Paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference

Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference

Some comments I just made in an email about this :

Ouch! "Unreasonable" recurrent neural networks will be doing all our jobs soon. (https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)

What happens when we have automatic tools to summarize news items, journal articles, and perhaps provide early filters (routing-queries) in "what's interesting" from the journals. Perhaps lazy reviewers will just run the filter over a paper to see if its worth reading.

And then if we use the same models to generate papers ???

Just like automatic high-speed trading algorithms go off and autonomously create bubbles and crashes in the market, could we see runaway feedback between automated science paper generators and automated science paper accepters create entirely new subfields of science / pseudoscience?

I suppose, given that this is a physics conference, it's a great response to the Sokol Affair.

OTOH, sadly, it seems like this is a junk conference put together by "open access" publishers. The terrible thing here is that the term "open access" which should be a term of approval, is now getting discredited as vanity publishing.

I don't quite suspect a conspiracy by academic publishers ... but ... it is awfully convenient.  :-/

Tom O'Reilly on The Global Mind

Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Data Mining Idiosyncrasy

Hmmm ... a year or two ago I suggested that it was useless to try to turn Google-style statistical learning algorithms on the data of a single individual. I figured that the idiosyncracies of the individual meant that there was way too little data available to make viable models and predictions compared to tackling the population at large.

To emphasize my point I claimed that Google, sensibly, weren't trying to apply their algorithms to the contents of my Gmail mailbox.

Except, now, it seems they are.

I'll wait to see if I'm proved  wrong and they can make a success of this.

Couple of random thoughts on this and this.

1) Interesting, William Gibson writing about this. Remember this?

2)

"We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do."

What about Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics? Asimov's big theme is surely that technology has hard-to-codify ethical consequences.

3)

"Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory."

Compare Foucault :

"The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body," Foucault explains; "its vocation was to become a generalized function" (Discipline 207). The ultimate result is that we now live in the panoptic machine: "We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism" (Discipline 217).

This talk by Kevin Kelly is quite good. Thought-provoking.

Reminds me ...

I seem to remember Joseph_Weizenbaum worrying about this in Computer Power and Human Reason.

Now it's happening ....

Something *very* ethically ... icky ... about it.