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Bill Fulkerson

The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC3062901

folk science stories

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 25 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 25 Sep 20
     
    People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion-an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1-6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7-10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12. Implications for the roles of intuitive theories in models of concepts and cognition are discussed.
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

Gamification has a dark side - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...he-dark-side-of-gamifying-work

gamification productivity software development social control

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. ‘We are starving and games are feeding us,’ writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). ‘What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?’
  • But gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.
  • The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill – that’s a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. ‘Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,’ he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. ‘The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,’ he notes. ‘Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.’
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  • The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault would have said that these are technologies of power. Today, the interface designer and game scholar Sebastian Deterding says that this kind of gamification expresses a modernist view of a world with top-down managerial control. But the concept is flawed. Gamification promises easy, centralised overviews and control. ‘It’s a comforting illusion because de facto reality is not as predictable as a simulation,’ Deterding says. You can make a model of a city in SimCity that bears little resemblance to a real city. Mistaking games for reality is ultimately mistaking map for territory. No matter how well-designed, a simulation cannot account for the unforeseen.
Steve Bosserman

A radio play about radio that became the first fake-news story | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...came-the-first-fake-news-story

fake news credibility journalism

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The broadcast has become an origin story of fake news and technological anxiety in the United States, and its tentacled aliens watch when we talk of fake news today. Then, as now, the worry over whether the news can be believed was a proxy for something else entirely – fear of the new technologies that brought it. Scholars have convincingly questioned the scale of the 1938 panic. Everybody loves a good story – especially the newspapers threatened by radio news, the social scientists seeking a claim to relevance, and Welles, great ham that he was. Firsthand accounts attest that some listeners did panic, but many more did not. Why, then, did millions more find the panic so easy to believe these past 80 years?
  • In that decade, radio became more trusted than newspapers. The reasons had to do partially with the unique characteristics of the medium – its intimacy and ability to put you on the spot to hear as an event unfolded without a reporting gap in which craven newspapermen could insert their own slant. It also had to do with the trueness of the sounds that radio reproduced.
  • In November, three days after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist and radio reporter, published an oft-cited piece in response, entitled ‘Mr Welles and Mass Delusion’, in which she argued that the broadcast suggested American susceptibility to foreign propaganda:All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic … If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.
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  • The new trajectory changed news from an informative tool to an expressive one, and upended older reader-to-journalist relationships that looked almost more like a student-to-teacher relationship, albeit one entered into by choice. Though readers could always share stories, social media propelled the act. Readers can share stories because they feel true, and lend those stories emotional rather than factual force.
  • There are plenty of reasons the fake news concern of today does not exactly parallel the War of the Worlds story– among them, the fact that a large part of the modern worry is the degree to which lone actors can create the illusion of legitimacy online. But as with War of the Worlds, any individual piece of fake news – like the false story that Pope Francis endorsed President Trump – is not the only concern.More than the news, we fear the technology that transmits it. The quintessential Martians are those ways of knowing that are enabled by our new machines, threatening to make the solid world make-believe once more.
Steve Bosserman

Will AI replace Humans? - FutureSin - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...ai-replace-humans-42c19c114cb8

humans robotics artificial intelligence

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, some jobs will be wiped out, others will be in high demand, but all in all, around 5 million jobs will be lost. The real question is then, how many jobs will be made redundant in the 2020s? Many futurists including Google’s Chief Futurist believe this will necessitate a universal human stipend that could become globally ubiquitous as early as the 2030s.
  • AI will optimize many of our systems, but also create new jobs. We don’t know the rate at which it will do this. Research firm Gartner further confirms the hypothesis of AI creating more jobs than it replaces, by predicting that in 2020, AI will create 2.3 million new jobs while eliminating 1.8 million traditional jobs.
  • In an era where it’s being shown we can’t even regulate algorithms, how will we be able to regulate AI and robots that will progressively have a better capacity to self-learn, self-engineer, self-code and self-replicate? This first wave of robots are simply robots capable of performing repetitive tasks, but as human beings become less intelligent trapped in digital immersion, the rate at which robots learn how to learn will exponentially increase.How do humans stay relevant when Big Data enables AI to comb through contextual data as would a supercomputer? Data will no longer be the purvey of human beings, neither medical diagnosis and many other things. To say that AI “augments” human in this respect, is extremely naive and hopelessly optimistic. In many respects, AI completely replaces the need for human beings. This is what I term the automation economy.
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  • If China, Russia and the U.S. are in a race for AI supremacy, the kind of manifestations of AI will be so significant, they could alter the entire future of human civilization.
  • THE EXPONENTIAL THREATFrom drones, to nanobots to 3D-printing, automation could lead to unparalleled changes to how we live and work. In spite of the increase in global GDP, most people’s quality of living is not likely to see the benefit as it will increasingly be funneled into the pockets of the 1%. Capitalism then, favors the development of an AI that’s fundamentally exploitative to the common global citizen.Just as we exchanged our personal data for convenience and the illusion of social connection online, we will barter convenience for a world a global police state where social credit systems and AI decide how much of a “human stipend” (basic income) we receive. Our poverty or the social privilege we are born into, may have a more obscure relationship to a global system where AI monitors every aspect of our lives.Eventually AI will itself be the CEOs, inventors, master engineers and creator of more efficient robots. That’s when we will know that AI has indeed replaced human beings. What will Google’s DeepMind be able to do with the full use of next-gen quantum computing and supercomputers?
  • Artificial Intelligence Will Replace HumansTo argue that AI and robots and 3D-printing and any other significant technology won’t impact and replace many human jobs, is incredibly irresponsible.That’s not to say humans won’t adapt, and even thrive in more creative, social and meaningful work!That AI replacing repetitive tasks is a good thing, can hardly be denied. But will it benefit all globally citizens equally? Will ethics, common sense and collective pragmatism and social inclusion prevail over profiteers?Will younger value systems such as decentralization and sustainable living thrive with the advances of artificial intelligence?Will human beings be able to find sufficient meaning in a life where many of them won’t have a designated occupation to fill their time?These are the question that futurists like me ponder, and you should too.
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