471 karma · joined November 15, 2018
Once any pattern is formed and determined, there are always some people who will attempt to exploit it, and those people are often the ones who would eventually ruin all the good things for everybody else.
I personally have not seen this implemented, but one possible solution I believe may work is to apply a thin layer of sticky hydrogen tape right along the edges of the mask so it would act like an adhesive that helps seal the open space gaps as it can fit with the unique shape and contour of each person's face.
Medical hydrogen tape is the same material that we often see being used in those sticky pads that they put on a person's body during an electrocardiogram (EKG) test. It's also the same adhesive that used by those electro pads in TENS pain-relief machines. This sticky adhesive material is safe for human skins and can last multiple uses.
It would be great if someone could add a feature in which you can insert a removable HEPA filter so it can be swapped in and out when needed.
Over the years, society has shifted into favoring financial languages and metrics in most of today communications instead of telling stories that are often associated with lifetime generational experiences. Most things are calculated based on precise risks and probabilities so naturally we would opt for the least risky path. As a result, the system has evolved into favoring incremental improvements rather than explorations of uncharted territories that are much more riskier.
In scientific publishing, this metric is represented by an over-emphasize in citations which has become the main criteria those publications are now being evaluated based on. Novelty or a desire for new experience that can generate large and meaningful impact, or even simply playful experimental ideas are no longer valued as much. Citations quantity has become the main currency in scientific publishing, and understandably has also led the community to prioritize incremental improvements.
In the paper, it mentioned that many seemingly irrelevant or uninteresting new scientific discoveries initially took a long time for the community to understand its potential, but those very same discoveries would later lead to much bigger and more meaningful inventions, such as the gene-editing tool CRISPR we have today. It took 20 years for this to happen counting from the initial discovery, so this is where the disconnection occurred.
In that sense, there is a great need to help propagating those initial discoveries both in its magnitudes and speeds so that it can receive more attentions from other scientists and community. The novelty should once again be the main focus to drive motivations and inspirations. Scientific publications shouldn't just prioritize on hard cold metrics like citations, but instead attaching more metaphors and new visions of future possibilities that can excite and propel both science community and public interests.
More than ever, people today are craving for that common naivety which used to connect everyone together into believing making the impossible possible. That's precisely what has made Elon Musk and his companies so successful.
It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
I have noticed human emotions and intelligence seem to be at odds with each other. Sometimes they are even a trade-off. The increase of one may lead to the decrease of the other. If we look around, humans today have the most advanced technologies in history, but are our lives really better compared to people's in the past? Materialistic wise, certainly yes because they are products directly produced by technologies, but mentally and emotionally it could arguably be worse.
AI and techs keep getting better and better everyday, but then human have to work more with longer hours and higher stress. We all thought the machines are supposed to help us human but it's actually the other way around. We work tirelessly days and nights in order to keep making those machines better and more advanced, but in return our lives have not seen many meaningful improvements, and even arguably worse than before in some areas. Individually our personal ability has limits and naturally it evolves very slowly, but the power of AI machines is potentially unlimited and growing at an even faster rate than Moore's law. We seem to be collectively working to make machine much better than us while we are remaining relatively the same individually. Are technlogies actually enslaving us?
We keep buying things that don't really serve us much. We have a lot of stuff now but they don't mean much. If something broke, meh we will just get another one. It's just another item and it will get shipped here tomorrow. We didn't have as much in the past but every little thing carried much greater value. Even the most simplest thing could fascinate and brought us joy.
We humans today already operate based on rules and algorithms dictated by the machines. We still don't know how our brains function organically (memory, consciousness, etc...), but in the quest of trying to make AI becoming human-like, we have created AI neural networks to simulate our brain. The danger is that even though we still don't know how our real brain functions, but we have now turned around and claimed that the human brain works in a similar way under the same principles of an AI neural network. We are enforcing AI rules onto ourselves.
This is a dangerous assumption to make simply because AI does not have emotions. Once we begin to operate strictly under these rules and principles that are dictated by AI, we would soon lose the attributes and characteristics of what made us human. Our emotional spectrum may get increasingly shorten.
TV shows and movies are an example as they are a form of story telling that have biggest influences on us at the emotional level. It's no coincidence that "Seinfeld" and "Friends" are still the two best tv shows today. Many movies that are considered as best were also made from a while ago. Despite the most advanced technologies, why is it that today we can't seem to tell stories that bring out the same level of emotional reponse and intensity as before? They all seem to lack the genuity and inspiration that the previous generation once had.
Is it because AI do not understand human emotions so its algorithms cannot accurately factor that into consideration? One can say that today humans are the ones who write those algorithms so maybe we can add in compenents to account for that? But just like the example above, if we don't even understand how our brain works, how can we simulate the machine to accurately reflect us? In the future, machines are supposed to learn and write all the codes by itself without human intervention, what would likely happen then? Would we still retain the ability to even understand those codes? Would it possible that human may slowly evolve into machines? In trying to make those machines becoming like us, we may instead become like machines.
Having said that, maybe there was a better solution they could have implemented instead. Something like this should only be the very last choice on the list after exhausting all other options.
When a customer considers buying something online, what are the main criteria driving their decision-making process? The most important criteria are the ones that will not change very often no matter what happens, and should always remain true even in 10 or 20 years time from now. These are: "a wide selection of goods, great prices, authentic merchandises, convenience (fast shipping time to anywhere)".
Amazon do not always have the best online prices anymore these days. Based on many online reports, they are increasingly letting in inauthentic merchandises by 3rd party sellers. Their shipping time is still outstanding though, plus a very wide selection of goods which are what keep them going mainly these days.
Amazon should be very cautious, if another platform could beat them to the two main key criteria in the near future then they may lose some of their market share. In the quest of chasing for growth, sometimes companies could overlook these basic principles.
Remember there is a very fine line between creativity and illusion. Technically there is not much of a difference because both are a distortion of reality. Even we humans have a hard time distinguishing this sometimes as many new inventions used to be deemed crazy at first. It looks like when it comes to concepts that we hadn't seen, we were also susceptible to the same flaw just like those machines.
I don't really know much about symbolic AI but can it really solve this problem? If it can then the human game may really be over!
The new prime editing tool is supposed to improve further on this, but I'm still not sure if these tools are in a perfect condition ready for mainstream launch.
Simply being better did not guarantee that they would make it. Example: Cesc Fabregas, the former Arsenal captain soccer player, often wondered how he could even made it into a professional soccer team. He still did not understand why many of his peers from La Masia Academy back in the days, despite having more talents and being so much better players than him, just could not succeed in the end.
Meritocracy is truly a false belief.
Grammar is so fundamental as it is the spinal core of any language. Without comprehension of grammar, we effectively cannot construct full sentences that make sense. We would be limited to just knowing random words and phrases.
There are many different ways to express the same idea in Spanish and so without understanding why a sentence was written in such a specific order, it is almost impossible to formulate a long-term pattern for that sentence structure in our brain. This is why grammar acts as a spinal core that holds all vocabulary together.
For Duolingo to improve its effectiveness beyond its current capability, its development team needs to add additional modules/lessons that focus more into this area.
I can't tell if we are getting better or worse on that front. The attention economy and social media might have accidentally turned people into various giant bubbles, making it increasingly more difficult to find common patterns to agree on. Everyone all has different opinions on thousands of tiny different things. People in the past did not face this problem, the society of yesterday was a much more simple place with fewer variables, so groupthink was probably a lot more common.
Diversity is the obvious answer to counter groupthink, but managing diversity effectively is in itself another challenge. This is a modern problem of today and will become even bigger tomorrow.
Other than alignment, a safe environment for everyone to operate in as you have suggested is absolutely fundamental. Human will always have the tendency to attach labels to everything, it's the natural way for our brain to create patterns and make sense of the world around us. Without those patterns, we can't operate effectively either.
In that sense, the only way to counter that is to anonymize informational sources during internal meetings and data collection processes so people can't attach labels and link it to specific sources - people don't like to admit it but we all do this unconsciously. That way the data will be free from prejudices and biases since all sources are being given equal weight in consideration.
Organizations should run pilot programs to test this on their decision-making process. It should be easy to achieve with many tools available today.
Applying the "grey zone" mental model is also important here, as it constantly forces us to consider the pros and cons and weight everything in probability calculation - there is not a clearly right or wrong position in many cases.
Another method is by encouraging each group member to seek out two to three other directly or secondary related topics by themselves (so there is a higher chance for a more random selection which should yield better accuracy), and then asking each person to make a summary on the areas they had chosen, and to further explain their idea on why they have established those critical connections with the main topic. This way, it may foster the discovery of new patterns based on arbitrary links that no other individuals had ever thought of before.
Google's management is having a hard time in dealing with this aspect, evidently by the scaling back of their weekly town halls, internally categorized as "TGIF meetings", mostly known by the public as those quick fire chat Q&A sessions with management. The recent cancellations of many Google products and services were probably an indirect result of this too, it was also an attempt of scaling back. Its huge size must have exceeded the current limitations of their operation structure, unless some of its core policies and missions must be altered significantly. A few of these changes may have already been carried out, the hiring of an anti-union organization and the installing of internal web browser monitoring tool.
This begs the question though, when you have something that got scaled up to such an enormous size which inevitably would accompany with more unique and challenging chaotic scenarios, what are the possible approaches to resolve these situations in a harmony and effective way? The solutions are not easy and these problems are becoming increasingly common in our modern world. The same issues that were once very simple have upgraded themselves to become much more difficult to deal with and with many added layers of complexity.
I attended a recent startup event in Vietnam in which Mr. Nguyen Thanh Nam, chairman of Endeavor Vietnam, told the story of his personal experience in facing a similar challenge in managing a large number of people. The numbers were probably not at the same crazy level at Google's but the effective solution for him in the end was to go and live in some rural villages for a while where thousands of people manage to participate daily in a very large but well-behaved community and all in harmony.
The challenge facing with an increase of diversity is alignment. The greatest benefit of diversity is new innovations, but only if its chaotic nature can be managed by correct alignment. Without this anchoring element, things will quickly spiral out of control. To effectively aligning a massive group of people, this anchoring element must be based on basic core values or principles that naturally DO NOT or RARELY CHANGE over time. There won't be any consistent alignment if those values change too often or just cannot be applied effectively for long enough. I believe Google might be approaching it incorrectly. Some of the methods reported by the media seem very similar to censoring. That is not alignment, that is the equivalent of putting a dome structure over everyone. It would slowly create an environment that inhibits creativity limiting people's abilities. It's certainly an alternative method but just not a preferred one.
Correct alignment is a much better and more efficient method for the long game. Talents and technical skills can all change very quickly in modern time, what binds people together are the common mindsets and personality attributes that are always considered good under any environments and withstanding any degrees of change. This alignment is applied even to the management themselves, and not just to the engineers whom they manage, it is actually more critical at the top level. What is the Google's personna? There should be a mechanism in place for the management to detect when they are deviating too much from the anchoring alignment as well. What we are seeing at Google is probably an early sign of this deviation, or perhaps the values being used in aligning everyone together just do not have as much longevity?
In reality, other than medical scientific knowledge and methods, effective treatments also come from having compassion and caring deeply for your patients. Unfortunately, we have to admit that not all doctors today have that. I have seen the good and the bad ones, good doctors were really good and bad doctors were also really terrible, just like in any other professions I guess. Without those human attributes though, those bad doctors can't really help anyone as it is the main force driving them to help seek the right cures for the patients. Worse, they may contribute to misdiagnoses and malpractices that are the prevalent sources for medical related accidents and deaths.
As individuals, we should all educate ourselves so we are more equipped in working together with the doctors when issues arise, rather staying in the unknown and completely leave your own fate to the hand of luck.
I'm afraid there's no solution to this. In the end we are all humans. How does one even begin to solve a psychological problem at a large scale like this?