The headline of the article, "Is Artificial Intelligence Lost in the Woods?", in the recent MIT Technology Review is compelling. I began reading it expecting that the author, David Gelernter, might be outlining some new research into what makes emulating the intelligence of the human brain / body so daunting. Instead, it is an incoherent rant that basically boils down to an argument that computers will never literally be human beings, and even if they behave exactly as intelligent, it doesn't matter.
While investigating Gelernter further online, I was happy to find that Ray Kurzweil layed the smack down in a recorded debate with him by clarifying that whether computers will ever truly be conscious in the exact same way humans are is a philosophical question, not a scientific one, and that Gelernter is rigging the argument in his favor by refusing to accept any objective way to verify that a computer has become conscious.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
facebook survives the cut
Every now and then, someone invites me to join some social network, and the same thing usually happens:
- I sign up, enter in some subset of the usual 'profile' questions
- I find a few people and become "friends" with them
- I don't visit the site for a few months
- I get some spammy update email from the site encouraging me to find more friends
- I delete my profile from that site (accept for linked in, which won't let you, so in that case I just changed every entry in my profile to 'linked in sucks')
Facebook started off on the same path, but has managed to avoid the ax so far. The addition of 'news feeds' was a big reason, it's easy to log in now and then and see quickly if there is anything worth checking out (a friend posting a photo for instance). I also like how people are tagged in photo, so you are alerted when you've been tagged in a new photo for instance, or can easily see the photos of one of your friends whether it was taken by them or not. One thing I recently discovered is you can remove yourself from being tagged in an individual photo if you like; let's say someone snaps a shot of you when you weren't sucking your gut in and don't want everyone to see it every time they look at photos tagged of you, you actually can remove the tag from someone else's photo. So while you can't remove someone else's photo, you have some control over what photos of you people will easily discover. The rest of the privacy controls are good too.
Since facebook doesn't suck, I'm glad they've opened up a developer API so that every new site doesn't have to create their own half assed social networking feature. I don't want to create a profile on flixter.com just to write a couple of movie reviews, but I'm happy to add the flixter app to share reviews with my friends on facebook. My tolerance for creating profiles for new sites is at an all time low.
- I sign up, enter in some subset of the usual 'profile' questions
- I find a few people and become "friends" with them
- I don't visit the site for a few months
- I get some spammy update email from the site encouraging me to find more friends
- I delete my profile from that site (accept for linked in, which won't let you, so in that case I just changed every entry in my profile to 'linked in sucks')
Facebook started off on the same path, but has managed to avoid the ax so far. The addition of 'news feeds' was a big reason, it's easy to log in now and then and see quickly if there is anything worth checking out (a friend posting a photo for instance). I also like how people are tagged in photo, so you are alerted when you've been tagged in a new photo for instance, or can easily see the photos of one of your friends whether it was taken by them or not. One thing I recently discovered is you can remove yourself from being tagged in an individual photo if you like; let's say someone snaps a shot of you when you weren't sucking your gut in and don't want everyone to see it every time they look at photos tagged of you, you actually can remove the tag from someone else's photo. So while you can't remove someone else's photo, you have some control over what photos of you people will easily discover. The rest of the privacy controls are good too.
Since facebook doesn't suck, I'm glad they've opened up a developer API so that every new site doesn't have to create their own half assed social networking feature. I don't want to create a profile on flixter.com just to write a couple of movie reviews, but I'm happy to add the flixter app to share reviews with my friends on facebook. My tolerance for creating profiles for new sites is at an all time low.
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