Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article. Right now I have to open a new tab and search the article on blendles website. That adds friction that causes me to use blendle less than I would.
That and the "we're in beta" not just being able to sign up for it in a straightforward way makes it a non-starter for me (and I would expect for most consumers).
> Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article.
I designed such a system in 2012 and was granted a patent for it late last year. I asked a professional about what to do next and the advice was "wait until someone is infringing". Not hugely satisfactory.
I wanted to build the scheme described in the article. My goal was: fix the internet. The way it's paid for breaks it. Fix the money and the rest would follow.
Everyone who's thought about this problem for more than 10 minutes has hit on the same basic business model. I hit on it in 2008, I wasn't the first. Since then I've watched business after business fail in this area. The problem has never been the technology and I'm not sure if a successful shared scheme will ever emerge.
well, just sitting on a patent and waiting for an infringement isn't going to help fix the internet. That would be the other thing.
Seems to me like a patent is a good start, a good nucleus around which you could build some venture capital to actually try to start a company to solve the problem.
I totally agree that the problem isn't technology, it's the business side, the negotiation and that end. You'd need a very business-y business partner.
In fact I got the patent for that purpose -- to act as a substitute for the usual pedigree pattern-matching. I just didn't see it taking 5 years.
I go back and forth on whether to try and raise funds. It's an all-or-nothing proposition because of my visa status. There are also personal considerations involved.
Having worked for a mixed services/enterprise company, I am now keenly aware that sales is a strategic necessity and steady PR is a massive force multiplier. You can have the best everything in the world, but if nobody's buying, it doesn't matter.
Anecdotal, but I have been walking to work for the past 2 months and it helps a lot. I get around 12km of walking and 2 hours of exercise out of it.
It has helped a lot to balance my sleep as well since I'm usually too tired to stay up late. I highly recommend it to anyone who works long hours behind a desk.
I think there's a legitimate point to be made that it's a shame that the best way we've found to coordinate our resources to advance science and technology is capitalism. It's not like capitalism doesn't work, but if you envision a sort of "coordination oracle" which divides up resources ideally, and which everyone magically trusts, it seems pretty obvious that we would be advancing much more quickly.
But I also agree that there's not much point in dwelling on that point. So far, finding ways to leverage capitalism into solving problems has tended to be a lot more fruitful than looking for a replacement.
Capitalism = greedy optimization with a Bayesian assumption. It tends to get stuck in local maxima and does weird things when the inputs are biased, but otherwise works ok.
There are almost certainly better ways to search the solution space, but most serious attempts attempts thus far have been non-sensical or impractical.
No one objects that capitalism isn't a good optimization processes. Just that it's optimizing the wrong utility function. At one point something like 50% of STEM majors at MIT went to work on wall street. And the ones that don't go there go to work making more efficient targeted advertisements or addictive smartphone games or other unethical shit.
Our population has a limited number of "smart people". I don't think any alien looking in from the outside, would think we are allocating them even remotely efficiently. It would be pretty difficult to design a system that does worse than ours on this aspect.
The solution isn't necessarily communism, but perhaps a hybrid. E.g. the government funds things capitalism has no incentive to optimize for, like scientific research.
They may be smart, but they are still humans. You can't ethically assign them to career paths based on some vision of social good. That goes against the whole free agency thing and I'm pretty sure we've decided it's a horrible way to treat people.
That's well over the line into dictator territory. The results never match the predictions in the brochure. That's pretty much a sure fire way to get a tribunal convened at the Hague or a not-friendly visit from a SEAL team.
Capitalism already assigns people career paths. How is that any more ethical? Not many kids grow up saying "I want to work on Wall Street" or "I want to make better targeted advertising." They go into those careers because they offer piles of money, and the jobs they might want to do don't. We could fix that.
No, it doesn't assign them, they choose them. Many people don't decide on a career path based on the greatest salary potential, but on things they enjoy, problems that interest them, and places they want to be.
I think empirically people do choose jobs because of money. Otherwise why would Wall Street firms pay so well to attract talent? Why would people go to work there if they didn't care about money?
That's a very small number of people, not all of whom are well paid. The work is intellectually stimulating and has the ability to have far-reaching impacts.
I think you're confusing empirically for being significant numerically. I will offer a counter for your Wall Street example, look at how many go into teaching.
>That's a very small number of people, not all of whom are well paid.
By 2006 about a quarter of MITs entire graduating class went to Wall Street. Some firms were offering $400K salaries to junior level positions. They weren't just taking huge numbers of people, but the ones they were taking were the best of the best. Other companies at the time had a terrible time recruiting anyone because they couldn't compete with that kind of money.
The problem with this is I don't think these firms are actually doing anything productive for society. The amount of work, money, and resources that go into getting a nanosecond edge for high frequency trading is just obscene. And all of the stuff they develop must be kept top secret and under NDAs. So even if they invent something cool by chance, they can't share it with the world or let anyone else benefit from it.
Yes, there are many more smart people than just those st MIT. I hold a Ph.D. (Applied Mathematics) from MIT. I've never even been to Wall Street, even as a tourist. I worked in traffic modeling, because the domain had interesting problems to solve and the opportunity to leave a mark was there.
Wall St. doesn't even employ that many people, in total. I'd also be curious as to how many remained working there.
Now, to remind us of the subject, we're discussing how it is immoral to determine career paths for other people. To be clear, I have no issues with providing incentives to get people to select a career. I'm good with that. However, demanding or forcing is right out.
People incentivized are still exercising free will when they choose to do so. Capitalism isn't determining their career paths. You could offer $75/hour to people to eat horse poop and you're still not going to get a lot of takers. People choose their careers for many reasons other than expected salary.
If they chose with salary as the criteria, we'd have no teachers. We'd have no researchers. We'd have no field scientists. Nobody would work for the government. We'd have few artists, few musicians, few authors.
People choose their career for many reasons, salary sometimes isn't even in the top three reasons. Of course, some people do so for monetary reasons. I'm not sure they are actually the most suited for the job.
The next time you go to get emergency medical treatment, do you want someone who is there for the paycheck, or do you want someone who is there because they want to save lives?
Now, your final paragraph... You don't think they are doing anything productive for society. I'm not sure why that's a problem. We are not the arbiters. There are very few jobs that someone won't point to and say the people performing those jobs aren't productive. Usually, they are Ayn Rand fans but I'll assume you're not one.
They create wealth. They create a system that enables transfer of wealth. They enable companies to be partially owned by the public. They increase the incomes of those who employ them. They enable people to retire comfortably. They enable employees by getting them greater value for their share of the company.
In short, they do lots of things that are considered productive. If I made you $10,000 in profit per day, you'd probably think I was pretty productive. I know the reverse is true.
Anyhow, your last sentence kind of draws a more complete picture for me. First, you speak of insisting people do certain kinds of work which you decide the priority of. That struck me as misguided, but I was willing to see it through. Now, you're lamenting that you're not being given the output of someone else's investment.
You can't ethically own humans. Insisting they do only certain tasks and then wanting the output of their labor is, well, treating humans as if the are your property. That is not okay, at least according to my morals.
If I'm misreading you, feel free to explain. However, it looks like you initially wanted to make people, smart people, do certain kinds of work. You've since added that you think paying them above average is like forcing them, that they are equal. You're now asserting that their labor output shouldn't belong to them.
seems like we're basically in agreement. STEM majors working on ads are stuck at a local maxima.
On the other hand, humans are bad at predicting the future, so attempting to allocate resources perfectly is probably a waste of resources. see GPUs for video games, now used for deep learning - things that look trivial now might be important later on. If clicking ads gets us closer to AGI, maybe it's not so bad in the end.
It's not that it's a local maxima. There really isn't any economic incentive to care about investing in technologies that can't be turned into a profit in a few years. Capitalism is doing a fine job optimizing, it's just optimizing the wrong function.
>humans are bad at predicting the future, so attempting to allocate resources perfectly is probably a waste of resources.
It's hard to do worse than "random" or "not at all", which is basically what our current system is. Sure it brought us GPUs. But that's pure coincidence that what video games require happened to be what AI requires. If we weren't so lucky that two completely unrelated industries happened to require the same technology, we would never get AI.
Imagine tomorrow someone make a superior graphics chip. That's somehow highly specialized to 3d rendering in video games and does nothing else. Dropping all the general purpose computation and linear algebra stuff. Gamers would all switch to it and the market for GPGPUs would die and AI would stop advancing, or even reverse.
And GPUs aren't that weird or surprising of an invention to invest in. Increased computing power benefits many scientific fields besides AI and would be an obvious investment for a hypothetical central planner.
We've tried the 'coordination oracle' a few times. It hasn't worked out very well at the larger scales, and I'm not sure trust was the issue.
It appears that it works better when the two systems are blended and neither is used to an extreme. It's really quite a broad spectrum between unfettered capitalism and central management of resources by the State.
Well, if you had a "coordination oracle", you could probably convert most of the world's people to working on science and technology to advance the human race, and not spending any time on things like sports or fashion (or art). I mean, just cut 5% of the budget the world spends on fashion and use it to pay for science, and we'd have amazing advances.
The problem with this is that most people don't want to do this or think this is ethical in any way. (I'm more conflicted... you could take 5% of what the world spends on fashion to lift everyone out of poverty, too, as another example).
One minor foible. Don't select edges that are part of the minimum path, instead remove edges that are not part of the minimum path until only the minimum path remains. This strategy works even on graphs with multiple minimum paths.
I don't get why having multiple optimal paths would falsify my algorithm. Can you provide an explicit counter-example?
Here is why I think the algorithm is correct:
At each step the edge that we are considering is either contained in all the optimal solutions or only some of them. If the edge is contained in all the solutions, increasing its weight to infinity would change the optimal solution and we pick that edge in our solution. Otherwise (if the edge is contained in only some of the solutions) increasing the weight would not change the solution because there is another optimal solution that does not contain that edge so we do not pick that edge.
So we can prove this theorem: At every step of the algorithm if an edge is picked, it is contained in all the optimal solutions.
So the algorithm does not pick any extra edges. Now we have to prove that it includes all the necessary edges. But that is easy because each time that we choose not to including an edge, we are sure that there is an optimal solution in the remaining graph so we are never left with a graph with no optimal solution.
I think you assumed that I meant we change the edge weights
from infinity back to their original value at each step but that is not what I meant.
How could an "AI" as they describe simultaneously be so naive and ALSO protect itself in any meaningful way? Especially in its early stages. It wouldn't even know to hide. And why would Big Corp give up trying to fix this sort of problem.
Overall not a credulous conclusion. Hand waving in the final paragraphs after the author crafted an accurate and believable narrative left me disappointed. (grammar)
The evolutionary pressure is just people or programs detecting certain strains (it would generate lots of strains randomly).
I think the only real issue to plausibility here is I'm not sure brute force is enough to make enough plausible behavioral branches, at least with current computing power/internet bandwidth. A reasonably efficient self-modification mechanism (in terms of viable strain per transmission) is probably extremely large, I'd say at least 1GB. Not unlike deep learning systems, this would consist of a large functional composition of heuristics, codifying how to write code that can embedded itself in other programs and write modifications to itself that are likely to work.
Note that we haven't yet gotten a good neural-generated code modifications, even using large networks, GPU training and large computing time. Best examples I could find:
So we're not yet at a point this could be plausible (as it couldn't hide itself in small programs), but eventually it will be --
once there is enough headroom on most GPUs and certain types of software are large enough it could hide it's network inside, and generally enough internet bandwidth to spread it's >GB-scale code. I'd imagine something like a game, which usually has networking -- it would be using GPUs partially to generate and spread new strains of it trying to infect other games and such.
Note there are biological viruses with tiny genomes however -- the smallest are on the order of ~1kbyte. But as you cite they had billions of years, producing maybe quadrillions of viruses every year, giving this tiny efficient and specialized weapon. Interestingly, they rely on other cells machinery to even replicate their genome -- analogous to using the compiler here.
If everyone could send >10^18 different small self-replicating viruses over your network, it seems likely some would exploit bugs in certain kinds of hardware/software, evolving through this selective pressure.
Consider that even with billions of years worth of evolution natural viruses have not developed any sort of Hivemind (tm).
Also, now that science has illuminated the human genome we are quickly (on an evolutionary time scale) advancing toward gene therapy treatments that could combat viruses.
Now consider executables. We have the ability quickly inspect AND edit executables, source code..., etc. Not to mention a much better conceptual framework for interpreting assembly instructions (compared to codons). After all they were created by humans for machines that humans built.
Then consider the resources viruses have had at their disposal to evolve. Every single cell [1] of every single living creature that has ever been infected over billions of years [2]. Assuming a conservative average number of 1e31 cells over the course of life's history that means (1e31 * 3.5e9 years) = (3.5e40 cell * years) of computations time. Then consider RNA transcription rates ~6.3e12 nt/year/cell [3]. So all together something like (3.5e40 cellyears) (6.3e12 nt/year/cell) = 2.2e53 nt. Approximation of course but probably with a few orders of magnitude.
Now compare to the number of instructions since the epoch. (1.5e9 s) * (2e18 instructions/s [4]) = ~3e27 instructions since the epoch. Again approximation.
That means we would be seeing the equivalent of viruses that evolved (3.5e9 years since first life) / (6.6e26 nt/instructions) = ~17 nanoseconds after life emerged.
[4] http://www.worldometers.info/computers/
1 billion computers in use in 2008. with say 1 instruction per cycle and one core per computer at 2GHz that's (1e9 computers) * (2e9 inst/computer/s) = 2e18 inst/s
They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.