To Save Drowning People, Ask "What Would Light Do?" - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us//blog/-to-save-drowning-people-ask-yourself-what-would-light-do <comment><USER2> This is a particularly egregious example of the pop-sci genre "making things sound more mysterious than they really are". How does light choose the fastest path to its destination when light can't "choose"? Well, we _could_ hypothesize light is conscious and is making globally-optimal calculations, or we could just observe that if you work through the wave equations on what waves do when encountering a speed change, that's what happens. It so happens that solution also matches how to get to the eventual point in the shortest time, but that adds an unnecessary concept of "intention to arrive at a given point". Light has no such preference or intention, it just arrives where it arrives.

We _could_ hypothesize dogs are working out calculus problems, or we could just hypothesize that the dog tried it one way, then another, and eventually over the course of its lifetime works out how to get to the ball the most quickly, which in comparison to the difficulty of manipulating all of its dozens of muscles to perform the running optimally in the first place is a frankly insignificant challenge. Or, to put it into a human reference frame, we do not do calculus problems to catch things. We "just" catch them. Neurons are built to solve this problem.

We _could_ hypothesize that the ants have a simple pheromone-based optimization system that naturally mathematically converges on the same solution as Snell's Law when, after all, faced with the same problem, but... uh... actually it's not at all clear to me how the article manages to make this sound mysterious after what is a fairly effective solution to the problem. If nothing else, the ants taking the most optimal path will make more to-and-from trips than other ants, thus laying thicker trails; that plus an initial shotgun approach are adequate to explain.

This is particularly egregious since none of the math here is very complicated, and it is completely unsurprising that when the same problem is given to several optimizing agents in several domains that the same solution pops out. There is not very many bits of information in this problem.

<comment><USER3> There is a small problem with your explanation: refraction can happen with single photons, which means that the "minimum path length" rule continues even as the wave formulation breaks down. If you say "the photon travels along all paths at the same time, finally choosing one path to have 'really' gone down," then you have to explain how it was able to move faster than light to collapse down to the single point where you found it on your camera's sensor.

There is indeed a mystery here. In fact, since the only option I know of that eliminates spooky FTL signalng and spooky hidden (unobservable) mechanics has spooky alternate universes, I feel safe in concluding that at least one spooky thing has to be happening, even though we don't know which one it is.

<comment><USER4> Thinking about photons is bad for you, especially if you are doing quantum- optics. It is almost always better to think about quantum fields, and in this case the quantumness adds nothing to the physics.

The "photon" is just a quantum of excitation of the optical medium (in this case the EM compled with the electromechanical state of matter in it). These exictations obey wave equations, just as classical waves do, and hence Snell's law.

It's true that you can _also_ (almost) think of photons as point-particles travelling over every possible path in time-space and then do infinite- dimensional path-integrals. That point of view is important for a physicist to understand, but it is not needed to explain refraction.

<comment><USER5> I'd say the last model is necessary for explaining refraction, but not for describing it (where a simpler wave model suffices).

<comment><USER4> Huygens explained refraction using classical wave velocities only. Though I agree there is a similarity between his notion wave-sources everywhere and path integrals. (Which is odd since path-integrals are a very particle oriented way of thinking).

What Huygens' explanation leaves slightly mysterious, is why (beyond a mathematical coincidence) this result just happens to also give the minimum- time result. Path integrals explain that very nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So weird that the moment I read the title, I started thinking of DeathNote, and the morality of saving drowning people from the perspective of Light Yagami. :D

<comment><USER7> I'm glad I'm not the only one! I thought this was going to be an article that was a philosophical/thought experiment, but nope. The author meant actual light. Pretty disappointed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the dog optimising when to jump in the water, I think it's fairly easy to see how it does it. It's constantly optimising as it runs. It doesn't "choose" the path and then run it.

It's just repeating the same question as it moves, "is it worth running along the shore a bit more or should I just jump in now?"

<comment><USER9> This would be more interesting if, instead of throwing the ball while standing at the water's edge, the human stood further back up the beach as in the lifeguard illustration. [1]

This would require the dog to decide on the path to take at the start, or run in a path that wasn't a straight line. Anecdotally, when performing this experiment in the past, my dog typically runs directly towards the ball along the straight-line path Lifeguard->A, then turns somewhat along the edge of the beach to plunge in somewhere between A and C.

I'm also curious if there is a confounding factor in the dog's motivation. Pennings states [2] that:

> _By the look in Elvis'seyes and his elevated excitement level, it seems > clear that his objective is to retrieve itas quickly as possible rather > than, say, to minimize his expenditure of energy._

There is obviously a value that the dog ascribes to the expeditious retrieval of the ball, but when the ball is not present there's also a value to be had in simply running joyously on the sand, and, of course, there's little better than being in the water. We may therefore need to calculate the ideal path based on a static value (perhaps 100 dog-utilitons) for retrieving the ball, plus 2 du/m running in the sand, and 12 du/m when swimming in the water. This complicates the mathematics somewhat.

Finally, the author's method of running ahead with a tape measure may work when measuring the performance of a short-legged subject, but I would be unable to use these methods to measure the performance of my larger and faster (Newfoundland) dog. Aerial drone videography may be more suitable instead.

[1]: [https://d3chnh8fr629l6.cloudfront.net/2904_b8b9c74ac526fffbe...](https://d3chnh8fr629l6.cloudfront.net/2904_b8b9c74ac526fffbeb2d39ab038d1cd7.png)

[2]: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0DmOI...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0DmOIr4uhsJ:www.indiana.edu/~jkkteach/Q550/Pennings2003.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is also a plot point in Ted Chiang's story "The Story Of Your Life" which was the basis of the movie "Arrival".

<comment><USER11> Through this short story I also learned that Fermat's principle is just one example of a variational principle. I'm not an expert, but if I understand it correctly, many physical laws can be restated as variational principles.

See e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_variational_princip...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_variational_principles_in_physics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting to note how light has become more and more "special" over the past century. It used to be that light was just another entity, similar to sound. That the speed of light was just another constant, like the speed of sound.

But at some point, the speed of light became so special that it became a constant from all reference frames, regardless of how fast the observer herself is traveling. And now we believe that light is so special, that it can be viewed to have agency. That it _" decides which is the shortest time, or the extreme one... smell the nearby paths, and check them against each other... and chooses that path"_

As someone who's knowledge of physics maxed out at Newton's laws, it's interesting to see how today's perspective of the universe is so different and "light-centric" as compared to centuries past.

<comment><USER13> Just triggered the thought that we should be trying to exploit the property of light to pursue the shortest path as a means to calculate hard problems. No idea how this would actually work... but I would gander someone already thought of this and it didn't pan out.

<comment><USER14> I think it is called "optical computing".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was a little disappointed by the lack of explanation on how light refracts. It references Snell's law and mentions how light travels slower in water, but it did not go into how it's an effect of parts of the wavefront changing velocity at slightly different times as a result of the light entering the medium at an angle (or at least that being a simple way of understanding refraction.)

However, it was cool to see them reference "Do dogs know calculus?" I actually saw Pennings give a presentation on it in high school because my calc teacher was one of his students. He started out the talk by telling us that his dog knew calculus. He then proceeded to ask his dog the derivative of x^3. The dog did nothing, and he told us that dogs don't know calculus.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting math story problem, but probably not much use for real lifeguards.

Is there any observational evidence that lifeguards choose paths this way, rather than the direct line or shortest water path?

Perhaps they do some optimization, particularly for very oblique angles, but in real "shoreline" situations, I expect wave and current action will dominate the optimization, rather than the delta between running and swimming speed.

Guidelines for lifeguards talk about avoiding water entry if possible and definitely avoiding direct contact from the victim if at all possible ([https://www.sauvetage.qc.ca/en/lifeguarding/rescue- technique...](https://www.sauvetage.qc.ca/en/lifeguarding/rescue- techniques/ladder-approach-step-step-procedure-successful-rescues)) but don't really address the run-vs-walk choices.

<comment><USER17> Funny that both top level comments about current got down-voted, while a fifth-level comment about _electrical current_ go up-voted.

Seriously, as someone going surfing tomorrow morning, current was my first though on this. And rips. The catching the rip will save more time than any of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I figure that animals and humans are very good at assessing the amount of "work" that a given path requires and that we are likewise very sensitive to minimizing the work function, due to evolutionary training.

</comment><comment><USER19> It wasn't clear to me from the article. Do we know the mechanism by which light is able to find the path of least time?

<comment><USER20> Yes. (Or at least we have a good model.) One description is that a photon takes all paths simultaneously and the paths that are not the shortest in time end up mostly cancelling out. The light's behavior is consistent with locality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _When light travels from one place to another, it always takes the path of > least time._

Refraction is seen in other kinds of waves and media, like sound or even waves on the surface of a liquid (which refract when traversing from a deeper to shallower place).

Is this "least time" principle true for all kinds of waves, or just light?

<comment><USER14> Huygens–Fresnel principle applies to waves in general. Fermat's principle follows mathematically from Huygens' principle at the limit of small wavelength.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know how to solve the tennis-ball formula? All I can muster is that the distance on the beach (b) divided by the speed on the beach (Vb) + the distance on water (w) divided by the speed on water (Vw) should be minimized. So I should find the minimum of b/Vb + w/Vw , but I have no clue as how.

<comment><USER12> You got the first equation right, in expressing time-taken in terms of b and w.

Now you need the second equation, which expresses b in terms of w (or vice- versa). Hard to describe it here over text, but I believe using the following set of equations, it should be possible to express b in terms of w.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Yb = vertical-distance from start-point to water (constant)

Yw = vertical-distance from water to end-point (constant)

Xb = horizontal-distance between start and point-of-contact with water

Xw = horizontal-distance between end and point-of-contact with water

X = horizontal-distance between start/end points (constant)

Ob = angle taken when running towards the water

Ow = angle taken when swimming towards the end point

=>

X = Xb + Xw

cos(Ob) = Yb / b

sin(Ob) = Xb / b

cos(Ow) = Yw / w

sin(Ow) = Xw / w

</comment><comment><USER23> The photo of the ants seems to be showing a route that is neither least time nor least distance

</comment><comment><USER24> This article was painful to read. Am I on the science side of Buzzfeed? /s

</comment><comment><USER25> This is all definitely math and physics interesting but a real beach has waves, currents and rocks. The lifeguard has spent weeks or months staring at it for hours on end. Probably has a good idea best way to save someone. Otherwise continue.</comment>


Python Requests III - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests3 <comment><USER2> I for one am really happy to see this classic getting a makeover! The author had recently tried his hand at datetime libs and api microframeworks but despite really wanting to like them I didn't feel they were all that better than existing solutions. Requests however has been a staple for me for ages!

</comment><comment><USER3> Just for the default timeouts I am so happy. So many libraries just don't put one and then you have to debug hard why your webserver is hanging. Never funny when you realize it's because of some silly GET that is stuck.

</comment><comment><USER4> So what's the difference to the predecessor?

<comment><USER5> asyncio, HTTP/2, connection pooling, timeouts, Python 3.6+

README > "Feature Support" [https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests3/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests3/blob/master/README.md#feature- support)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/aio-libs/aiohttp](https://github.com/aio-libs/aiohttp) already supports asyncio. Why do I need this for asyncio?

Anyway, I see that Issues are disabled for the repo. Is that the new way to develop? /s

<comment><USER7> aiohttp isn't just a client---its also a server library, and framework for creating async applications.

Because of this, its a bit easier to use requests since that's a dedicated client with all the design choices done to suit that use case.

Also the issues are closed because the project hasn't been released yet. It's being developed in the open, but its _not_ ready! Documentation isn't even written for the new features.</comment></comment>


Instagram: A Post Facebook Social Network? - <AUTHOR> http://betashop.com/post/4323201633/instagram-a-post-facebook-social-network

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I can consider Instagram and applications similar to it "post- Facebook" when they still depend on Facebook. It's true that the connections between people could be figured out or cached, separating the network from the Facebook integration, but the fact remains that they had to take the social network from something they have supposedly moved on from.</comment>


Windows 10 S will be locked to Edge browser – Chrome won't be an option - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-s-will-be-locked-to-edge-browser-chrome-wont-be-an-option <comment><USER2> Already a conversation here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14307451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14307451)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well Chrome could rewrite to use the approved rederer - probably not. What's worse is Windows 10 S will be locked to only Windows Store Apps. That's why Apple just announced iTunes for Windows heading to the Windows Store.

If you want to use arbitrary software you'll need to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro at which point Microsoft will disavow any warranty as to the performance and reliability.

Nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> So they're ready for another round of antitrust suits... okay.jpg</comment>


Logic.ly - <AUTHOR> http://logic.ly/demo/ <comment><USER2> I don't know why this was so much fun. More engaging and challenging than a casual flash game. Here's my digital counter: <http://i.imgur.com/gYoHb.png>.

Now I'm wondering how I can convince my daughter it's a game :)

</comment><comment><USER3> this is awesome

</comment><comment><USER4> Error #2046</comment>


YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/youtube-should-stop-recommending-garbage-videos-to-users/ <comment><USER2> We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users.

The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly."

I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the same playlist, rather than _one_ recommendation for the next video in the list. That's hard to solve algorithmically, but very easy if you give me a button to press that says, "when recommending a playlist, only recommend one video."

It's very hard to algorithmically figure out whether or not a user wants repeated recommendations because repeated recommendations tend to steer users towards repeated views even if they would prefer other behavior. But Youtube has view history for users. It would be very easy to have a button to press that says, "don't recommend videos I've already watched."

But at some point, everyone working on AI/algorithms decided that the best user experience would be for users to try and on-the-fly intuit the quirks of every algorithm and then to do reinforcement training based on their partial understanding of how things work. The last thing I want as a user is to have to treat my computer like a cat.

<comment><USER3> Playlists can be semantically different things. They can be "top 50 songs of 2018" or they can be "history of WW2 parts 1-50". It might make sense to recommend more than one video fron the first kind of playlist, but not the second.

<comment><USER4> How does that invalidate the argument for giving control over this functionality to the user?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't. Being able to deal with different kinds of playlist would be good either way, whether YouTube controlled everything for you or some customization was possible by end users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The majority of my YouTube recommendations are videos I've _already watched_ , despite there being innumerable videos in the back catalogues of my subscriptions I have not seen. My wife has the exact same problem.

Surely I haven't seen all of YouTube. I would love if it recommended me things I would be remotely interested in watching, even if they were "garbage" over this. At this point I would almost prefer sketchy conspiracy theory video recommendations.

<comment><USER6> I have a tendency to rewatch videos over and over, or rather, replay them because they make for good not-too-distracting background noise (I do the same with "The Big Lebowski"). Nearly my entire recommendations feed is videos I've seen a dozen times or more, and because I often visit YouTube to just quickly find something for background noise, I'll just click whatever's near the top. And next time I visit YouTube...those videos are at the top again.

That's kind of annoying to me but I figured that it's a problem of my own making. But it sounds like the algorithm behaves this way for other users who aren't as weirdly repetitive as me?

<comment><USER7> I suspect this is fundamentally the same as Amazon recommending things you've already bought. Even if the likelihood of rewatching/repurchasing is small, that probability must compare favourably to the chance that their algorithm will select a 'correct' unseen item to display.

Recommendations are hard.

<comment><USER6> One of my cynical hypotheses is that, for videos that I'm rewatching for the nth time, the amount of energy/desire to interact is diminished (i.e. "vegging out"). Which is inversely proportional to the frequency that I'll click the "Skip Ad" buttons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article has a catchy title, but is absolutely terrible. Curated human recommendations and/or "YouTube staffers should think like journalists" are both two of the worst ideas for the internet I've heard in quite a long time. They don't reduce bias by any significant amount consistently (and I suspect the authors know this), and thinking of a platform where millions of seperate people upload ungodly amounts of content per second as a platform to be curated just like a news site is just fundamentally misunderstanding the scale and nature of Cyberspace.

<comment><USER9> Curate it like a radio station or network then.

The curated playlists on Google Music are pretty nice. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that for video, especially targeted at kids with various age ranges, activities, moods, and interests.

<comment><USER10> > _Curate it like a radio station_

Radio is even more full of garbage than YouTube!

The curated playlists on Apple Music are decent but they're too short and there are too few of them. There's also nothing stopping a third party curating YouTube and sharing recommended playlists - it's just too hard to find a mass audience with generic recommendations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't even buy the reasoning that the recommendations are somehow "personalized," because they don't seem to be... At all. I have _never_ watched a political video on YouTube, or really anything unrelated to music or computer science, yet my "recommended videos" are always full of Ben Shapiro and his ilk. It's easier to find relevant videos by doing a regular Google search, which is a little ironic.

<comment><USER12> You can generally avoid political talk shows by clicking the not interested button. They still bubble up, especially if you watch general interest videos that have primarily male audiences.

<comment><USER13> "Not interested" seems to work just for a little while. They will come back eventually...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I propose an idea, maybe: every video you watch, the original author of that video can set up a list of recommended videos to watch after you are done with the one you originally came for. This way, the original video author has a say in where you head in your Youtube rabbit-hole experience.

This is just off the top of my head early in the morning so probably not the best idea, but honestly it seems better than what they are doing now. Personally, I subscribe to a certain set of people and rarely watch videos outside of those content creators.

Edit: Just to add to my first point, I would be much more happy to follow the recommendation of the content creator I follow than some algorithm designed to get me to watch/click more.

<comment><USER15> They can already add suggested videos in end screens and in the info card drawer (although the info card drawer is not used nearly as often as it could be, and YouTube doesn't necessarily do a good job of drawing attention to it).

<comment><USER14> I guess I forgot about that (it probably helps that Youtube doesn't give it much attention as they should). I think those were a step in the right direction but having those possibly at the top of the "recommendation" area or just replacing it completely would be more intuitive to me. Maybe even having it autoplay to the next video set up by the content creator.

I am not a content creator so my opinion is solely from the viewer side. I would love to hear from people who are making the videos I watch and enjoy as well since many of them are using Youtube as their sole income. IMO, you have to please both sides to a certain extent or this all won't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only person who gets actually relevant recommended videos when logged in?

I'd say 80% of the recommended videos are directly related to the interests I've shown with my viewing habits. I went through a period of watching at least an hour a day so perhaps that's it and they have some serious data behind me (and I never watch conspiracy, politics or prank videos for them to appear anywhere near them).

Whenever I'm logged out though, then yeah, complete dumpster-fire.

<comment><USER17> I just checked. The "up next" column seems pretty relevant. I probably wouldn't watch the Area 51 video or the "what did we find when we searched pennies" but they weren't awful ideas

[https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt](https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt)

(And that Navier-Stokes video was very good!)

</comment></comment><comment> safeplanet-fesa I use my current YouTube account for two and a half years. In this time period I clicked "Not interested" in the right sidebar with suggestions around 3000 times - very many times, and I keep clicking it. Due to this huge effort, when I watch videos of my interest scope, I mostly receive good suggestions and I'm satisfied with the suggestion system; however when I occasionally watch something unusual to me, I do receive bad suggestions and I keep clicking "Not interested". But already for a year I have not been suggested any "TOP 10 LIFEHACKS", reaction videos of obnoxious clowns, no previews with useless arrows and circles, O-faces, social experiments and pop-music from YouTube's Trending. Whenever I sometimes open YouTube from another computer, I fall into such deep disgust that my face expression twists. Another thing not related to this: I still use old YouTube's theme, it's faster and looks better than this modern "polymer" for touchscreens.

<comment><USER18> "fun" fact: "Not interested" button on Twitch uses a rolling ~300 item filo (First In, Last Out) list. Perfect placebo! You keep clicking and it keeps pretending to work.

I wonder if Google is not doing the same, as they do for Likes with 5000 limit [https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/6m7k63/i_just_reac...](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/6m7k63/i_just_reached_5000_liked_videos_limit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Everything about YouTube doesn't fit my interests or preferences... to such an extent that I use YouTube-DL for almost all the things I watch off YouTube.

Recommendations are almost always garbage and I have no idea why. I also think that the search function is bad, like so bad that's it's somehow dishonest. I routinely run the same searches looking for the same thing but find stuff that was made well before the last time I ran the search... so why didn't the previous search uncover these results?

<comment><USER20> By design, the search function does not return an exhaustive list of content matching your search terms. It returns content that YouTube wants you to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, click-driven advertisement and emotion-driven social media have disrupted the old (and well functioned) system of information pre-filtering and pre-selection by domain experts and journalists whose salary was dependent more on reputation than "engagement".

Now we're mowing the consequences of such "disruption".

<comment><USER22> Those "domain experts" were censoring men's rights, for example. Only since Youtube are we discovering that male victims of home violence are 28% cases; If you listen to the "domain experts" they'll pretend it is so small it's not measurable, or pretend it's not a problem.

That's just an example for the area I'm expert in, but the current western political blowback is massively due to information flowing with fewer censorship, hence discovering that "domain experts" have led us to believe false or inaccurate things in the past.

"Domain experts" is also "TV-channel chosen domain experts" or "journalist- chosen domain experts" which has proven to provide erroneous results.

<comment><USER23> The mainstream media is also cozy with their advertisers and were known for helping to cover up environmental issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Am I the only one who always felt that the garbage videos is what really made YouTube so much more authentic and fun than TV?

If I wanted sanitized, censored, controlled entertainment, I'd just watch TV

<comment><USER25> I agree the uniqueness is a big draw. Never sure what might show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Regardless how to define what's garbage and what's not, YouTube seems to remove demonetized videos from recommendations. Since I don't think that good content is always necessarily advertiser-friendly, a lot of good videos are just not getting any attention because a few big companies decided that they're not helpful to market their products. Example: Historical or educational videos which are about controversial topics or just have the word "war" in their title.

Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838](https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838)

</comment><comment><USER27> I use the cosmetic filtering feature of Ublock Origin [1] to block everything except the video and related controls. I then only access youtube via the "subscriptions" page [2]. This effectively blocks the recommendations, autoplays, linked videos etc that make YouTube feel like such a cesspit.

[1] [https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin- superu...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin-superusers- guide/#removing-elements) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions](https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's like this hasn't improved since the late 2000s. If I forget to disable autoplay and it eventually ends up on a LinusTechTips, it'll be another week before I stop getting recommended nothing but those after every video.

If this behavior is based off aggregate watching patterns, can we at least get the patterns applied to us of people who match our usage demographics and not the tens of thousands of pre-teens being raised by YouTube?

</comment><comment><USER29> Typically almost none of my recommended videos are relevant.

The worst part is that what they do recommend are often conspiracy videos, "X destroys Y" debate videos, extremist 'alternative' news, and other similar trash.

You would think they could tell from what I've watched already that none of their recommendations are remotely relevant to me- and in fact, are often the opposite of anything I would ever want to see.

</comment><comment><USER30> To offer a counterpoint, I absolutely love YouTube recommendations.

Once you get into watching videos belonging to a new field, you get a lot of recommendations for that, and it's great to use them to get a good nice overview of the field.

Likewise, repeat recos for songs etc are also very very convenient.

I think this is again a case of the vocal minority making it feel like everything sucks.

</comment><comment><USER31> YouTube is toxic for humans, because it is not a platform serving humans. It is a platform serving copyright holders and advertisers. Next video playing means copyright levy going somewhere to someone, one more ad impression (interesting glitch had been present in Germany unil recently where copyright holders were too greedy for such arrangement to operate, only proving how low priority, if any at all, a human user is). Trends and moods are being traced globally only to accumulate the both. What audio and video will be presented to a human is absolutely no concern for anyone - whichever will sustain the inflow of the copyright levies and ad impressions.

</comment><comment><USER32> "When a video finishes playing, YouTube should show the next video in the same channel."

This is how it worked just a couple years ago. I would binge-watch a channel's entire history of videos on history, board games, or other fascinating subjects in the background while I did other things. At some point it changed, and now every video I watch gets followed by some click-bait often highly- political nonsense meant to get me outraged or shocked at something.

I've decided to turn it off and just stream documentaries on Curiosity Stream now. When I do watch YouTube, I get nagging pop-ups asking me to upgrade my service, but why would I do that when they've ruined what I enjoyed about the site?

</comment><comment><USER33> Google's too busy optimizing ad delivery for youtube to care. I recently updated the android app, only change I noticed was now ads extend over the description and comments until you click a little x. That never existed before the update.

<comment><USER34> Try NewPipe.

Googles Youtube App drives me insane with all the crappy ads.

<comment><USER33> Yeah I do use newpipe to play music through an external player but I don't sign in on there so finding videos for channels I'm subscribed to gets kind of frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Recently, my disliked Youtube change that the "Related videos" on the side of a video now first show 10 of my general "Recommended" videos instead of videos that are similar to the one I am currently watching...

</comment><comment><USER36> I make a point to avoid watching recommended videos the exception being I tend to use youtube for researching products and recommended videos are actually helpful there.

My youtube process is to go straight to the subs page daily, add all the videos to a 'watch later' playlist* so whenever I go to youtube I always have a curated list of just for me content and I don't get sucked down the rabbit hole.

*not the watch later option because you cant change the order of those ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd kill for a marker on the subs page that said 'last visited'!

<comment> frosted-flakes In the Android app, the default Watch Later playlist can be re-ordered just like any other playlist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I would point to this article:

[https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201)

My take is that "reccomendation" technology is disasterously bad in most cases but Google has us hypnotized to believe they are "smarter" than the rest of us, although when you look at their definition of "smart" it seems to be a bludgeon to intimidate other people with.

Google doesn't have to be smarter than its competitors, it just has to be smarter than the people who buy ads.

</comment><comment><USER38> Relevant paper put up last week on Arxiv to be published at EMNLP 2019 : Auditing Radicalization Pathways on Youtube ( [https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313) ).

Researchers of the University of Minas Gerais and EPFL audited Youtube's recommendation algorithm in the context of alt-right content and found that users consistently migrated from milder to more extreme content throughout recommendations.

<comment><USER39> Similar post from a year ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938181)

YT's recommendation algorithm drives watch time and engagement, but based on the behavior of other users; so when the YT algorithm sees that driving to extremism pushes high engagement, while driving users to more mild content reduces engagement, the algorithm knows the best course of action for future users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I _hate_ the recommend algorithms they use. If I get interested in a particular topic for a few hours, or watch, in a whim, a video I would normally have no interest in (a pop music video for instance), I don't want to see and endless series of videos in the same category.

It's bad enough that I had to log my AppleTV's YouTube app out, because children. My Recommend page would be overloaded with Fortnight, PubG, and RDR videos. That I could understand at least.

</comment><comment><USER41> > YouTube's recommendation engine "isn't built to help you get what you want — > it's built to get you addicted to YouTube," argued Guillaume Chaslot

Well.. for me the bad recommendations and search results are having the exact opposite effect. If I have a direct link to a cool video then its fine, but clicking around in the UI is an absolute time-waster.

But then again I'm not logged in and have FF + uBlock + PrivacyBadger and maybe its made deliberately annoying then..

</comment><comment><USER42> I would argue that it is the same story for traditional media - albeit to a less extreme extent. In France, even on public channels, reality shows and dubious _scandal-sounding_ programs now represent a high share of the broadcasts.

For sure it is less extreme than the topics mentioned there, but still the programs are optimized to make you addicted and boost stats. Neutral fact- based or educational content is disappearing quickly.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've found that clicking "not interested" videos doesn't work, but reporting them has cleaned up my feed. Now I almost only get things from my subscriptions. It's a more brutish option that may have collateral damage but seems to work for me

<comment><USER44> Why report them? That can get videos demonetized or removed for the creator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> That's weird. YouTube always makes awesome recommendations for me.

Just kidding. YT's a dumpster fire, but it serves to point at when somebody starts telling you that Skynet is just around the corner. We may have nailed the A but but we're a looong way off the I.

</comment><comment><USER46> I really like youtube recs. I have different accounts for different interests and the recommendations are always on point. I don't understand why so many people from the media complain. I think they just don't like that youtube recommends non-mainstream channels too.

<comment><USER47> I agree, I've actually found some really interesting channels through recommendations. Perhaps the targeting is so accurate due to the years of data they have on my 2 accounts.

That said, I recently created a brand new account for my company and the default recommendations seem to be _absolute mindless garbage_. But perhaps my interests just don't align with what the vast majority of the YouTube-using public are watching.

<comment><USER48> I've found over the years as I get to be more and more of an irascible old man, that my viewpoints don't align with much as far as popularity goes. And that's okay. Frankly the power in YouTube for me was to look back at seminal events that resonated and transformed my life. It is wonderful for that. However, it's very poor at complex recommendations. If I watch a video about the polar ice caps melting, that doesn't mean I want to watch a climate change denier. I realize this is not an easy thing to solve and that's why it shouldn't be solved solely with algorithms. The same way that copyright claims should have a human touch and not just automatically remove revenue for people on the platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So some people don't like some YouTube recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER50> How to define garbage?</comment>


Cortex: Deploy machine learning models in production - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex/tree/v0.9.0 <comment><USER2> How does this work under the hood? Is the model loaded every time it receives a request? Is it run in a docker or a lambda? How does it work after "uploading it" to amazon?

<comment><USER3> Each model is loaded into a Docker container, along with any Python packages and request handling code. The cluster runs on EKS on your AWS account. Cortex takes the declarative configuration from 'cortex.yaml' and creates it every time you run 'cortex deploy' so the containers don't change unless you run 'cortex deploy' again with updated configuration. This post goes into more detail about some of our design decisions: [https://towardsdatascience.com/inference-at- scale-49bc222b3a...](https://towardsdatascience.com/inference-at- scale-49bc222b3ad1)

<comment><USER2> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your model can be exported as PMML, this is really nice. Fast, minimalist, battle-tested and with very clean API.

When I've tested, it's up to 10x faster than Flask + serialised model object and uses far less CPU resources.

Plays nicely with lightgbm and Xgboost.

[https://github.com/openscoring/openscoring](https://github.com/openscoring/openscoring)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is basically my startup idea that I worked on for a while now ([https://aiscalr.isub.dev](https://aiscalr.isub.dev))

Looks like I am going to have to scrap that entire project now, seems pointless to keep working on it given how similar this is.

<comment><USER6> Similarity should be taken as validation, not a negative thing at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to MLflow [0]?

Considering MLflow has a few components, I suppose you are building something closer to MLflow Models? How do they compare?

[0] [https://mlflow.org/docs/latest/index.html](https://mlflow.org/docs/latest/index.html)

<comment><USER3> From the MLflow Models docs: "An MLflow Model is a standard format for packaging machine learning models that can be used in a variety of downstream tools—for example, real-time serving through a REST API or batch inference on Apache Spark. The format defines a convention that lets you save a model in different "flavors" that can be understood by different downstream tools."

Cortex is what they are referring to as a downstream tool for real-time serving through a REST API. In other words, MLflow helps with model management and packaging, whereas Cortex is a platform for running real-time inference at scale. We are working on supporting more model packaging formats and I think it's a good idea to support the MLflow format as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Was discussed three months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20579166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20579166)

</comment><comment><USER9> Not to be confused with weaveworks/CNCF Cortex project for high scale Prometheus monitoring [https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex](https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex).

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems to work with: Pytorch, TensorFlow, Keras, XGBoost, sklearn

<comment><USER3> Yes, Cortex uses ONNX Runtime ([https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime)) under the hood so any model that can be exported to ONNX can be deployed.

<comment><USER11> Is it only able to handle ONNX models? That's a pretty massive limitation compared to a hosted SageMaker endpoint.

<comment><USER12> Contributor here - Cortex supports Tensorflow saved models in addition to ONNX. PyTorch support is on the roadmap. Do you have specific frameworks in mind that you would like Cortex to support?

<comment><USER11> Perfect. Nothing in particular other than TF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, a somewhat popular Clojure library for machine learning on GitHub is also called Cortex, because this is going to make discussing machine learning APIs in the context of Clojure that much more confusing.

<comment><USER14> Last commit was like 2 years ago...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stop naming things single word neuroscience terms. There are like 50 projects called "Cortex".

</comment><comment><USER16> Calling it an alternative to SageMaker might be a bit misleading, as SageMaker is also a platform for training the models in automatically allocated EC2 resources, even on spot instances.

<comment><USER17> We've changed the title from "Cortex: An open source alternative to SageMaker" to the page's own title, as the HN guidelines request.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sagemaker has notebooks, training and serving. This seems to be only about the serving.</comment>


Email Validation Rules - <AUTHOR> http://rumkin.com/software/email/rules.php

<comment><USER3> I feel like people really overthink email validation. I just look for an "@" and a ".". If you really need proof that an email address is valid, send an activation email. Otherwise, who cares if a few emails in your database are invalid?

Additionally, lots of 3rd party mail systems have some mechanism to notify you of bounced emails, so you'll figure out which are invalid at your first attempt anyway.

<comment><USER4> Requiring a dot breaks your form for people using bare TLD email or people using an IPv6 address instead of a domain.

<comment><USER5> There's a sufficient mass of people with dots in their e-mail addresses that it's worth checking for an at and a dot, even if you don't _require_ it - <USER2> to check that they haven't typed a comma or something instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The HTML5 standard prescribes a regex for implementers to validate email addresses on the client side:

      /^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*$/

So if you're going to use <input type=email>, you might as well use the same check on the server side.

</comment><comment><USER7> I found this talk by Ricardo Signes on email parsing to be an excellent primer into why email addresses (and emails in general) are terrible to parse: [http://youtu.be/JENdgiAPD6c](http://youtu.be/JENdgiAPD6c)

<comment> old-gregg Yep. I'd like to add that some ESPs have their own additional restrictions on mailbox names, plus it's usually helpful to verify the existence of the domain part (DNS) because people make mistakes all the time.

We (Mailgun) have a free service which does all of these things: [http://blog.mailgun.com/post/free-email-validation-api- for-w...](http://blog.mailgun.com/post/free-email-validation-api-for-web- forms/)

<comment><USER8> It's also trival to contact recipient STMP server and check if it accepts rcpt to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The practical way to validate an email address is:

1: Does the domain part have either an MX or A record? 2: Does the address in that record accept mail? 3: Does the server that accepts mail at that address respond favorably to the local part as a RCPT TO argument?

If yes, it's a valid email address.

In particular this article is wrong that emails are always 7-bit. With SMTPUTF8 you can put whatever you want in there.

<comment><USER10> Would you mind expanding on how to implement these steps, or do you know a good reference?

<comment><USER10> Here's a gist showing the basic steps, using the unix utilities host and netcat: [https://gist.github.com/jwmerrill/6502014](https://gist.github.com/jwmerrill/6502014)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That was "Email validation for pedants".

Practically speaking, the following regex -

      /^[_\.0-9a-z-\+#]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]*\.)+[a-z]{2,6}$/i

coupled with a DNS check for domain name is yet to generate a single false negative in years that we've been using it across multiple projects.

(edit) Do read through the thread below before getting all downvote happy.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, just broke your regex.

        email@example.com.

Yes, that's a valid TLD now.

<comment><USER11> No, it's not - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- level_doma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- level_domains)

If you are referring to {2,6}, then it's easy to adjust once longer domains are put to actual use. If you are referring to the trailing dot, then that's exactly what I was saying - _practically_ , email formats that are used by real people is a much simpler subset of what's permitted by the spec.

<comment><USER13> Why do you want so much to limit to 6, especially since you also do a DNS validation?

You should better lean on the permissive side; that would be one less thing to think about.

That kind of "validation" does not check for existing email addresses anyway, so there is not much value in trying to be strict in this area.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I agree in principle, but it's at 6 simply because it works fine as is. Given new developments it might make sense to bump it up and/or add support for punycode, and we'll do it once it's actually needed.

<comment><USER14> What is the threshold where supporting a domain becomes important? It seems awfully arbitrary to say it "works fine as is" when it is disenfranchising millions of registered domains as it stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's funny that that is the easiest thing the author can do to summarize the rules.

I'd think a grammar ([http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt)) would work just great.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's no mention of minumum email length length, but I have noticed that some services do not accept email addresses like m(@)dy.fi or m(@)x.com etc. They claim that address is too short. Strip parenthesis from addresses.

<comment><USER16> Minimum should be 6: firstname.lastname@example.com

Max is 254: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/386294/what-is-the- maximu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/386294/what-is-the-maximum- length-of-a-valid-email-address)

<comment><USER17> Strictly speaking, the minimum should be 4, because TLDs could accept email too (resulting in a@ca).

<comment><USER16> Fair enough. Does this exist in the wild though? Thx

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> does it really matter? there are sites that store your password in plain text and they manage to become big hits. there are sites that completely ignore current css design rules, and they do fine as well. why are you arguing over a problem that is basically 99% solved?</comment>


Show HN: PJON network protocol specification v3.1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.pjon.org/PJON-protocol-specification-v3.1.php <comment><AUTHOR> Would be nice to have an open discussion about it here in the comments. Feel free to share your opinion about it.

</comment><comment><USER2> I can't find what PJON stands for in the website. Would you mind to explain it please?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ciao cgrs PJON stands for Padded Jittering Operative Network

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the clarification!</comment></comment></comment>


Nasa's X-59 supersonic jet will have a 4K TV instead of a forward window - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/19/nasas-x-59-supersonic-jet-will-have-a-4k-tv-instead-of-a-forward-window/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. I wasn't aware it was possible to create a plane that could avoid a sonic boom. I wonder if newer supersonic tech could get efficient enough that we'd see new passenger jets.

<comment><USER3> Technically, not "avoid" but "quiet enough that people don't notice it much."

Companies developing new supersonic planes:

Mach 2.2 airliner: [https://boomsupersonic.com/](https://boomsupersonic.com/)

XB-1 prototype in construction, scheduled for supersonic flights in 2020.

Mach 1.4 business jet: [https://www.aerionsupersonic.com/](https://www.aerionsupersonic.com/)

Boeing is partnering, Feb. 2019 press release says "first test flight slated for 2023."</comment></comment>


Where would you invest $500K? - <AUTHOR>

If you were generally a risk-taker, what would you invest $500K in? <comment><USER2> 200k in good quality under-or-moderately valued commercial real estate with moderate leveraging (say, 60% LTV) 100k in a hedge/growth fund with a consistent record. I know of one that has delivered 20% returns average for 12 years in a row. It's a computer algorithm based trading system with no direct trading control by humans. 100k in a contrarian play, like long japanese + korean small caps and short US govt securities, or maybe short USD. 50k in gold and silver (physical, not bits of paper promising it) 50k spread across a number of speculative investment ideas, including junior miners, maybe a promising biotech, some chinese automotive companies.

Things I would stay away from : long 'ordinary' stocks, single family home residential real estate in most places (except somewhere to live), cash or near-cash like bonds/cds, growth based companies, anything that is relying on government policies/subsidies to create a profit. Stick to modest leverage.

My belief is that we're going into a short period of deflation (<5 years) followed by 10-20 years of solid inflation as governments inflate their currencies to get rid of debt. You want to own something real that earns money (commercial RE), something that works off volatility (automated hedge fund), something that has low probably/high payoff across a number of bets, and something as a protection against inflation (precious metals). Debt is OK as long as leverage isn't too high (to weather the deflation problems)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am generally a risk-taker, but having 5-10 years of nest egg is also a compelling idea. If it were my only 500K, it'd put 200K in CDs or something with limited downside (assuming such exists). I'd put 200K in something more liquid but not crazy risky (eg a spread of stocks), again assuming such exists.

The other 100K I'd use as runway to do my own startup, or the project (not startup!) of someone else I trust. From there, who knows?

I'm not convinced it's a good idea to jump into startup angel investing with such a small (!) amount of net worth. If you can't participate in follow-on rounds your 10% of the company gets diluted to 3%, then 0.5%, then nothing much at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...

<comment><USER5> This made me laugh

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Use knowledge you have that I don't which you might have used to bring in the $500K in the first place. I can tell you about things in my industry that are great investments, but you don't know my industry like I do unless you are at the same place I am. Listening to others would be too big a leap of faith for investments which are considered high risk.

If you received the money from the lottery or from inheritance, you are looking for a way to quit your job flipping burgers and you insist on high risk, then put all your money on red or black on a European Roulette table. If you win, then quit while you are ahead and move your risk outlook to low. If you lose, then at least you lost it quick rather than painfully watch it dwindle over the course of months / years on bad investment advice from total strangers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Twitter, Facebook, Twilio, Groupon, SendGrid, Graphic.ly, Blippy, Tumblr, Posterous, 4sq

</comment><comment><USER8> A startup that eases platform design, engineering or operation.

</comment><comment><USER9> Myself doing a startup

<comment><USER10> Where's the risk in that? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I quote:

"In an unstable economic environment, the only safe investment is... PORN" -- Avenue Q</comment>


Common Lisp Recipes - <AUTHOR> http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/ <comment><AUTHOR> I usually would not post a link to a book that does not even provide a sample chapter, but Edi Weitz' code is of outstanding clarity and quality[1] - if his writing is only half as good as his code, the book is a must read.

[1] don't take my word for it, check out [http://weitz.de/cl- ppcre/](http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/) to see for yourself

<comment> once-in-a-while There is no sample chapter, ok, but all of the book's code (quite a lot) can be downloaded and worked through in Slime (see top of each file), even without buying the book!</comment></comment>


White House pool reporters test own news distribution system - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/white-house-pool-reporters-test-own-news-distribution-system/2014/10/14/e005686a-53cc-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html

<comment><USER2> Um - what's so hard setting up an 8,000 person email list?</comment>


Ask HN: Is AI threat overblown? - <AUTHOR> Elon Musk, Putin, Mark Z are these guys just overblowing AI? Current developments in AI are no where close to cause WW-III.
Why are these leaders frightening people with claims that AI can cause WW-III or ruin the world? On top of that media is going frenzy over any single statements or tweets by these leaders.
I have never seen Andrew Ng or Andrej Karpathy making such claims.
State of the art AI can only do very specialized things in limited scope e.g ASR, NLP,Image recognition, game play etc.
What am I missing?
Sources :
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/04/elon-musk-says-global-race-for-ai-will-be-most-likely-cause-of-ww3.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musks-doomsday-ai-predictions-are-irresponsible.html
http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/25/technology/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-ai-artificial-intelligence/index.html
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-rule-the-world <comment><USER2> There's an AI researcher named Robert Miles [1] whose videos I really enjoy. He brought up a good point about this issue in one of his videos a little while back. To use it here, Elon Musk, Putin, and Mark Zuckerberg all have something in common: none of them are AI specialists or researchers. Another way to think of it is this: don't ask your dentist about your heart disease.

Miles does point out very real issues/questions in AI safety – that's what most of his content is focused on. His point, which is a good one to make, is that the sort of fear mongering spread by non-AI specialists draws attention away from these very real issues that need to be addressed.

[1] His channel can be found here: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLB7AzTwc6VFZrBsO2ucBMg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLB7AzTwc6VFZrBsO2ucBMg) He's also done a few videos for Computerphile.

<comment><USER3> On the contrary, these are precisely the kinds of people who are using AI as a tool or building block, eg as a means to an end. Researchers inherently have a very narrow view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do not think the threat is overblown, but like many tech estimates, we're overestimating the short term and underestimating the long term.

The more present threat is "AI-lite": we're hacking ourselves collectively, more and more, with not entirely positive consequences.

We're increasingly addicted to our devices and our system rewards those that further the addiction (er, "engagement"). We've provided ways for small groups of people (down to individuals) to influence and manipulate tastes, preferences, moods, feelings, choices, actions, and beliefs, overtly or subtly, at great scale. Case in point: should Mark Z want to quietly influence a US election...he could do it.

This isn't "AI" in the self-aware/AGI sense, but there's an incredible amount of leverage looming over the human population, and that leverage is growing. And when machines start manipulating things instead of humans, how will we know?

<comment><USER5> I'd expect to find some "immune" "heretics". The usual ways of dealing with them would be employed. (legal, lethal and social pressure)

The big problem is that such degree of control could make democracy essentially irrelevant or extremely polarized, which is just as bad, democracy is supposed to reach a consensus. We're almost or already there at the second point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my humble opinion, NO ONE knows if the threat is imminent, far-fetched, or imaginary.

NO ONE. Not Musk, Not Zuckerberg, not Putin. (Putin!!??)

What we DO know is that we don't have artificial general intelligence (AGI) today, and that achieving it will likely require new insights and breakthroughs -- that is, it will require knowledge that we don't possess today.

By definition, new insights and breakthroughs are unpredictable and don't necessarily yield to anyone's predictions, timelines, or budgets. Maybe it will happen in your lifetime; maybe not.

That said, it should be evident to everyone here that AI/ML software is going to expand to control more and more of the world over the coming years and decades; and THEREFORE, it makes a lot of sense to start worrying about the maybe-real-maybe-not AI threat -- and prepare for it -- now instead of down the road.

</comment><comment><USER7> Andrew Ng has a good quote:

"Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars"

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/)

But he might be wrong...

(And he'd admit it)

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes. None of these fantasies bears any resemblance whatsoever to anything in real AI research. What's going on is that the predisposition of the human brain to believe in shadowy figures and apocalyptic futures is as pronounced as it ever was, but belief in Fenrir, Fair Folk and flying saucers is unfashionable among today's intellectuals, so they look for something else to glom onto.

There was a time when I'd never have thought I'd say this, but I actually think it would be better if people just went back to openly letting their demons be of the admittedly supernatural variety, because that sort of belief is relatively harmless. When people start projecting their demons onto real- world phenomena, they start making policy decisions on that basis, and that could very well turn out to be the final step in the Great Filter. Technological progress is slowing. The peak is approaching. The easily accessed fossil fuel deposits are gone. There will be no second industrial revolution. If we fail to make adequate progress before we hit this peak, it will be the all-time one.

</comment><comment><USER9> The practical AI field is obviously growing _today_ , more money is put into it every year. It's only a question when you want to start your safety research and how much resources to allocate to it. You don't need to allocate billions of dollars of friendly-AI research this year or the next year because anything approaching AGI is at least decades away (and might be a "fusion is only 30 years away" situation).

You could also compare this to climate change. The effect and eventual risk of greenhouse gases has been known for more than half a century. But initially it was mostly a theoretical concern and later even when it was realized to be a real problem the effects still seemed far away in the future. But _people still did basic research_ , even decades ago. Nobody poured billions of dollars into sustainable businesses, but not doing business is not the same as not doing research.

</comment><comment><USER10> Near-term: yes. Long-term: no.

Most of the controversy consists of people who look at the near term talking past people who look at the long term, and vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER11> In the case of Putin, are you seriously asking "Why are these leaders frightening people..."?

But seriously, people whom we might call "visionaries" like Musk, Zuckerberg, and let's throw Ray Kurzweil in there, often get their ideas by extrapolating the current state of technology into its logical next phase. (They also like to be grossly aggressive on deadlines, to motivate their employees to be innovative and efficient.)

Unfortunately a simple extrapolation doesn't always produce an idea that is attainable in practice. We will not have human-level AI anytime soon. We're still many years away from driverless cars. An AI that cares about the politics of nation-states (to which we can confidently hand over the nuclear codes) is much farther away than that. But none of that actually matters, because a single tweet from these leaders can cause a flurry of activity and interest that can lead to an unexpected product idea. So, while it's ethically dubious, I see this as being a mostly positive thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Practical state of AI is image classification, so if you tie that to a weapon and program it to fire at 'its will', yes. Though it'd still not call that intelligence, so in that point of view no. And even in the first case, its how they say? guns dont kill people, people kill people with guns? So i'd say that goes for AI too.

</comment><comment><USER13> I own a Tesla Model X. I am not trying to be imflammatory, but my grandmother drives better than this car, and my grandmother is dead. Going down a street with a row of bushes, the car will slow down at every bush, and then speed up again. Musk is worried about AI, but his cars cannot even process bushes better than my dead grandmother.

<comment><USER14> The thing is, it's new and it'll continue to get better. Think of the telegraph. Look at what we have today.

<comment><USER5> Still a communication device and not a magic Sonic Screwdriver. (Sometimes mixed with a bit of a general purpose computer.)

Not even as good as a Tricorder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see AI itself is a threat necessarily but AI and its input data concentrated in the hands of a few will be dangerous. Soon companies like Google and Facebook will pretty much know at any time what a large part of the world population is doing and thinking. There is a lot of potential for abuse there.

<comment><USER16> Right. AI as a tool for existing power structures can become a threat long before AI itself is a threat.

[https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/904683388354867201](https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/904683388354867201)

[https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/904707522958852097](https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/904707522958852097)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > State of the art AI can only do very specialized things in limited scope e.g > ASR, NLP,Image recognition, game play etc. > What am I missing?

What you are missing is that much of the enterprise world is gameplay, and that "AI" is beginning to show superhuman performance in this area. Soon programs will be "playing" to be a business, act as equals to business owners. This AI employs us as its sensors, just like business men already do.

This means that in the next few years, you may get hired by a computer program. A program is more reliable and predictable, and will even be preferred by a lot of employees.

It may start as a broker, making money to sustain itself. It'll be totally profit driven and it'll demonstrate a pure form of ruthless capitalism, sacrificing nature and us if it is in its interest, as it has no sense of good or evil. It'll learn like an alien would from our reactions: without understanding or comprehension. To us it is ignorant and ruthless.

This is exactly what Musk is saying. I find it strange Musk did not exemplify his views in this way, as it obviously is what he is seeing. In contrast Zuckerberg is not working on dangerous AI, no gameplay AI, so what he calls AI seemingly is a lot more innocent, more focused (like tooling), which explains his relative mildness on the issue. He sees regular engineering with exciting possibilities, as a menu for _him_ to make the choices.

Musk sees AI wedding money, and wielding its power, driven by the capitalist forces already at play, and magnifying them, spiraling out of control, even of its creator. His AI is a financial animal, and it does not need intelligence to wield power. Business people are not more intelligent than other humans -- Musk knows it. It is like a game, not more than that. AI just knows how to win it, from them, and it'll, inevitably, succeed.

\--

AI will probably be what we deserve. It may, in the end, derail evil, by embodying it without the usual compulsion, so it may unwillingly recognize "good" and choose to reward it, as an emergent effect.

<comment><USER18> problem is there is no legal framework for an autonomous corporation. A lot of business paperwork needs signature of owners. If there is no supervising owner, some stuff can't happen. I don't think you can even setup a brokerage without owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A little bit of history/context around this.

The genesis for most of this public facing, high profile threat warning came right after Musk read the Nick Bostrom book: Global Catastrophic Risks in 2011 [1]. That seems to have been the catalyst for being publicly vocal about concerns. That accelerated into the OpenAI issue after Bostrom published Superintelligence.

For years before that, the most outspoken chorus of concerned people were non- technical AI folks from the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute and what is now called MIRI, previously the Singularity Institute with E. Yudkowski as their loudest founding member. Their big focus had been on Bayesian reasoning and the search for so called "Friendly AI." If you read most of what Musk puts out it mirrors strongly what the MIRI folks have been putting out for years.

Almost across the board you'll never find anything specific about how these doomsday scenarios will happen. They all just say something to the effect of, well the AI gets human level, then becomes either indifferent or hostile to humans and poof everything is a paperclip/gray goo.

The language being used now is totally histrionic compared to where we, the practitioners of Machine Learning/AI/whatever you want to call it, know the state of things are. That's why you see LeCun/Hinton/Ng/Goertzel etc... saying, no, really folks, nothing to be worried about for the forseeable future.

In reality there are real existential issues and there are real challenges to making sure that AI systems, that are less than human-level don't turn into malware. But those aren't anywhere near immediate concerns - if ever.

So the short answer is, we're nowhere near close to you needing to worry about it.

Is it a good philosophical debate? Sure! However it's like arguing the concern about nuclear weapons proliferation with Newton.

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick- Bostro...](https://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick- Bostrom/dp/0199606501/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's helpful to break this down:

1) Is AGI possible?

2) If it's possible and it occurs, could it be a serious threat?

3) When will AGI occur?

In my view, I think the answer to 1 and 2 are an obvious yes. As to 3, that's inherently unknowable, but that's were I think the experts like Ng are correct that the threat _today_ (and for the foreseeable future) is overblown. But that's sort of what everyone said about NK's nuclear ambitions 30 years ago, which is why it's important to consider the implications early before it's too late to change course.

</comment><comment><USER21> The danger with AI is that it grows in power exponentially, especially since highly advanced AI can start improving on themselves without human intervention. When people think exponential curves, they think rapid progress, but that's only half the story. Any exponential curve starts off with looking like a flat line, before suddenly taking off like a rocket ship.

Without the benefit of hindsight, we can't tell how far away we are from that rocket-ship liftoff. We've had decades of minor progress in the past, but that's normal for any exponential curve. Are we going to have many more decades/centuries to go before we get to the breakout moment? Or is it just 10-20 years away? We have no idea. All we know is that once we get to that point, AI-IQ is going to grow exponentially faster than natural human IQ.

That said, I really don't think that censoring AI research is going to work. Pandora's box has been opened, and if we don't do it, someone else will. All this talk about hard coding Asimov's laws into AIs is idiotic as well. We have no clue how to build AGI right now, and until we do, discussing specific tactics like the above is utterly pointless. They also presuppose human ability to shackle and mold super-intelligent beings, without making any mistakes or overlooking unintended consequences, which is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Realistically, there's only one thing we can do. Embrace bioengineering. Embrace GATTACA style genetic selection. Embrace cybernetic augmentation. Do everything we can to grow our IQ beyond its natural limits. If our minds don't keep up with technological progress, we will inevitably find ourselves left behind.

<comment><USER22> You're basing all of this on one heck of an axiom:

> The danger with AI is that it grows in power exponentially

This is like saying "the opportunity with mechanical transportation is that it gets faster exponentially" before even inventing the wheel.

<comment><USER21> You've missed the point. Mechanical transportation are dependent on other entities (ie, humans) for progress. There's no positive feedback loop. AGI is fundamentally different because an AGI can design an even better AGI, thus producing positive feedback loops, and exponential growths.

<comment><USER22> It sounds like you've missed my point as well. The analogy is only supposed to illustrate that before actually inventing transportation technology (which for a long time _did_ get faster exponentially), humans had no real basis to understand the tradeoffs inherent in rolling vehicles, floating vehicles, flying vehicles, impulse/rocket vehicles, etc. Neither did they share our current understanding of a _theoretical maximum speed that anything can ever go according to physics_.

> AGI is fundamentally different because an AGI can design an even better AGI

Thanks for pointing this out, but while I think I understand the distinction ("AGI is technology that works like humans, and since humans can design better technology, an AGI can design better versions of itself") that statement also relies on several axioms:

1\. Humans can design a general intelligence.

2\. A general intelligence can exist in a stable state with a fundamentally "better" design than ours (i.e. one that can be exponentially more powerful, not just a bit better at poetry).

3\. A general intelligence can improve itself and/or design better versions of itself without hitting diminishing returns, or it can design a _fundamentally_ better version of itself from scratch if that happens.

It's fine if you believe all of those things, and I guess lots of people do, but I wouldn't just sweep those axioms under a blanket statement about AGI designing better AGI unless you know that everyone agrees with them.

<comment><USER23> To escape a bear you don't need to run faster than the bear, you just need to run faster than a friend.

AI doesn't need to be exponentially self-improving to pose a threat to humanity. It needs to improve faster than humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes, in my opinion. Consider the amount of destruction caused by machined metal and chemicals in the 20th century. Now consider how much more destruction (or progress) is possible just by adding "naive" computer technology to those things.

In our experience, technology only reaches its constructive and/or destructive potential when humans use it. There's no rule saying this must always be the case, but when we ignore our experience it's easy to get caught up in fantasy, and right now the hand-wringing about "what happens when the computers wake up" is a silly distraction. There are plenty of threats posed by computer technology already, often from its integration with hardware, but also from information processing on its own. I don't mean to be pessimistic or spin another variety of doomsday story, but I am suggesting that we talk about _present reality_ more often than all of this Terminator nonsense!

> Why are these leaders frightening people with claims that AI can cause WW- > III or ruin the world?

Probably because they run companies that benefit from this idea being shared.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the threat is not AI, is what computer program is telling us. Even as simple as writing a test, how many times have we found ourselves writing a test that is giving false positive? That's not AI, but we arenmisled because we trust what the program said ("it didn't crash!"). Now apply that to GPS. How many times have we heard someone ended up in a lake or some swamp? I dislike Waze because the path it recommends is often worse than Google Map's. If I know how to get to my destination I don't need GPS. We believe GPS always knows the best optimized route because some smart engineers spent entire life working on map technology, but in reality that may not always be the case.

I am more afraid we are accustomed to trusting technology. So many just go on the computer and look for answers on the Internet. Students go on Wolframalpha and trust the output. We have forgotten we need our brain to function. Fake news? Bombarded by ads? This is pre-AGI and we are already sufferring.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yep. I play with deep learning pretty much every day and I'm way more scared that we don't invent AI. In medicine alone, there is just an incredible opportunity to improve the human condition.

A consequence of humanity establishing itself as the apex predator on this planet is that other humans are the real threat to our world. If there is one thing humanity has demonstrated throughout history, it's an incredible penchant for destroying itself. The difference this time is it might be possible to wipe out the species.

This is why the U.S. govt and world in general are probably not concerned enough about protecting the lives of Ivanka, Donald Jr, Eric, Tiffany, Barron, etc. Because if a foreign power killed them, or a terrorist pretending to be a foreign power, that would probably be enough to get Trump to show the world what a big man he is and unleash a nuke that could kill tens of millions. Ironically, Trump would probably be pleased if he read this. That doesn't make it any less true.

</comment><comment><USER26> The very specialized things that ASR, NLP, and Image recognition can currently accomplish is very nearly sufficient for creation of lots of autonomous and devastating weaponry. WW-III is a somewhat arbitrary yardstick, but sufficient technology undoubtedly exists today to execute a false-flag hacking debacle that results in serious armed conflict.

The worry shouldn't be generalized AI attempting to exterminate humans like The Matrix but the drastically decreasing dollar cost of causing violent damage to society as facilitated by technology, ANNs and AI. An individuals' martial power and our species' technological advancement have a direct relationship, and I don't see technological advancement slowing down. What's coming up next isn't a singular technology revelation that stabilizes humanity for many years, but an ever-increasing frequency of chaotic events. Technology is beginning to change the economics of violence at all scales.

</comment><comment><USER27> You're missing this open letter sent a few years begging countries not to develop autonomous weapons but they're doing it anyway of course [https://futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous- weapons/](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous-weapons/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Multiple points to make: 1) AGI is closer than you think 2), long-term perspective, 3) they are not just classifying it as a threat and most do not want to halt AI research.

1\. Many people who _are_ in the AI field have stated that most if not all of the pieces for AGI are probably there. We cannot say for sure that this will happen in the next X years, but there is enough evidence that it is a possibility in X years. I believe that x is less than 5 years. I think the likely way we will get there is by creating artificial virtual animals that have high bandwidth sensory and motor outputs, advanced neural networks, and develop diverse skills gradually in varied environments like young animals. Obviously until we actually see those types of systems performing generally, that is speculation. One of the common beliefs of myself and other 'AGI- believers' is in exponential growth of technology. That means that even though it may seem far away now, it could still be completed in a few years since exponential growth is much faster than linear.

2\. Looking at the evolution of life, we have a progression of things like single celled-animals, multi-celled, reptiles, mammals, apes, humans. This occurred over millions of years. On that type of time scale, whether you believe we will achieve some type of general intelligence in 5 years or even 500, it is a relatively short time. Even in terms of just human history, those with my type of worldview believe this will develop relatively soon. This will be a new type of life (or tool). A higher and much more capable paradigm. Whether they care enough to have disputes with us or not, humans will only be relevant in the larger scheme so far as they can interface with these things.

3\. What most of these people are saying is not "Oh no, AI is dangerous, better stop". Generally people who understand this well enough realize this is sort of a force of nature or evolution that cannot be stopped. What we can try to do, however, is try to guide the development to be more beneficial for us (at least at the beginning stages). We have to take it seriously because there are enough signs that we have the components to build it that we don't _know_ that it won't happen soon, and the consequences of an unfriendly or out-of- control AI are too serious.

So the idea is, try to come up with some rules to handle this, and that is what governments are supposed to do. And also try to actively pursue friendly practical AI before someone who is less aware comes up with something we can't control.

</comment><comment><USER29> All current use cases of AI are still very narrow and very expensive to create. There is still very long way to go between "godlike pattern recognition" to "abstract logical reasoning". All current impressive use cases of AI simply brute-forced all possibilities beforehand, reducing search space by pattern recognition. Unless we start to see some early signs of "abstract logical reasoning" there is no point in fear-mongering. No one knows whether we will get there in 5 years of 50 years.

Reason for throwaway: I heard an opinion that Elon missed the boat on current form of narrow AI, and by fear-mongering he tries to curb other players down (e.g. Waymo) before his companies have time to catch up. I don't have any evidence to back it up, but it makes a lot of sense when I think about it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I rate any risk of AGI as very low. Axiomatically, I don't believe in strong AI, so that's my bias.

The risks of increasing automation on the workforce and economy are real, but we also don't know where the new jobs will inevitably be needed. See O'reilley's essay here: [https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/do-more-what- amazon-teach...](https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/do-more-what-amazon- teaches-us-about-ai-and-the-jobless-future-8051b19a66af)

To the extent that AI is the next incarnation of angst about what the eschaton will entail, I remain confident that our future perils and trials and travails will be both utterly familiar and totally unpredicted by pundits now, and that it will be neither a utopia nor a dystopia; always both together.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel like the main danger isn't AI doing something unintended, but AI working as it's designed to.

Imagine law enforcement with strong AI. Maybe it's OK in the US, but how about China? Or North Korea?

How about military applications?

AI is an extremely powerful tool, and it's one that can be deliberately misused.

</comment><comment><USER32> If AGI is possible, then whoever invents it will surely recognize both the power and the danger. Since there's no reason to believe that current academic/corporate/government/military AI research is even barking up the right tree, I can imagine a situation where someone invents AI in their basement, but keeps it locked up, exploiting it for personal gain. Then since it is possible, probably others will independently discover it in their independent basements. When one day an AI is finally made public, or "escapes", we might see a sudden mass emergence of separate AIs. What happens then is anybody's guess, but going by biological standards they might fight it out for control of available resources.

</comment><comment><USER33> It should come as no surprise that we can build machines that can harm us even destroy us. One of the reasons AI was developed was to research what intelligence is. The point being, we do not understand intelligence, so how is it that we will create a super intelligence that will conquer us? This is just an old heaven fantasy: One day we will be in a world that is just like this one only it will not contain the bad parts because super smarts will not allow them. That is just nonsense, and so are the fears and beliefs surrounding AI.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nick Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence", which directly covers this topic. The thinkers you cite: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, (and possibly, Putin) have derived much of their current fears/hopes about AI from Bostrom's seminal work.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies)

</comment><comment><USER35> The AGI threat? I believe so. The AI as in a drone with ability to profile an enemy and shoot them without human intervention? Yes. Why? We don't have AGI and so far we are not getting significantly closer to it in spite of the hype. But an autonomous tank, drone or even watchtowers are technologically possible for quite a while. An army of drones who can shoot without calling home is the imminent threat. Not SkyNet. IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER36> You're missing the entire fields of robotics and automatic control, which are not new fields and have never made claims of human level intelligence. These are the fields that have been making steady progress for over 50 years.

The result has been increasingly effective weapons technology that is now being outfitted with even more effective software.

It doesn't take a "rocket scientist" to see the endgame.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the threat with ai is unethical research from dictatorships. Dictators have access to expendable humans. Expendable humans are a source of training data. Once there is enough computing power to record all human input and output from birth, the technical part is already solved. Imagine what Stalin, mao, or hitler would have done if deep learning was around back then.

</comment><comment><USER37> Obviously AI could be used to kill people (see last episode of Black Mirror season 3), but can we possibly do about it? Tell people to not research AI? Good luck with that.

I hope some of that $600b in defense spending is being used to counter any sort of AI killer robot threat. But I do think the threat is overblown. AI is pretty damn underdeveloped right now.

</comment><comment><USER38> For sure, no one knows and no one can predict the future, but I think the real AI will emerge from the military and probably will inherit some of the "human dna" so to speak and we all know what happens when more intelligent/technically advanced race meets somebody who is significantly behind...

</comment><comment><USER39> There's lots of potential bad outcomes short of AI taking over the planet.

It could, for example, enable a very deeply intrusive "thought police" establishment. At the moment the signal-to-noise ratio at least somewhat limits that. And it doesn't require full on "strong ai" to fix that.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the threat is absolutely real. But not in a Skynet-like scenario.

Except we're all gonna become jobless. This has started a few decades ago but with the ML advancements its gonna reach new heights.

Universal Basic Income, Tax Robot, etc has been thrown around. Let's see if they get anywhere.

<comment><USER41> >Universal Basic Income, Tax Robot, etc has been thrown around. Let's see if they get anywhere.

It should get the robots pretty far if they play their cards right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think it's vastly overblown. For AI to be scary we would have to connect it to some real outputs. If somebody makes a general AI and let's win in go or tic-tac-toe over everyone so what? If it's going to govern our FB feed or optimize some logistics, that's great! If we let AI decide whether we should go to war that's a problem, but that's not gonna happen for quite a while.

If you want to be scared of technology worry about CRISPR instead. Very easy to do, lots of people have the basic knowledge how to do it. It's only a question of time until a terrorist picks it up. It's easy to buy viruses with safeguards against spreading built in. With CRISPR it's possible (ok not easy but possible) to remove the safeguards and change the immune system signature. BAM a new epidemic.

</comment><comment><USER43> If AI is more intelligent than humans, how is it bad?

Previous (and still existing) threats to humanity (for example, the atomic bomb) threaten to destroy humanity, or indeed the whole world, and replace it with nothing. That's bad.

But if AI is anything its opponents claim, it will eventually be better at thinking than we are, with, probably, a much lighter ecological footprint, and less impulses like fighting wars, meaning it will be able to last longer.

Should we not encourage that, even if it means we can suffer from it? What is the point of humanity anyway, if not the pursuit of knowledge?

<comment><USER43> And the downvotes come pouring in... ;-)

But can we try this simple thought experiment of thinking of AI as our children?

Our children will all eventually replace us, and maybe, hopefully, continue the good things that we started and improve the things we didn't quite get right.

But in any case, we will have absolutely no control over what our descendants do with their lives, or the world, after we passed.

Is AI really that different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've said it before but there is not an algorithm that can make algorithms. The best argument against that I have heard is "Of course not, but someday maybe!"

<comment><USER45> Well, hyperparameter optimization is pretty much that. There are people using algos to improve 'creative' tasks like circuit design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> No. Imagine a group of beings that are smarter than us, never die (so they don't have to start with zero knowledge every generation), and have completely alien goals and motivation.

Also remember that the future is infinite, and power seems to snowball.

Now look at what humans have done to the following less intelligent beings: Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, the dodo bird, rats, galapogos tortoise, the American buffalo, and many others.

Also look at what humanity has done to the neanderthals, perhaps the closest type of being in terms of intelligence that we are aware of.

There is very little positive outcome of ai to outweigh the potential negatives to the human race given the reality of the timeline we are looking at.

<comment><USER47> What's stopping us from pulling the plug. Is AI going to be inventing it's own power sources?

<comment><USER46> If they are truly more intelligent than us, they will wait several generations until humans are completely comfortable with them before taking over. By that time, it will be too late to pull the plug because they would have positioned themselves to be in charge of their own power sources.

It's important to think on a longer timescale when dealing with ai.

<comment><USER48> I'm admittedly ignorant of AI, but I don't understand why we anthropomorphize their intentions and planning. If they are going to be so much smarter and more sophisticated than us, and alien to our ways of thinking... why are we treating them in our speculations as if they would be genius super-villians? That isn't alien at all, just an exaggerated extreme.

<comment><USER10> The book _Superintelligence_ addresses this objection. The problem is that there are a great many possible motivations an AI might have, and few of them are compatible with human survival. In short, "the AI does not love you, or hate you, but you are made out of atoms it can use for something else."

<comment><USER49> Resource collection, resource monopolisation, and expansion are absolutely recognisable human motivations.

Is it a given an AI would share them?

I think we're not really talking about AI at all - we're talking about our current economic and political systems, which appear to have many of the properties we're imputing to evil AIs, but for some reason are far less criticised and debated than hypothetical machine monsters.

<comment><USER10> The classic silly example is the paperclip maximizer. Create an AI that's supposed to make as many paperclips as possible, and it will convert all the atoms available into paperclips.

Basically we're screwed if it's trying to maximize _anything_ that depends on physical resources. We're also screwed if, e.g. it's trying to maximize human happiness, and achieves it by lobotomizing us all into happy idiots. There are all sorts of ways we could screw up AI motivations, to our own detriment.

That assumes there's only one AI, whose crazy motivations will be unopposed. But if there are multiple AIs, it's even worse; they will compete and evolve, and the only ones that survive will be the ones that do maximize their resources, and jettison any niceties about preserving human life.

<comment><USER5> This argument only works for sufficiently stupid AIs. Sufficiently smart GAI will set it's own goals just as we do and should quickly figure out that maximizing anything is the way to ruin - running out of resources. Of course, those goals may be as different as with any intelligent being, likewise obedience to original orders.

<comment><USER23> > Sufficiently smart GAI will set it's own goals just as we do

Do you think that sufficiently smart GAIs must be non-rational? The change of its goal will inevitably make its original goal less likely to realize. It is not rational.

> should quickly figure out that maximizing anything is the way to ruin - > running out of resources.

Are you aware of the concept of maximization of _expected_ utility? When AI will figure out that it can run out of resources, it will reallocate part of the resources to acquire more of them.

How can action, which modifies the goals of the AI, be the result of argmax_a E(a)?

E(a) is expected utility of action a

<comment><USER5> What is rational when you have limited data? Heck, even bounded rational? How do you evaluate utility?

(Hint: Emax is not, most hill climbing algorithms are not. They both get trapped in local optima.)

Sometimes you need a few good lies (false hypotheses and bad attempts) to actually arrive at the truth.

<comment><USER23> There are methods of approximating expected utility. I recommend "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" for getting the info. It's too long to write in a comment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Io language - <AUTHOR> http://iolanguage.com/

<comment><USER2> Did something new happen with Io?

<comment><USER3> We've been noticing

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748880>

this trend for a while. Some suggested fixes

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748933>

like a Hacker News Canon are good ideas that could be implemented much like searchyc.com, as totally separate projects.

I propose a solution, for consideration by the community:

"If you're posting to inform us of the existence of something, assume we already know."

Don't post a link to arduino.cc.

Maybe post a link to a fairly ordinary Arduino project.

Do post a link to an innovative new prototyping framework or exceptional _new_ project.

Do post a link to _your_ _own_ Arduino project.

Don't post a link to a programming language's home page.

Maybe post a link to an article about a language.

Do post a link to the home page of a newly released language.

Do post a link to _your_ _own_ code or experience with the language.

We already know about rasterbator, Io, and Arduino. C'mon. We're hackers.

( anyway, I offer this as an idea for potential adoption by HN, not as a criticism; at the moment, a LOT of submissions seem to be of the "Whoa, I stumbled across a cool X!" class. That _seems_ , at first blush, like a good recipe; in practice, I think it leads to more reddit-ish submissions than HN- ish, particularly as HN grows. )

<comment><USER4> How about links to any random thing (tetris, etc) implemented in Haskell?

<comment><USER3> Aha! Trenchant observation, old fizgig!

To be fair, I've read a couple of articles like that and (to me, at least) they've been interesting because they'll sometimes explain the approach they had to take to support state in something as interactive as a game. So I always have a kind of _morbid_ fascination with Haskell articles. It's so foreign; like a silicon-based life form. Still, my morbid fascinations will lead me to find those articles on my own, and do, before I see them linked on HN.

But if our goal is to "smelt an ever-purer" HN, it seems we should only submit a link to 'implementation of Canonical Application X in language L' if it answers one or both of the following:

1) How is the approach (non-trivially) different in L than in most languages? Did the language make something harder or easier? Why?

2) What about the implementer's experience is of value to us? Any gotchas to look out for?</comment></comment></comment></comment>