Absolutely not. The improvement in fields that were said to be impossible for AI are just astonishing, and I am among the first surprised by such successes. Let's state it clear: computing power is increasing, theoretical models are improving, practical implementations are getting more efficient. So yeah, basically Turing was right, we are just impressively capable computers and nothing more.

Around 5 or 6 years ago, there were some image classification benchmarks that were incredibly tough and said to be almost impossible to solve with a machine, with very low accuracies. Were are we now? Well the improvements have been far better than expected. Far better than I expected, to be honest. In some sense I would have loved if it didn't, since the pressure of this ever growing progress is stressful to my students and complicates the publication of novel ideas. But basically, yeah, it is improving a lot. It is science, it just works.

You could argue computer vision is not AI, but it is. Everything that allows a computer to make a statement that you thought was only possible by a human is AI.

Again, I am not interested in the the colorful stories about consciousness or whatever. What I'm saying is that there is basically no task that a computer will not be able to perform in the long run. Get over it, we are all replaceable by machines. Engineers, researchers, artists, name what you want, it is only a question of time and not of possibility.

And still you know it will work very well in the long run, like almost every other task that was set to fail with AI.

Well, the truck can deliver the goods to a local market. Then, you can go to that market using your feet or even a bike. I guess it is even more green. It is the way our grandparents did. Why do we different? Because we have plenty of cheap energy and it is more comfortable the other way.

It might change when the energy will not be that cheap, though. I am pretty pessimistic at the idea some environmental enlightenment will win against laziness...

I have the greatest difficulties with the assumption our society is a stationary process. Especially when most of the things around us are expected to grow exponentially. These 2 are mutualy exclusive, that is, you should take one but not both. Either you take the stationary society, and the "it was so before, thus it will be so in the future" is a very valid argument. Or you take the exponential growth everyone is looking for, and things will surely not be in the future as they were in the past.

You didn't understand his point. He says that whether you pay artists or not, they will continue to create new things, because the primary reason they do it is that they like it much more than everything else. Which may obviously not be the case of you taxi driver, who takes his job as a necessity to survive instead of a pleasant activity.

So yeah, you can basically cut some art revenues with little (if any) effect on art creation.

Here are more curves that were posted in the comments of the blog you're linking:

https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas

Clearly, the exponential model has the best fit (which is not very surprising), and says 2015, take or give 1 year for 95% confidence. Of course, there is no theoretical model behind, but most of the time, the theoretical explanation comes after the empirical fit.

Not exactly. Java is unable to vectorize floating point operations now (might change with java8 though), which is very common in any multimedia application. So it remains a lot slower than what you get by default in C/C++ with a decent compiler.

Exactly this!

Almost everything you ever dreamed of as a non machine learning expert is available at https://mloss.org/software/
Please now annotate more data so that we can tune the algorithms ;-)

As an associate professor at the university, I can tell you many students have lost sustained focus, even in very small groups. If an explanation takes longer than 5 minutes, you lose them. If a problem takes longer than 5 minutes to solve, you lose them too. Starting 2 years ago, I modified all my lectures to have like "breakpoints" very often, so that no-one gets lost.

However, I think we already lost the Cartesian approach to breaking problems into smaller tasks. If you give them a rather simple but big problem, very few students are able the break it down and solve each part. Most will just try a global solution for a few minutes, then try the internet for a global solution, and finally get bored and say it's too complicated. One of my hypotheses is that the internet permits to solve most of the problems instantaneously, so you don't need sustained attention anymore. For the few cases where it is needed, well, that's the difference between the elite and the others...

I would not bet a penny on that...

You might be surprised, but a lot of people in France think to go back to 40 hours a week, because they want higher wages whatever the unemployment rate. They don't get that going from 35 to 40 roughly fires 1 in 8 workers (of course it's not exactly true, because people get better wages, and this tends to create jobs - or the company doesn't raise the wages and instead invests in more machines to fire more workers).

I'm pretty sure it would be better for every one to lower this to 32 or 30 hours per week, and it won't have a significant impact on productivity. But the impact on the quality of living would be great.

Forget about miles and think in kilometers. In Europe, we say that 640k should be enough for anybody.

I would also have chosen the BY-NC-ND package even if I don't care about the NC aspect just because it is the only one to have the ND claim. This one is fundamental for a research paper.

If you take into account the time spent to write a good paper, every single word has been carefully crafted for hours. The idea to allow paraphrase or remixes is at best non-sense, most of the time it's just a very bad idea.

I'm pretty sure the authors in the study choose ND, and what ever the remaining condition, because as a researcher, there is just no way I could allow you to make me say something I was not meaning to say in the first place.

How far all thess jokes will go until we decide collectively for a stop, and just throw all those IP crap out the window?

I mean, seriously?