Next we solve knowledge. From Wolfram Alpha Computes Answers To Factual Questions. This Is Going To Be Big. There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It’s good at answering factual questions; it’s a computing machine, a tool — not a mind. I predict that this will work rather poorly, but enough to generate interest and to be appealed to a moderate amount of the time. And it will be followed by competitors that do the same thing, only much worse. And then, out of nowhere, using some closely guarded proprietary methods, some tech company will knock this out of the park with the “It just works” feature from day one. And it will be the dawning of a new age.

I had a brief debate on the patio of Jesse’s apartment on Saturday regarding ‘dangers’ of historically blind philosophy. Today, I read the following aside on Peter Smith’s blog : Why should the philosopher be any more especially interested in the history of her subject than the physicist is in the history of hers? If you take a broadly naturalist line, then I think the answer, to a first approximation, is: there is no good reason. The physicist and philosopher alike should start from the hard-won available theoretical options in their best-developed forms. Of course, philosophy is difficult, there’s a danger of foreclosing options too soon, and it is a good to remind ourselves that there may be more theoretical options than the currently most explored ones: the Great Dead Philosophers might provide a useful source we can mine for alternative ideas. So, less approximately, the naturalistic philosopher — being grateful for all the help she can get in her pursuit of truth — might occasionally delve into the history of philosophy for inspiration (and she supposes that she’s more likely to get inspiration from something like the lines of thought actually pursued by her best predecessors than from straw positions created by incompetent exegesis). Still, by my lights, the naturalistic philosopher’s interest in the history of her subject should remain relatively minor and completely instrumental. It perhaps feeds into her thinking about causation or knowledge, or whatever: but it is causation and knowledge that she cares about, and she is interested in Descartes or Hume or Kant only insofar as they offer useful pointers. And as soon as she finds herself at the edge of interpretative swamps — which is in practice rather soon — the naturalistic philosopher will typically lose interest: let the historians amuse themselves, and come […]

From Chaos filter helps robots make sense of the world The Oxford group’s FabMap software tackles those problems by having a robot assign a visual “vocabulary” of up to a thousand individual “words” for each scene, every two seconds. The “words” describe particular objects in a scene, for example a bicycle seat, and the software learns to link words that occur together into groups that are given words of their own. For example, the word “bicycle seat” is almost always found associated with the words “bicycle wheel” and “bicycle chain”, so they linked together in a so-called “bag of words” – “bicycle”. That means when the robot revisits a scene that now lacks, say, a bicycle, it notes a single change rather than the disappearance of many smaller features. That prevents too much significance being attached to the bike’s disappearance and means the robot is more likely to recognise the scene as familiar, says Newman. Video of this bot posted below the break because its shitty ad autoplays.

From Pixar’s Gender Problem WALL-E: Robot somehow acquires human gender characteristics, strives to clean up earth, goes on adventure to space. Why does WALL-E need to be male? Why does EVE need to be female? Couldn’t they both be gender ambiguous and still fall in love? That would have been a bold move, but I think it’s safe to say that Pixar is less than bold on the gender front. “Hey, guys, we have this robot with no inherent gender identity. We want to give it an arbitrary gender. Maybe we could make it female. Yeah, no, that would just just be ridiculous.” Female characters: EVE, Mary, maybe some of the dead ex-captains of the Axiom Challenging Gender Stereotypes score: 2/10. EVE is the competent scientist-bot. Still, making something that is inherently genderless male because male=neutral is bullshit.* … I just returned from seeing WALL-E with my 12-year-old sister, and I’d like to revise my comments on it somewhat. The first time, I just watched for enjoyment, but this time, I tried very hard to identify the cues and actions that marked WALL-E’s and EVE’s genders and see if I could imagine them as gender neutral. In truth, it wasn’t too hard. Up until the scene when they introduce themselves by name, it was pretty easy to imagine each of them as either the opposite gender or gender-neutral. There are only a few things that specifically gender WALL-E as male: his name, a single comment from John (“I know that guy.”), and his copying of the male part of the “Hello Dolly” dances. His voice could be interpreted as masculine, but I forced myself to think “gender neutral” and it actually worked pretty well. With just a few tweaks, particularly the name, I think that WALL-E could have been portrayed […]

or the brain, for that matter. In this case, the sensible, anti-pseudoscience guy has the wrong position, for the same reason, as the other wrong person. 5 points extra credit for listing each scientific, theoretical, conceptual, or practical confusion the motivates this discussion.

From Singularity Hub (thx Lally)

This is sort of interesting: New Kindle Audio Feature causes a stir (WSJ) Kindle 2 is smaller than the first version of the product.The new device also features a five-way navigation element, faster wireless service for downloading books and the ability to wirelessly sync between Kindles and cellphones. Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice. “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won’t confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider. Is reading a book a derivative work? How can we even make sense of ‘derivative works’ when dealing with digital technologies?

– Egon, “Ghostbusters” I recently wrote up a very long comment in response to this post on LiteraryGulag. It screwed up the formatting of my comment, so I am reproducing it here for posterity. Let’s see if we can’t get Sheets to show up and respond! I find the recent lamenting over the death of traditional newspapers to be a curious phenomenon. I suppose people wailed and moaned over the death of radio, and I vaguely remember similar chicken little articles as cable (and particularly cable news) began to steal viewers from network television. Newspapers enjoyed a monopoly over the kitchen table during these media transitions for a few basic reasons: the news was reliable, portable, and incredibly user friendly. More than any other alternative, the newspaper allowed readers to extract the information they wanted, and to skim or ignore the rest. The internet radically increases the portability and user-friendliness of media, and of news media in particular. I scan RSS feeds on my phone on the bus ride to work, and my girlfriend is infatuated with aggregator services like Newser and The Daily Beast that can digest and colsolidate massive amounts of information from all over the net into easily assimiliated bites. There may be some sacrifice of depth in favor of a breadth of knowledge, though articles of interest will get singled out and saved for more in depth review at a more convienent time. This behavior in particular is sorely absent from your attempt to villainize the internet and hold it responsible for the death of journalism. The moral you draw from studies about apparent “changes” in reader behavior are terribly misleading in this regard. Exploring the web is precisely a process of filtering and sorting, of determining what is important and worth paying attention to, what […]

New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development Results from the most extensive U.S. study on teens and their use of digital media show that America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online – often in ways adults do not understand or value. “It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”