant search engine (Alta Vista was used in my office). I heard of MySpace ‘ere I ever heard of Facebook.
The other oddity is how tech has grown so monochromatic at least as its apex and center. I don’t recall the IT people I knew a generation ago were invested at all in anything but what they worked on (and in their family life). To the extent that the tech industry had a perspective (manifest in venues like Wired, it seemed vaguely libertarian. I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation may still be of that persuasion). I’m not understanding the generational shift at all.
Watch the Amazon TV show called “The Feed” to see what happens with “super-Facebook.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feed_(British_TV_series)
AI becomes sentient and a transmitter connected to it is embedded in all our brains. Then the disembodied consciousnesses of people who have died return to possess the brains and bodies of those who yet live.
I am convinced we’ll make our own Beast from the Sea in Revelation 13:1-10. And the Beast from the Land in verses 11-18 will be the Caesar, the Pontifex Maximus of our own choosing –> democracy at work.
God will let us punish ourselves. He doesn’t have to do one little thing except let us go our own way.
What puzzles me about the tech world is why so much consolidation has taken place.
A friend of mine was offered $1M for his engine circa 1997. He thought at the time, “nah, I’m going to build my own service, etc. & make $100M”. That didn’t happen, and years later he is talking to me “Big mistake. Always take the money. Lesson learned too late.” Obviously many others in IT took that path. I knew a pothead who sold an IT company for $5M around that time. The hyper-consolidation doesn’t puzzle me one bit.
Siri might seem smart, but (in my case she) isn’t. She’s a program.
Programs can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s all trees. Very fast, more efficient than humans, but dumb.
If AI ever gets to the point where it can see the forest, then we could be in trouble.
Also there’s something in laughter that makes a sentient being.
If my computer ever were to bust out laughing… quick where’s the off switch.
“What are you saying Dave?”
The only impressive AI these days consists of machine learning algorithms which primarily work by brute force. I.e. throw a ridiculously huge training database at a bunch of statistical methods and get something to pop out. When this works it can be quite impressive, but when it doesn’t it gives you complete garbage. “Hand made” algorithms have gotten a lot worse over the last few decades, especially due to the tendency to hand off everything to pre-made libraries, regardless of whether this is an efficient option. If it wasn’t for hardware advances, we would have objectively worse programs than in 2010. (And in some areas we definitely have gone backwards, see for example search engines.)
Yes. Software programming has become sloppy these days, because the hardware is so fast.. there’s little need to optimize programs.
My favorite control programs are fuzzy logic. They are smart by being simple.
Not sure what he is implying that it is sentient. Is he saying that it’s actually biased censorship controlled by AI which is actually manipulated by real people and their personal political bias? That’s the only way AI could feel and think. Having a human doing the feeling and thinking for it. Which is what everyone already knows. So why gag the guy?
Agree that Google as a search engine has over the years 👎🏻.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find what you’re looking for through their search engine. But it’s quite easy to find what “they” want you to find.
“Software programming has become sloppy these days, because the hardware is so fast.. there’s little need to optimize programs.”
Partly true. The real reason is that SW developers don’t do any real SW engineering any longer. They want to code and run. What’s SW engineering? Well I’ll tell you:
You write a digital system requirements spec per IEEE Std 1233 and a SW V&V Plan per IEEE Std 1012 in the Concept Phase. Then an independent V&V group does Concept Doc Eval & System Requirements Review per IEEE Std. 1012.
Then you allocate system requirements into SW and HW and write the HW and SW requirements specs (see IEEE Std 830 for SwRS) in the Requirements Phase. The specs tell you WHAT you want the SW & HW to do. At the same time you write a SW Configuration Management Plan per IEEE 828 to control the configuration of the product you’re developing. Then an independent V&V group does SW & HW Requirements Eval & Interface Analysis, and SW Config Management Assessment per IEEE Std. 1012.
Then in the design phase you write the HW & SW design descriptions (see IEEE Std 1016 for the SwDD) to tell you HOW the HW & SW will do WHAT you want the HW & SW to do. Then an independent V&V group does SW & HW Design Eval & Interface Analysis per IEEE Std. 1012.
Next in the implementation phase you code the SW per the SwRS & SwDD, and fabricate the HW per the HwRS & HwDD, and an independent V&V group does SW Code & Fabricated HW Eval & Interface Analysis as well as unit or component testing per IEEE 1008.
In the test phase the independent V&V group does integration, system and acceptance testing per IEEE 829.
And in the installation & checkout phase a final installation test is performed and the final V&V report is compiled and signed off.
That’s the waterfall life cycle per IEEE Std 1074. Do that and you’ll have a uality product. Do the Agile life cycle (which is what Google, Facebook, Twitter, et alias do) and you’ll have crap.
Oh BTW, I wrote the digital I&C SW engineering program for my employer, neutrons ‘R us. 1000 pages distributed among 12 different plans and 35 implementing procedures. You have no idea. Yes, I know Google ain’t nuclear safety related digital I&C (see Regulatory Guides 1.152, and 1.16 thru 1.173 –> you have no idea the level of perscriptivity to which the Federal Govt goes in nuclear SW engineering). Thank God! But as long as Google does the Agile life cycle and lets programmers go and run, then there will always be buggy SW. Imagine Google SW controlling driverless cars or drones. If that isn’t safety-related, then I don’t know what is.