unimpossible

Longer does not always equal better. The quality of the extended lifespan is key. But, if you could guarantee quality of life, there is still a bimodal distribution I find among my peers - "Why would you want to live forever?" and "Why wouldn't you want to live forever?"

FWIW, I'm in the "Why wouldn't you want to live forever?". Think of all the things to do and learn and experience and relearn. Ask me again in 10,000 years though.

When I worked in the office, I thought I could never work at home because I'd be too distracted. Once I started working at home, I realized that WFH is really good for me and that I'd never want to go back to the office. I suspect that if I do have to go back to the office, I'll find some advantages to being back in the office and enjoy it.

I use Chromecast with Prime. Mine's from 2016 so I don't know if they stopped supporting it on newer models. Everything else though, I agree with. Big tech, like any monopoly, does not play fair.

The really awesome part about Dawn (and musicality) was how open she was to the beat and the sound. One of my favorite videos is of her dancing to Bhangra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwsTIp2KDfc

I highly recommend The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert if you like this topic. A great read that tells you about the extinction-level event that we are currently part of and, is most likely, caused by us (i.e., humans).

Got it. Then it is a call to "concrete" action in some way. Thanks.

That makes sense to me. I guess I was hoping for something stronger and more in line with "don't pollute God's creation" rather than "let's pray on it" but perhaps that's the first step to an exhortation to keep in mind the delicate balance between humans and machines.

That makes more sense. But I still don't see why the answer is to pray rather than exhort people to do something about it.

Does it matter? I'm no theologian but if the robots take over, isn't that God's will? I'd rather put my faith (and money) in ethics research and really hope that we gradually become sentient robots (by replacing parts of ourselves) instead of ending up in a Terminator-style war with AI.

Setting aside whether Deep Learning can do everything, would you want to do everything with deep learning? We don't use Quantum Physics for mechanical engineering, we use Newtonian Physics because it is at the right abstraction level for these purposes. Similarly, there are other abstractions possibly to talk about causal reasoning or consciousness (he did say everything!)

Also, he mischaracterizes Symbol Systems. A symbolic system has two important properties - Composability (you can combine parts to make new things just like words are combined to make sentences) and Distal Access (a part can stand for something else. For e.g., a word like Justice stands for a complex concept. Very similar to naming something). Nearly 40 years ago, Newell also talked about the various levels of an AI system - Implementation Level, Algorithmic Level, and the functional level. Neural Networks etc are at the implementation level, Deep Learning lies at the Algorithmic level, and symbolic systems are at the functional level (i.e., they describe function not how that function is implemented). A symbol system is not at odds with a neural network or deep learning although there are those who say that neural networks can never implement a symbol system.

With the improvements in speech recognition, NLP, speech generation, I wonder how long before we can quickly spin up a network of false personas simply to provide "witnesses" or verify false information, or even provide alibis.

If people using the tool come up with the same designs/artwork, it's pretty clear the tool is responsible. If people have very different outcomes using the tool, then the people are responsible.

What makes it difficult is that we are just entering into a phase where a little bit of knowledge and artistic ability when combined with the right tool can take you much farther than either of those alone. And it's not just paintings but also music or even creative writing (using something like GPT3).

A lot of people talk about minima because thats the language we have for analyzing optimization techniques. Deep Learning is still new enough that there is lots of low hanging fruit to explore including empirical approaches and applying existing theoretical tools to try and explain DNNs. The community is slowly moving towards developing new tools specifically for deep learning properly analyze these networks and prove stuff (bounds, convergence etc) about them.

The most useful part of AI is the ETL and feature engineering. Those are also the parts that are now mostly commoditized. ML plays a minor role for most legacy companies. These companies should (and do) just white-label startup solutions as their own.