karmacondon

Edison's major inventions represented a difference in kind, not in degree, that drastically changed things for humanity. Think of how different life is as the result of recorded sound, the concept of an electric company or light bulbs for home use.

Job's products were often well designed incremental changes. Apple made computers consumer friendly, but they didn't invent the technology. They didn't invent the global telecommunications network that makes the iPhone useful either.

Edison was an Inventor with a capital I. Jobs was a truly great corporate executive.

It is a cool idea and an interesting project, and publically declaring it will probably help to motivate some people to take on projects of their own. But I do get the feeling that he could be aiming a little higher. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. The alluded to Iron Man was a billionaire who used technology to fight gods and monsters. Zuckerberg is...tinkering with the internet of things? Can't tell someone else how to live their life, but I would have expected him to make public announcements about the Big Problems and leave projects like this for cocktail party conversation.

For whatever you think about his views on income inequality, it's difficult to make the case that he's rent seeking.

This idea, and many of Bostrom's other scenarios, boil down to "computers take everything literally", which is a rather cartoonish understanding of the concept of intelligence. It's possible that ASI will be programmed to have a hyperliteral view of all instructions, or will not be able to change its own utility function. But that seems like such a remote possibility, the exception rather than the rule. While superintelligent computers may pose many dangers, blindly executing instructions doesn't seem like the highest priority of them.

It's also possible that most major corporations meet the demands of the market rather than create those demands. Art imitates life. The thing about brand advertising, like for Coca-Cola, is that its done mainly for commoditized products that consumers already want. People already want a cold soda on a hot day. The question is will they reach for a coke or a pepsi? A Big Mac or a Whopper? A dell or a macbook? It's not like none of those things would exist if evil corporations didn't make us want them. The cat is out of the bag now, people already want sodas and fast food. The global advertising empire is primarily fueled by getting people to choose company's product over another, not intentionally making you want things you can't afford.

We cant blame society's ills on corporations, capitalism or any other system of behavior. All of these things are democratic, they reflect the will of the people. And human beings have been making themselves feel bad due to envy and desire for as long as there have been human beings. I would advocate for banning all advertising forever if I thought it would change things. But it won't.

Now, maybe it would make more sense for the assassination of carefully guarded targets. But it will probably be a few more years before that technology is more reliable than strapping a vest containing c4 on someone.

The truly heroic will find ways to make what's "best" also the cheapest and easiest solution. But who wants to undertake that herculean task without being very well compensated for their effort? And there's the rub.

Yes. Coke, McDonalds, The Gap and every other consumer company try like hell to create involuntary behaviors in people all the time.

is it ethical to judge users for behaviours deliberately created in them by applications?

Yes. Other than the specificity of the words "by applications", this is what credit scores are designed to do. Madison Avenue in deliberately trying to create behaviors in all of us. A credit rating measures a person's ability to resist that when it isn't financially sound.

should the attention of users be better protected?

No, at least not for adults of sound mind. People are free to make their own decisions, whether that's doing a keg stand or spending 3 hours clicking a button on Farmville. People can be warned about potential dangers, but it probably won't have much of an effect.

can we start developing consumer applications that aren't deliberately designed to capitalise on the attention of their users?

Yes. Or at least, you and anyone else who wants to can. But making products that people use frequently is a common definition of success. Most comapnies aren't going to pass that up because some people have addictive personalities.

how can we educate people to navigate a world of applications designed to hold and capitalise on their attention?

Good luck with that. Education vs the Forces of Capitalism. Winner: Capitalism.

An unsolicited suggestion: Maybe it would be best to have to "Buy From YC Companies" page or something like that, and then just select 6-8 of them on a separate "for the holidays" page. At least that way an everyday consumer could quickly scan the list without having to read 20+ startup descriptions (which can be tiring, even for the hn crowd).

Personally, I thought it was worth the read. I had no idea that many of these companies were YC backed, or that some of them existed at all.

I highly recommend a summary, unless you think you'll benefit from reading twenty examples of the same concept. It's one of the few books that I started but didn't finish this year.

It's like blaming someone who dropped a last second touchdown pass for losing the game. Yes, it would have been nice if that player could have done a better job. But it would also have been nice if everyone else on the team hadn't made any mistakes either, making a last second play unnecessary.

She was very well compensated for failing, but that doesn't mean that she acted in bad faith. Many executives have compensation packages that are heavily based on performance. Apparently hers wasn't. Ultimately there is a lot of blame to go around for the demise of Yahoo!, not the least to other half dozen CEOs they've had in the last decade or so. You win the fight today based on the preparations and positioning you did years ago. For all her mistakes, that's not on Mayer.

I did my best to group the text of the urls, using first kmeans in php (which is a very stupid idea) and finally settling on LDA. I'd like to use hierarchical LDA to automatically discover topics within my bookmarks, but that's "Future Work" for now.

There were a few interesting things I've noticed by randomly viewing old bookmarks. The first is that linkrot is a very real thing and the web is decaying at a measurable rate. Second, it's amazing how limited my memory is. Half the time I don't remember something I bookmarked from years or even months ago at all. It's new to me, all over again. I'm going to bookmark this discussion and then completely forget it existed within a few months at most. Regularly reviewing old web pages and notes makes me feel like my mind is a sieve, as well as highlighting how my interest and thought processes have changed over the years.

I'm really interested in this topic, feel free to contact me to discuss.

1) Drivers remain liable for actions taken by their car's AI. This would encourage people to only use truly driverless AI in the safest possible conditions, ie not on crowded streets or when its raining. This will let market forces balance the technological development of the cars with public adoption

2) After initial legal precedents for damages are set, some companies will make enough money to insure a large fleet of autonomous vehicles. And again, market forces will be able to pace the tradeoff between how "safe" the AI technology is vs how quickly its adopted.

tldr; an authoritarian government isn't necessary to push this particular technology forward. As much as I hate to say it, the Free Market will do just fine in this case

Andrew Ng (I believe) compared worrying about evil AI to worrying about overpopulation on Mars. Which is to say, the problem is so far off that it's rather silly to be considering it now. I would take it a step further and say that worrying about the implications of AGI is like thinking about Earth being overpopulated by space aliens. First we have to establish that such a thing is even possible, for which there is currently no concrete proof. Then we should start to think about how to deal with it.

Considering how hypothetical technology will impact mankind is literally the definition of science fiction. It makes for interesting reading, but it's far from a call to action.

Money is great, openness is great, big name researchers are also a huge plus. But data data data, that could turn out to be very valuable. I don't know if Sam meant that YC companies would be encouraged to contribute data openly, as in making potentially valuable business assets available to the public, or that the data would be available to the OpenAI Fellows (or whatever they're called). Either way, it could be a huge gain for research and development.

I know that I don't get a wish list here, but if I did it would be nice to see OpenAI encourage the following from its researchers:

1) All publications should include code and data whenever possible. Things like gitxiv are helping, but this is far from being an AI community standard

2) Encourage people to try to surpass benchmarks established by their published research, when possible. Many modern ML papers play with results and parameters until they can show that their new method out performs every other method. It would be great to see an institution say "Here's the best our method can do on dataset X, can you beat it and how?"

3) Sponsor competitions frequently. The Netflix Prize was a huge learning experience for a lot of people, and continues to be a valuable educational resource. We need more of that

4) Try to encourage a diversity of backgrounds. IF they choose to sponsor competitions, it would be cool if they let winners or those who performed well join OpenAI as researchers at least for awhile, even if they don't have PhDs in computer science

The "evil" AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever. Hopefully they will be able to use their resources and position to move the state of AI forward

It sounds like you expect everyone who becomes a police officer to be willing to dive in front of a bullet like Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. There are noble and heroic people who are willing to do this, but they are few and far between. Most of police work is routine and boring: mediating domestic disputes, filing paperwork, processing evidence, etc. We need people to do all of those things without having to be willing to sacrifice their lives for strangers.

As the grandparent comment pointed out, there is no objective source of morality on any issue. As the OP pointed out, most people don't loudly proclaim themselves to be jerks. Outside of sociopaths and those with mental disorders, most people lie, kill and hate because they think it's somehow the right thing to do. Or because they can rationalize acting in their own self interest to be somehow fair or in the greater good.

Though the article tried to end on a positive tone, I found it to be pretty disheartening. It's easy to say "Don't be hateful", but much more difficult to say "Don't do what you think is right". Ain't no solution for that.

I've seen no evidence that Mark Zuckerberg is anything other than a normal ivy league type guy. I'm sure that he hears dozens of positive things about facebook every single day - it helped someone meet their spouse, connect with old friends, solve a problem. It's likely that in his view he's doing something to make the world a better place. Some may focus more on the negative aspects of facebook, and that's fair. But there doesn't seem to be any reason to question his character.

I'm very old and out of the loop, I have no idea what modern work-sample tests look like. I remember when I did one many years ago it was to the effect of "Write a script that checks to see if a URL returns a valid response code, and trigger an event if it does not". My prospective employer liked my coding style and I got hired. What was so wrong about that?

As I recall, they intended to modify the script and use it in production whether they hired me or not. I also don't care about that. It took less than an hour, and it seemed like a valid form of evaluation. Maybe it's a pride thing, but I had no problem with it and I think a lot of other people would have been ok with that practice as well.

But if your biggest objection is that it will take additional time, that depends entirely on the nature of the trial. I was given a work trial at my first job and it took about 40 minutes. It didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped, but I would much much rather have done that than spent 40 minutes answering brain teasers in front of a white board.

If I'm already taking a day off, I don't care if the interview lasts three hours or five. I'd rather work on a collaborative task with my potential teammates to see if it's going to be worth radically altering my life to take a new job. I understand that there are many programmers who are opposed to work trials, and they can say "I'm opposed to work trials and would rather demonstrate my abilities in another way."

It seems like your research so far has been very comprehensive, why dismiss an effective technique because some people are opposed to it?

Ultimately, I don't think that individual programming ability matters that much. It's extremely rare for the technical talents of one person to turn a company around. Some people can inspire others and turn dysfunctional groups into great teams, and there's never enough of that. But said great teams are ephemeral, like sports dynasties. All a company can do is try to avoid toxic employees and hope that the magic happens.

And it seems that the same is true of Uber itself. It's possible that the existing laws and regulations aren't necessary. People seem to be able to conduct themselves properly without being licensed and bonded. I consistently hear more good things than bad things about Uber, and all of my personal experiences have been positive. Whatever they're doing, it's working.

The same might not be true for an electrician or a massage therapist. As much as I hate to say it (deep breath), the Free Market seems to be sorting this out just fine. I'm not going full libertarian and suggesting we conduct social experiments with the FDA or the fire department. But in some cases, maybe the best way to figure out which regulations are really necessary is to ignore them and see what happens.