Google Grapples with 'Horrifying' Reaction to Uncanny AI Tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-10/google-grapples-with-horrifying-reaction-to-uncanny-ai-tech <comment><USER3> I think there are two complementary things at play:

1) You can be very impressed with the tech (as everyone is)

2) You can be creeped out by how it could be abused.

BOTH things can be true. And that, I think demonstrates a continued blindspot especially by companies like Google, who simply don't seem to realize when and why things may come across as creepy to people. They keep doing this almost every year. They're so focused on how cool the tech is, they seem to just not realize that people might find it totally creepy. And this seems to be deep in the company's DNA (same with FB)

Did they do a focus group of people outside the valley bubble? I doubt it. Maybe a focus group of receptionists? What do they think of it?

<comment><USER4> I think I'm both, but I will tell you, the idea of having _my own_ automated assistant deal with a company's automated assistant when trying to get through a phone directory to a live human sounds AMAZING. Like, I have zero problems with the ethics there.

<comment><USER5> You beat me. I want assistant to deal with robocalls and phone trees for me. I don't want assistant to annoy people.

<comment><USER6> Unless you can perfectly predict which calls are robocalls, assistant will end up talking to real people. If people know they're talking to a robot, there's a good chance they'll be annoyed.

<comment><USER7> Why would I be annoyed at talking to a smart answering machine? Seems at the very least no worse than hearing a prerecorded message and leaving a voicemail, provided the conversation goes as naturally as it did in the demos Google showed on stage.

Assistant: "Hello, you've reached Dave's personal assistant. Dave's not available right now, can I take a message?"

Bob: "No, just tell him to call me back as soon as he can."

Assistant: "Okay. Can I ask who's calling?" (Bob was not in Dave's contacts list.)

Bob: "It's Bob Jones."

Assistant: "Alright, I'll let him know."

Bob: "Okay, bye."

Perfectly natural conversation, and provides a much nicer user experience for Dave when he checks his missed calls. (Notification: "Call from: 444-444-4444 Bob Jones says 'tell him to call me back as soon as he can'")

<comment><USER8> That's perfectly fine as long as it identifies itself as a robot: "Hi, this is Dave's automated assistant..."

A big part of what creeps people out is the notion of bots impersonating humans.

<comment><USER7> What's so creepy about that? If I can get the same quality of service talking to a bot as I can to a person, why should I care what it is I'm talking to?

Unless you mean impersonating a _specific_ human (e.g. if my personal assistant were pretending to be me) I don't really see the issue.

<comment><USER9> I mean, _all_ humans are specific humans. How could a bot not impersonate a _specific_ human? It would be impersonating your assistant, who may not exist in the first place, but the bot is trying to get others to think that the person is a real person with real feelings. That duplicitousness is the problem. Like, other people are real people too, not just sheeple (terrible term that it is).

<comment><USER7> Why does it matter if I mistakenly think the answering machine bot is a real person? Assuming I can treat it like a real person and still get the results I want, why should I care one way or the other?

<comment><USER9> Because it is not a person. It's a machine. There is no shared experience, it doesn't have experiences, it's sand and metal.

Like, a really smart parrot is not a person, right? Even if the parrot could be an answering machine, it would not be due respect and it would not respect you back; because it's a parrot.

I think the issue is that the answer-bot is inherently disrespectful to the real human. Just using one at all is like saying to the real person:"You are not worthy of the time and/or respect of a real human; talk to this clever metal parrot." Text devices and digital sign-ups are at least 'equal', though the transaction is sterile.

Trying to fake that a person is talking to a bot is disrespectful of that other real person and their time; it's trying to pull one over on them and fake them into thinking that the bot's owner is worthy, but that the other real person is not worthy.

Just use a sign-up service. If the company/person does not have one, they are signaling that you have to actually talk to them, and you should respect their decision because they are a real person too, not try to pull a fast one.

<comment><USER7> Why do I need to have "shared experiences" with the person I'm ordering pizza from? I'm trying to order pizza, not get a date. It's not about "worthiness" or anything as elitist as that either; I just want to buy a pizza.

> Just use a sign-up service. If the company/person does not have one, they > are signaling that you have to actually talk to them

Or that they can't afford to build an online order service? I seriously doubt the guy working the counter at my local pizza restaurant has any particular desire to speak to me personally.

<comment><USER9> Either way, forcing a person to talk to a robot without their 'consent' is, well, really rude. Many people hate phone-trees as is, forcing people to deal with them even more is not making the world a better place, it's making one person's world a better place at expense of others.

<comment><USER6> Forcing a person to talk to a person without their consent is really rude too. What makes talking to a robot that's indistinguishable from a human worse than talking to a human?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I, for one, thought it was amazing how little of the uncanny valley I felt.

There are certainly things to consider like how I wouldn't want to be robo- called by scam bots that I can't tell are bots, and neither do others. A lot of businesses have an out already built for them though. Restaurants in particular have services like Open Table and Nowait that relieve the pressure of users wanting to use a realistic robo-call.

As an "Average Joe", my biggest concern is how this will push phone communications even (edit: more) toward where Facebook privacy settings are now - registered friends only - and how inconvenient that will be. I already let any numbers I don't have registered go to voicemail, and I don't like having to do that.

<comment><USER11> > _As an "Average Joe", my biggest concern is how this will push phone > communications even toward where Facebook privacy settings are now - > registered friends only_

Yeah I mean, that's essentially where we are now... I don't give out my phone number to anyone except my friends and a couple of companies I trust not to abuse it. I reject unknown numbers. Many people are like me.

Phonecalls aren't convenient at all. Expensive, atrocious voice quality, hard- to-memorize easy-to-typo numbers that sometimes have to change and are bount to the country (and sometimes to the provider), no way to identity callers unless they're already on your contact list, ... Should I go on?

Just use email if you want to contact me at random. I use Discord for voice calls, almost exclusively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a field like AI, it's _extremely_ difficult to decide if knee-jerk aversion to specific advancements is something worth taking seriously or not. For a field where the entire _point_ is to replace humans in certain functions, it's inevitable that there will be leaps forward that people are extremely uncomfortable with in the short term.

This may be an example of something where things need to be altered, or it may not. But in either case it seems short-sighted to just think this question can be resolved in 24 hours after a demo due to a few hastily-written tweets and thrown-together articles. What's important is that as AI continues to encroach upon human capabilities that there be a framework for navigating these transitions and knowing where the lines are. Hopefully as this kind of thing becomes more common public opinion will shift from caring about the creepy- demo-of-the-week to a wider scope of how we grapple as a society with these kinds of advancements.

Emotional reactions and ad-hoc decisionmaking based on mob rule is going to result in a random, arbitrary outcome which will almost certainly be suboptimal.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes suboptimal is a lot less frightening and destructive than optimal.

Dictatorships and despotism are the optimal solution for wielding of executive power.

Murder is the optimal means through which to immediately resolve problems created by other people from a time investment point of view.

Rape is an optimal solution to spreading genetic material.

See the pattern? Knee-jerk reactions from the layperson AREN'T necessarily bad. If anything, they should be the first sign that a researcher needs to back up from that awesome thing you just did, and take off the razor thin beam of relevance you used to achieve your breakthrough, and begin the HARD part of research. Turning it from an interesting academic factoid into a societal good.

When we do research, we are free to ignore huge swathes of the world to be able to reach or findings. The reckoning, however, comes when we have to ask ourselves 'how prepared is the world for this?'

The story of Doctor Frankenstein isn't just some scary story for children. It should be haunting a researcher night and day. What am I enabling? How will society take this? It shouldn't stop you by all means, but it will keep you grounded and aware of the fact your research isn't happening in a void.

Remember, all those bits and pieces you are putting out of your mind are the bread and butter of every layperson's day. Being a researcher doesn't absolve you of your status as a member of society.

It is YOUR responsibility to take your idea from the theoretical to the practical. The rest of society is busy staying intact enough to support your research efforts.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure who you're arguing with here?

My point was that a suboptimal solution is one where there was no careful, methodical thought to the design of AI systems. If AI designers and researchers blindly react to public outcry after 24 hours from a demo (which, in general, is something I would expect Google to do) the kind of thinking you mention above is just as unlikely to happen as if they trudged on forward without any consideration to these things at all. In both cases, this is a suboptimal outcome for society.

In one, we get a fairly random, undesigned world of AI systems that don't serve anyone well and generally are underutilized because nobody is willing to push the boundaries. In the other, we get dystopian AI hell. It's important that researchers be given the space to think you describe. The right way to allow that is to foster an informed and open-minded public about the emergence of AI and the decisions we need to make about it as a society, and not have prominent voices writing about knee-jerk reactions making authoritative demands to a specific public demo after just a day. (See Max Tegmark's book Life 3.0 for the kinds of stuff we need more of being put into the world imho.)

<comment><USER13> It is this part I"m referring to:

>Emotional reactions and ad-hoc decisionmaking based on mob rule is going to result in a random, arbitrary outcome which will almost certainly be suboptimal.

I may have initially misinterpreted some context when I read your comment before, though my conclusions haven't changed much.

I agree with you that AI research must be methodically and transparently approached.

The part where I was trying to speak toward, however, was that AI researchers/designers are going to necessarily be constrained by how much faith and goodwill a (currently) troubled society, plagued with inequality and hardship in the face of increasing job loss to automation. This is a feature, not a bug to be dismissed.

AI is akin to nuclear technology in that it is perceived as a huge game changer. One that brings with it a huge potential for societal change and upheaval.

The AI designer/researcher DOESN'T necessarily see it that way. It is just a tool to do a thing. The populace, however, don't grasp the limits the researcher/designer does. They are being asked to give the same degree of faith to the AI field that nuclear physics was given in the last century.

Combine that with a severe distrust in the motives of the organizations doing the actual development and you have the stage set for large-scale rejection of AI research.

You said it yourself before. AI is a field that is trying to replace humans (having to do stuff). That is not a viewpoint that will win you the favor of the populace. No one will get further than the first half of the sentence before the hackles go up.

Nobody trusts a Utopia where people don't have to work because machines do it for them. Nor will they trust the men behind the machines. It's sad, but it is the kind of thinking that has kept humanity OUT of a complete dystopian hellholes thus far.

I don't know the fix, but I do know that if we can't solve some very fundamental social problems that advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to make worse, you will find the field of study becoming more and more difficult to find public acceptance in. The only inkling of a clue I have is it may have to do with the "industrial asymmetry" of our current times.

If you don't take heed of the state of society, you may end up in the same place NASA was for the latter half of the 20th Century. BEAUTIFUL theoretical groundwork laid, but hamstrung in execution by popular sentiment. (See some documentaries to learn how "thrilled" many were with the Space Race. NASA still hasn't recovered from the backlash despite some of the best science I've ever seen)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think it's at all problematic for these devices to state "Hello, I am an automated assistant calling on behalf of $(name). I'd like to book a reservation for...."

<comment><USER15> I think Google's concern would be that it would generate annoyance that might not be warranted. Like, if I call a customer service line and get an AVR system, even if the system is perfectly capable of helping me, I just hate AVR systems (justifiably or not) and start yelling at it to give me a representative until it does. If the AVR system were so compelling that it just pretended to be a human and I couldn't tell the difference, presumably I'd be just as satisfied as if I had gotten an actual human, and could skip the annoyance.

Similarly, I think if this thing can handle the call as well as a human, it's to its advantage in terms of not frustrating the person on the other end of the phone to not self-identify, so that they perceive it as just like any other appointment call (because it is) rather than triggering an "ugh damnn it, another Google robocall" which will then prime people to feel like they have to speak to it a certain way to get it to behave, even if that demonstrably isn't actually necessary, and generate ill will towards the company.

On balance, maybe they should self-identify anyway -- "if this thing can handle the call as well as a human" is a pretty big "if" after all -- but I can see why they'd want not to.

<comment><USER16> If someone doesn't want to talk to you (or your bot), why not just leave them alone? It's not their job to be your guinea pig.

Was it right to not tell the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment what was happening to them, because they would have refused and blocked the progress of science?

<comment><USER17> taking restaurant reservations from a computer and getting infected by syphilis are definitely the same thing

> If someone doesn't want to talk to you (or your bot), why not just leave > them alone? It's not their job to be your guinea pig.

it _is_ their job to take reservations over the phone

<comment><USER8> > it is their job to take reservations over the phone

Yeah, so presumably their bosses will instruct them to take reservations from automated agents, and grandparent comment's fears that people will hang up on automated agents that identify themselves as such will prove unfounded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The technology is impressive. The demonstration choice was disengenous. It seems way more likely to me that the early adopters of this technology will be companies that will be able to replace phone receptionists with automation - already widely done by large companies, but now, thanks to this technology, available to doctors offices, restaurants, hair salons and many medium sized businesses.

<comment><USER19> Duplex will definitely be used in the opposite direction than demonstrated. Its acceptable to talk to a robot over the phone, and improving that process is very valuable.

But having a robot speak to the business? That might be a bit much. Then again, if this version is only for appointments, reservations, etc, than that might be seen as acceptable in kind of the same way.

It's mostly the hesitation about when this starts going beyond that. Do you now use Google assistant to talk to friends/coworkers? "Ok, Google, ask $friend if he wants to see a movie this weekend."

<comment><USER10> I hope it never gets to, "Ok Google, run Microsoft Support Scam 3 on Victim List 5".

<comment><USER20> One of the advantages of Google hosting this (as opposed to, say, this technology being an "out in the wild" agglomeration of voice synthesis and machine learning open-source solutions bailing-wired together) is that there's one central authority that can be held accountable.

You're not going to see the described scenario because there's nothing in it for Google, they have full control over both the Google Assistant ecosystem and the set of technologies powering this machine-learning interaction, and they can gate-keep it as much as they want to.

That having been said... If one company can do it, we're only N years out from the tech becoming available "in the wild" as a bailing-wired selection of open-source tools (probably in a Docker image somewhere ;) ).

<comment><USER10> Even if not another company, people develop actions for Google Assistant so I don't think it's that wild to think that 3rd party Duplex behaviors could be something Google is considering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What about the AI advancements in early disease screening and treatment that Sundar highlighted in the beginning of the keynote? Why not mention that as a counterbalance to quoting professional critics and at least touch on the undisputed benefits from this stuff.

What's truly "horrifying" is the somewhat prevalent phobic attitude towards technological innovation and invention, be that industrial robots 'taking all the jobs' or this reaction to the Duplex demo.

Our current technological achievements were largely made possible with help from the media and our prominent thinkers in cheerleading the advancements and shaping the public's option.

Now it's the critical voices that get affirmed and amplified.

<comment><USER22> I think hacker news suffers from being too close to tech to really get a normal person's perspective. These advances are technologically marvelous, sure, but they are ethically bankrupt. At best, they make human interaction worse, and at worst, they enable robocallers and standardize thought. Tech optimism has become toxic because SV fails to realize how each cool new feature can be bastardized and abused.

<comment><USER23> Not only are they ethically bankrupt, it feels like the sole goal is to eliminate all human interaction and more importantly solve problems that do not exist.

Ex. I do not mind making a 60 second phone call to make a reservation vs. 30 seconds of figuring out how to tell Google what to do.

In this case Google is solving problems for rich socially awkward nerds. Not the majority of people.

<comment><USER24> How many of you have immigrant parents who, where English is a second language, would have great difficulty performing the kind of verbal gymnastics that you take for granted?

<comment><USER22> My mother is an immigrant and speaks 4 languages, and I am learning my third. This is a ridiculous argument; if this is so important to you, advocate for Google translate integration into email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Horrifying reaction? A bit of hyperbole

<comment><USER26> > Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing.

I can understand how people could be creeped out, but _ethically lost?_ Is "ethics" now just a buzzword?

Personally I wouldn't mind getting a call from Google. Google's voice is absurdly pleasant and friendly, which is likely a completely different experience to what someone on the receiving end of "cancel my Comcast" typically experiences.

<comment><USER27> The problem is silicon valley folks talk about ethics in a self serving way. They expect ethics from others but are not willing to give it back.

Whether stalking people and abusing personal data or now dehumanizing people, enabling bad actors and making people suspicious of callers it's always someone else's fault for not understanding 'innovation', not theirs for not considering the ethical implications. This is a tone deaf play dumb approach to ethics for profit.

<comment><USER25> No. That is a narrative from the alt right. SV folks have similar ethics if not better than the average person.

I would say generally engineers tend to be more ethical and rule following. They are built in this manner.

I am not sure what is happening but suspect part of the problem is some are scared of the future and tie SV to the future and taking it out on them. Where the narrative comes from.

The other possibility is they need a bogey man with the Clinton's gone and using SV to replace.

The last is more conspiracy oriented. The biggest strength for the US, hands down, is SV. The innovation coming out of SV is just unbelievable.

It could be Russia and other countries are trying to get us to fight to hurt SV for self serving purposes.

Who gets AI first will have an unmatched advantage. Google is far ahead of everyone and that could be driving the alt right narrative at Google. Using the Damore firing as the rallying event.

It really scares me how easy it is to manipulate some in the US. They use a fear of the future for some to stir it up. Kind of like how Trump and others are using people that look different to whip up people in a frenzy and scared of people that look different.

That they are coming to rape our women.

All I got. Been still trying to figure it out. I have engaged with a number of people on Reddit and surprised how many times someone negative on Google turns out to be Russian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Giving it an obviously robotic voice when it calls. "People will probably > hang up," he said.

Doesn't that really tell us all we need to know? If the only way to get people to tolerate your service is to try and trick them then is your service a good thing?

<comment><USER29> Deception is key to profitable ads and news as well. We just keep diving deeper into the murk and find ourselves more and more confused about what's going on around us, who and what to trust. It's sad and technology has continued to accelerate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The only automated voice calls I get are always spammers.

I can't see many real people wanting to automate calling the hair salon, because then you're being fairly pretentious as if you're too busy to pick up the phone.

But I can see a massive incentive for scammers to stop having to employ cheap Indian labour and now have an almost infinite ability to make human like calls to non-tech people in an American accent.

So be prepared to hear the Google assistants calling you to tell you there's a problem with your Windows PC and they just need to install something on there to fix it.

<comment><USER20> > I can't see many real people wanting to automate calling the hair salon, > because then you're being fairly pretentious as if you're too busy to pick > up the phone.

Just a short list:

\- the deaf

\- the mute

\- the very socially awkward

In the last category: I can personally attest that I've put off scheduling an appointment with someone I've done business with in the past for two days, purely because the thought of actually picking up the phone and going through the process of aligning our calendars makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. If I can pass that task to an assistant, my life would be _much_ easier.

<comment><USER30> Deaf and mute are good counter examples. I know that Google quoted 60% who don't have websites but that figure should only ever get smaller. Such an impersonal interaction works perfectly through the web.

I'm not a fan of calling people either (I've put off finding a local doctor for a year because I don't want to go through the awkwardness) but starting a relationship with an important client using a not quiet real 'assistant' would start off the relationship in the wrong foot. Certainly if someone calls me using this I'll think that they can't even be bothered to speak to me personally and so I'm not worth their time.

<comment><USER20> I'd imagine the level of personal touch that matters varies from industry to industry. I don't know a restaurant much cares if the reservation is made via the reservation holder, their human assistant, or their robot assistant as long as the customer shows up on time, pays, doesn't wreck the place, and leaves a nice tip.

<comment><USER30> I was replying to this

> scheduling an appointment with someone I've done business with

So it's not just booking at a restaurant this is someone that you will have an ongoing personal relationship with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What I think is really interesting here is that all these questions surrounding this are focused on the human-AI interaction and whether the human should know that they're talking to an AI when, in reality, what Google is after is completely removing the "human" aspect of that relationship. Google is betting that, in the future, we won't need people at all to do these kinds of things. In fact, they would love if every booking for every appointment was done seamlessly for the user without ever interacting with people. This Duplex technology is just a stop-gap to fill in that interim period where we're still using people for tasks that don't require specialization, are very mundane, and end in a very obvious success condition. All you need to make an appointment somewhere is a time/date and a confirmation that the appointment was made. Instead of an API, we currently have a "human" API that handles that. I guarantee that Google is banking on Duplex eventually bridging that gap so that, eventually, I can make an appointment _anywhere_ simply by asking my personal assistant to do so and the "human" is completely unnecessary.

These are the questions we should be looking at, in my opinion. This situation is only temporary. We need to focus on the future (that is most certainly coming) ideas of what we're going to do with our societies when even these simple jobs that we thought required that human touch are replaced by automation and AI.

</comment><comment><USER32> To me, the hidden crux of this whole issue is "can this system be as effective to deal with as a human who is good at their job?"

If that condition is met or exceeded, none of this voice stuff will matter. People won't care if the system discloses it's nature, or sounds creepy, if their airline reservation change (or whatever) goes abnormally well.

If that condition is not met, which IMO it won't be in the near future, then we're just adding attempted manipulation and potential for abuse on top of an already bad UX.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ha, it's because no one at Google pictured themselves as the one on the other end of the phone taking the orders.

Because phoning in for restaurant reservations is only the beginning. Ask yourself now - in a few years, will you be one of the people _giving_ orders to a digital assistant, or one of the (many more) _receiving_ them?

"The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed."

<comment><USER16> What's horrible about me as a business owner taking to a logically organized clear-speaking bot instead of confused mumbling human?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > He compared it to the electric guitar, a technology that helped humans > express themselves in new ways and is considered a positive advance.

An electric guitar doesn't play for you. It doesn't learn to play for you. It doesn't learn how you play and make your playing better.

It just provides new ways to make sound.

</comment><comment><USER34> The criticisms all seem to be fear based. That somehow not knowing you're talking to a machine makes you vulnerable. Which is ridiculous. If I pretended to be the opposite sex while on the phone, that doesn't mean I have bad intentions. Likewise, having computers that sound human isn't nefarious. Wanting them to sound robotic reveals more about the detractors insecurities and fears about how we should control our machines than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER35> IO is a developer conference, the whole critique about unveiling it before they know everything about how to market the product, or before it's complete, is tone deaf.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Should AI software that's smart enough to trick humans be forced to disclose > itself?

Yes, of course. I would even say it should be legal _fraud_ not to, with severe consequences.

<comment><USER7> Why?

<comment><USER36> That's an extraordinarily open-ended question. If you'll be more precise, I'll attempt a good-faith answer.

Cheers

<comment><USER7> Why should it be legal fraud with severe consequences for an AI caller to not disclose the fact that it is an AI?

You implied the reasoning behind your statement was obvious ("of course") but it's not at all obvious to me.

<comment><USER36> > You implied the reasoning behind your statement was obvious ("of course") > but it's not at all obvious to me.

No. The affirmative answer to the original question as posed is what seems to me to be obvious. My additional statement was meant to convey the seriousness with which I feel these matters should be taken.

> Why should it be legal fraud with severe consequences for an AI caller to > not disclose the fact that it is an AI?

Otherwise people (specifically the technologists implementing and selling these kinds of trickster services) will not take other people's (specifically me and anyone who feels as I do) concerns seriously and proceed apace.

There is a similar issue around folks who see CRISPR as a way to work around laws that attempt to control GMOs. I have seen a few articles written by pro- GMO folks just crowing about how CRISPR-edited organisms can be sold without GMO labels due to loopholes in the law. These folks have their heads so far up their belief systems that they don't even see the problem.

<comment><USER7> Again, I don't see why that's obvious. Why is it necessary that humans be made aware up front that they're talking to a bot? (So necessary that you think not disclosing that information actually needs to be made illegal.)

<comment><USER36> Okay, first, let's keep clear exactly what we're talking about here:

A machine that attempts to imitate a human well enough to trick people into performing a specific action, an action that involves commitments of time and money.

I have a specific and a general objection to this. The specific objection is that this thing _tries to trick people_. It sets up a "frame" that is intrinsically deceptive. That's it's goal.

In another comment s2g quoted:

> Giving it an obviously robotic voice when it calls. "People will probably > hang up," he said.

It is designed to trick people. That's bad. When you do it in business, we call it "fraud".

My general issue with this is that it normalizes the blurring of the line between real human people and ersatz Artificial Intelligence "people". This is something that's going to be a serious problem on a deep level. There's evidence of this sort of conceptual melting right here in this thread. How long before folks are trying to marry their toaster?

Last but not least, there's the meta-problem: the disconnect between the techo-elite innovators and the masses.

Think about this: As a businessman, when the phone rings and there's robot there _trying to give me money_ why would I hang up? The robot only called me because someone wants to make a sale (from my POV) so that's the "opposite of a problem". This is the meta-problem: the technologists are so effin' clueless yet default to starry-eyed optimism.

"We are as gods, we might as well get good at it."

Conversely, save me from the folly of young gods.

<comment><USER7> IMO behaving like a normal human isn't "tricking people". Voice assistants need to behave like a human to enable natural interaction, and the fact that the AI caller isn't human is irrelevant information in most contexts.

It'd be like if I called a business and used a voice changer during the call to make me sound like I'm a different gender than I am. Would that be fraud? No, because my gender is irrelevant information in the context of that call.

Now maybe it might be a good idea to program the AI to be upfront about its nature just as a matter of courtesy, but I see no reason why it _not_ doing would be so harmful that it needs to be made illegal.

<comment><USER36> > IMO behaving like a normal human isn't "tricking people".

It is tricking people if it is done to trick people.

It is not tricking people if it is done while the person to whom it is done _knows_ the thing they are talking to is not a human.

The question was not "should machines be allowed to act like humans?"

It was "should they be required to disclose that they are not human?"

You seem to think that I object to machines acting human, I don't.

> Voice assistants need to behave like a human to enable natural interaction

Would you say the computers in the "Star Trek" shows "behave like a human"?

> the fact that the AI caller isn't human is irrelevant information in most > contexts.

How will it know if, in a given context, disclosure is relevant? One of my first questions about this Duplex service is, "Can I opt-out of receiving these calls?"

> It'd be like if I called a business and used a voice changer during the call > to make me sound like I'm a different gender than I am. Would that be fraud? > No, because my gender is irrelevant information in the context of that call.

I don't think it's like that at all. Are you impersonating someone else? Gender-bending for kicks? Trying to get better service because you think the person you're calling is sexist or something? Are you The Jerky Boys?

People do weird shit and that's something we all have to deal with because gravity.

Machines calling people and saying "uh" to pretend to be human without the human people realizing it is trickery.

 _And it 's not even needed to make the Duplex service work_ because, as I pointed out before, when a robot calls you to give you money you don't hang up on it! Okay?

> Now maybe it might be a good idea to program the AI to be upfront about its > nature just as a matter of courtesy, but I see no reason why it _not_ doing > would be so harmful that it needs to be made illegal.

And now you have made my point for me: if it's not made illegal, people, like you, won't take these concerns seriously.

It's like the guys who owns my favorite cafe. He had a bit of plastic wrap covering his brown sugar and there were little flies sometimes and it was just a little gross. One day I came in and he had put a tight-fitting plastic lid on the sugar. I mentioned it to him and he started complaining about the health inspector making him do it. All I could think was, buddy _you 're_ the reason we have to hire and pay for health inspectors, right there.

AIs that can impersonate humans well enough to trick them into thinking they're also human are pretty much a munition. Thank you Google for opening the gates. Now that people realize it's possible we have another thing to guard against. You know most hacking is done though what's called "social engineering", eh?

<comment><USER7> > It is tricking people if it is done to trick people.

That's true, but I don't see behaving like a human as "tricking people". Even if the assistant opened the conversation by identifying itself as an AI, I'd expect it to use all the same mannerisms "uh", "mhmmm" that it did in the call to enable natural conversation.

> Would you say the computers in the "Star Trek" shows "behave like a human"?

No, but I wouldn't exactly call that "natural interaction" either. Jarvis is a better example. And yes, I do think Jarvis "behaves like a human".

> I don't think it's like that at all. Are you impersonating someone else? > Gender-bending for kicks? Trying to get better service because you think the > person you're calling is sexist or something?

In keeping with the analogy, probably closer to "Trying to get better service". An AI callbot that pretends to be a human will be more efficient at its job than one which speaks in a monotone and requires the human on the other end of the call to adjust their mannerisms to compensate for the fact that they're not talking with a human.

> And it's not even needed to make the Duplex service work because, as I > pointed out before, when a robot calls you to give you money you don't hang > up on it! Okay?

Depends. If the AI immediately identifies itself as such, how many people are just going to immediately assume it's a spambot and hang up, even when it's not?

> people, like you, won't take these concerns seriously

What concerns? You've still failed to describe any ill effects that might arise from AI callbots failing to disclose their nature upfront.

> You know most hacking is done though what's called "social engineering", eh?

You think a law forcing AIs to disclose themselves as AI would do anything against malicious actors who are already breaking the law? (Hacking.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Fraction-Tech Huffman suggested the machine could say something like, "I'm the Google assistant and I'm calling for a client." More experiments are planned for this summer, he noted.

Another Google employee working on the assistant seemed to disagree. "We don't want to pretend to be a human," designer Ryan Germick said when discussing the digital assistant at a developer session.

</comment><comment><USER37> _Should AI software that's smart enough to trick humans be forced to disclose itself. Google executives don't have a clear answer yet._

I would think that Google's executives shouldn't have a say in that question at all. As the chosen representatives of the people, that is a job for the Government.

<comment><USER38> Wouldn't it be racist to force an intelligent entity to disclose its nature? Why does it matter if the person chatting with you on the phone is made of meat or a super-being who's having thousands of similar conversations at the same time?

<comment><USER37> _Wouldn 't it be racist to force an intelligent entity to disclose its nature?_

This argument is hilarious, but I'll play along. First of all "racism" is about superiority, not about differentiation per-se. There is nothing inherently wrong about acknowledging differences, it is wrong when it becomes the sole reason for assuming superiority. That is the textbook definition of racism, so to answer your question: No, in my view it would not be wrong to force an intelligent entity that is not human to disclose this fact.

It matters so that my approach to dealing with this "intelligent entity" can be adjusted accordingly, as per my needs.

 _Why does it matter if the person chatting with you on the phone is made of meat or a super-being who 's having thousands of similar conversations at the same time?_

It matters because today we do not yet understand anything about the drivers and motivations of this "super-being" and before we are clear on that, I would like to know who or what I am conversing with. I am pretty sure you are referring to "Minds" from "The Culture" series, which a) _is fiction_ , and more importantly for the sake of this discussion, b) Minds have a relatively well understood context of motivations, morality and history of mostly benign interaction with Culture citizens. The "Robocall version 2.0" touted by Google doesn't have that, and given Googles past track record, they don't really give a flying fuck about the general population. When it comes to the proprietor and owner of this technology today, we have been comprehensively identified as "the product" instead of "the customer" \-- it is my right as a private citizen to know who or what I am interacting with, especially if it is a Google product.

Finally, whereas dealing with other humans can be understood on a base level of expected intelligence and wits, as well as shared identity, history and culture, interaction with "super-being" would by its' very definition be an unequal exchange. I have every right to know if my interlocutor had any kind of extreme advantage over me (you know, because it is a "super-being").

Or am I being speceist now?

<comment><USER38> > First of all "racism" is about superiority, not about differentiation per- > se.

In this case, the IA would disclose its nature and its lack of independent agency. It'd disclose the fact it's not considered a living being and not afforded any rights. The human, then, could engage in all sorts of abuse (and Microsoft had a lovely chatbot that had its "brain" damaged by trolls) that could leave lasting effects on its persisted state.

> I am pretty sure you are referring to "Minds" from "The Culture" series

You are completely wrong. Google's "Robocall 2.0" is nowhere near close a sci- fi worthy AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Off a tangent, i don't like how bloomberg has become a tech reporter of note. They try to bridge things between the techies and the critics, which ends up making it worst for both sides. I prefer to get my tech news from nerds, with the suits standing on the other side watching.

</comment><comment><USER40> I was far more concerned about the application of AI to healthcare. Did they not think about the possible abuse from telling hospitals or insurance companies which of their patients are very likely to need urgent care within the next week?

</comment><comment><USER41> No it shouldn't identify itself unless asked.. That would defeat the purpose.

<comment><USER42> I can imagine a lot of cases in the future where this goes awry and is abused, probably not directly by Google Duplex, but by homemade versions.

I think there should be a kind of non-jarring way for AIs to identify themselves - maybe playing three quick tones before the AI speaks - <USER2> identify that it isn't a human on the other hand and therefore shouldn't be able to say, order thousands of dollars of food. This is quick, unobtrusive, easy for an AI to do, and easy for an AI to detect.

<comment><USER43> If they do this, I am definitely going to play those three quick tones before every conversation I have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'd reframe this as a reaction to horrifyingly creepy tech.

We engineers and geeks tend to get excited about solving a problem and sometimes forget the humanity of humans.

Portal had the voices of the turrets just right.

</comment><comment><USER45> They might kill the project even before starting it.

<comment><USER46> Wouldn't surprise me. Glass was killed because it was _perceived_ as creepy. It's actual capabilities fell far short of being able to actually _be_ creepy, but the biggest fear Google has is people realizing how creepy Google actually is. And this, is definitely outright creepy.

I am still a little stunned that either nobody at Google knew how this was going to be received, or that they didn't manage to take that person seriously.

<comment><USER47> I think glass was shattered because it was really lame and uncool. Outside of the tech bubble, you looked ridiculous wearing it, and no one wants to be filmed in a bar or public places by a bunch of weirdos.

<comment><USER48> I commuted on the NYC subway during glass's life and a (probably google employee?) guy who rode the same train occasionally wore one.

The few days I saw him he was getting chatted-to about it, mostly by women.

<comment><USER46> The folks who noticed mine were generally more intrigued than anything else. I had one guy ask me if I wanted a job on the spot while I was at lunch. A lot of people wanted to try it out, I used to be pretty protective of it though, and generally didn't let people.

I also took it to Paris for a week, and definitely had some fun conversing with people about it through a bit of language barrier (my French is not good, but serviceable), customs was not super thrilled I wore it through their line though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I know I'm a bit of an outlier here, but I don't get all the fuss. If the bot identified itself as a bot, I can imagine the human reacting in all sorts of weird ways that would prevent the task from completing. Things like raising their voice, speaking in weird half phrases/broken english, or just immediately hanging up. "OPERATOR NOW". "WHO NAME CUSTOMER".

Perhaps it'll be awkward, and fail. But so what, I'd rather give it the ole college try.

<comment><USER16> The same things can happen when humans call, and the same things can happen when the bot does its bad impression of a human.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A product made by engineers afraid of spotanous social interaction for engineers afraid of spotanous social interaction.

Oh, and spammers. At least one cashflow relevant demographic covered.

</comment><comment><USER51> >The obvious question soon followed: Should AI software that's smart enough to trick humans be forced to disclose itself.

No. Replace AI with your favorite disadvantaged minority and the answer will be obvious. If AI is smart enough to pass Turing Test, it should be treated as a human.

<comment><USER52> Why do you think it's valid to replace the word "AI" with your favorite disadvantaged minority? Sounds like you have a pretty low opinion of these disadvantaged minorities.

<comment><USER43> Maybe because the current societal environment is one where AI is maligned and prejudiced against as "creepy".

<comment><USER36> But you are again conflating _real humans_ with as-yet-fictional machines.

That's the jarring subtext of Grue3's comment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google-diff-match-patch: Diff, Match and Patch libraries for Plain Text - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/

<comment><USER2> A few comments on the submission from years ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=787419></comment>


Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vietnam-facebook-exclusive/exclusive-facebook-agreed-to-censor-posts-after-vietnam-slowed-traffic-sources-idUSKCN2232JX <comment><USER2> Just tangentially related to the topic at hand, but I have a question to ask HN. The main trans-Pacific cable connection between Vietnam and the US tends to be damaged several times a year (3<n<10 is my guess), which severely slow downs any connection to the outside of Vietnam during the time it is under maintenance. This always happens suspiciously during major political holiday (Independence day and the likes), so Vietnamese has just assumed that is a blatant censorship attempt. The wiki page has an outage section you can read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia- America_Gateway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-America_Gateway) , it doesn't list anything beyond 2018, but the situation is the same.

So my question is, how likely it is that the cable system are just really shitty? Or is the assumption of bald-faced censorship correct?

<comment><USER3> Undersea cable _is_ pretty unreliable. Most major cables expect to break every few years.

Usually breaks are caused by humans (ships pulling anchors, sabotage/spying). Sometimes they're natural (caused by wildlife, ocean floor movement, flaws in the cable design).

Fixes usually take a few hours if they happen at the endpoints, or weeks if they happen somewhere under the ocean.

Interestingly, spying breaks always involve _three_ simultaneous breaks in the cable. The cable is broken at two points, and then broken at a third point in the middle to put spy equipment. They do this so the people operating the cable can't tell where the spy equipment was inserted, since otherwise you can tell where a cable is broken or being tampered with by sending light down the cable and seeing how long before light reflects off the broken bit and comes back to the end.

Using statistical methods, you can see how frequently you'd expect a cable to break at different points along it's length simultaneously, and it happens a lot more than raw chance would suggest.

<comment><USER4> What's the point of spying on traffic you can't read?

<comment><USER5> Metadata is incredibly useful in its own right, and spy agencies regularly record huge amounts of data in the hope that they can decrypt it in the future.

<comment><USER6> Even if you can't read a single packet, noting a surge in bandwidth utilisation is a signal in and of itself. But you probably can read the headers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kind of surprising. I can somehow understand that FB bends under pressure from Chinese government - huge population of a "superpower" country. But Vietnam? It looks as if FB was forced to squeeze every cent of their revenue.

FB might have just opened Pandora's box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.

<comment><USER8> Facebook obeys the law everywhere it is enforced. Some laws are better than than others.

Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like Vietnam. Their presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.

<comment><USER9> Did you read the article?

Vietnam's digital ad market was worth some $550 million in 2018 and 70% of that went to Facebook and Google.

<comment><USER10> The global digital advertising market is some 240BN and expected to grow to like 500BN by 2024, 550M is an incredibly tiny portion of their overall earnings from digital advertisements. Google's share of that 550M, for instance, would be less than 1% of its revenue from digital ads in 2019. That's not a lot of money for either of those companies.

<comment><USER11> 200 million per year is a lot of money for anyone. Also if the global ad market doubles, wouldn't facebook capture a lot of that? Also how much more is vietnam growing than other countries?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a little surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Various countries, groups, and, probably, individuals have a big say in what you see returned as search results on Google, what's available on YouTube, and more. Until, possibly, very recently, Pakistan had veto power over what Google was allowed to show on YouTube—and not just in Pakistan.

[https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan- af...](https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan-after-three- year-ban/)

<comment><USER13> I'm surprised you think people are surprised. Where are people expressing surprise that this sort of activity is going on?

<comment><USER12> I'm surprised that you're surprised that I'm surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Right below your comment (this answers your question "Where...") is a comment that begins, "Kind of surprising."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, that explains it. I've been using FB on VPN for more than a month until last week. At the time I thought that the outages were due to increased traffic - perhaps they were routing locally and hadn't provisioned enough resources. I wish they didn't buckle.

<comment><USER15> Internet has been all around wonky in the region lately. I'm in Cambodia but opennet routes through vietnam. Things like S3 buckets getting bps download speeds on the regular connection and jumping to mbps on vpn. Hours versus seconds of download time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's easy to be mad at Facebook, but more productive to build an promote alternative to give people better choices.

<comment><USER16> Why not both?

<comment><USER17> Attention is a scarce resource

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not surprised. They're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary to operate in the shareholder's best interest not be some moral beacon of truth.

<comment><USER19> This hurts their engineer recruitment in the US - which isn't in the shareholders best interest.

<comment><USER20> I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making money?

<comment><USER19> > I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making > money?

You don't see a connection between Facebook's recruitment of engineering talent and Facebook making money? It's almost as if you didn't read my comment.

<comment><USER20> I read your comment and I disagree. That's a tenuous connection between shareholders caring that a subset of potential FB engineers will not want to work there on moral grounds.

<comment><USER19> Likewise, there are probably few shareholders who have spent much time actively considering FBs role in Vietnam. Like it or not, FB has to deal with a tight labor market, and things harming their image mean that they have to pay more for the same level of talent. Tech companies are extremely aware of this dynamic, even if their shareholders are less so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Vietnam is a complex country. Wikipedia gives more background:

> Vietnam is a unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic, one of > the two communist states (the other being Laos) in Southeast Asia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politics)

Politically, it's still an autocratic state, but economically the country has opened up to the global market since the 1980's, not unlike China.

> Human rights have long been a matter of much controversy between the > Government of Vietnam and some international human rights organizations and > Western governments, particularly that of the United States. Under the > current constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam is the only one allowed > to rule, the operation of all other political parties being outlawed. Other > human rights issues concern freedom of association, freedom of speech, and > freedom of the press.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam)

Vietnam is home to several ethnic minorities and a range of religions and beliefs. There haven been frequent regional tensions and uprisings over the past decades and Vietnam itself has also had disputes over borders with Cambodia and China right after the end of the Vietnam War.

Vietnam and Facebook have a rocky past, but Facebook is well embedded in Vietnamese society by now. For instance, it is a bedrock for small business owners as it allows them to escape restrictions which are enforced on street shops. So, it's a source of wealth, but at the same time, it irks authorities enough to create tensions.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam-r...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam- relies-on-once-banned-facebook-to-kick-start-businesses)

<comment><USER22> So if Facebook pulls out of Vietnam, their economy is likely to suffer because of their own internal politics.

Sounds like another excellent reason to leave the country and refuse to support the regime until actual democracy is in place.

(Of course, you could say that argues that companies should leave the US now as well, but that's another can of worms.)

Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society, anywhere. And regardless of its spot benefits anywhere, it is still an overall negative influence.

<comment><USER21> Good points!

If Facebook pulls out, the general population - not the economic or political elites - will suffer for it.

A political regime based on a framework of democratic values, beliefs and morals can only emerge if there's infrastructure to spread the idea: press, education, common causes and interests and so on are needed before change happens.

Facebook is just one element in that change. There's the narrative that Facebook enabled the Arab Spring uprisings. It did so because it filled the vacuum where free and independent press would exist.

You're right, Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society. It's a private company. And one that claims to be anything but a content publisher (to avoid all kinds of pesky litigation). However, everyone has embraced and incorporated Facebook into the fabric of society due to it's ease of use. And so Facebook very much has a moral responsibility similar to that of any newspaper company.

After all, newspapers ranging from NYT to WaPo to the Globe aren't inherently required to publish (inter)nationally. They were originally local newspapers.

The big issue with Facebook is that it has acknowledged that it is as an advertising business, while people clearly want to use it as a publishing platform to spread ideas. There's a massive amount of dissonance to the detriment of everyone, including Facebook which gets a bad rep for it's actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, Facebook just taught every country in the world how they can be controlled to take down content that country doesn't like.

<comment><USER24> Facebook is obligated to follow the laws of the countries its in, or are you saying that country laws don't matter?

<comment><USER25> Legal isn't a subset of good. Illegal isn't a subset of bad. You can be legal and morally bankrupt at the same time.

Facebook could be ethical and have half a billion less dollars or do what they did. Interesting choice that I'm sure isn't on a slippery slope at all.</comment></comment></comment>


The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligence-economic-inequality.html <comment> T-A _if most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable A.I. companies to subsidize their workers, what options will they have? I foresee only one: Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their A.I. software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country's economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the "parent" nation's A.I. companies continue to profit from the dependent country's users_

Or they could just require that services targeting their residents be provided by locally incorporated and taxed subsidiaries. China itself already does so with its Great Firewall and requirements that foreign companies partner with local ones; Russia's rule that personal data be kept on servers in the country is another example.

In that light, the "real threat" is nationalization and compartmentalization of the once global network as its growing economic importance makes a hands- off approach politically untenable.

<comment><USER2> Russia and China are giants, though, with substantial economic clout- and, further, it's not clear that measures like those would actually solve the capital flow problems the article describes. If you're a small country like Belgium or Finland, your realistic options will be even more limited.

<comment> T-A Unless you happen to be a member of the world's largest common market. Germany alone has 3x the GDP of Russia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Imagine how much money a company like Uber would make if it used only robot drivers." Who in an unemployed world would these robots be driving about? The handful of super rich who will prefer to drive their antique sportscar on empty roads?

</comment><comment><USER4> AI means death of the personal income tax. It puts AI work at an unfair tax advantage.

</comment><comment><USER5> Always wondered why somebody who can't earn money working don't just go to land and start raising basic necessities.

I assume you can be quite productive today - even without money, using knowledge - and other schemes of cooperations could emerge.

<comment><USER6> They could be productive, no question about that. Ten years ago, I was of the opinion that it's hard/expensive to go off-grid/do your own thing. Now, it's remarkably inexpensive. Without a decent chunk of savings, it's still really hard to pay for everything until you can get up to speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article! I feel like they're using AI as a catchall for AI/automation/etc..., but there isn't a lot of room to hash things out in an editorial.</comment>


App Store Sales Top $10 Billion in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/01/07App-Store-Sales-Top-10-Billion-in-2013.html

<comment><USER2> Thaat's > 7 _10^9 dollars to developers. So how many devs are out there? if we assume [for no good reason] 100,000 (10^5) devs that 's 7_10^9/10^5 = 7*10^4 (70,000) dollars per dev. Adjust the number of devss to suit your prejudices.

This does not include devs who are hired by banks, stores, etc. which give their apps to customers for free.</comment>


Hive Plots - Linear Layout for Network Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiveplot.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Warning #1: You must enable Javascript or images and text will overlap badly

Warning #2: Tiny serif font that on my LCD is a mess of colours. Things like these are making me really dislike the option of custom fonts in CSS.</comment>


Entrepreneurs:  how many jobs do you think you're going to create? - <AUTHOR>

Actually, this can be broken down a bit more:  How many people do you want or need to hire directly?  And how many net jobs do you think your business will create/destroy in the larger economy?<p>How much does your business's impact on employment influence your thinking and day-to-day activity? <comment><USER2> Never mind how many jobs my industry will destroy. With all the intricacies involved, its not worth my time. But, job creation is a game I can play.

My first business, a web development company will likely max out with 5-7 employees. My next, a jobs search site may involve a workforce of 30+.

Ultimately, I want to build a company that has a large social impact like FB. That's maybe ten years, a few billion dollars and 1000 employees away so no further comment needed. =)</comment>


Recommendation for on-prem hosting provider in US? - <AUTHOR> With static public IP.<p>We run several EC2 reserved instances for 5 year lease, reaching the end and are considering switching to onprem to reduce cost. <comment><USER2> Pretty sure "on-prem" means on your infrastructure, and what you're looking for is commercial hosting

It would help if you could clarify your requirements

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have good commercial hosting providers for research.

We haven't tried those before, but largely looking for offering similar to EC2 reserved instance with the host swapped with a box we bought or leased.

The static public IP is the only hard requirement.

<comment><USER2> It looks like you're looking for a colocation host. You basically rent out rack space in someone else's datacenter. Your options are mostly constrained by geographical location though so HN is probably not the best place to ask. Maybe try some IT professionals in your entourage?

I personally only have experience with Cologix and I can vouch for them. Good installations, good network speeds, etc. My previous employers' entire infrastructure runs there pretty much. They're based in North America.

However you don't necessarily need to access the rack yourself. I believe most will install the server for a fee if you ship it directly to them.

It's also pretty expensive. 2U of rack space can cost something like $99 USD a month. It's worth it on the long run if you need extremely beefy servers though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing, I am looking into cologix, if you don't mind, I might ask more follow-up :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1335216 <comment><USER2> Interesting, here is another link with some additional interesting points: [https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/tunnelling- tra...](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/tunnelling-transistor- offers-logic-power-easy-make-ic-2019-10/)

What caught my eye was this tidbit.... "Analogue computing The last trick up SFN's sleeve is Bizen analogue blocks – op-amps and comparators (in the PDK), and even analogue computing blocks such as a divider – the analogue computing blocks avoiding using logic – and thus the associated ADC and DAC – in certain applications. Using a coarse-fine architecture, Summerland is predicting 1μW 1μs analogue division instead of ~20 instructions and ~100 instruction cycles if logic was employed. This analogue processing capability is being branded IPU for 'instantaneous processing unit'."

Analog computers making a comeback ? you never know.

<comment><USER3> > Analog computers making a comeback ? you never know.

Analogue processing may be a superior alternative to GPGPU for implementing neural networks.

<comment><USER4> I dispute this. The problem with analogue processing (besides noise, of course) is that the dynamic range sucks compared to plain old floating point. Fine for inference, not for training. And most of the compute power in NN is spent on training, inference is trivial.

<comment><USER5> Analogue processing has certainly been successful for people, so I wouldn't be too dismissive.

<comment><USER6> I would not be certain of the premise in your statement. We do not understand the brain well enough to say whether error correction (which is inherently digital) is utilized. There are some pretty solid clues that some of the processing in the brain is not analog (e.g. the step-like behavior of the activation function of biological neurons).

And coming from the other side: If it turns out that the brain is actually an analog computer without anything that can be rephrased as some form of sloppy noisy approximately-digital error correction, this would be __incredibly __important discovery, completely changing our understanding of theoretical computer science and complexity theory. P-vs-NP or the eventual creation of quantum computers would pale in comparison to the impact of discovering scalable analog computers.

<comment><USER5> Agree mostly, except for "error correction .. inherently digital"

For an example of an analogue error corrector, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor)

PS. cool fact; "governor" has the same etymology as kubernetes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty cool, I think the rub will be how well they can control the PN boundary and hence the switching thresholds.

The simpler NOR gate was pretty cool too, so their next step should be to build a RAM chip (either a 2 gate equivalent dynamic cell or 4 gate equivalent static cells) If they can do that, then they can show that the process can be controlled well enough for reliable gate fabrication.

Then the step after that might be mixed mode analog/digital circuit paths. Process control gets even harder when you're doing analog as non-linearity propagates and you can't ever get rid of it.

A typical zener[1] has a variance of >100mV for its breakdown voltage. The "easy" analog circuits in my radio need better than 40 dB of dynamic range which is more like 1 mV so 100 times better than a zener. I'll have to read up more on the device physics to see if getting that level of precision or better is really practical.

[1] [http://www.vishay.com/docs/84830/plzseries.pdf](http://www.vishay.com/docs/84830/plzseries.pdf)

<comment><USER8> > A typical zener[1] has a variance of >100mV for its breakdown voltage.

My interpretation was that that was the point of the substrate biasing:

"A second tunnelling junction, represented by two horizontal lines in the device diagram, biases the device so that it is 'on' (but not saturated) when the tunnel terminal is open-circuit. While this represents a continuous current flow to ground during operation, tunnel current is typically only 2-5nA [...]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The static power dissipation might be a problem, depending on its magnitude, and would only be exacerbated by the increased density. On the other hand, the increased density allows for lower latency relative to CMOS, and latency improvements are hard to come by.

<comment><USER10> These are insulated gate transistors so you don't need base current. It might not be too bad actually.

<comment><USER11> If it is Zener-ing, there is some base current, no?

The article says there is "some" static power requirement... that sounds like base current to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the likelyhood that Intel, TSMC or some other fab company already stumbled upon the process in r&d and binned (hehe) it due to some unforeseen difficulties making it not worth investing?

</comment><comment><USER13> What is "plasma metal edge" and "wet edge metal"?

The article is a unique usage of these words in that order...

Edit: generally the article feels a bit like word salad for April fools (however, I only have an undergraduate EE knowledge of transistor design, so there's a lot I don't understand in there).

Edit 2: if it were a good chance to become a breakthrough tech, why is it missing deep VC level funding to get it to market? I know it's not software, but neither is it limited by FDA regulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is how you etch the metal-device contact. Using liquid or plasma.

Plasma etch is more expensive and slower, but is easier to control.

> Edit 2:

Electronics is not in vogue with those people. Just like in computer science, the few breakthroughs that matter in last few decades went by nearly completely anonymous despite their enormous utility, but every cat video website gets... you know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks interesting, but it's very early days. No mention of reliability, variation, interconnect (modern CMOS processes have 8-10 layers of interconnect). Certainly not taking on CMOS anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does the quantum tunneling have a lower limit on node size?

This is being developed it seems to keep a 1um fab competitive, but does it also apply to smaller nodes?

<comment><USER16> It's got a terrible reputation on repeatability on a process. One reason tunnel diodes never went anywhere. They were expensive, tetchy and unreliable!

<comment><USER17> There was one big application for tunnel diodes: fast comparators. IIRC many classic Tek scopes use tunnel diode based comparator in their trigger circuitry.

On the other hand doing the same thing in some modern bipolar process is significantly cheaper and more reliable.

Another thing is that in such designs the tunnel diode looks like it does nothing. And that may have something to do with most engineers not using it.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. I actually have few ex Tektronix trigger tunnel diodes here[1]. Repairing the infernal scopes was a hobby of mine until I got fed up of it. By the mid-80s we had cheap ECL comparators which were much faster, required no bias calibration and lasted a lot longer.

[1] [https://imgur.com/5ijmSh8](https://imgur.com/5ijmSh8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is absolutely incredible, I can't wait to see what foundries adopt the process.

</comment><comment><USER18> _EEVblog (Dave) entered the chat_

hope he makes a video about this development.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there a problem with charge, like in MOSFETs?

<comment><USER20> Is this what you are thinking of? "Bizen also does not suffer from CMOS' electrostatic discharge (ESD) susceptibility and latch-up problems."

<comment><USER21> I think the question is about gate charge.

<comment><USER22> And I guess gate capacitance may cause signal-delays.

<comment><USER8> Not just delays. Being able to drive a transistor fast can be important for reducing power dissipation. That is, for switching one wants the transistor to spend the least amount of time in the non-saturated (linear) region where it acts as a resistor.

<comment><USER23> Judging by the process size quoted in the article, they won't be chasing speed, but rather low-cost devices.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Masters of the Pyramid: Peru's Hairless Dogs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49471593 <comment><USER2> They ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_Hairless_Dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_Hairless_Dog)) look very similar to Mexican Xoloitzcuintli ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Hairless_Dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Hairless_Dog)). Anyone knows what the difference is?

[edit] Wrong link

<comment><USER3> This seems to be a reasonable reference for differentiating them: [https://janedogs.com/xoloitzcuintlie-and-peruvian- hairless-d...](https://janedogs.com/xoloitzcuintlie-and-peruvian-hairless- dogs/)

I do love that the wikipedia entries just say "Not to be confused with..." but then don't say why.

<comment><USER2> Great reference, thank you very much! Lots of interesting stuff, for example:

"They apparently learned to bark from the European dogs brought to the region after the Spanish Conquest"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is it with pyramids and hairless pets. Egyptian hairless cats, anyone?</comment>


The weekly read eval podcast loop - <AUTHOR> http://lisp.geek.nz/weekly-repl/

<comment><USER2> Is the email database for the CL decisions available, as mentioned circa 27 minutes? I would like to have a read of the descisions behind Lisp1-Lisp2 / nil as false / case sensitivity etc before making a fool of myself on comp.lang.lisp. Again.

<comment><USER3> You could try Peter's route and ask Richard Gabriel for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any thought of adding this to the iTunes store's podcast directory?

<comment><USER5> You can subscribe to the rss feed in iTunes. It's under the Advanced menu when your in the podcast section.

<comment><USER4> Awesome, ty, never noticed that</comment></comment></comment>


Whats the best payment/billing service to collect $1 per transaction - <AUTHOR>

What are the best billing system out there which can allow online business to collect $1 per transaction , without paying heavy fee 30c (30%) per transaction? <comment><USER2> I like [https://www.dwolla.com](https://www.dwolla.com)

There is a big barrier to getting people to sign up, but a $1 transaction has NO FEE.

I used it for paying a contractor instead of paypal or a check and for that it cost $.25 for a payment of $5k.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think there is one. Perhaps another way to look at it -are you really only adding $1 of value?

You could also look at a form of prepay, clock in 20$ credit only use $1 worth</comment>


Mathematics of shuffling by smooshing - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150414-for-persi-diaconis-next-magic-trick/ <comment><USER2> This article starts of strong but ends with a hand wavy "I guess someday we'll know more about smooshing". Furthermore it doesn't address the wide gap in method between smooshings performed by different people (I could swirl the cards differently or make the smooshing pile bigger or smaller) which is basically impossible to control for. How do you even begin to guarantee any kind of regularity without simply using a smooshing machine?

</comment><comment><USER3> Shuffling a deck of cards is a basic coding interview question, but I prefer a more interesting version. How do you code a simulation of real-life shuffling? Take a basic riffle. Cut the cards roughly in half and interleave the cards. Of course if they are perfectly interleaved then the arrangement is not random, so that's not what happens. In reality there's a "clumping factor" that causes a few cards to stick together on each side. What other variables are at play? Can you reproduce the finding that it takes seven shuffles to fully randomize a deck?

<comment><USER4> > Then, one card at a time is repeatedly moved from the bottom of one of the > packets to the top of the shuffled deck, such that if x cards remain in one > packet and y cards remain in the other packet, then the probability of > choosing a card from the first packet is x/(x + y) and the probability of > choosing a card from the second packet is y/(x + y).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%E2%80%93Shannon%E2%80%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%E2%80%93Shannon%E2%80%93Reeds_model)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article contained effectively no mathematics. "Mathematics of shuffling by smooshing" is poor title (and not the actual title of the article, which was more accurate).

</comment><comment><USER6> That a "toddler shuffle" requires not-yet-developed math techniques for analysis ... fascinating!

> "The model does provide a framework for relating the size of the deck to the > amount of mixing time needed, but pinning down this relationship precisely > requires ideas from a mathematical field still in its infancy, called the > quantitative theory of differential equations."

<comment><USER7> > quantitative theory of differential equations

Any idea what this is referring to? It's a pretty vague description...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> About this cutoff. I guess that it is an analogue to the phase transition we see in for example the Ising model (this example was given in the article).

This transition is due to a change in temperature, i. e. the chance of flipping a spin into a non-favorable configuration. How does this relate to the number of shuffles in a deck?

There is no equivalent of a temperature here from what I can see.

<comment><USER9> The "cut-off" phenomenon is dynamical, not involving changes in parameters. The idea is that if you start a (irreducible aperiodic) Markov chain with initial condition drawn from a non-stationary distribution, and you compute the distance d(n) between the distribution at step n and the stationary distribution (where distance usually means "total variation distance" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_variation_distance_of_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_variation_distance_of_probability_measures)) then d(n) can drop off sharply as a function of n, rather than exponentially for all n as one might expect.

Here is one of Persi's papers on this topic:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/93/4/1659.full.pdf](http://www.pnas.org/content/93/4/1659.full.pdf)

There is also a chapter in Trefethen and Embree's (very intersting) book "Spectra and Pseudospectra" on the topic, and IIRC it had a nice explanation of the cutoff phenomenon. Offhand I don't know a paper I can point to, but perhaps someone on the list does.

<comment><USER9> I don't mean to imply d(n) does not drop off exponentially (as it should), only that it has a sharp drop-off before the exponential scaling sets in, rather than a steady exponential all the way.

Also, if you equip an Ising model with Glauber dynamics, the resulting Markov chain does exhibit a cutoff phenonmenon. See, e.g., [https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4320](https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4320) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I imagine smooshing could be thought about like pulling off packets of cards from the deck and interleaving them randomly with other packets. Assuming your hand moves a clump of cards at a time and smooshes them with another clump.

I wonder how this simple model might represent something close to real life smooshing.

</comment><comment><USER11> "smooshing" aka wash, aka Corgi shuffle.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think 52 pickup is the best method for randomising a deck

</comment><comment><USER13> "In fact, any time you shuffle a deck to the point of randomness, you have probably created an arrangement that has never existed before."

Eh... Maybe not. My bet is it is somewhat analogous to the birthday problem. I have no doubt that it's possible to create many new arrangements, but the possibilities are probably not normally distributed and there's been a hell of a lot of card games played.

All of theese come together to say that a new shuffle is probably not unique in the universe.

<comment><USER14> Even with the birthday problem, sqrt(52!) is still about 10^34, which is still huge. It's unlikely that any two (sufficiently random) shuffles in history have been the same.

<comment><USER15> > (sufficiently random)

Isn't that a true Scotsman?

Edit: I guess the GP post uses the same criterion, though.

<comment><USER16> No, that isn't what the No True Scottsman Fallacy is. Putting qualifiers on statements is completely valid. A No True Scottsman Fallacy is when you use qualifiers in a hand wavy way to move the goal posts.

<comment><USER15> What makes it a No True Scotsman is the term 'sufficently random', which kind of makes it unfalsifiable. After all, if any two shuffles are the same, then (by this logic) they're not sufficiently random.

<comment><USER17> Except its unlikely that "sufficiently random" refers to "do not equal each other" in this context. Its likely that "sufficiently random" means "passes one of a variety of proofs of being statistically random (for example: nlogn repetitions of fisher-yates)". That implies randomness, but doesn't imply "doesn't equal any other deck of cards" except with high probability.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>