I view modern AI as a combination of things that are too early and too late - data science hasn't changed much since the 1990s, but people have a misconception that there is still a lot more to do in data science because of the undeserved excitement around deep learning.
Perhaps I've misunderstood your desire to be sarcastic, but I think your timeline is off. To give two concrete examples, Geman and Geman's "Stochastic Relaxation, Gibbs Distributions, and the Bayesian Restoration of Images" paper is from 1984 and Holland's "Statistics and Causal Inference" paper is from 1986.
Raising taxes is not the only way to improve public infrastructure. One can also lower the trade deficits, improve the technology the government uses, and legislate away some of the problems (jails would be less full if drug offenses didn't carry such harsh penalties). Taxation should only be tried when nothing else has worked. With 50% marginal income tax rates in many states, the US leans much more towards the communist than Randian side of the spectrum as it is.
> Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of light. Pretty much nothing else is practical.
What's your reasoning for this? You would only have to accelerate at 1g for 3 years to hit 99.5% of the speed of light. You can use an electromagnetic shield for dust. It seems conceivable that this will be possible eventually, even if warp drives are not possible.
Forgiving the problem of time dilation and the consequences it has on the expectations of conscious things...
You can't just accelerate 1g for 3 years. What are you burning? A chemical rocket can easily achieve 1g. For about 5 minutes. A nuclear rocket is great, you can get 1g easy enough, but you're shoving hot hydrogen out the back end to get that thrust.
The Rocket Equation teaches us that to get arbitrarily close to c, you need an exponential amount of your ship's mass to be propellant.
I recommend this website to everyone in this thread that hasn't read it yet
Edit: moreover, the problem of an EM deflector, or any kind of deflector, is that no matter what, no matter what, you must deal with the kinetic energy of the thing that just hit your deflector. It will (a) slow your ship down, and (b) cost you more energy, e.g. from your generator, to deflect it than it imparted on your vehicle. The energy numbers here are staggering. We have trouble theorizing how a relatively uncontrolled terawatt rocket might work, but imagine a terawatt reactor on your ship somehow powering a terawatt EMfield in front on your ship.
And then you have to worry about dust that's not charged and thus goes right through EM fields.
Indeed, and the benefit of traveling at 0.995 c is that a container of information doesn't suffer from degradation by the inverse square law as it travels over a large distance. It might actually cost less energy to transport information to far flung destinations that way, interstellar snail mail if you will. Some amount of information has to accompany the robot anyway, at the very least, its initial operating instructions.
Of course whoever can get there at 0.996 c can take advantage of a market arbitrage. ;-)
1kg matter at 0.1c has a kinetic energy of 4.5x10^14 J
It is certainly very expensive to spend this amount of energy. But is it also extremely challenging to even extract this out of an engine that has to accelerate itself.
1kg matter at 0.995c has a kinetic energy of 8x10^17 J
This is the amount of enery you get if you convert 9kg in pure enery. That seems impossible to reach, even with an anti matter drive.
A 9:1 ratio of fuel to mass doesn't sound particularly bad. Are there known theoretical limits to extracting the full E=mc^2 worth of energy from an object?
Good luck capturing and containing antimatter and feeding/containing the explosion though. It's going to be practically impossible to get a 90% fuel ratio from an antimatter reactor, since literally 45% of your ship will be antimatter, by mass.
You can also do this by feeding a black hole with ordinary matter and using Hawking radiation for propulsion. That is probably more practical than carrying around large quantities of antimatter.
If you watch PBS Spacetime on the 'Kugelblitz' idea, it seems that one way to go about it (over the course of a couple hundred years) would be to convert Mercury into a solar energy collecting swarm by use of Von Neumann probes and essentially harvest much of what the sun has to give. That kind of energy apparently would suffice to create tiny black holes (simply by redirecting enough energy to a focused point), which is I think the theoretically most efficient battery (or star system destroying bomb, depending on how you go about it...).
I... can't.... Half of me recoils in horror at the impracticality, but the other half of me has a good enough armchair sense for the practicality of a high fuel ratio antimatter rocket, so I can't say you're wrong :P
You need to accelerate the fuel as well. And for a reaction engine, you need to carry reaction mass that you accelerate. And at some point you want to decelerate again.
Would be interesting to see whether this is at least theoretically feasible.
> But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don't write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible... this author still working on it...), speaking publicly.
I would be careful with this point. Young people who don't have great social skills already tend to feel that they are somehow missing out on something important. But those who have good social skills in our culture will have a hard time forming new and unique ideas, and will often get talked into believing big, fundamental ideas that are wrong or crazy. I'd compare it to being a smoker in the 1960s. In exchange for being cooler, you suffer irreducible risk, that is made more dangerous by the fact that few people realize it's there. Until our culture changes, it's probably better to encourage people to learn about human nature than about "social skills".
> But those who have good social skills in our culture will have a hard time forming new and unique ideas, and will often get talked into believing big, fundamental ideas that are wrong or crazy. I'd compare it to being a smoker in the 1960s.
I can assure you that having good social skills is absolutely nothing like being a smoker in the 1960s. And, there is no absolute relationship between having good social skills and getting talked into believing crazy ideas.
I have absolutely no idea where you get those ideas, but they are completely and demonstrably wrong.
I don't really think there are any negative effects to having good social skills. If anything, being able to effectively communicate with others probably helps with coming up with new/unique ideas. Very few great ideas are created in a vacuum. But, I do agree it's important that people don't feel afraid to be an independent thinker, and it's easy to fall into the trap of forced conformity in order to feel more socially accepted.. but I don't think that is really necessarily a product of having good social skills.
While this is a cool result, I wonder if the focus on games rather than real-world tasks is a mistake. It was a sign of past AI hype cycles when researchers focused their attention on artificial worlds - SHRLDU in 1970, Deep Blue for chess in the late 1990s. We may look back in retrospect and say that the attention Deepmind got for winning Go signaled a similar peak. The problem is that it's too hard to measure progress when your results don't have economic importance. It's more clear that the progress in image processing was important because it resulted in self-driving cars.
Firstly, research into Chess AI has had a surprising amount of beneficial spin-off, even if we don't call the result "AI".
Secondly, while it's still a simplification and abstraction, DotA's ruleset is orders-of-magnitude more similar to operating in the real world than Chess's is.
Thirdly, I'd argue that the adversarial nature of games makes it _easier_ to track progress, and to ensure that measure of progress is honest.
There's a lot of ways you can define "progress" in self-driving cars. Passengers killed per year in self-driving vs. human-driven cars? Passengers killed per passenger-mile? Average travel time per passenger-mile in a city? etc.
Another benefit of showing off progress with games is it allows the everyday reader to follow and understand it as well. It works great as a public awareness standpoint, especially when an AI can beat a human (i.e. Gary Kasparov vs Deep Blue). Awareness is a good thing in the space.
One explanation of the inflation of the public and private markets in the US is that the Chinese are in the middle of a massive debt bubble, anyone with cash there has nothing good to do with it, so they've been willing to invest in the US at almost any price.
That isn't a good explanation. China has extremely tight capital export controls in place, you can't easily get your money out of China to invest it into the US.
Beyond the annual $50,000 currency conversion limit they've put into place domestically, they've also made it an obnoxious and suspicious process to go through even if you attempt to convert the allowed $50k.
The US is far wealthier than China is anyway, and that's with 1/4 as many people. There is no need for Chinese capital to spur asset inflation in the US, the US has more than enough capital to do that on its own.
It's worth noting that this basically gives you competitive tips - how to be more effective at solving a problem after it's been given to you. I think it's much more valuable to be good at recognizing important problems that others don't believe are important.
It's nowhere near as bad or pervasive as the competition to get into student debt. But I'm not really sure what psychotherapy would work. Maybe convince people to read about mimetic theory.
This. Problem finding is a harder problem than problem solving .. heh. That said, whether or not others believe it to be important is only a matter of whether the problem is important for your career.
Problem finding requires the backing of curiosity and curiosity has no teeth without well developed knowledge and skill. i.e. Problem finding is effective in areas that you've spent considerable brain time on. So the path to top class problem finding is a long hard road that demands patience. Those who find it easy to solve problems that are given to them often are not motivated to travel this road (at least in the instances I have seen), while those who have to struggle a bit but not too much manage to stay on the road.
Sometimes I find myself being cynical about all the emphasis on "problem solving" in hiring especially with puzzles .. like problems are always handed to you in well defined mathematical form in the real world. I'm looking for folks who have the courage to ask "why is this problem important?"
I believe that their problem will be finding the small group of users that derive enormous value from it. When you really dig into all the applications they've suggested, they don't quite make sense.
The book "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse" tells the stories of companies that suddenly collapsed due to hidden issues, like Enron and Worldcom. Tesla fits every sign: larger-than-life CEO with massive executive turnover, board of directors very deferential to the CEO, conflicts of interest (Solarcity acquistion), "innovation like no other", attempts to silence criticism, pressure to maintain numbers (Model 3 production and resulting problems with factory workers, firing employees and contractors to reach profitability).
I find the fact that they have an executive departure rate on par with what Enron and Valeant had most concerning - when large numbers of senior people don't vest their stock grants, it's normally because they know there's very something wrong that's not yet public.
It's especially suggestive that the VP of finance and chief accounting officer left in March, at the same time as the Fremont factory was put up for collateral and a "special purpose entity" was created to hold $546m in car sales, presumably to make the company appear more creditworthy.
Enron is not remotely comparable to Tesla. Tesla makes first class products, products the world didn't know could be made.
Everything else follows that. It may bear superficial resemblance to chosen points of Enron, but that is just pattern matching mammalian brain at work.
I would be skeptical of new entrants to scooter / bike sharing. In China, ofo and mobike together captured about 95% of the market. If it were possible to challenge the companies that have reached scale, one would think one of the many dozens of failing competitors in China would have figured out it by now.
