tariqali34

"When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something new."

The work is never done right. You talk about engineers and programmers right? Well they should know that their work never ends; there's always the need to continually improve the product so that you don't "fall behind", fix the rampant bugs that occur when you add in new features, fix the bugs that were caused by you fixing the previous bugs, realize that the customers actually wanted something different, need to refactor the code properly to match the latest design fad, have to rewrite the program in a brand new language...

And all this work has to be done. Because if you don't continually upgrade your product, then your product will quickly become old-fashioned and obsolete.

So, when we say "there's no work to be done", it's a blatant lie. Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate doing, or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be done. Lying may make you happy, but it makes me less happy. I prefer misanthropy over delusion.

Here's my entry. Code doesn't work because the offsite resource is not accepting connections from jsfiddle, but otherwise, I think it's a good proof of concept.

http://jsfiddle.net/gedhry5o/2/

Yeah, okay, that's a fair enough point. I will need to probably figure out a better dividing line between "false advertising" and "outright scam".

I think there is a distinction between misleading marketing and scamming. If you promise "revolutionary AI" and only give the customer templates and algorithms, well, at least the customer have a program that can make websites. That's useful.

A scam, on the other hand, would not deliver anything at all...period. That is because, no matter how easy it is to produce the templates and algorithms, it's just cheaper to take the money and run.

Obviously, it's scummy to mislead your consumers to get them to buy a product. But I would say that misleading your consumers to buy a product that doesn't even exist is even scummier.

The problem is that people's tastes differ, and what content someone will hate, another person will happily consume. For example, Brad Frost appears to hate 24-hour news network...I actually like them. Why? Because I find those 24-hour news networks "genuinely useful things". Brad Frost doesn't.

But let assume that we do live in a world where 90% of the Internet is trash, and we agree that they are trash. The idea that consumers will gravitate towards the remaining 10% still seems fairly odd. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually find good, quality content, and it seems more likely that consumers will just tune out everything, and avoid going anywhere.

Plans in general fail as soon as they hit cold reality. There will be problems with implementation, inglorious watered-down compromises, corruption, unforeseen consequences, etc. The funny thing is though that political radicals will not view their original plan as flawed, only the 'deviations' from that plan.

For example, some communists would argue that the reason communism failed was because it deviated from the "paper" version. See 'actually existing communism' and the Nomenklatura (New Class) for more information.

A blogger created a calculator that allows you to determine (over a 5-year time frame) whether it is cheaper to buy an expensive robot and do automation or to just use manual labor and to save the excess in Treasury bonds. He found that when the minimum wage is at $7.25, it would be slightly cheaper to hire humans, and if the minimum wage is raised to $10.10, then it would be slightly cheaper to hire robots.

The blogger assumes that it would cost $150,000 to build the robot, including R&D and maintenance. This comes out to $30,000 per year (while your assumptions claim that the bots only cost $20,000 per year to replace one human).

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/01/business-m....

I don't know which assumption is correct, though I would guess that eventually bots will be cheaper as we get better making them.

My comment was satirical too actually. The whole idea of thinking computers have created something "new and original" just by shoving together bits and pieces of human-produced works of art seems somewhat ridiculous. It's not entirely ridiculous, as the computer did do some manual labor of piecing together the words, but ultimately, you are relying on a corpus of pre-existing work and then reassembling it together. Any emotion (or indeed, most of anything good) comes from the corpus, not from the bot analyzing and imitating the corpus.

I like the ideas behind the blog post, but in practice, I do not care about design as much as I do content. Yeah, content is mostly terrible on the Internet, but the solution isn't prettier design. It's better content. And in fact, I may prefer the cold, clinical machines over this blog post design that serves to distract people from the content and make navigation harder.

Also, it seems hypocritical to me to decry monetization and advertising, only to then advertise a yearly subscription service after the blog post is done.

The main path going forward in improving Markov chains is expanding the individual "unit" that are selected by these chains. Current Markov chains only randomly select words to string together into semi-coherent thoughts, but what if they instead randomly select paragraphs, or even entire chapters? This will promote large-scale structure within the book, and ensure the plot will always be varied and engaging.

I hope that your grandchildren's Bachelor of Science would train them in curating brilliant works of art that can then be feed into the Markov chain and perform the one-dimensional random walk.

"We are not separate from the computer systems we create"

Every bug in code and every example of high-speed computation is evidence enough that we are separate from the computer systems we invented. Claiming credit for the work that our computer systems have done is very insulting to the machines that actually did the work.

"they exist in a symbiotic relationship with us and they are driven by our basic needs."

But the computer systems are not driven by our basic needs. The only thing that is "driven" by our basic needs is the source code that the computer systems use. But once we provide it with that source code, the computer system will happily execute it, no matter how buggy or unmaintainable it is. If I run a computer system in an infinite loop and then die, the computer system will keep on running.

Once we provide source code to the computer systems, then our role is finished. For all they care, we can be ushered off the stage and replaced by cyborgs and computers that can happily produce more source code. If these cyborgs and computers delusionally believe themselves to be human, all the better.

I agree. If governments can't protect their private information from being leaked by hackers and whistleblowers, what hope do the average person have? Adapt to changing circumstances rather than hold onto outdated concepts.