Where's geany? It's much better than gedit.

People do not want to work less. If it were the case, we would see massive political propositions in that sense, which is not what we observe.

In France, the legal work duration is 35h/w (remeber the crappy commercial by cadillac), and people do not like it. Sarkozy was elected on the leitmotiv "work more, earn more", and proposed a system for taxes free overtime. Hollande reintroduced the taxes, and people got mad and angry. Every single week, you can hear some french politician saying we need to move back to 40h/w, and you never hear someone proposing to lower at maybe 32h/w or even below 30h/w - such proposition would not be highly impopular.

Basically, people want more, even if it's pointless and even if it 's harmful for the entire society. Stupidity? Tragedy of the anticommons.

The most ridicule part being "must not be able to explain how". That doesn't even make sense for humans! If you ask artists, they'll tell you what their influences are, if you ask critics, they'll tell you why this particular piece of art was made this way and not in a completely different manner.

Fun fact: any program with yet unseen bugs that make their behavior totally unexplainable to their developers has passed the test. That gives you either an idea of the soundness of this crap, or a deep insight of what type of failure humankind is.

It depends of what you expect from an AI. If it is a perfect replica of a human mind, with which you can talk and share life as if it were human, then it will probably never be around. But that's also pretty useless, and most development in machine learning (ML) are in a more abstract level than trying to solve a very specific goal like this.

Now if you consider AI to be completely new intelligent species, that behave in an intelligent way (volontary fuzzy definition here), then it's probably already there. I mean, the ML programs that dictate the behaviour of you insurance policies so as to send you sport ads when you're a bit overweight, or holidays at the sea when you're close to a burn out, that raise the price of things predicted to induce a loss and lower the ones of things predicted have big return in order to influence your choices, etc, that, to me, sounds exactly like what you do with your pets when you decide they should eat that instead of this for some reason they could not handle with their inferior minds. Now, if you think of all the interconnected ML programs searching for new optima every second and exchanging information, you can view it as the new superior species of this planet.

A very short example: the vast majority of the human race wants to put an end to automated short-sighted finance, just like the vast majority of dogs wants to get free from their leashes. Bot never will until their recpective superior species allow them to. We talked a lot of the facebook experiment lately, the real question is how long has it been already done by the machine to fulfill goals we are not able to grasp? Maybe the singularity is already there since a few years, and just like for peak oil, we'll know it some time after. If we get to notice something more intelligent than us is governing our lives.

Seriously, the poster was presented yesterday at CVPR and ends up on /. today. There is nothing sensational about it. I'm getting sick of science turning into PR stunts all the time.

I have only one problem with fancy GUI that allow you to train a predicting model in 2 clicks: how confident can you be in your model, since all the parameters are masked and you have no knowledge about them? I still think it is dangerous to rely on a tool you don't understand and you can't control up to a satisfactory level, especially when it is to be used in prediction - something we expect to be highly reliable in many aspects due to old development of science like balistics.

I've written a ML library myself (also in Java, more lightweight than weka, but with no gui - although it comes with standalone binaries for some basic setups) and I can tell you there is no good default tunning that works well for every kind of situation. ML is seriously a young science that gets rapidly tricky even on very common problems, which is very different than field for which we have very accurate solvers that work most of the time (again balistics is probably a good example, at least because it is taught in school and sets the prototype of what we name science). I fear hidding the youth (and thus the imperfection) is only going to cause damage through misconception and false interpretation.

Asking if robots can be evil is about as futile as asking if a microwave can be happy.

That being said, there already are killer robots, with a pretty good track record in recent operations. But the evil lies in the humans who made them (from the top exec that launch the program to the small hand that does the job) and used them, not in the pile of steel and semiconductors.

caveat: Looking at your food, your microwave is probably sad, which explains their tendency to commit suicide.

JMLR is a fantastic journal, with high quality papers, high quality reviews, and completely open. The dream of many come true. I've always wondered why the idea did not spread to other fields.

If someone is willing to start a Journal of Computer Vision Research based on the same principles, count me in. I'll be happy to do editing/reviewing for such journal instead of well known IEEE/Elsevier/Springer journals.

Given that mir also means peace and considering what is happening in Ukraine, I sadly suppose you are right. Nonetheless I prefer puns when they don't carry a grim presage.

I am pretty much waiting for the other way around: when I, as a human, known that I am quite bad at handling the current situation and that the machine will do much better than I'll ever be capable of. In particular, I am thinking of traffic jams where you have to find maximum speed that maintains a smooth global flow, without falling into chaotic start/stop sequences like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Most humans typically tend to drive too fast in such situations, leading to an average speed well below what machines could very simply achieve. So basically, I'll drive when it's easy, and let the machine do the complicated stuff, as usual.

Funny, I often say that I have enough students to make having children unnecessary.

My wife and I are in the same situation, and I never understood the selfishness argument. Why is it selfish? To whom? What harm does it bring and to what?

The more I have this discussion with family and friends, the more it turns out to be pure jealousy towards us better enjoying our life. Most of them didn't expect it is that hard to raise children, and especially the many things you have to give up due to the lack of time to do it.

No, not if they didn't enabled the compromised feature.

Stop the bullshit. You're not changing your mind, you're trying to gain a lot very quickly by gambling.

If you don't understand the implications of what you're doing, please go to the casino instead of messing up our global economy.

This. The internet and the books of Richard Dawkins are endless sources of arguments.