sevenless

I've been wondering when neural networks might be able to compress a movie back down to the screenplay.

Or just live underground. There should be zones at around room temperature not too far off the surface.

Colonizing Mercury makes more sense than colonizing Mars. Much more abundant energy, reasonable gravity, plenty of water at the poles, and to avoid radiation you'd have to live underground in either place. The only drawback is the higher delta-V to get there.

Hitler got some of his worst ideas from the Eugenics Institute in California. Such as 'humanely' gassing undesirables and 'genetic defectives'. Eugenics, from Galton on, was considered progressive, enlightened, 'scientific' thought at the time.

Why not put the city at a pole?

Why? Video game economies are already bigger than many real world nations. If enough of us live in the video game world, game labor has value.

Already happening: WoW gold farmers.

Enjoyed

> Some aspects of communication are likely to prove more challenging, Hinton predicted. “Irony is going to be hard to get,” he said. “You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don’t get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.”

Anything that behaves like an object, would be the obvious answer. GUI elements, things in games or simulations. More abstractly, an object's a namespace with persistent properties, so for something that has a persistent, possibly mutable, state, an object is the metaphor you want.

Whether data structures should be objects rather than primitives depends very much on the data.

I've heard there are two kinds of jobs: the kind where you shower before, and the kind where you shower after.

This is the same question as 'What values should we impose on society?' And that is an irreducible conflict. It's politics.

Programming a computer to perform a task is a powerful way to reveal hidden assumptions. What the problem of machine learning on human data reveals, is there is no objectivity. Our most 'objective' models will simply learn and then reinforce biases and prejudices and cause harm to people. We can't build objective, neutral, value-free models when it comes to human behavior, because humans change their behavior in response to the models. When we reject stereotypes we are imposing a set of values, just as much as when we embrace them. Machine learning forces us to confront the fact that this is exactly what we are doing.

There's a kind of philosophical crisis going on here. We need an entirely new way to think about the limits of objectivity in human sciences, and how to create ethical models in the presence of feedback between science and society. The language of objective physical science doesn't work.

If your lifestyle basically consists of stuff you could do for free, like cycling and internet, does that mean you're wealthy?

The trouble with this definition is that your lifestyle changes with your income. If I were making millions I might need yachts and private jets to maintain the good life.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - John Steinbeck

This is the problem with democracy: the people making the decisions often aren't those who are affected by them the most. It's how you define the demos. It's unjust for Americans to vote on policies that make the difference between life and death for large numbers of much poorer people, without giving them any say.

If democratic decision-making goes against vast improvements to the lives of billions of people, then democracy is simply wrong and should be abandoned.

Some of us don't think humans are less deserving on account of which side of a border they were born. Agreeing that free trade did somewhat hurt the American worker, America's loss helped lift hundreds of millions of people elsewhere (especially China) out of poverty.

It's hard to say they should have remained abjectly poor just so some Americans wouldn't experience a (fairly small) drop in living standard. A drop which could be alleviated by more socialist government policy anyway. From a global perspective, free trade is the best thing for improving the welfare of humans going.