Quora uses a massive amount of dark patterns. They are huge gaping assholes. I bet they even have a counter-UX engineer whose role is just to design users to enter as much info as possible and never leave the website.
I agree, I guess that I would do my best to get the easiest tasks so my performance would be up, and the hardest tasks would either never get done or in a really dirty way.
But how do you implement a global stack ranking in such a diverse company like Microsoft? There is no good criteria for comparing the kernel developers to the frontend programmers, for example. I doubt you could even find 100 employees working on the same kind of task.
An earlier poster, who works at Microsoft, said that the ranking is done in large groups. So I imagine it would be grouped something like developers reporting to a particular PC. . .so it wouldn't be as granular as you describe. . .and the criteria wouldn't be granular either. . .Or I guess the criteria/objectives could be fairly high-level, but any benchmarks used could be more granular and specific.
I have always considered websites to be comparable to public shops. Any "client" can enter and profit from a "[web] service" given by a "server", so it seems much more fitting than a private house or office, which would be comparable to the backend, itself off limits in most cases.
And in most cases, in the areas I've lived in, you have no right to refuse service to "certain people". So, yes, this seems just as bad as a baker who would refuse a certain subset of people from even entering his shop.
Just about any store in the USA can ban customers for non-discriminatory reasons. For example, if you go to a restaurant, start swearing at the servers, throwing your food, and misbehaving, you'll quickly find yourself banned from the location.
I think it varies by state, but as long as the banning isn't because you're part of a protected class[1], a private establishment can refuse service for any reason it sees fit, including none at all.
Ah, yes, that's what I meant by most cases. If you establish rules that do not discard a class of the population, then it's very much acceptable to reject those who infringe them, in my opinion.
In any case, I was just correcting your analogy, not your premise.
Right, and banning a customer from a store is equivalent to a computer denying a request from a remote client. But in this case, the computer didn't deny the request.
No, banning a customer is almost exactly equivalent to sending the sort of C&D letter that Craigslist sent. I'm banned from Walmart for life, and was asked to sign a trespass warning explaining that if I'm found on Walmart property, I'll be charged with trespassing. That's Walmart's right.
Just because the door is open doesn't mean that everyone is welcome to go through it. The same holds true for websites just as it holds true for grocery stores.
In the U.S. you do have the right to arbitrarily refuse service, except on the basis of certain specific classifications: race, religion, ethnicity, etc. Nothing keeps me from closing my shop to people named Joe, people below 5'8", people who like Battlestar Galactica, etc.
The way that works is that someone entering a public shop has implied license to be on the property. But that implied license can be explicitly revoked to exclude specific people.
Where to? Do we have access to the source of this?
On that topic, I have never found much of Github's source code, which is extremely hypocritical, and makes me fear the day we'll want to move away from them. I'd be glad to be wrong and find out that I had just never looked in the right place.
That's not hypocrisy in the slightest. It would be if Github made claims like "we think companies should open-source all of their product's code", but they would never make such a claim. In fact, their business model is selling features to people who want to keep their code private.
But why? All that does is handicap the people who don't speak more than 2 dialects, even though they may be more productive in terms of work than the people who speak 22 dialects.
At age 21, I have already immigrated twice to countries with different languages, and I have always considered language as the major barrier in everything I always did (because past a certain age, no matter how hard I try, I keep the accent).
I dream of a world where language is a concern of the past. It just makes no sense to keep this hindrance around when there are important things to do.
Language is important to people who aren't you. Your notions of what is and isn't important are personal, not universal, and you really don't have the right to dictate to people that they're no longer allowed to speak a certain language simply because it's not the one you picked.
That's presuming that the very notion of a one world language would even work, considering all we know about linguistic mutations.
What you want is akin to, "Why are we wasting all this time fighting cancer when we could be achieving spaceflight?" Maybe, just maybe, it's people that are important?
No need to be arrogant, I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal. Indeed, I only talked about myself in that comment, precisely to avoid peppering it with IMHOs.
I never said I was going to dictate anything onto anyone, it's an opinion, and yours is acknowldged. 7 billion+ to go.
>That's presuming that the very notion of a one world language would even work, considering all we know about linguistic mutations.
The US have had immigrants from all other the world a few centuries ago and I have never seen any problems directly related to education with 2-3 generations descendants, so I think it was a safe assumption. It can be discussed.
>What you want is akin to, "Why are we wasting all this time fighting cancer when we could be achieving spaceflight?"
Not really. IMO, it is actually much more akin to an engineer proposing that we set a standard so we could stop focusing on component integration so much, and actually get to work. I think many engineers prefer standards to having a large variety of systems that achieve the same things, so I see no reason why that wouldn't apply to languages.
> I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal.
This wasn't the problem.
The problem was that your opinion was to have a universal language.
This is textbook imperialism. This is why English has such major influences from French and Latin when it's essentially a Germanic language. Because a couple of empires invaded England and imposed their language.
> The US have had immigrants from all other the world a few centuries ago and I have never seen any problems directly related to education with 2-3 generations descendants, so I think it was a safe assumption. It can be discussed.
The US prints out reams of extra paperwork precisely so that it can be offered in multiple languages. The US fought and continues to fight proxy wars dealing with how these immigrants are integrated into the culture. New York City used to be a battleground between the Italians and the Irish. Read just about any significant span of American history and you'll find a disagreement between two different sets of immigrants. Don't need no West Side Story to explain it.
Of course, at the same time, the US invented the network standard dialect of English while making fun of Californian versus Midwestern versus New England versus Southern accents. Odd... those are also some of the clearest political battlefield lines historically. And it's the US who is internationally laughed at for having the least informed and most cross-culturally inept population in the world.
Furthermore, do you really want the US to be the de jure overlord of the entire world? Because I don't.
And lastly, linguistic mutation. Even if you buy into the Chomskyian notion of a universal grammar inherent in the biological human brain, you still have the fact that language evolves differently for different groups of people and there isn't any way to reliably intermingle them on a regular basis unless you use top-down imposition.
> IMO, it is actually much more akin to an engineer proposing that we set a standard so we could stop focusing on component integration so much, and actually get to work. I think many engineers prefer standards to having a large variety of systems that achieve the same things, so I see no reason why that wouldn't apply to languages.
>What's the problem with keeping the accent? Why do you think an accent hinders you?
In my experience, it does, in most social contexts, and also in job interviews, as some interviewers don't feel it would be as easy for me to integrate to the rest of the team, which is true to some extent. These may all be exceptions but it's a big indicator in my opinion.
>And which language and universal accent should the world switch to?
I think any language known to me would do. When the time comes and people feel ready to accept the idea of one language (looking at the replies I got, it's not gonna happen), we'll discuss it.
But the reward is so great that we can't dismiss the possibility of finding the special wings that are appropriate for that priceless plane.
Think about it: we dont' just get very cheap labor working 24/7 without moral issues or personal needs. We can also make the robots take our jobs very efficiently, and technological progress will be unstoppable (particularly if they can improve themselves). It's the essence of singularity.
It's also really, really dangerous. Imagine an amoral being without that is hundreds or thousands of times more intelligent than humans. Do you think you could control it?
That's not unrealistic. Computers already have clock cycles many thousands of times faster than the human brain (our brains get away with it by being massively parallel), have instant access to the entire world's knowledge base, can be scaled up indefinitely (just add another processor), and most importantly, can modify their code at will. If they see an improvement they can make to their own intelligence, they instantly become more intelligent, and get better at finding even more improvements, or designing even better AIs.
There always seems to be an assumption in popular thought that any intelligent machine would necessarily be like us: ie, have drives, motivations, self-preservation instinct, etc. This just isn't the case. Even in us, our rational nature is an appendage to our more base drives and instincts. Intelligence does not come with these motivations and drives, they are completely separate. There is no reason to think that a general AI would have any of these things, thus concerns about it deciding that its better off without us are completely unfounded.
There is a concern however, that someone would program an AI specifically with these motivations. In that case we do have everything to worry about.
Intelligence does not come with these motivations and drives, they are completely separate.
Do you know of any examples of intelligent beings that don't have any motivations and drives? (Note that "motivations and drives" is a very general term; there's no need for them to be human motivations and drives. I agree the motivations and drives don't have to be human ones; but that's not the same as saying the AI has none at all.)
There is no reason to think that a general AI would have any of these things, thus concerns about it deciding that its better off without us are completely unfounded.
If an entity doesn't have some kind of motivation and drive, how can it be intelligent? Intelligence doesn't just mean cogitating in a vacuum; it means taking information in from the world, and doing things that have effects in the world. (Even if the AI just answers questions put to it, its answers are still actions that have effects in the world.) So an AI has to at least have the motivation and drive to take in information and do things with it; otherwise it's useless anyway.
So given that the AI at least has to "want" to take in information and do things with it, how do you know the things it will want to do with the information are good things? ("Good" here means basically "beneficial to humans", since that's why we would want to build an AI in the first place.) We can say that we'll design the AI this way; but how do we know we can do that without making a mistake? A mistake doesn't have to be "oh, we programmed the AI to want to destroy the world; oops". A mistake is anything that causes a mismatch between what the AI is actually programmed to do, and what we really want it to do. Any programmer should know that this will always happen, in any program.
>Do you know of any examples of intelligent beings that don't have any motivations and drives?
My computer, for certain definitions of intelligent.
> Intelligence doesn't just mean cogitating in a vacuum; it means taking information in from the world, and doing things that have effects in the world.
I agree with this; but its behavior does not have to be self-directed to be intelligent. Again, computers behave quite intelligently in certain constrained areas, yet its behavior is completely driven by a human operator. There is no reason a fully general AI must be self-directed based on what we would call drives.
>So an AI has to at least have the motivation and drive to take in information and do things with it
I don't see this to be true either. Its (supposed) neural network could be modified externally without any self-direction whatsoever. An intelligent process does not have to look like a simulation of ourselves.
The word "being" perhaps is the stumbling point here. Perhaps it is true that something considered a "being" would necessarily require a certain level of self-direction. But even in that case I don't see it being possible for a being who was, say, programmed to enjoy absorbing knowledge to necessarily have any self-preservation instinct, or any drives whatsoever outside of knowledge-gathering. All the "ghosts in the machine" nonsense is pure science fiction. I don't think there is any programming error that could turn an intended knowledge-loving machine into a self-preserving amoral humanity killer. The architecture of the two would be vastly different.
Yes, but I would argue that those definitions are not really relevant to this discussion. You say...
behavior does not have to be self-directed to be intelligent
...which is true, but the whole point of AI is to get to a point where computers are self-directed; where we don't have to laboriously tell the computer what to do; we just give it a general goal statement and it figures out how to accomplish it. If we have to continuously intervene to get it to do what we want, what's the point? We have that now. So this...
Its (supposed) neural network could be modified externally without any self-direction whatsoever.
...is also not really relevant, because the whole point is to develop AI's that can modify their own neural networks (or whatever internal structures they end up having) as an ongoing process, the way humans do.
(Btw, one of the reasons I keep saying this is "the whole point" is that developing such AI's would confer a huge competitive advantage, compared to the "intelligent" machines we have now, that only exhibit "intelligent" behavior with continuous human intervention. So it's not realistic to limit discussion to the latter kind of machines; even if you personally don't want to take the next step, somebody else will.)
The word "being" perhaps is the stumbling point here.
No, I think it's the word "intelligent". See above.
I don't think there is any programming error that could turn an intended knowledge-loving machine into a self-preserving amoral humanity killer.
I don't think you're trying hard enough to imagine what effects a programming error could have. Have you read any of Eliezer Yudkowsky's articles on the Friendly AI problem?
The architecture of the two would be vastly different.
Why would this have to be the case? Human beings implement both behaviors quite handily on the same architecture.
I have a feeling our disagreement is largely one of terminology.
>the whole point of AI is to get to a point where computers are self-directed; where we don't have to laboriously tell the computer what to do;
There is much in between laboriously tell it what to do and having a self-directed entity traipsing in and out of computer networks. A system that is smart enough to figure out how to accomplish a high level goal on its own doesn't have to be a self-directed entity. It just needs to be infused with enough real-world knowledge that the supposed optimization problem has a solution.
>because the whole point is to develop AI's that can modify their own neural networks (or whatever internal structures they end up having) as an ongoing process, the way humans do.
I think you give us too much credit. We may guide our learning processes, but the actual modification of our neural networks is completely out of our control. The distinction here may seem useless, but in this case it is important. A supposed unself-directed-but-intelligent being would simply not have the ability to direct its learning processes. We would still have to bootstrap its learning algorithms on a particular dataset to increase its knowledge base. But this isn't contradictory to general AI, nor would it be useless. In fact, I would say the only thing we would lose is the warm fuzzies that we created "life". It's still just as useful to us if we're in control of its growth.
A system that is smart enough to figure out how to accomplish a high level goal on its own doesn't have to be a self-directed entity.
But a system that can do this and is a self-directed entity provides, as I said, a competitive advantage over a system that can do this but isn't self-directed. So there will be an incentive for people to make the latter kind of system into the former kind.
We may guide our learning processes, but the actual modification of our neural networks is completely out of our control.
As you state it, this is false, because guiding our learning processes is controlling at least some aspects of the modification of our neural networks. But I agree that our control over the actual modification of our neural networks is extremely coarse; most aspects of it are out of our control.
It's still just as useful to us if we're in control of its growth.
No, it isn't, because if we're in control of its growth, its growth is limited by our mental capacities. An AI which can control its own growth is only limited by its own mental capacities, which could exceed ours. Since one of the biggest limitations on human progress is limited human mental capacity, an AI which can exceed that limit will be highly desirable. However, the price of that desirable thing is that, since by definition the AI's mental capacity exceeds that of humans, humans can no longer reliably exert control over it.
>No, it isn't, because if we're in control of its growth, its growth is limited by our mental capacities
I don't know why you think this is true. In fact, we do this all the time. Just about any decent sized neural network we train we are incapable of comprehending how it functions. Yet we can bootstrap a process that results in the solution just the same. As long as we are able to formulate the problem of "enhance AI intelligence", it should still be able to solve such a problem, despite our lack of intellect to comprehend the solution.
I don't know why you think this is true. In fact, we do this all the time. Just about any decent sized neural network we train we are incapable of comprehending how it functions. Yet we can bootstrap a process that results in the solution just the same.
That's because we can define what the solution looks like, in order to train the neural network. We don't understand exactly how, at the micro level, the neural network operates, but we understand its inputs and outputs and how those need to be related for the network to solve the problem.
As long as we are able to formulate the problem of "enhance AI intelligence", it should still be able to solve such a problem, despite our lack of intellect to comprehend the solution.
You've pulled a bait and switch here. Above, you said we didn't comprehend the internal workings of the network; now you're saying we don't comprehend the solution. Those are different things. If we can't comprehend the solution, we can't know how to train the neural network to achieve it.
If the problem is "enhance AI intelligence", then we will only be able to do if we can comprehend the solution, enough to know how to train the neural network (or whatever mechanism we are using). At some point, we'll hit a limit, where we can't even define what "enhanced intelligence" means well enough to train a mechanism to achieve it.
> There is no reason to think that a general AI would have any of these things, thus concerns about it deciding that its better off without us are completely unfounded.
That's addressing a strawman; I suspect you don't understand the argument. It would be narcissistic to worry about advanced AI meddling in human affairs, unless it were specifically programmed to do so.
But that's not what people are worried about. The concern is that we would be no more to a super-intelligence AI than ants are to us. The concern is that these slow, stupid fleshy bags of meat would be a nuisance in the way of an amoral AI.
>The concern is that these slow, stupid fleshy bags of meat would be a nuisance in the way of an amoral AI
Why would this be a concern unless the end result is an AI who decided to get rid of us? I think I understood the argument just fine.
Edit: I think I see where the misunderstanding is. For an AI to decide we were a nuisance it would necessarily need some kind of drive that we were getting in the way of. No drives means no decision regarding out fate.
Humans have an annoying tendency to monopolize the energy and material resources of the planet we occupy... that could be a nuisance for an AI with other plans, without the end-goal being anything to do with humans at all.
And all AIs have goals. That's what an AI is: a utility-optimizing machine. Utility implies a goal, and end-game state of affairs with maximal expected utility.
An intelligence without a goal or motivation wouldn't be completely useless. Sure it would be safe to be around, but it also wouldn't have an reason to improve it's own intelligence or do anything useful. It would just do nothing because there would be no reason for it to do anything.
Once it has a command to carry out, it is no longer idle. It has a goal, to fill out whatever that command is. If the goal you give it is not exactly the same as humanity's goals, then it could do things that were unintended, or things that conflict with our normal goals (i.e. you ask it to make money so it goes and robs a bank.) I seriously suggest reading these:
So essentially what happens if your AI turns out to be like Dexter? I suspect that in early forms that might be almost MORE likely since the character (and the theory he's based on) is essentially human with a "bug" in dealing with morality. Which leads to another point, you determine your self aware AI is likely to commit murder based on a debug session. Are you allowed to wipe it without having a trial first?
Empathy is a very specific trait that evolved in humans, it would be unlikely that the first AI's would have it, and if they did, it wouldn't likely be exactly the same as the version humans have. I expect the first AIs to be psychopathic/amoral, or else have an entirely different moral system than our own. The first is scary enough, the second could lead to very disturbing dystopias.
For example, the AI force feeds everyone happy pills to maximize happiness. Or kills everyone to stop anyone from ever suffering again. Or maybe it values lots of beings and so forces us to reproduce as much as possible. All sorts of disturbing worlds are possible if the AI doesn't have exactly the same values we have. And we don't even know what our own values are.
I think as long as we do not understand the relation between intelligence and conscience, we should probably assume that a AGI has moral issues and personal needs.
To take it further, I suppose they want to protect US citizens, companies and government from crypto attacks while using US laws to snoop on them easily. That way, they prevent foreign threats by making it very hard for everyone to break any system in the US. And on the other hand, they can still read everything by issuing subpoenas to any company and ISP they feel like (with borderline constitutional legality in some cases).
As for iOS, it doesn't matter whether you get the source code because you have no way to make sure that what you see is what you get (from the App store).
