Dec 6, 2016While some see this new prediction tech as like a new pipe tech that could improve all pipes, no matter their size, it is actually more like a tech only useful on very large pipes. Just as it would be a waste to force a pipe tech only useful for big pipes onto all pipes, it can be a waste to push advanced prediction tech onto typical prediction tasks.
↩︎ Overcoming Bias
Prediction is cheap, unlike ethics
The semiconductor lowered the cost of arithmetic, which the Harvard Business Review cites to predict that the economics of machine learning mean we’ll start using predictions on everything: “The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction.” The next step will be that we’ll start using prediction as an input even in industries where it has typically had little reason to be applied.
That shift is already underway as big tech companies change their business models to incorporate AI at every level. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft are all investing heavily; they’ve even worked together to establish best practices in AI ethics, a partnership from which Apple was notably marked absent.
Google Translate invented its own shortcut
Google announced that their translation team discovered something interesting: after they turned over translation to a machine learning-enabled AI, it figured out its own way of translating.
After being taught to translate between English and Korean, then between Japanese and English, the AI invented its own fourth reference language that may draw upon deep-learning insights into a shared structure between the three languages. “This “interlingua” seems to exist as a deeper level of representation that sees similarities between a sentence or word in all three languages,” says TechCrunch.
Full explanation of the phenomenon from the Google team here.
Korean? Easy. Archie comics? Not so fast.
Machine learning treats a dataset as a closed system. In the case of comic books, too much happens in between and outside the frame for the machine to understand.
For now, only humans can achieve “closure,” a measure of literary comprehension that computer scientists test in humans and AI by asking for a prediction of text in successive panels.
"Power is not a great place for a good time."
A New Zealand scientist, apparently fed up with the blindly financial reasons why academic conferences often accept papers of dubious quality, wrote a paper entirely reliant on Autocorrect’s AI. The paper was accepted.
Nov 29, 2016[The bot] lives under the assumption that nothing will be novel, as if out of faith. It fields sentences by comparing them with those it knows, understanding phrasings using algorithms somewhat like Markov chains. Then, it assembles a response according to poetic constraints, rules and templates, or selects the best one from a list.
↩︎ Real Life
The Editors' Longreads Picks
- An excellent essay on poverty and writing by Starr Davis. Updated May 31, 2022
- Novelist Héctor Tobar tries to understand the 1992 Los Angeles riots through the experiences of a single high school.
- Steven Johnson with a long assessment of the current state of A.I. and language. (The illusion has gotten very good.)
Welcome to The Morning News Tournament of Books, 2017 edition.
- Our championship match is decided in the Tournament of Books, with news of a Rooster surprise debuting this summer. Updated Mar 31, 2017
- In Thursday's action, Reyhan Harmanci sets up a colossal final.
- The Zombie round opens with Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald reading The Nix and The Underground Railroad.
Все ваши Белый дом принадлежит нам.
- "Will Putin expose the failings of American democracy or will he inadvertently expose the strength of American democracy?" Updated Mar 3, 2017
- Wilbur Ross just wanted to make some money in ethically gray areas (that should've prevented him from taking office).
- Jeff Sessions's spokeswoman can't help but continue to lie.
The oceans are under assault, and not just from the White House and friends.
- Trump's assault on the environment begins with American headwaters. Updated Mar 1, 2017
- Don't just blame the oil companies for destroying the oceans—blame sushi restaurants.
- Nothing escapes the deepest trenches of the ocean floor. Not light, not nutrients, not pollutants.