johann28

The same can happen with many things on the internet. Reddit, Youtube etc. It's not specific to facebook.

> The most successful webpages are those where people are authors.

Exactly. But not because they enjoy tweaking some website settings or enjoy the control over the layout of a page. No, the reason is connection with other people. They write a blog so that they get feedback from people. They post pictures to Instagram and Facebook to get likes and show off.

Connecting the electric guitar and repairing things with screwdrivers is seen by most people as a chore. Sure, techie, geeky tinkerers enjoy messing around with things, the same ones who enjoy configuring linux, for example.

I just haven't seen a single use case that would make sense in an everyday setting. Having a knob that controls the lamp? Well, lamps already have that, without being radio controlled.

If a car dashboard is designed well, then there's no need to remap the buttons. Very few people like to customize their stuff that much. If there is a trend in software (and hardware) it's that they remove options. We have less features and customizations than 10 years ago. Developers realized that people just mess their settings up and they call support. Also, the more options there are, the more bugs there will be. So now instead of supporting a myriad of settings, they just go with a default and leave it at that. Why don't we have the option of vertical browser tab arrangement in Chrome? Well, because they decided it's too complex and unnecessary for most users.

People just want to get their things done. They want to get business things done with other business people and they want to have fun with their friends.

The success of the Internet is all about human communication, sharing experiences (mainly through photos), and gossip.

Most people don't want to reprogram stuff, they don't want to customize stuff. They want things to "just work", they don't want to choose which button controls the car windows and which knob controls the bass. This is the job of the designer. Most people want a finished product.

People don't want to "rewire" their products, they don't want to hack on this kind of thing. Except for geeks and technical people, who can also handle normal apps and interfaces.

The analogy with the Internet breaks down because the Internet is mainly successful because it connects people. That's what people care about, other people. The telephone was a success because it lets you talk to other people.

Unless this thing helps people deal with other people, it's too complex and uninteresting for the masses and probably too simple and tedious for technical people.

This is true but irrelevant.

It may well be that reading doesn't make you successful, but not-reading makes you not-successful.

It's like playing the lottery doesn't make you win, but not-playing makes you not-win.

The becoming part of a special in-crowd who will save the world is the similarity. Not the torture and crimes of course. I've seen and read quite a lot about Scientology, but you are right that they are nowhere near the same league. Scientology is a massive and extremely rich bunch, who do some very bad things on purpose.

His website didn't load for some reason so I just went with the Google hit's title. Maybe that was his old page.

Grids are problematic because one can observe you at the boundaries, moving from one cell to another, so there are moments when you are very accurately localizable.

> OpenAI's research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning. Our CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe. The group's other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group. OpenAI's co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Sutskever is a researcher at Google, worked with Hinton in Toronto and Andrew Ng at Stanford.

Karpathy studied in Toronto and at Stanford, worked under Fei-Fei Li, worked at Google. He also has an awesome blog and seems very active and passionate about computer vision and ML.

Kingma also works with deep neural nets, worked under Yann LeCun (who works at Facebook)

Schulman is a PhD Candidate at Berkeley with publications at top conferences.

Zaremba is an PhD student at NYU, intern at Facebook. Impressive publication list and awards.

Abbeel is at Stanford's AI lab.

Bengio is one of the "stars" and celebrated figures of the deep net revival.

Levine is a researcher at Google working on deep nets with many serious papers.

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Basically these are the main domain experts among them. The list is quite skewed to Google/Facebook, Stanford/Berkeley/Toronto and deep net researchers, working primarily on computer vision.

> Unless I am mistaken, this is a clear reference to Roko's basilisk. EXCEPT Yudkowsky didn't dream it up. Roko did.

Correct, I was conflating things. But his unfriendly AI scenario is pretty bad too.

My issue with it is that it's a symptom of an over-confident belief system naturally leading people to such conclusions. And now I don't want to get into refuting it, it's been done numerous times to varying degrees. I think the whole underlying system is problematic, there is no superficial mistake in the reasoning, once you accept a few philosophical standpoints and value judgments that the reader is spoon-fed while reading his blog posts.

I share your concerns. It also worries me that the brightest ML researchers choose to work at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft instead of public universities. One reason is probably that academia and public grants are too sluggish to accommodate this fast paced field. Another is that these companies have loads of data that these researchers can use to test their ideas.

The downside is that much of the research is probably held secret for business advantages. The public releases are more of a PR and hiring strategy than anything else in my opinion. By sending papers to conferences, Google's employees can get to know the researchers and attract them to Google.

Others say there's nothing to worry about, Google and Facebook are just today's equivalent of Bell Labs, which gave numerous contributions to computer technologies without causing much harm.

The brain doesn't "solve" tasks. That's cart before horse thinking. Our whole concept of "vision" only exists because eyes and visual cortices exist. I know it seems like a philosophical nitpick, but saying that the visual cortex is good at vision is like saying that water is good at being wet or being surprised that your soup is perfectly fitting the shape of your bowl.

Now, the human brain is definitely a complicated thing to study and understand (by whom? by itself!), but framing it as if the brain was a computer that received a task that it then solved, is the wrong way of thinking about this.

Somehow Japan seems to be an exception and they seem to like humanoid robots a lot more than Western countries. Even old people are comfortable with being helped by human-shaped robots from the depths of the uncanny valley.

ML was there but at least when I started learning about these things around 8 years ago, the label "AI" was mostly used for symbolic stuff. Courses named "AI" taught from the Russell-Norvig book. Things like resolution, planning in the block world, heuristic graph search, min-max trees, etc. ML existed but it wasn't really under the label of "AI" as far as I can remember. I think it's something of a marketing term that big companies like Google and Facebook reintroduced due to the scifi connotations. But that's just my guess.

Sutskever, Schulman, Karpathy and Kingma are experts in machine learning.

And yes, AI will definitely be used for all sorts of purposes including hostile means. Just like anything else, really. Financial manipulation, spying, intelligent military devices, cracking infrastructure security, etc.

These are realistic concerns, we shouldn't fall for the Skynet red herring. We can have problems with ethical AI use, even if it's not a self-aware super-human superintelligence.