Disqus - Latest Comments for harleycw

Re: Trump’s Dog Problem | Scott Adams Blog

chato — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 13:33:43 -0000

When I read the title and saw the picture I was really hoping this was his dog. I was anticipating you saying how because we associate the qualities and looks of dogs with owners he was going to have to overcome this ugly dog pic. Guess not. Hopefully you can discover something just as crazy in the future.

Re: Opinion Vs. Stupidity | Scott Adams Blog

chato — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 13:33:16 -0000

In this case the laws are changing as tech changes. However, I'm very concerned that we have a huge company that we are supporting in which people are leaving their skilled jobs to work for a company which is very clear on their stance to shift most of this current workforce from a cheap large labor pool (drivers) to self driving cars (a support and tech workforce). This is a case where the laws are failing the lower income segment. They can't do the math appropriately even to realize how low their actual take home is until one or possibly two years of tax returns and worn out vehicles only to find themselves completely out of a job in 5 years with no skills and no money saved. I get it that we should be changing laws because the tech is good enough to allow for these drivers with a reasonable amount of safety and efficiency gain to society but the laws should also protect against the obvious massive loss of future jobs (or perhaps it does if they can unionize but good luck with that). I'm just in awe I don't hear more talk about this clear case of a huge draw and then purge of a workforce that will become less skilled.

Re: Elon Musk and Tesla Motors have made all of their electric car patents open source

chato — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:32:59 -0000

Frankly if I were Elon and owned a mansion in Bel Air why not do what I could to inspire the automakers to convert more cars to run on electric power.
I wouldn't want to sit around fighting L.A. traffic breathing the poisonous air generated by my competition.
Besides, truly great, innovative companies which are ahead of the curve could use the challenge of future competition to keep them innovating.
Bravo, Elon !

Re: Flawed Turing test and fooling humans 33% of the time

chato — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 13:28:49 -0000

Perhaps the critique of there not being a "connect" between the AI built for rat-tracker and passing a Turing test is a bit strong.
When I read this at least there was a feeling he was leading us on another way of thinking about AI (one other than purpose built AI just for passing the Turing test).

My view was that he was saying if an AI was built to model true intelligence and it just happened to be built in order to create the most brilliant rat tracker (which perhaps only a truly intelligent self modifying AI could do), then if you just so happened to ask give the parameters of the Turing test and had them take it why shouldn't it be able to pass?

Probably, in the way Ray Kurzweil envisioned computers passing the Turing test, it was not by purpose built AI, but instead, true general purpose AI which are supposed to think, reason and self modify. Judging by the enormous complexity and speed at which the brain processes information, even though we have made significant advances, we can't hope to achieve a realistic model of the brain for at least another decade and likely much longer.

Also keep in mind that although processors have gotten orders of magnitude faster, the speed at which they connect to large amounts of information has not increased as quickly (although still by orders of magnitude). Our brains not only process information incredibly fast, but have the ability to quickly create extremely fast connections to much of the information stored within it. Even though a processor is fast, when it exceeds the local storage capacity, the speed of communications is slowed greatly. This is just the hardware problem. Even IBM Watson, with it's massive capabilities (great hardware and software) only does one enormous query at a time (taking seconds).

Put another way, our brains are many billions of incredible processor and storage systems able to communicate with other ones with a much greater relative and meaningful amount of throughput overall. Good luck emulating this any time soon using chips. Transistor on a chip doesn't equal neuron in the brain.

Re: Softbank $2000 Companion robot for 2015 will test many social issues such as Learning your families habits and technical ones like Cloud Artificial Intelligence

chato — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 12:27:29 -0000

This is the beginning of the low cost remote workforce revolution. People in low cost labor areas can go to the local area which has equipment allowing them to remotely operate these robots. Then imagine some person half way around the world with some kind of razer hydra (hand position sensing) and oculus rift (3D viewing) taking control of your robot to watch the kids, wash dishes, mow the lawn, sweep, and whatever else.

Re: SETI will likely find intelligent life in the next 20 years if it exists predicts Seth Shostak

chato — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 13:07:36 -0000

1. Do you think intelligent species would feel it is ethical to exponentially populate and/or interfere with other planets?
2. Of course evolution makes it possible that other areas of the universe could have intelligent life which has come and gone or still exists but they are unable to communicate with us. Due to the requirements of element creation over time and the size of the universe, other intelligent life is currently millions to billions of light years away. Even if they knew exactly where we are, the fastest form of communication possible is limited by the speed of light.
If we perfect communication technology that instantly transfers information from point to point, it would first require the communication equipment to travel somewhere first (taking thousands, millions or billions of years traveling some percentage of the speed of light) before communication then became instant.
3. I believe time-travel will never be possible (at least going backwards) but at least in theory since time slows at the speed of light, and perhaps there is some future discovery allowing us to bend (or locate bent) space and/or light, we may eventually be able to target viewing certain positions in the past enabling actual historical information gathering, possibly even for our own planet. Any argument why this is not at least, in theory, possible?

Re: Wrong and Right Reasons To Be Upset About Oculus

chato — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 13:37:06 -0000

One of the biggest problems of the Oculus Rift experience has been it's lack of shared social experience. Frankly I would love to have a social experience with the goggles on. A VR headset doesn't work connecting real world users as you can't emulate a 3D head rotational experience on both ends and even if you could you would look silly since you won't be able to see the other's person's eyes as they are wearing the goggles/glasses. I believe the next facebook acquisition will be something like Onlive and/or Artemis since you need to perform massive computing for a fantastic visual experience while also reducing the latency or performing some tricks like prediction or hybrid local computing to smooth out issues of latency. Hopefully, they will consult with folks like Carmack in the future as they make these strategic acquisitions.
On a side note, Onlive was great when they first came out, latency was better, computing seemed more powerful and interface was better. Shame on Perlman for what happened to the company and employees. For this I hesitated to mention Artemis, but regardless, the tech is going to be essential, especially for mobile platforms. All the tech exists today for us to have an untethered, mobile highly powerful social immersive VR experience.

Re: Fully Rejuvanated bodies two to four times for life extension to 180-280 years

chato — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 09:23:21 -0000

One good thing this article points out at least that others seem to miss is that even with existing known life extending technologies, there isn't much progress to keep the brain functioning longer. What this and others continue to miss is the peeling of the onion problem. As one discovery, real cure or extension happens, others quickly fill the gap. The probability of other bad age related or even untreatable diseases will go up. I'd like to be optimistic but my realistic side says that even with perfect knowledge, we could not build systems fast enough to keep currently middle aged people living beyond an Average of about 130 years.

Re: Steve Perlman: pCell is real, and it will change the world (interview)

chato — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 18:34:18 -0000

Yes we figured out the secret, Wireless power, charging, etc. Now please, please just bypass the middle men and get back to leveraging this tech with OnLive capabilities to provide us with super powerful devices where all the processing is done on shared time Watson like servers and just streams the video to our mobile dumb terminals.

Re: Condition One immerses iPads and iPhones in 180-degree video, shakes up dreary apps (video)

chato — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:18:46 -0000

Games should make effective use of the gyro as well. See the Android "Gyro Island" prototype on Google Play.

Re: Engadget Giveaway: win a new iPad, courtesy of Kabam!

chato — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:40:47 -0000

Ready for my new iPad !

Re: Engadget Giveaway: win one of two ASUS Transformer Primes, courtesy of NVIDIA!

chato — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:02:12 -0000

In it to win it.

Re: So much of what we’re doing is obvious

chato — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:55:18 -0000

Ben,

I love this comment, "we’re coloring in an outline that should’ve never been empty in the first place".
Sometimes I feel reading your blog is like a much more entertaining expression of my own thoughts.
You're making excellent progress. Keep coloring !

Re: Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Wide Open Teaching (and how you can join in!)

chato — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:12:54 -0000

My personal opinion is that the future is not with software packages like opensim that require large downloads and clients. It is more like creating environments that stream from your web browser similar to streaming movies from Hulu. I think using packages like Unity3D to instantly stream content is the future and that is why I am spending my time researching it. I am using it to build educational games and even using it on my main site (just search for worldlearningtree if interested). I think the best current example is FusionFall which was built using the Unity3D engine. Where are all the great 3D educational games?

Re: From A Weekend Cheating on Flash With Unity3D to Now

chato — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:20:20 -0000

That's great. That way I don't have to do it myself. I'll just use your site. You could also look into Delicious visualizations or see an example I used with 6pli at http:/6pli.com/harleycw or you could organize websites by category using netvibes, see http://www.netvibes.com/har... for my example in doing research long ago for worldlearningtree
Keep up the info gathering.