kwooding

Absolutely. Lots of humans live in a post-truth world. They learn not to trust anything they read or hear. Think totalitarian regimes wi try tight controls over media.

A more painful and pertinent question might be: Can democracy adapt to a post-truth world, and the answer to that I fear is probably no. How can a democracy function if it’s citizenry can’t remain informed?

Hahah. We did, but we were a few years too early for many parts of it. The Global Learning XPRIZE was a $15M challenge to build basically this: tablet software that could let kids without access to schools or teachers teach themselves.

We (Learn Leap Fly) were a semi-finalist in that competition. We bet heavily on AI, but again, were a few years early (Note the constraints of the problem said that the devices were NOT connected to the internet, which makes things still challenging today)

We were also a semi finalist (round 3) in the AI XPRIZE (with the same tech).

We’ve thought about whether to resurrect the core ideas and give it another go. For that we need partners. Education isn’t the most lucrative of fields, it turns out.

That said, anyone who wants to go down this path, send me a note. I’m happy to talk nerdity on this topic all day, be it AI, literacy education, pedagogy or grand challenges!

That’s a weird comment. Were you trying to be sarcastic?

There are 3 major federal parties (Liberals, Conservatives, NDP), who received 33%, 33%, and 18% of the popular vote respectively.

There are two minor federal parties (Greens and the People’s party) who together took around 7% of the popular vote, and

Finally there is the Bloc Québécois. It is a federal party but it exists only in one province. It grabbed around 8% last time.

Of course those percentages aren’t entirely representative, because seats are won in a first-past-the-post style in each riding.

Here’s a book I don’t expect to see on too many lists (and I’m surprised it’s on mine, as I don’t typically like big-property universes like Star Trek): The Final Reflection, John M Ford. It’s an ancient book (by Star Trek standards-1984) set in the original ST:TOS universe, but it did Klingon world-building before that was a thing (it’s not canon, as it did this long before Klingons were fleshed out in any real way). Loved the worldbuilding, loved that it made a then 2-dimensional alien into a rich 3-d society.

Not sure what you mean by >20 years to be right. I built and trained a 3-layer back-propagating neural net to do OCR on an Apple 2 in 1989 based on that paper. Admittedly, just the 26 upper case characters. But it clearly worked better than the alternatives.

What is the actual point of a generative text model that emits plausible-sounding scientific technobabble? How this is not just a DDOS against the entire system of peer review?

Honest question: how can this be used for any kind of good? What’s the actual point?