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Comment by 908087 | Hacker News Reader

It saddens me to see these people being given awards for improving the surveillance and manipulation capabilities of advertising corporations.

This isn't how you encourage people to use their abilities to contribute to society in a positive way.

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It saddened me when Boyle and Smith won the Nobel prize in Physics for inventing CCD which powers digital cameras and is of no use other than surveillance by big brother. Don't get me started about Alexander Graham Bell /s

Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.*

AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects.

What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends.

* Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.

But LeCunn still works for Facebook. I don’t understand why such a smart person should spend his time working for such a company.

are you serious? there is no way to do research on massive amounts of data at the public level anymore. if you want to change things its in the private. + money is also good

Let’s withdraw the Nobel from Einstein while we’re at it.

Then you must be sad when the Internet was invented as well ? How about cars ?

I didn't realize the internet or cars were created by the employees of advertising corporations for the sole purpose of furthering their surveillance and user manipulation capabilities.

Also, my comment was about people being given awards, not people inventing things.

I didn't realize the internet or cars were created by the employees of advertising corporations for the sole purpose of furthering their surveillance and user manipulation capabilities.

Seriously man? Do you think you might be being just a little bit hyperbolic there? I mean, it's pretty darn clear that Deep Learning isn't "created ... for the sole purpose of furthering ... surveillance and user manipulation capabilities" when almost all of the papers on the topic are freely available on arXiv, and source code for nearly every important implementation is available as Open Source, usually in multiple languages, using multiple different frameworks (which are almost all Open Source as well). I mean, sure, Google use Deep Learning to display ads... great. But you, or me, or anybody else, can also use the same techniques for our own (presumably more noble) ends.

None of these people do that though, they all work on theoretical research.

Do you hold the same opinion of the people at Bell labs who got Turing or Nobel awards?

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