Robin Li

Relax Mr. Li, I've memorised the logical conundrum used by Captain Kirk that makes fancy pants computers think so hard they blow up. Everything is in good hands…on top of that, asking developers to control the stupidity of management is unlikely to work.

A long time ago I created a program to determine the location of concentrators in a particular type of network. I used an optimization technique called simulated annealing. The program was provided to an operational team that was in charge of deploying the network. Each member of the team was working on a particular district. Once I visited the team. They were eager to show me the result of my program. They were interpreting my program's results in terms of rules they used every day and they thought I had the expertise to appreciate the results when I had no expertise at all on the particular problem. With computers you can execute algorithms that perform millions of calculation in a matter of seconds. Human being do not proceed like that. They use other techniques to resolve problems and often cannot do as well as computers. You can use some machine learning algorithms to recognize (not that accurately by the way) faces. I don't think that human being can explain how they recognize faces, and what we know is that our brain certainly does not work in same the way Artificial Neural Network do.

I agree with Li. AI is not the problem. It is a nasty cocktail of military, industry, politics wanting the tech that comes from the mad scientists' experiments. They got cockroaches as robots (dread to think where that tech is now) being able to steer them with a joystick like a game. Imagine being able to do a John Malkovich! Ghastly business it all is. The Military have huge budgets and so many of our technological progress has come from their funding of research and development. The internet itself began life with the military.

Now the ball is rolling we have to keep up because if we do not then it's the metaphorical Stone Age for us. The Cold War was like that. America had to keep up with Russia and Russia with America. Competitive markets make an environment where everyone must keep scrambling to out perform the other. If China are trying to lead with AI that will give them the technological edge over the U.S industrially and militarily. The U.S are not going to let that happen. Note the U.S have brought Apple home from China. They already have Microsoft under wraps and Google, too, to all intents and purposes. Zooks has been reminded how good he is and who he must please politically. I have been watching all this happen. With the tough data laws in the EU now China and U.S are going to move quickly ahead I believe. It is possible the EU has caused itself a data desert. We got privacy, but lost out in terms of technological progress. The U.S don't have all the privacy and neither does China. Their access to all hat data will surely give them the edge if it is so high in demand and why Zooks sees it as such a treasure trove.

The programmers should have shut their stupid mouths about Maven and put in lots of well-hidden Trojan Horses and self-destructing functions. They should have used the "Trump Doctrine": fuck everything up so badly in the code that nothing can be done to fix it.

Software engineers have all the power. Unfortunately, they can't also keep quiet.… (mehr)