Before I launch into my reaction to these all to common predictions that AI is right around the corner and will take all of our jobs, let me establish my own credentials. Hey, anyone can have an opinion, but like everyone else, I think my opinion is better!Bob points out that AI has been riding the Gartner Hype Cycle for a long time. In last summer's Gartner summary, they put it near the peak. For the third time.
I have worked in what many would call the field of Artificial Intelligence. I made the largest return I’ve ever made selling one of my 6 Venture Capital Startups to another company. The technology we built was able to automatically test software.
One of the marketing gurus doing AI demos says "all we gotta do" is wait for computers that are about 100,000 times faster than what we have, and then overstates Moore's law to say we'll have them in 25 years. If computers get twice as fast every two years (and the actual clock speeds plateaued around 2006 and aren't going up, but let's ignore that and say we get twice as fast due to architectural improvements) that takes 17 cycles or 34 years for computers to get 100,000 times faster. It's gonna be a long time before we have Hal "open the pod bay doors". Besides, I have evidence Moore's Law died in 2012 so we may never get there.
- Medical diagnosis better than what human doctors could do. See Mycin for prescribing antibiotics, for example. It was claimed to be better than human doctors at its job but never saw actual use.
- All manner of vision and manipulation. Blocks? So what. Driving cars? Yeah right. Turn ‘em loose against a New York cabbie and we’ll see how they do. The challenge for autonomous vehicles has always been the people, not the terrain.
No matter how many autonomous cars drive across the dessert (talk about the easiest possible terrain), they’re nowhere until they can deal with stupid carbon units, i.e. People, without killing them or creating liability through property damage.
By the way, despite awarding numerous prizes of one million dollars and up, so far the DARPA Grand Challenge has failed to meet the goal Congress set for it when it awarded funding–to get 1/3 of all military vehicles to be autonomous by 2015. But the demos sure are sweet!
- Computers have been solving mathematical theorems for ages. In some cases they even generate better proofs than the humans. Cool. But if they’re so good, why haven’t they already pushed mathematics ahead by centuries? Something is not quite right with a demo that can only solve theorems already solved and little else.
- Oooh, yeah, computers are beating chess masters! Sure, but not in any way that remotely resembles how people play chess. They are simply able to consider more positions. That and the fact that their style of play is just odd and offputing to humans is why they win. What good is it? One source claims Deep Blue cost IBM $100 million.
When are those algorithms doing to genuinely add $1 billion to IBM’s bottom line? Building still more specialized computers to beat humans at Jeopardy or Go is just creating more demos that solve no useful problems and do so in ways that humans don’t. Show me the AI System that starts from nothing and can learn to beat any human at any game in less than a year and I will admit I have seen Deep Skynet.
So we need artificial brains that are 100,000 times more powerful. In essence, we can compare today’s AI to brains the size of what cockroaches have. Yet, we’re worried they’re going to take all of our jobs.Decades ago, I read about a drug company that trained pigeons to be Quality Control inspectors on their production lines. The gelatin capsules coming off the production line would sometimes stick together, so you'd get two tops or two bottoms stuck in each other. The production inspectors would watch the molding machine's output on something like a conveyor belt and pick out the defective gelatin caps. The humans would get bored with such a menial task, their attention would wander, and defective capsules would get through. The pigeons found it interesting enough that they paid more attention. As a result, the pigeons were actually better inspectors than the humans - they found 99% of the bad capsules. The only reason they didn't make the pigeons permanent inspectors after this experiment? They were afraid what the competition would say about them if they discovered they were using pigeons.
Are you in a job that a cockroach could do? I hope not.
So far, I am not aware of anyone having harnessed cockroaches to do their bidding, but they are cheap, plentiful, and just as smart as today’s AI’s. Maybe smarter if their brains are quantum computers too.
Maybe it would be cheaper to spend billions learning how to make cockroaches useful?
I don’t know, but we don’t even seem to be able to make much smarter animals useful. Are there dogs running machinery somewhere in China? Is a particularly adept German Shepherd behind the latest quant trading engine on Wall Street?
Nope.
William Bossert, legendary Harvard professor, summed it up by saying, “If you’re afraid that you might be replaced by a computer, you probably can be—and probably should be.” While it may not be comforting, it could be a wakeup call for continued education.
The income tax has been slashed so many times since 1981 that it’s no longer a broad based societal tax; it’s a kind of luxury tax on upper income salary earners and the small share of households which garner most of the capital income from dividends, interest payments and capital gains…Stockman went on to point out that 60% of tax filers accounted for 5% of tax revenue. In addition, 35% of tax filers – more than 52 million filers at the bottom and middle of the income ladder – didn’t pay a single dime of taxes after deductions, exemptions and credits. I think Stockman was sloppy with his wording in saying, "the income tax has been slashed so many times". Tax rates go up and down regularly. I think he means the number of people paying income tax has been slashed.
"We are actually unique in the world in the way we discourage capital from coming back to America and how we incentivize off-shoring jobs," ... "This is not the kind of exceptionalism we should aspire to ..."The overall progressive structure of the tax code doesn't change. We still penalize success. We have "sin taxes" on booze and tobacco to discourage their use. And we have our highest tax rate on our highest earners to discourage success.
Why? Because the activist Left has despised the NFL for years. They hate everything about it. It’s a game filled with big, tough, manly men engaging in the closest thing to warfare you can manage without guns. It’s a game rife with symbolism and, yes… nationalism. Even people who would never buy an album from a country singer could feel their blood heating up when Hank Williams used to sing, Are you Ready for Some Football. The military loves football and they fly jets over the stadiums in formation and send our nation’s finest out to pay tribute. And it’s not just the military. Our police and other first responders are frequently called out for honors at the games. Everything about it screams of apple pie, fireworks and patriotism. (Or, if you prefer, God, guns and flags.) And the activist Left hates it. Probably the only sporting event they despise more is NASCAR.If I watch football, it's for escapism. I want to avoid politics, and to see really good athletes do things very few people can do. Avoiding the annoying politics is very easy. I record the game and start watching an hour or two after the start. I fast forward until the kickoff and miss the protest. If the announcers talk about it, I either mute the audio or fast forward a little bit. I fast forward through all the commercials, too, so I never really see any of them.
SELF DRIVE ... will allow companies to test up to 100,000 autonomous vehicles on regular roads, even if they don't meet current safety standards. What this legislation does is give companies researching and actively working on self-driving tech a chance to prove their technology is safe.Machine Design opines:
The need for these regulations is important so that all car manufacturers work against set standards. This way Tesla cannot make ADS vehicles that operate different from Ford, which could lead to accidents. In addition, in the absence of federal regulation, states have taken to creating their own laws for ADS vehicles. This could prevent self-driving cars from crossing state lines.Personally, I think this is a stupid argument. Why should industry need Washington to mandate that Tesla not make ADS vehicles that operate differently from Ford? It's like agreeing on specifications for modems: it's in everyone's best interest to come up with a set of standards everyone can live with; after all, look how successful electronics industry standards like RS-232 or Ethernet or about a zillion others work. In the world I used to work in, committees of representatives from all of the competitors would meet in "impartial NGOs" to iron out how aviation systems should work. In the auto industry, I don't know how it came to be, but having the same basic controls - the same basic User Interface - in every car has to help everyone. Now, could Tesla or Ford or someone else come up with a vehicle that meets all the industry group standard but has some other advantages to try to capture sales? Why not? What's wrong with a company trying for competitive advantage by offering something above and beyond the minimum requirements? I don't see why they want the heavy, clumsy hand of government.
The second part of the act allows car manufacturers to deploy 100,000 self-driving cars per year (25,000 for the first year the law would be enacted) that would be exempt from existing automobile safety standards. This is important for car manufacturers to design without needing certain safety features like a steering wheel or pedals, such as that for Google’s self-driving vehicles. The act is moving on to the Senate, where autonomous trucks might be added to the bill as well.The US Department of Transportation issued some guidelines for ADS development and testing. They eased requirements for safety equipment, so that these test cars are not legally required to have a steering wheel (I didn't know that was a law; I thought we needed one to make the car work).
At the gathering, Secretary Chao introduced the guidance document A Vision for Safety 2.0, released by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The guidance, according to Chao, “supports further development of this important new technology, which has the potential to change the way we travel and how we deliver goods and services.” According to the press release from NHTSA, the voluntary guidance will help car manufacturers with the following:
The guidance document outlines 12 safety elements that car manufacturers can follow to help design ADS vehicles. Some of the 12 safety elements highlighted by NHTSA are human-machine interfaces, crashworthiness, post-crash ADS behavior, data recording, and object/event detection and response. Click here for a PDF of the full guideline document.
- Focus on SAE International Levels of Automation 3-5 – Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) – Conditional, High, and Full Automation.
- Clarify the guidance process, and that entities need not wait to test or deploy their ADSs.
- Revise unnecessary design elements from the safety self-assessment.
- Align Federal Guidance with the latest developments and industry terminology.
- Clarify federal and state roles going forward.
Looking at that chart, we see that a new car doubled in price between 1990 and 2014. That's 24 years. Using the "rule of 72" that I learned in Econ 101, we can easily determine the average annual rate of inflation is 3%. This is also the official rate. I don't see the problem.Instead of arguing over whether real inflation is his 3% or closer to 9% like Shadowstats calculates (using the methods from 1980 instead of today's methods), I have a different approach. If you like the 1990 method better, Shadowstats provides that on the same link - using the 1990 method, inflation is closer to 5-1/2%, but again, even though either one of those numbers obliterates his argument, I don't want to go there. Where I want to go with this is to step back and ask, why should there be inflation at all? Why do we expect inflation? The Fed targets 2% inflation, what's a reasonable amount?
On average, workers born in 1942 earned as much or more over their careers as workers born in any year since, according to this research — and workers on the job today shouldn’t expect to catch up with their predecessors in their remaining years of employment.Workers born in 1942 were probably working for a living by 1960 to 1962, perhaps 1964. From the group of men that entered the labor market in 1967 to the group that entered in 1983, median lifetime income of men declined by 10%–19%. This problem has been going on for more than the 50 years back to 1967. Most people will say it's because of off-shoring or outsourcing jobs or blame it on the Evil Rich People. Bill Bonner had a good summary in a piece I quoted more than a year ago.
Most economists (and politicians) have blamed world trade for stagnant U.S. wages. The median wage in China is only $8 a day. No wonder U.S. factory hands can’t catch a break; who can compete with that?While the Germans and the French have a central bank, they're not working under the US Federal Reserve. Not having the so-called "Reserve Currency", perhaps their banks are required to be not quite as manipulative as ours, allowing some sanity.
But Germans compete with the Chinese, too. And their wages have gone up! In real terms, after adjusting for inflation, wages in France and Germany have been going up at a 0.7% rate for the past 15-20 years.
It's been replaced with two photonics masts that rotate 360 degrees. They feature high-resolution cameras whose images are displayed on large monitors that everyone in the control room can see. There's no barrel to peer through anymore; everything is controlled with a helicopter-style stick. But that stick isn't so popular.The stick is a system designed by defense giant Lockheed Martin - LockMart, as we call them - and it's a $38,000 box.
"The Navy got together and they asked a bunch of J.O.s and junior guys, 'What can we do to make your life better?' " said Lt. j.g. Kyle Leonard, the USS John Warner's assistant weapons officer, referring to junior officers and sailors. "And one of the things that came out is the controls for the scope. It's kind of clunky in your hand; it's real heavy."The solution? A video game controller, Microsoft's X-Box controller, something very similar to the Logitech Rumblepad that I just added to my CNC milling machine.
The Xbox controller is no different than the ones a lot of crew members grew up playing with. Lockheed Martin says the sailors who tested the controller at its lab were intuitively able to figure out how to use it on their own within minutes, compared to hours of training required for the joystick.
The Xbox controller also is significantly cheaper. The company says the photonic mast hand grip and imaging control panel that cost about $38,000 can now be replaced with an Xbox controller that typically costs less than $30.
The Navy says that the system has gone through extensive testing over the past two years and that the Xbox controller will be included as part of the integrated imaging system for Virginia-class subs beginning with the future USS Colorado, which is supposed to be commissioned by November.Just a nifty little story. Caught my eye because of the similarity to the hardware I've just started using.
The Gartner Consumer Trends in Automotive online survey, conducted from April 2017 through May 2017, and polled 1,519 people in the U.S. and Germany, found that 55 percent of respondents will not consider riding in a fully autonomous vehicle, while 71 percent may consider riding in a partially autonomous vehicle.It turns out people seem to have taken lessons from things like the Equifax data breach - along with so many others - to heart and are concerned about security along with the general category of "technology failures".
"Fear of autonomous vehicles getting confused by unexpected situations, safety concerns around equipment and system failures and vehicle and system security are top concerns around using fully autonomous vehicles," explains Mike Ramsey, research director at Gartner.Gartner isn't unique in finding this; AAA found similar results.
A new report from AAA reveals that the majority of U.S. drivers seek autonomous technologies in their next vehicle, but they continue to fear the fully self-driving car. Despite the prospect that autonomous vehicles will be safer, more efficient and more convenient than their human-driven counterparts, three-quarters of U.S. drivers report feeling afraid to ride in a self-driving car, and only 10 percent report that they’d actually feel safer sharing the roads with driverless vehicles.Three-quarters of drivers are afraid to ride in a self-driving car? That's quite a bit more than the 55% Gartner found, but those numbers are more like each other than not. There's a lot of anxiousness about the technology. Still, AAA reports that while the majority are afraid to ride in a fully self-driving vehicle, the survey also found that a bigger majority (59%) wants to have autonomous features in their next vehicle. This apparent contradiction suggests that drivers are ready to embrace autonomous technology, but they are not yet ready to give up full control. People are responding with a skeptical "prove to me it works" attitude.
Musk's fervent vision of a driverless world repeatedly clashed with his team's view on the progress of the technology. The dispute led Sterling Anderson, then Autopilot director, to resign just two months after the October announcement. Since his departure, at least 10 other engineers and four top managers -- including Chris Lattner, who had been selected as Anderson's replacement and lasted just six months on the job -- have also left.The team working on Tesla's Autopilot feature felt uneasy about marketing the technology as "fully autonomous." They felt they didn't yet have a product that could "safely and reliably control a car without human intervention." In other words, they felt like the 55 or 79% of consumers surveyed who didn't want to trust their lives to the self-driving cars.
This isn't the first time dissent among Tesla engineers has been reported. In July 2016, after a fatal crash killed a driver using the Autopilot function, CNN reported that several employees tried to warn Musk about the reliability of the technology, and that it wasn't ready to be deployed to consumers.
Glen Campbell first heard The Lone Ranger’s brisk theme song as a kid and vowed to learn it on guitar. Not only did he do just that, Campbell made the theme—an overture from the 1829 opera William Tell, by the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini—one of his signature numbers. He revisited it throughout his career, wowing audiences by playing it with casual ease, sometimes with the guitar on top of his head. [link added - SiG]I would never describe myself as a Glen Campbell fan and never thought of him as a virtuoso guitarist. In my mind, Glenn Campbell associates with his late '60s hits: Wichita Lineman, Galveston, By The Time I Get to Phoenix, and that's about all. Maybe the stereotype of country music: "three chords and the truth". That said, I find this an amazing performance. Not just the blazing speed, but the casual, almost carelessness he plays with. Virtually all guitarists, no matter how many years they've played, spend a lot of time watching their left hand on the neck. Glenn glances there, but looks around a lot, too. He seems to be talking to people out of the view of the camera.
NASA received its last data transmission from the Cassini spacecraft at 4:55:46 a.m. PDT (7:55:46 a.m. EDT, 1146 GMT) today (Sept. 15), before losing contact with the probe as it hurtled into Saturn's atmosphere. It was a fiery grand finale for the probe, which spent 13 years orbiting the ringed planet. NASA officials expect that Cassini broke apart about 45 seconds after that final transmission, due to the intense friction and heat generated by the fall.Properly called the Cassini-Huygens mission, the probe was a joint venture of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. It was launched in 1997 and arrived at the Saturn system in 2004. In 2005, the Huygens lander dropped onto the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, revealing the hidden world beneath its opaque, orange atmosphere. The Huygens lander detected lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, propane and some heavier compounds on Titan. Liquid methane boils to the more familiar (here!) gas at −161.49 °C or −258.68 °F. , so that gives you a perspective on just how cold it is there. The temperature at the landing site was 93.8 K (−179.3 °C; −290.8 °F).
Well, a new proposal says the “traffic lights” system – widely adopted on food and drink packaging since 2013 – should be migrated from individual items to entire receipts. Forget the problem of making it through checkout without impulse-buying three bags of bonbons and a copy of Heat! magazine; now it is about the half-price pizza catapulting your basket into “red” territory.Sheer madness. Let's start with the knowledge that there's no evidence that forcing restaurants to put calorie counts and nutrition summaries on menus does anything. In fact, the evidence is that the requirement to post nutrition counts makes work for restaurants and raises prices but consumers don't care. Now let's extrapolate to the grocery receipt. This is based on the assumption that what the buyer bought is eaten between grocery store trips as it came from the store, and not prepared into meals combined with other things they already have or buy elsewhere. The buyer could just as well be feeding friends, donating food, or storing it so that it's eaten over a longer length of time or at some time in the future. All of the nutritional guidelines are based on consuming a mix of foods in meals and the quality of the meal is based on comparison to standard daily intakes of some amount of food. There is simply no way to get that from a grocery list, unless everything that person buys is precooked meals from that store and that's all they ever eat.
“Instinctively, it seems like a good idea,” says Ed Morrow, campaigns manager at the Royal Society for Public Health. “If health information is just on the product, it’s easy to ignore, but if you get another reminder at the till you might start to compare receipts, see what you’ve scored each time, then try to do better. Doing things that gamify the experience of shopping can be a good motivator in terms of changing behaviour.” That is if you want your midweek trip to Tesco to be gamified: is this just 21st-century code for the nanny state? “It’s not telling people what to do,” Morrow says. “All it does is provide people with extra information.”
“What would be really interesting is if the retailers link it to algorithms set up for loyalty cards for those who want it,” says Taylor. “So, if a till receipt shows lots of reds, you might get vouchers to buy more veg. That’s when it could start to get really powerful. But let’s be clear: the whole food system has to work harder to make the easiest choices the healthy choices. That’s what needs to change.”No, Ms. Taylor. What needs to change is you. You need to go away.
After digging into the specs and extracting the measurements from the transmitted data it looks like the advisory intensity is purely based on a peak wind speed measurement over a 10 second interval at flight level between 2200-3000 m altitude. I found a decent paper on the measurement equipment aboard the aircraft from 2007 (http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Uhlhorn/MWR2007Uhlhorn.pdf) and thought some of their conclusions were interesting.What does it all mean? Beats the heck out of me! Here we have several lines of data showing that when winds are measured in the monster hurricane, it's not what's being described.
Prior to 2005 intensity was determined by a model that took the flight level winds and extrapolated 10m surface winds from those. In 2005 the planes were outfitted with an updated SFMR radar that measures the ocean surface emissivity which is correlated to surface wind speeds. Due to lots of tropical activity in 2005 the new radar was able to help derive a better physical model matching the readings with dropsonde data.
In their conclusions the earlier quadratic models consistently underestimated winds at speeds > 50 m/s (111 mph). They also found that earlier boundary layer models were underestimating winds in the eyewall by as much as 10% when compared to dropsonde readings.
So are the storms more intense because of increased SST or because of better models, higher frequency sampling, changes to peak measurements from 1 minute averages, and improvements in the sensor equipment?
...
If we look at the most recent Air Force data in Irma the peak flight level wind was 133 kts (153 mph) SFMR surface wind was 120 kts (138 mph) and same 88% linear adjustment would extrapolate 134 mph. NHC 11 pm advisory for Irma is 160 mph.
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