As opposed to what? - Anarchy, tribalism, feudal warlords? An economic market is not a thing or a place, it's a set of rules that govern trade. The Fox News definition of "free market" = "free from regulation" is an oxymoron at best.

Sorry but the parent post is not insightful, if anything it's OT because it's not even talking about net neutrality.

Here's a simple explanation from a qualified comedian.

Why didn't you just write "You're wrong, fuckface"? - It's much clearer yet equally vacuous.

The FCC made the right call in the US, they upheld the long established status-quo of the international market, but it's a hollow victory if you only have one ISP to choose from. The decision is kind of a surprise to me given the head of the FCC was an influential telco lobbyist prior to his appointment. In this case it seems to me the FCC are doing their job by telling telco's what to do, rather than the other way around (as one would expect with such blatantly insestious oversight).

WTF, read Dicken's, working conditions back then make today's Asian sweat shops look like day care centers.

I think he just wants someone to allow him to swap heads around on Monkey's to see what happens, I hope nobody encourages him.

I understand how it works, that's why I was so impressed. What they (and others) have done in total is solve a long standing problem with NN's, their tendency to be single minded, ie: you train it to recognise cats then train it to recognise dogs, you end up with something that recognises dogs and non-dogs but has forgotten what it knew about cats. The hint is in the name "deep learning".

As for a "huge computer" Watson now knows a lot more than the original and runs on a commodity rack mounted server. Agree, prosthetics is where AI will converge with the human mind, again the technological bits and pieces are already in use, but still very much isolated from each other.

If you define AI to be the replication of human intelligence then it will never arrive except via birth and environment. IMO, it's a very narrow definition and not particularly useful since we presumably all posses our own human like intelligence. No matter how you slice it, it was a major milestone when an AI defeated the best humans in an unbounded problem space where humans excel, such as Jeopardy.

Ditto, I taught myself programming in the early 80's because playing Conway's game of life on graph paper was tedious. Sure, by definition knowledge removes the mystery but to paraphrase Feynman "Knowledge can only add to the awe and beauty of a flower, I don't understand how it can detract"

Talk to them in MBA speak, call it "scope creep", they may not know what it means but they've been trained to avoid it.

I remember using an external 3.5 floppy on the tablet version of the thinkpad in the early nineties, they were rare as hen's teeth back then. Laplink and similar tools were SOP for moving files on/off mobile devices.

What a coincidence! I've heard managers say the same thing about their staff.

Both of you are wrong, keep it up and whatever project/task you're working on will be unpleasant, and at best limp to the finish line. Just about everyone has a manager, a professional in any field will get their manager's respect by learning and solving their manager's problems with minimal fuss. If after 12 months or so, that doesn't work, find a new job/manager. If your manager doesn't have problems it's probably because you're both about to be put out to pasture on the next payroll cycle.

At 55, I've been on both sides of the managerial fence and I've hired and fired programmers. I rejected the project managers job when my current employer offered it to me 4-5yrs years ago, having "been there before" I decided to keep my more interesting and less stressful role as the resident CVS Nazi. My overall goal has always been to automate my way out of whatever tedious task confronts me, I've been lucky enough to work with several professional managers who ensured I never ran out of tedious, annoying, tasks.

Skimmed the article, conspiratorial themes aside, it seems like a good general history of neural nets.

To answer what I see as the main question in TFA - Here's the difference "this time around".

I've been interested in AI and automata since the early 80's, sporadically following closely over the years. Life distracted me from this interest for most of the noughties. The first time I watched IBM's Jeopardy stunt with Watson I was blown away, the missus shrugged and said "It's impressive but what's the big deal, it's just looking up the answers, like google with talking, right?" I tried to explain why my jaw was on the floor, but all I got was a blank look and a change of subject.

Far from being overhyped I think the general public simply don't comprehend the significance of these developments. They see it as 'hype' because like my missus they simply don't comprehend the problem and tend to grossly underestimate the difficulty of solving it. IMO the Watson stunt is one of the most significant technological feats I've witnessed since the moon landings, and possibly the start of a new Apollo style arms race based on the same old fears. That doesn't mean I think all the problems in AI have been solved, but machines like Watson are very strong evidence that we have recently cleared a significant hurdle (that few in the general public have even noticed).

To me, this period in AI is very reminiscent of where digital comms were in the early 90's. Most of the bits for the comms revolution existed but rarely talked to each other; pagers, email, mobile phones, computers, printers, fax, GPS, fibre optics, etc. Just a few years later everyone was talking about "convergence", "as foretold" pretty much all of those things and more have now converged into the ubiquitous smart phone. In 1990, virtually nobody on the planet saw the internet coming (including me), I was at Uni, mature age CS/Math student, 88-91. I was perfectly placed in space and time to see it born but didn't notice it.

I first heard about HTML and Mosaic at Uni, one of our CS lectures was very impressed and went on a tangential rant about it one day in a networking lecture. Still, nobody in his hijacked audience I talked to afterwards could figure out why he was so impressed. "What's wrong with zmodem?" was a typical comment that I would have agreed with then.

I think we are more or less at that "1990" point where everyone will soon start talking more and more about "convergence" in AI. The Watson that won Jeopardy in 2011(?) required 20 tons of air-conditioning alone, today an instance of Watson fits on a "pizza box" server and you can try out your own Watson instance for free with a web based developer's API (google it). Their goal is to squeeze Watson into a smart phone.

A couple of things that a Watson style AI may "converge" with aside from phones are, "Big Dog" which has pretty much solved the autonomous movement/balance problem, and face recognition software which has also made big strides in the past few years. What the end result will be when it all converges and evolves, or even when it will converge, I have no idea, but a dystopian SkyNet style future is no longer purely fiction. From a less pessimistic POV, AI could serve as a "check and balance" in a democracy full of bullshitters, a tool to fact check the waffle and make evidence based, transparent, recommendations on public policy free from partisan politics, in other words "speak truth to power", like the public service in a democracy is supposed to be doing now.

Disclaimer: The "missus" is far from dumb, she has a Phd in Business and Marketing, she lectures to several hundred students at a time. I sometimes fail to see why she is interested/impressed by some obscure event in the Business News and politely change the subject :)

Agree, what good is a robot maid that won't fetch a beer? - However if we follow your logic to the extreme, you see a drunk fall overboard on a party cruise and you do nothing because it's his own damned fault?

Take 5min to read this short essay by Asimov, you won't be dissapointed. Asimov was more than just the guy who wrote about fictional robot laws, for example, he was also well known skeptic. Not the modern anti-science kind, a real skeptic, spelt the old fashioned way!

None of it is about robot ethics, it's a metaphor about the folly of thinking that a list of rules, such as the ten commandments, could ever encapsulate all the vagaries of human morality.

Yeah, because that's how we buy cars and fridges, right?

Sounds like Kryton from Red Dwarf.