(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

I was told today by a sr. engineer that applying JavaScript's trim() to a string before executing search is wrong.

His reason? Because certain search terms have spaces in the middle;

i.e "Science Fiction"

😯

So I get sweet cravings when I feel down. Yesternight, after dinner, ate loads of chocolate cookies 🍪.

Dreamt of a dystopian society with things happening that could only happen in a science fiction setting with all the AI and cybernetics. Man that was crazy and scary at the same time. What a rollercoaster ride.

Gonna do it again tonight 😆

Whenever you feel down, whenever the code does not compile, just think... Think about the fact that you are the first line of evolution into the future. You are creating life with instructions, just by sitting at home and letting your mind wonder into finding a solution.

Reading. A lot. Fiction, science fiction, leadership, motivational, history...

okay, can someone suggest a good series.
IT related, science fiction. something like that. good actors and events.