Senator John McCain passed away. I am not an US citizen and he was not my Senator, but I have the highest respect for people who respect and honor Truth and Facts and he was one of them. RIP Sir John McCain, my condolences for the family and all who valued and loved him.
RIP Senator John McCain
Children separation at US border: It seem to me we are thinking that a Golden Cage is one and the same with a home. To me golden or not a cage is a cage and a cage does not need to be make of a material thing either!
Every country has the right to choose who can come and stay, but each country will be judged based on how they do that.
It deeply saddens me that the country I was holding high in my esteems related to human rights find itself and the bottom of the barrel in upholding human rights.
Time to wake up people!
We will all go to hell if we can’t make the distinction between the LETTER of the LAW and the SPIRIT of the LAW!
For example, the difference between peaceful Muslims and ISIS extremists is exactly that. Whereas a peaceful religion follower would use the text to allow others to enjoy life the ones applying BLINDLY the LETTER of the holly books will end up hurting others. In the end it is clear that they will end up in hell as God never intends to hurt people.
Punishments based on law infringements, even more important the ones we impose as “examples” for others in order to install mass fear are equally damning and usually on long term have exactly the opposite effect.
United Sates is becoming a communist regime. I could not (or did not want to) believe it, but the signs are there. I lived trough it, and I can recognize it.
Contrary to common beliefs communism is not about the economy, or the common ownership of goods or businesses, is about confusing fact and fiction, or more concise, the wide spread of disinformation and lies in the core of the society leading the destruction of the diversity.
The universe hates to have its diversity reduced. When the diversity falls under a certain level the group who over simplified will collapse. This is how civilizations die. I hope we’ll wake up in time to avoid a western civilization collapse.
Though I’ve seen this coming I was not able to see all the details on how will it happen.
The good thing is that there is a way to overcome the collapse, I call it “The Self reliant way” and includes using all the knowledge we already acquired to strengthen the base of the society, the individual.
To all out there believing that strengthening the individual is a bad idea and the group (or the society must prevail) I will remember you what the realistic solutions look like (as opposed to delusional ones). To showcase this please check how the cabin crews are instructing you to proceed in an emergency case. You FIRST put your oxygen mask BEFORE trying to help ANYONE else. Obviously once you have the mask on you MUST help other if they need help!
That is the key in balancing the abilities between individuals and groups and not the other way around we see currently be promoted in a delusional way by the social agents posed to extract the last ounce of profit of the society even if that will lead to its total collapse.
We need to wake up and face the factual world or we will go the way of the dinosaurs.
Self Reliant, is the only future way to prosperity. Human-Machine symbiosis allows a new way of living and well being. This is the only way humans can become a permanent species in the universe.
Personal and group delusions are our enemy now and forever!
More on this subject soon…
To anyone building walls around anything, playground, house, country … Learn the lesson Ray learned the hard way 😉 . He ended up begging for help from his father. Will your father be there to get you out of your country walls? Hyperventilating? 😉
The English mountaineer George Mallory was asked “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?”, he answered “Because it’s there”. Mallory died at 37 doing what he loved, climbing Everest.
I have the feeling that with AI these days we seem to have an equivalent approach “Why do we want machines to be like people?” and the answer seem to be “Because is possible!”. I really hope we will learn from history and avoid getting lost (or die) climbing the mountain of humanizing machines.
To understand the technological feat of this simple call, made by a machine, with a voice really indistinguishable from a human, you would need to open the hood of the machine learning software driving the AI application and take a look. I guarantee that 99.99% (or more) of the people on earth will have absolutely no clue on how the machine does what it did (provided all this was not just a trick).
I mean this is “rocket science” for most of people out there, so Google needs to be congratulated. Until you start to think…. (yeah thinking can be dangerous sometimes).
So, we hear a machine making a phone call to talk to a human in order to make an appointment. Both parties sounds perfectly human, but the caller is not. Let’s now think what would happen if the business also get a Google business assistant?
Now it really get’s interesting, and wired and, well … wired, and here is why. If you know a bit of computer programming you already know that you can achieve the same final outcome (your computer scheduling an appointment into another computer) by a 1000x simpler and more predictable algorithm by using simple structured text over internet connections.
What struck me is that this unavoidable future (as a businesses are more probable to get the AI before you) where machines talk to machines and pretend to be people is ludicrous. It is in fact this is an equivalent of a Rube Goldberg case of software solutions where the only reason to do it is “Because is possible!”.
For those cases, I usually like to talk about a potential measure of unnecessary complexity as the RG factor from famous (and funny) Rube Goldberg machines.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a computer nerd and I love those things, but I’m also aware of times when we seem to loose our bearing. Thanks to the audio bellow now I’ll have to drop my home phone as a machines can now impersonate anyone and call me for insane reasons.
Should I now start to send passwords over encrypted channels first so that if my wife call’s me I should ask her the password first to make sure I’m not talking to a machine?
What’s next?
May 16, 2018 —— adding some (positive) ideas —–
The only way to try keep the RG factor low for language tools in AI is to use it exclusively for personal use. That is, you train your own natural language to your own machine interface. Both recognition of your voice and speech syntheses (your machine talks back to you in natural language) are valuable tools when it comes to AI use cases.
This means you can “grow in” your personal machine (starting from very early age and continue to improve it until you die. This will minimize the error rate for both speech recognition as well as speech synthesis leading to a flawless interface between humans and their personal machines. An there is where “personal assistant” has a lot of meaning and real use.
This approach allows us to get one step closer to mastering the many-to-many class of communication we basically are unable to engage today. This will be done by using natural language to communicate with our personal assistants (human <-> personal machine) and communicate between each other via structured, secure, factual machine to machine channels.
In more lay terms you talk to your machine and get things straight and clarified then your machine talks to other machines out there. The receiving end machine(s) will receive, validate, process the information let’s say to remove redundancy (things you already know) then feed you only what really matters for you and the whole community of intelligent living entities.
The future can be bright. Is all up to us to choose the right path…
By now we have all probably heard the two magic letters ‘AI’. Artificial Intelligence we say, and this steers a lot of awe and fear in different people depending on what level of understanding you happen to be on the subject.
The problem is that, as with many other new things in our society, the full utility impact and danger of this technology are pretty much under or over-estimated. If you were old enough to understand the issue, during the first time microwave ovens first popped on the market, you may remember salespeople pitching the oven as a miracle able to cook pretty much anything. Today (2018) most of us would never try to cook something in a microwave oven but simply reheat food already cooked by conventional means. I feel that the same is true with today’s AI hype when we’ll look back in 10 or 20 years.
What is AA then?
AA is not Alcoholics Anonymous as it may first sound like but in the AI context, it stands for Advanced Automation. I think AA is actually what most of the current so-named AI applications are doing. Limited signal (image, sound, or other sensors) recognition, can e hardly be called ‘intelligence’.
Why AA and not AI?
The main problem with Real AI
Around 25 years ago (more or less) I won a praise from a radio station when (for the first and last time), I bothered to call in to comment on their show, which was about all those smart machines of the future. At that time AI was not yet what it is today.
My comment, which impressed the radio host was this:
“Any system modeled to work as the human brain does whose complexity is higher than a certain unknown level will naturally spawn a consciousness, or simply put will be a living intelligent entity like you and me!”
This is a totally different ball game than what we call today AI. Our current level of technology is much closer to regular automation but at a higher level of complexity due to the ability to process complex natural data flows generated by sensors sensing the real world by using various Machine Learning systems and variants.
Why we should not create real AI systems?
The answer is simple. If we will create real AI systems, they will by definition compete with human beings for resources and abilities sooner than later. Since we are already living in a highly competitive environment ourselves, the last thing we should do is to add high-ability competitors for human beings. This can and most likely will end in us humans being wiped out of existence. The only thing yet to be solved is a power source compact enough for the machines to use, but we’ll get there.
If not AI then what?
Advanced Automation (AA) targets enhancing existing human beings. Instead of creating new competitors for human beings as in AI’s case, with AA we simply increase the abilities to live and compete with regular humans and even other living things.
What would you choose, AI or AA?
May 9, 2018: Since publishing this article I’ve got some feedback and I’d like to add the following additional info to the article. Trying to clarify some issues pointed out to me without getting into technical details.
A hypothesis I like is that our universe uses a fractal engine whose change in the time dimension is powered by quantum mechanics (injecting random changes in the fractal structure). So, basically, it works based on algorithms (laws of nature). There are two kinds of algorithms out there, fully predictive and partially predictive. Regular (no ML/AI) programming is fully predictive. ML and AI are not. We built digital computers to BE fully predictive because we need stability in dealing with the quantum nature of reality (dealing with small random changes).
We did not yet master the classic coding, (how many defects are in our products so far?) and we are jumping head-on into more advanced cases of automatically generated algorithms used by ML which is the bases of AI. My point is simple, to succeed and avoid getting in trouble (legal?) in the future we have to make sure we know how to test ML and AI in order to minimize their errors. On the other hand, we have to educate the end user to understand the limitations, pitfalls, and dangers of the technology.
I’m afraid that the warning Carl Sagan gave us was not to put advanced tech. in the hands of technically illiterate users is near and it can impact all businesses using ML and AI very soon.
So ML and AI test automation as well as end-user schooling in limitations and pitfalls is a must.
From this perspective, I believe that AA (Advanced Automation) is a closer-to-reality acronym than AI, at least for now. Obviously, it is up to all of you out there to choose what two letters to use to label this new technology…
Today a great mind departed from this reality maybe joining a different universe. Stephen Hawking brought light of knowledge to anyone wanting to know.
Best way to remember him would be by reading his work http://www.hawking.org.uk/
I personally intend to read his book My brief history
I’m the father of a girl and a boy and my daughter and son are not children anymore. In the Me too movement I can’t afford to take sides and since I have a public site I can’t stay silent either…
To be very clear about this, I will state my position in this matter from the very beginning. I strongly believe that we all should be able to live in peace and no human being (man or female) should live in fear of being used and bullied by other human beings in any way.
Women and girls should feel safe around male human beings and given the same opportunities as man or boys.
All that said, we have to get to the murky part of hows, “the devil is in the details”….
What freaks me out, is this idea of ‘unconditionally trust the women’. In the context of political fights, can get extremely close to repeating the history of the dark ages of the witch hunts. The times when a lot of innocents were used, tortured and killed by other people to enhance their egos, fears and pocket books.
I have published two articles which are essential to understand the dangers of the wave the Me Too movement may create. a wave which can push good people to do extremely ugly mistakes. It can transform angels in to daemons, one judgment at the time. The articles are Fact, Fiction and the Truth and Fact, Fiction and BS.
The key to avoid those mistakes is to understand how Truth, Fact and Fiction concepts are in a tight interplay and how unchecked errors in perceiving each one’s reality can lead do disasters.
Again, I do not try to diminish in any way the women who suffer and possibly still suffer from abuses of males in power (power of any kind). What I’m trying to warn, is for other people who may think they know the facts or the truths in any of those cases and blindly take sides (of both accuser and accused).
If you are a religious person, please remember that one of the reasons humanity has been cast out of heaven is because of making judgments. Remember also the “who is without sin to cast the first stone“. Also remember that “Who lives by the sword will die by the sword“.
If we do not fight with all our power and soul for a fact based world we will only have chaos….
Please read my articles about Fact, Fiction and Truth and make your own decisions in a more safer way for you and all other people around you.
As you see I’m not talking about Lies here, that is a completely different can of worms and I do not want to mix it in this message, as it would send the wrong signal. What I wish, is to warn, that good people, can pushed by a social wave, to rush to judgments and actions they may later regret…