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Comment Re:You're completely missing my point (Score 1) 45

I've known people who behaved in an evil manner because they thought it was fun. None of those people misbehaved because they were mistreated, they misbehaved because they just weren't caught and punished. Lacking punishment, they continued misbehaving, even bragging about it and encouraging others to follow their lead.

Most human behavior depends on feedback.

Comment Re:One more reason to prosecute Roblox (Score 1) 45

There are about 33 million businesses in the United States. I can't find numbers, but it seems reasonable that at least half of those are incorporated. Thus you are claiming that there are about 17 million "very wealthy people" in the U.S., or 5% of the population. A net worth of $1,000,000 is about the 95th percentile. That was wealthy 50 years ago, but now it's just comfortably well off. You can't buy a national politician and keep him bought for 1 million. Those corporation owners aren't all "very wealthy people."

Most of the biggest corporations are widely held, that is, any given corporation has many owners. They aren't necessarily very wealthy, although the CEO most likely is.

It's a very bad thing that some very wealthy people can subvert the justice system. In part, it's because those in the justice system are cowardly or corrupt; and the corrupt people who break the law can bribe or threaten those in the system. That doesn't mean that corporations are to blame.

Comment Re:A serious question (Score 1) 40

It's a good question and one I'm working on trying to get an answer to. By giving AI hard, complex engineering problems, and then getting engineers to look at the output to determine if that output is meaningful or just expensive gibberish.

By doing this, I'm trying to feel around the edges of what AI could reasonably be used for. The trivial engineering problems usually given to it are problems that can usually be solved by people in a similar length of time. I believe the typical savings from AI use are in the order of 15% or less, which is great if you're a gecko involved in car insurance, but not so good if you're a business.

If the really hard problems aren't solvable by AI at all (it's all just gibberish) then you can never improve on that figure. It's as good as it is going to get.

I've open sourced what AIs have come up with so far, if you want to take a look. Because that is what is going to tell you if good can come out of AI or not.

Comment Re:Employee conversation in work environment (Score 1, Interesting) 40

The conversations are not private, but PII laws nonetheless still apply. Anything in the messages that violates PII privacy laws is forbidden regardless of company policy. Policy cannot overrule the law.

Now, in the US, where privacy is a fiction and where double-dealing is not only perfectly acceptable but a part of workplace culture, that isn't too much of an issue. The laws exist on paper but have no real existence in practice.

However, business these days is international and American corps tend to forget that. Any conversation involving European computers (even if all employers and employees are in the US) falls under the GDPR and is under the aspices of the European courts and the ECHR, not the US legal system. And cloud servers are often in Ireland. Guess what. That means any conversation that takes place physically on those computers in Ireland plays by European rules, even if the virtual conversation was in the US.

This was settled by the courts a LONG time ago. If you carry out unlawful activities on a computer in a foreign country, you are subject to the laws of that country.

Comment Not interesting yet. (Score 4, Informative) 49

It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

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