Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Richard Heathfield]

[Top-posting fixed]

That is your prerogative. But it seems a strange way of being intolerant
to your fellow men. Top posters do not have this infantile attitude
towards bottom posters, I note in passing.

A. Of course!
Q. Do you start novels at the back page?

Sounds pretty infantile to me.

 

[Bent C Dalager]

[Top-posting fixed]

Wow. It's readable now. Magic!

That would be because while top posting is incredibly annoying, bottom
posting is not.

Cheers
Bent D

 

[Roedy Green]

That coding is a tedious formality only;

I suggest you expose yourself to Forth. It is not just Algol with the
semicolons rearranged. It is a totally different way of thinking
about computer problem solving.

 

[Roedy Green]

Pinker's just as
pretty as genetic endowment can make one

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker/images/pinker200.jpg

I gather you are suffering from envious follicles.

 

[ghl]

Roedy,

interesting, thanks!

Hans-Georg

And in response to Roedy:
In 1975-77 I worked at PTM Interconnection, that controls power distribution
in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. We were writing the drivers for
4-color touch screen monitors used to open and close switches, rev
generators, etc. and fail-safe systems for the power system control. Our
digital system was replacing an old analog system.

There was a large football field wall that had all the circuits and stations
on it in lights that showed the transmission flows, on/off line status of
generators, etc. The other wall had the 60 cycle meter. I was there during
the previous-to-this-one blackout of NY. WE cut away from the system and
Philly was not blacked out.
Anyway, I had a boss that used to say "Someday we will just talk to the
computer and tell it what we want and it will do it. And we are halfway
there! We can TELL it what we want."

As far as I can tell, we are STILL halfway there. I despair that we will
ever get all the way there. When I worked in language translation (1956-62)
I left that field because of a comment Dr. Victor Yngve (Yale) made in one
of his books (quoting a contention of Bar-Hillel in a paper in 1960).
Without developing an interpreting system with gestalt, a computer will
never be able to parse and understand the different meanings of an identical
semantic structure that is easy for a human to understand. He gave as an
example the two sentences "The pen is in the box." and "The box is in the
pen." Then contention was that the meaning of the word "pen" could not be
determined by computer without a vast encyclopedic store.

I wish (sometimes) that I had stayed with language translation, but I think
it still hasn't gotten anywhere, and probably for the same reason pointed
out by Yngve/Bar-Hillel. The formal syntax of languages like Java eliminate
the need for an "understanding" of what we want. Even the context sensitive
syntax of PL/I was a mess and a failure.

Because of this, I don't mind following strict program language syntax, and
I shiver a little every time I hear of some effort to make the language
"intuitive" and able to compile "what I mean" rather than exactly what I
say. Even optimizers scare me a little; but I usually trust them. Whenever I
had trouble with optimizers it was because I was trying to "bend" the system
a little and rely too much on a specific operating system or engineering
level of machine. I learned to stop doing that.

And now that I'm "perfect" I can't get a job. It's all fled to India via
internet, done by imported cheap labor, and evaporated with the dot-com
bubble. Good thing I'm about at that retirement age, even though I didn't
want to retire. In poverty.

 

[Airy R Bean]

Misquoting corrected.....

[Top-posting fixed]

That is your prerogative. But it seems a strange way of being intolerant
to your fellow men. Top posters do not have this infantile attitude
towards bottom posters, I note in passing.

 

[Airy R Bean]

No.

Forth is an emulation of an assembly language, and very
closely matches the architecture of the English Electric KDF-9
whose design predated Forth by some years.

Forth is particularly bad because your coded version of a simple
arithmetical expression may contain numerous syntactical
and register-affecting errors and still pass compilation in a
manner that other HLL will reject at the compilation stage.

It _IS_ very much an assembly language because of the way
in which the programmer has direct program control of the
registers of the interpreted machine.

It is not, however, a totally different way of thinking about
computer problem solving. When you have designed your
program and come to code it, you have the same elemental
operations available to you as in other HLL, except in a more
primitive and error-prone way.

 

[Airy R Bean]

From 74 to 78 I worked on similar systems for the
CEGB in Britland, controlling lines and protection on the
pylon lines emanating from the Walpole St Andrew Supergrid
substation in Eat Anglia.

 

[dan michaels]

(PS. Have you read the one about the handsome cognitivist and the wicked
behaviorist?)

I suspect this would be Steven Pinker and J.B Watson. Pinker's just as
pretty as genetic endowment can make one, and a 41 YO Watson
impregnated his 19 YO lab assistant. The union got Watson kicked out
of academia [and into a career in advertising - ha!], and also
resulted in a kid named Albert, who Watson named after his favorite
lab rat.

[.. or did you really mean Chomsky and Skinner, in Fodor's Precis on
Modularity? My examples are much better than Fodor's, obviously]

You'd just better keep reading your Fodor references.

The grim specter of unintended consequences ... eg, your 19 YO lab
assistant getting preggers. Wicked, wicked.

Gotcha.

 

[dan michaels]

(PS. Have you read the one about the handsome cognitivist and the wicked
behaviorist?)

I suspect this would be Steven Pinker and J.B Watson. Pinker's just as
pretty as genetic endowment can make one, and a 41 YO Watson
impregnated his 19 YO lab assistant. The union got Watson kicked out
of academia [and into a career in advertising - ha!], and also
resulted in a kid named Albert, who Watson named after his favorite
lab rat.

[.. or did you really mean Chomsky and Skinner, in Fodor's Precis on
Modularity? My examples are much better than Fodor's, obviously]

You'd just better keep reading your Fodor references.

The grim specter of unintended consequences ... eg, your 19 YO lab
assistant getting preggers. Wicked, wicked.

Gotcha.

 

[rkm]

If my newsreader had a flag that would cause it to
automatically scroll to the bottom, then I would agree with
you. As it is, I find it extremely annoying to have to
scroll past everyone's incessant pasting of previous posts
just so I can get to the next piece of the conversation.

We're having a conversation right? Or is this one of those
religious wars?
Rick

[Top-posting fixed]

Wow. It's readable now. Magic!


That would be because while top posting is incredibly annoying, bottom
posting is not.

Cheers
Bent D

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Misquoting corrected.....

[Top-posting fixed]

That is your prerogative. But it seems a strange way of being
intolerant to your fellow men. Top posters do not have this infantile
attitude towards bottom posters, I note in passing.

Airy R Bean wrote:
ignored due to persistent top-posting.

I didn't misquote you. In my reply, I moved your words underneath the words
to which they were replying. That is not a misquotation. It is mere
redaction, and intelligent redaction at that. You, however, misquoted me,
for you said "Richard Heathfield wrote", and then did not quote anything
that I had added to the discussion. Please get your attributions correct
and your articles in proper order in future, if you wish to be taken
seriously. If you don't wish to be taken seriously, that works for me. I
have a killfile around here somewhere.

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

Anyway, I had a boss that used to say "Someday we will just talk to the
computer and tell it what we want and it will do it. And we are halfway
there! We can TELL it what we want."

As far as I can tell, we are STILL halfway there. I despair that we will
ever get all the way there.

We'll be half way there for a little more time, then there will
suddenly be rapid progress. This will happen when computers
approach and likely supersede the performance and ultimately the
intelligence of the human brain. I guess it will happen around
2020, but I could be off by up to 10 years.

He gave as an
example the two sentences "The pen is in the box." and "The box is in the
pen." Then contention was that the meaning of the word "pen" could not be
determined by computer without a vast encyclopedic store.

a) Future computers will have that vast encyclopedic store.
Actually, in a way they have it even today. Entire libraries are
already stored in computers. As soon as they begin to make sense
of written human language, they can begin to make use of that
huge store.

b) For the purpose of programming, the computer could ask back
what was meant and offer the possibilities it has already
recognized.

Hans-Georg

 

[Airy R Bean]

And therefore you misquoted. You presented under the
envelope of your quoting symbol, ">", a re-organised
version of what I had sent, and then tried to claim that that
was what I sent. You misquoted, in fact.

Misquoting corrected.....

[Top-posting fixed]
Airy R Bean wrote:
That is your prerogative. But it seems a strange way of being
intolerant to your fellow men. Top posters do not have this infantile
attitude towards bottom posters, I note in passing.
Airy R Bean wrote:
ignored due to persistent top-posting.

I didn't misquote you. In my reply, I moved your words underneath the words
to which they were replying.

 

[Airy R Bean]

WRONG! I quoted your line, "[Top-posting fixed]", as that was
to what I was replying.

If you concentrate on what I quoted from you, which you have
also quoted back to me, rather than concentrating on rather silly
childish spates of ridiculousness, perhaps we can get back on
track to topics relevant to the NG?

Misquoting corrected.....

[Top-posting fixed]
Airy R Bean wrote:
That is your prerogative. But it seems a strange way of being
intolerant to your fellow men. Top posters do not have this infantile
attitude towards bottom posters, I note in passing.
Airy R Bean wrote:
ignored due to persistent top-posting.

....You, however, misquoted me,
for you said "Richard Heathfield wrote", and then did not quote anything
that I had added to the discussion

 

[Roedy Green]

This will happen when computers
approach and likely supersede the performance and ultimately the
intelligence of the human brain.

Every time we solve a problem, e.g. playing chess, we say "Oh that was
just a cheap trick. That does not count as intelligence."

I have a conjecture, that human intelligence is a collection of no
more than 5 basic cheap tricks. It evolved so quickly I don't think it
ran really be all that big a deal above the intelligence of the
bonobo.

Strangely, tasks like designing high voltage transmission lines which
required engineers with PhDs and Masters degrees cracked first.
Chess, the egghead game came next.

Driving trains is now done. Next will be driving buses and taxis.

Voice activated everything can't be that far off. That way you can
pack arbitrary complexity into a very tiny package. Toasters for the
deaf can be found in thrift stores.


Something I have thought would be interesting would be a composition
program that just noodled away and monitored your pleasure via various
brain or bodily sensors. It might somehow gradually learn to compose
music that you liked, or draw pornographic cartoons you found
irresistible.

 

[ghl]

Every time we solve a problem, e.g. playing chess, we say "Oh that was
just a cheap trick. That does not count as intelligence."

I have a conjecture, that human intelligence is a collection of no
more than 5 basic cheap tricks. It evolved so quickly I don't think it
ran really be all that big a deal above the intelligence of the
bonobo.

Maybe less than 5, Roedy. Maybe one -- recognition of patterns. Humor seems
to spring out of the sudden unexpected shift of pattern (Arthur Koestler).
Humans are just pattern recognizing machines.

 

[rkm]

Something I have thought would be interesting would be a composition
program that just noodled away and monitored your pleasure via various
brain or bodily sensors. It might somehow gradually learn to compose
music that you liked, or draw pornographic cartoons you found
irresistible.

Are you equating that to intelligence? The computer would
be relying on the human's response to tell it which of it's
noodlings were good. So ultimately, it has no judgement of
its own, which is a serious deficit in any measure of
intelligence.

 

[Alfred Einstead]

Implementation language is *highly* relevant to which ideas can be
effectively represented.

Actually, the opposite -- by a famous result in Kolomogorov complexity
theory. Implementaiton language is almost TOTALLY irrelevant in the
strict sense that anything of size sA in language A can be rendered
as of size sB in language B such that |sA-sB| < delta, where delta
is a fixed (and generally, fairly small) constant, independent of
the items in question.

This is true as long as both A and B are Turing complete languages.

An upper bound for delta is, for instance, the size of an interpreter
in language B for language A. But delta can be quite a lot smaller
than that.

Even for assembly language (which is not Turing complete, because of
its explicit address and word lengths), experience proves that the
size-equivalence in size still tends to hold. Most translations I
do in either direction, the assembly and C generally come out to
around the same size. (Not too much a concidence, considering my
assembly looks like C and I use assemblers that allow multiple
entries per line, etc.)

 

[Richard Heathfield]

(This is certainly true, and consequently AI has an impossible marketing job
on its hands.)

Maybe less than 5, Roedy. Maybe one -- recognition of patterns. Humor
seems to spring out of the sudden unexpected shift of pattern (Arthur
Koestler). Humans are just pattern recognizing machines.

Humans are very good at recognising patterns, but they are not /just/
pattern recognising machines, unless you define the concept of pattern
recognition so widely as to make it useless.