Skynet Today

>> The fact that a working system for the limited domains of e.g. customer support or medical diagnosis would be worth a lot of money suggests to me that they must have been tried, but that nothing useful could be built, and we didn't hear about the failed attempts, meaning that those domains (at least) are too big for hand-crafted systems to work.

That's actually a good point and one I've made myself a few times in the past- negative results never see the light of day. So, yes, I agree we can't know for sure that such systems haven't been attempted, despite the certainty with which I assert this in my comment above.

On the other hand, there are some strong hints. First of all, there was an AI winter in the 1980's after which most of the field turned very hard towards statistical techniques and away from the kind of work in SHRDLU. This kind of work became radioactive for many years and it would have been very hard to justify putting a PhD student, or ten, to work trying to even reproduce it, let alone extend it. That's in academia. In the industry, it's clear that nowadays at least companies like the FANGs strongly champion statistical machine learning and anyone proposing spending actual money on such a research program ("Hey, let's go back to the 1960's and start all over again!") would be laughed out of the building. That is, I believe there are strong hints that the political climate in academia and the culture in large companies, has suppressed any attempt to do work…

Exactly, it's completely misleading

"They are astonishing pieces of engineering, capable of feats of locomotion and dexterity that took evolution millions of years to perfect. But they aren’t quite as capable as they seem. For all their physical prowess, the intelligence of these mechanical creatures is sorely limited. They can walk with an unnervingly animalistic gait and now they can open doors, but what they can’t do is, well, pretty much everything else"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132150-200-the-truth-behind-boston-dynamics-viral-robot-videos/

and
https://www.skynettoday.com/briefs/boston-dynamics

"Believing that these videos represent robotics with advanced autonomous capability is problematic, since that is far from the truth. There are substantial differences between a robot that autonomously performs these actions versus one that is preprogrammed to do so with the help of external sensors and computation, and the lack of transparency makes it unclear what Atlas and friends are capable of. Though the details are not clear, it appears to be the case that Boston Dynamics’ technology does not involve learning or advanced cognition and is based on human-defined methods for robotic control:

Boston Dynamics are getting a lot of press these days, but perhaps their most impressive accomplishment is that they do it all without any deep learning"

Here's the math behind Atlas, the backflipping humanoid.https://t.co/5l7VZ0MBzs … ……

As is often true of GPT responses, there's some nonsense interspersed here, e.g. the claim that R has "a more mature package universe" than Python.

I think this is false, but if you're reading quickly, it sounds cogent enough. As Sarah Constantin observed about GPT2 [0]:

> if you skim text, you miss obvious absurdities. The point is OpenAI HAS achieved the ability to pass the Turing test against humans on autopilot...The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text. This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)

[0] https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrating

https://www.skynettoday.com/overviews/misinfo

"There has been a 150% increase in countries using organised social media manipulation campaigns over the last two years." [University of Oxford]

https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/entertainment/amber-heard-twitter-support-is-largely-from-fake-and-inauthentic-accounts/

"A new survey has proved a large number of Amber Heard's Twitter support is coming from "fake" accounts."

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/large-percentage-of-amber-heard-twitter-support-is-from-fake-accounts/news-story/e40a331810becf515a6e1de7bf3d0474

"Nearly 11 per cent of all Twitter accounts participating in discourse surrounding Johnny Depp's defamation trial"

https://democracyinafrica.org/cambridge-analytica-africa-know/

https://m.dw.com/en/dictators-in-africa-using-social-media-to-cling-to-power/a-60360543

Cool idea!

http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/

Nowdays I largely write high-effort polished stuff about AI or life, with the occasional small fun thing thrown in.

Not sure if it counts, but I also run https://www.skynettoday.com/ which is a blog where many actual human beings with appropriate education/experience write polished articles to combat AI misinformation/hype in the media and more broadly get across what's going on with AI in an accessible way
(yes I know the name is a bit ironic, we like it anyway as a bit of a joke).

Skimming through I came across a fun example (new to me at least) in the introduction to translation, lecture 8 slides page 55.

"hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn hn" in Somali gives "Serious Therapic Anxiety syndrome" on google translate.

Perhaps not surprising, but fun. The link from the slide (below) has previously been submitted to hn without notable discussion.

https://www.skynettoday.com/briefs/google-nmt-prophecies