Stubbornness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow.
- Glen Seaman
- Glen Seaman
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
TripAdvisor Garners Rave Reviews for New Ethical Policies
TripAdvisor—the world’s largest travel site—has announced that it will no longer sell tickets to animal “attractions,” including elephant rides, tiger encounters, and “swim with dolphins” excursions, that put wild and endangered animals (and travelers!) at risk.
It is also working with PETA and other partners to launch a new education portal that will help inform travelers about animal-welfare concerns and issues.
TripAdvisor has long prohibited listing or posting reviews of blood sports such as bullfights and canned hunts.
- More Here
It is also working with PETA and other partners to launch a new education portal that will help inform travelers about animal-welfare concerns and issues.
TripAdvisor has long prohibited listing or posting reviews of blood sports such as bullfights and canned hunts.
- More Here
Now Is The Best Time To Be Alive - President Obama
And as I meet with these young people, I can’t help but wonder what might be next—what might happen at a White House Science Fair in five years or 20 years or 50 years? I imagine a student who grows an artificial pancreas right in front of the president—an idea that eventually eliminates waiting lists for lifesaving organs. I imagine the girls who discover a new fuel based on only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide; the teenager who makes voting and civic activism as addictive as scrolling through your Twitter feed; the boy from Idaho who grows potatoes from a plot of soil brought back from our colony on Mars. And I imagine some future president strolling out on the South Lawn with a student who invented a new kind of telescope. As the president looks through the lens, the girl turns the telescope to a planet she just discovered, orbiting a faraway star at the very edge of our galaxy. Then she says she’s hard at work on another invention—one that will take us there someday.
- More Here
- More Here
Quote of the Day
The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
- Henry Miller
- Henry Miller
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Quote of the Day
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
- Aldous Huxley
- Aldous Huxley
Monday, October 10, 2016
When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence
In the weeks after Mazurenko’s death, friends debated the best way to preserve his memory. One person suggested making a coffee-table book about his life, illustrated with photography of his legendary parties. Another friend suggested a memorial website. To Kuyda, every suggestion seemed inadequate.
As she grieved, Kuyda found herself rereading the endless text messages her friend had sent her over the years — thousands of them, from the mundane to the hilarious. She smiled at Mazurenko’s unconventional spelling — he struggled with dyslexia — and at the idiosyncratic phrases with which he peppered his conversation. Mazurenko was mostly indifferent to social media — his Facebook page was barren, he rarely tweeted, and he deleted most of his photos on Instagram. His body had been cremated, leaving her no grave to visit. Texts and photos were nearly all that was left of him, Kuyda thought.
For two years she had been building Luka, whose first product was a messenger app for interacting with bots. Backed by the prestigious Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, the company began with a bot for making restaurant reservations. Kuyda’s co-founder, Philip Dudchuk, has a degree in computational linguistics, and much of their team was recruited from Yandex, the Russian search giant.
Reading Mazurenko’s messages, it occurred to Kuyda that they might serve as the basis for a different kind of bot — one that mimicked an individual person’s speech patterns. Aided by a rapidly developing neural network, perhaps she could speak with her friend once again.
She set aside for a moment the questions that were already beginning to nag at her.
What if it didn’t sound like him?
What if it did?
[---]
Two weeks before Mazurenko was killed, Google released TensorFlow for free under an open-source license. TensorFlow is a kind of Google in a box — a flexible machine-learning system that the company uses to do everything from improve search algorithms to write captions for YouTube videos automatically. The product of decades of academic research and billions of dollars in private investment was suddenly available as a free software library that anyone could download from GitHub.
Luka had been using TensorFlow to build neural networks for its restaurant bot. Using 35 million lines of English text, Luka trained a bot to understand queries about vegetarian dishes, barbecue, and valet parking. On a lark, the 15-person team had also tried to build bots that imitated television characters. It scraped the closed captioning on every episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley and trained the neural network to mimic Richard, Bachman, and the rest of the gang.
In February, Kuyda asked her engineers to build a neural network in Russian. At first she didn’t mention its purpose, but given that most of the team was Russian, no one asked questions. Using more than 30 million lines of Russian text, Luka built its second neural network. Meanwhile, Kuyda copied hundreds of her exchanges with Mazurenko from the app Telegram and pasted them into a file. She edited out a handful of messages that she believed would be too personal to share broadly. Then Kuyda asked her team for help with the next step: training the Russian network to speak in Mazurenko’s voice.
The project was tangentially related to Luka’s work, though Kuyda considered it a personal favor. (An engineer told her that the project would only take about a day.) Mazurenko was well-known to most of the team — he had worked out of Luka’s Moscow office, where the employees labored beneath a neon sign that quoted Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Kuyda trained the bot with dozens of tests queries, and her engineers put on the finishing touches.
Only a small percentage of the Roman bot’s responses reflected his actual words. But the neural network was tuned to favor his speech whenever possible. Any time the bot could respond to a query using Mazurenko’s own words, it would. Other times it would default to the generic Russian. After the bot blinked to life, she began peppering it with questions.
Who’s your best friend?, she asked.
Don’t show your insecurities, came the reply.
It sounds like him, she thought.
- More Here
As she grieved, Kuyda found herself rereading the endless text messages her friend had sent her over the years — thousands of them, from the mundane to the hilarious. She smiled at Mazurenko’s unconventional spelling — he struggled with dyslexia — and at the idiosyncratic phrases with which he peppered his conversation. Mazurenko was mostly indifferent to social media — his Facebook page was barren, he rarely tweeted, and he deleted most of his photos on Instagram. His body had been cremated, leaving her no grave to visit. Texts and photos were nearly all that was left of him, Kuyda thought.
For two years she had been building Luka, whose first product was a messenger app for interacting with bots. Backed by the prestigious Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, the company began with a bot for making restaurant reservations. Kuyda’s co-founder, Philip Dudchuk, has a degree in computational linguistics, and much of their team was recruited from Yandex, the Russian search giant.
Reading Mazurenko’s messages, it occurred to Kuyda that they might serve as the basis for a different kind of bot — one that mimicked an individual person’s speech patterns. Aided by a rapidly developing neural network, perhaps she could speak with her friend once again.
She set aside for a moment the questions that were already beginning to nag at her.
What if it didn’t sound like him?
What if it did?
[---]
Two weeks before Mazurenko was killed, Google released TensorFlow for free under an open-source license. TensorFlow is a kind of Google in a box — a flexible machine-learning system that the company uses to do everything from improve search algorithms to write captions for YouTube videos automatically. The product of decades of academic research and billions of dollars in private investment was suddenly available as a free software library that anyone could download from GitHub.
Luka had been using TensorFlow to build neural networks for its restaurant bot. Using 35 million lines of English text, Luka trained a bot to understand queries about vegetarian dishes, barbecue, and valet parking. On a lark, the 15-person team had also tried to build bots that imitated television characters. It scraped the closed captioning on every episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley and trained the neural network to mimic Richard, Bachman, and the rest of the gang.
In February, Kuyda asked her engineers to build a neural network in Russian. At first she didn’t mention its purpose, but given that most of the team was Russian, no one asked questions. Using more than 30 million lines of Russian text, Luka built its second neural network. Meanwhile, Kuyda copied hundreds of her exchanges with Mazurenko from the app Telegram and pasted them into a file. She edited out a handful of messages that she believed would be too personal to share broadly. Then Kuyda asked her team for help with the next step: training the Russian network to speak in Mazurenko’s voice.
The project was tangentially related to Luka’s work, though Kuyda considered it a personal favor. (An engineer told her that the project would only take about a day.) Mazurenko was well-known to most of the team — he had worked out of Luka’s Moscow office, where the employees labored beneath a neon sign that quoted Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Kuyda trained the bot with dozens of tests queries, and her engineers put on the finishing touches.
Only a small percentage of the Roman bot’s responses reflected his actual words. But the neural network was tuned to favor his speech whenever possible. Any time the bot could respond to a query using Mazurenko’s own words, it would. Other times it would default to the generic Russian. After the bot blinked to life, she began peppering it with questions.
Who’s your best friend?, she asked.
Don’t show your insecurities, came the reply.
It sounds like him, she thought.
- More Here
Quote of the Day
I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that's your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Malcolm Gladwell
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Does Trump's Rise Mean Liberalism's End? - Yuval Noah Harari
But history has not come to an end, and following the Franz Ferdinand moment, the Hitler moment, and the Che Guevara moment we now find ourselves in the Trump moment. This time, however, the Liberal Story is not faced by a coherent ideological opponent like imperialism, fascism, or Communism. The Trump moment is a nihilistic burlesque. Donald Trump has no ideology to speak of, just as the British Brexiteers have no real plan for the future of the Disunited Kingdom.
On the one hand, this may imply that the present crisis of faith is less severe than its predecessors. At the end of the day, people won’t abandon the Liberal Story, because they don’t have any alternative. They may give the system an angry kick but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.
Alternatively, people may look further back and seek shelter with other stories, traditional nationalist and religious tales that have been pushed to the side in the twentieth century but never completely abandoned. This is arguably what has happened in places like the Middle East, where nationalist extremism and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. However, for all their sound and fury, movements such as the Islamic State don’t offer any serious alternative to the Liberal Story, because they don’t have any answers to the big questions of our era.
What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of an enormous new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families, and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty? What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open even larger gaps between the rich and poor? You are unlikely to find the answers to any of these questions in the Bible or the Koran. Radical Islam, Orthodox Judaism, or fundamentalist Christianity may promise an anchor of certainty in a world of technological and economic storms, but in order to navigate the coming twenty-first-century tsunami, you will need a good map and a strong rudder, as well.
The same is true for slogans such as “Make America Great Again” or “Give Us Back Our Country.” You can build a wall against Mexican immigrants but not against global warming; you can cut Westminster from Brussels but you cannot cut the City of London from global financial currents. If people cling in desperation to outdated national and religious identities, the global system may simply collapse in the face of climate change, economic crisis, and technological disruption that nineteenth-century nationalist myths and medieval piety can neither fathom nor solve.
Mainstream élites therefore look in horror at events such as Brexit and the rise of Trump, and hope that the masses will come to their senses and return to the fold of the Liberal Story in time to avert disaster. But it might be much harder for the Liberal Story to survive the current crisis of confidence, because the traditional alliance between liberal ethics and capitalist economics that has long underpinned the Liberal Story may be unravelling. During the twentieth century, the Liberal Story was immensely attractive because it told people and governments that they don’t have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the smart thing; protecting human liberties was both a moral imperative and the key to economic growth. Britain, France, and the United States allegedly prospered because they liberalized their economies and societies, and if Turkey, Brazil, or China wanted to become equally prosperous they had to do the same. In most cases, it was the economic rather than the moral argument that convinced tyrants and juntas to liberalize.
In the twenty-first century, however, the Liberal Story has no good answers to the biggest challenges we face: global warming and technological disruption. As the masses lose their economic importance to algorithms and robots, protecting human liberties may remain morally justified—but will the moral arguments alone be enough? Will élites and governments go on valuing the liberties and wishes of every human being even when it pays no economic dividends to do so? The masses are right to fear for their future. Even if Donald Trump loses the coming election, millions of Americans have a gut feeling that the system no longer works for them, and they are probably correct.
- More Here
On the one hand, this may imply that the present crisis of faith is less severe than its predecessors. At the end of the day, people won’t abandon the Liberal Story, because they don’t have any alternative. They may give the system an angry kick but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.
Alternatively, people may look further back and seek shelter with other stories, traditional nationalist and religious tales that have been pushed to the side in the twentieth century but never completely abandoned. This is arguably what has happened in places like the Middle East, where nationalist extremism and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. However, for all their sound and fury, movements such as the Islamic State don’t offer any serious alternative to the Liberal Story, because they don’t have any answers to the big questions of our era.
What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of an enormous new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families, and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty? What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open even larger gaps between the rich and poor? You are unlikely to find the answers to any of these questions in the Bible or the Koran. Radical Islam, Orthodox Judaism, or fundamentalist Christianity may promise an anchor of certainty in a world of technological and economic storms, but in order to navigate the coming twenty-first-century tsunami, you will need a good map and a strong rudder, as well.
The same is true for slogans such as “Make America Great Again” or “Give Us Back Our Country.” You can build a wall against Mexican immigrants but not against global warming; you can cut Westminster from Brussels but you cannot cut the City of London from global financial currents. If people cling in desperation to outdated national and religious identities, the global system may simply collapse in the face of climate change, economic crisis, and technological disruption that nineteenth-century nationalist myths and medieval piety can neither fathom nor solve.
Mainstream élites therefore look in horror at events such as Brexit and the rise of Trump, and hope that the masses will come to their senses and return to the fold of the Liberal Story in time to avert disaster. But it might be much harder for the Liberal Story to survive the current crisis of confidence, because the traditional alliance between liberal ethics and capitalist economics that has long underpinned the Liberal Story may be unravelling. During the twentieth century, the Liberal Story was immensely attractive because it told people and governments that they don’t have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the smart thing; protecting human liberties was both a moral imperative and the key to economic growth. Britain, France, and the United States allegedly prospered because they liberalized their economies and societies, and if Turkey, Brazil, or China wanted to become equally prosperous they had to do the same. In most cases, it was the economic rather than the moral argument that convinced tyrants and juntas to liberalize.
In the twenty-first century, however, the Liberal Story has no good answers to the biggest challenges we face: global warming and technological disruption. As the masses lose their economic importance to algorithms and robots, protecting human liberties may remain morally justified—but will the moral arguments alone be enough? Will élites and governments go on valuing the liberties and wishes of every human being even when it pays no economic dividends to do so? The masses are right to fear for their future. Even if Donald Trump loses the coming election, millions of Americans have a gut feeling that the system no longer works for them, and they are probably correct.
- More Here
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Wisdom Of The Week
COWEN: Which of our current practices or views will in the more distant future seem crazy, or just outright wrong? To ask the Chuck Klosterman question..
KLEIN: Sure. How we treat animals. I think that how we treat animals, particularly around factory farming, and factory dairy production, etc., will be a genuine moral blight on this era. And particularly on this era, because we’re at this point now where we’re beginning to get very, very good at creating plant-based meats, and increasingly we’re moving towards lab-grown meats. We’re about to have a bunch of technological changes that will make eating very little meat or no meat, at least no factory-farmed meat, pretty easy and pretty affordable..
That tends to be something that comes along with big changes in morality. One of the ways I think about this is that I remember reading Ron Chernow’s Washington, the biography of Washington which is great. I remember being surprised by the way the Founding Fathers talked about slavery in their letters to each other. It was very much the in-vogue thing to be against slavery..
They all in their letters talked about it as a moral blight, and may it be gone from the Earth in 50 years, and the stain on this great nation, but they all just also had slaves, with the exception obviously of Hamilton. There was something in that, in that they knew it was wrong, they knew they wanted it to stop, but it was just really hard to stop it at the time. It’s how the economy worked: they already had them, and they not just kept them but added more..
Looking back, it’s unconscionable, but when I talk to virtually anyone I know, I don’t know anybody that defends factory farming as a moral part of our society. I don’t know anybody. You might hear it in reference to much poorer countries, but not to this one. So we are running around knowing that we’re causing immense, tremendous suffering to sentient beings, and I don’t know, it’s a pain in the ass to eat less meat. I think it’s going to look really bad.
-Ezra Klein on Media, Politics, and Models of the World - This is not exactly "Wisdom Of The Week" but an immense satisfaction that more people are thinking about this horror we create.
KLEIN: Sure. How we treat animals. I think that how we treat animals, particularly around factory farming, and factory dairy production, etc., will be a genuine moral blight on this era. And particularly on this era, because we’re at this point now where we’re beginning to get very, very good at creating plant-based meats, and increasingly we’re moving towards lab-grown meats. We’re about to have a bunch of technological changes that will make eating very little meat or no meat, at least no factory-farmed meat, pretty easy and pretty affordable..
That tends to be something that comes along with big changes in morality. One of the ways I think about this is that I remember reading Ron Chernow’s Washington, the biography of Washington which is great. I remember being surprised by the way the Founding Fathers talked about slavery in their letters to each other. It was very much the in-vogue thing to be against slavery..
They all in their letters talked about it as a moral blight, and may it be gone from the Earth in 50 years, and the stain on this great nation, but they all just also had slaves, with the exception obviously of Hamilton. There was something in that, in that they knew it was wrong, they knew they wanted it to stop, but it was just really hard to stop it at the time. It’s how the economy worked: they already had them, and they not just kept them but added more..
Looking back, it’s unconscionable, but when I talk to virtually anyone I know, I don’t know anybody that defends factory farming as a moral part of our society. I don’t know anybody. You might hear it in reference to much poorer countries, but not to this one. So we are running around knowing that we’re causing immense, tremendous suffering to sentient beings, and I don’t know, it’s a pain in the ass to eat less meat. I think it’s going to look really bad.
-Ezra Klein on Media, Politics, and Models of the World - This is not exactly "Wisdom Of The Week" but an immense satisfaction that more people are thinking about this horror we create.
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