Hmmm... I was left a bit unconvinced by this series of essays. They feel like casually written blog posts - or hastily dashed-off Sunday Supplement articles. I was expecting a bit more rigour and investigation. The book treads over well-worn ground - most Silicon Valley companies are trying to recreate Mommy tidying their room via AI, Uber is trying to eat the world, algorithms leave us in…
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During my (brief) stint teaching senior leaders about AI, there was one question that I urged them to learn above all others. What is the acceptable failure rate? For this, I had to teach them two concepts. False Positives. For example, telling someone they have cancer when they don't. False Negatives. For example, telling someone they don't have cancer when they do. There is a cost…
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![I have to apologise for some delay in answering your obliging favor, in which you did me the honour of suggesting to me the manufacture of a [mechanical] Lawyer's Clerk. After much consideration, I regret that I have found it impossible to produce an article which should be satisfactory to myself, and to the profession. I have, however, been completely successful in the production of a New Patent Mechanical Novel Writer—adapted to all styles, and all subjects; pointed, pathetic, historic, silver-fork, and Minerva. I do not hesitate to lay before you a few of the flattering testimonials to its efficacy, which I have already received from those most competent to judge.](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/punch-fs8.png)
The Zeitgeist's newest toy is OpenAI's Chat Platform. So I asked it "Could you write a limerick about a man from Woking?" Sure, here's a limerick about a man from Woking: There once was a man from Woking Whose life was quite dull and uneventful He worked at the bank And liked to walk by the tank But never went out and got adventurous Note: Woking is a town in the county of Surrey, England. It…
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When I was a kid, our school had one computer per classroom. Luxury! Teachers had long-since given up on the state of my handwriting. So I got special dispensation to write up some of my work on whatever primitive word processor was installed on the PC. With one caveat: no spell check! Which, even as a ten year old, I thought was reasonable. Learning to spell is an adult life skill. So using …
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Listen to this blog post in your browser: Download MP3 audio. Powered by Amazon Polly. I've noticed an interesting trend on some of the blogs I follow. More of them - though by no means the majority - are including audio versions of the content. The usually look something like this: or The ones which have this are mostly using commercial Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines.…
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I speak English. My Amazon account is set to English. My Alexa listens to my English commands and replies in English. Except for new book notifications. I saw a pulsing yellow light on the dot. I've memorised all of the various signs and portents the accurs'd device can summon up, so I asked it (in English) what notifications it had for me. It replied, naturally, in German. I couldn't grab an …
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I started reading this as the news came out that someone at Google got convinced that their AI was sentient. And that's what this book is about! A researcher starts talking to his computer and gradually becomes convinced that it is "alive". It is a perennially prescient story. And it is fascinating to see how the state-of-the-art was perceived in 1972. It is in the shadow of 2001 - but much…
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In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: "hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun", "description":"The legendary extinct bird cooked in tomato sauce, served in a gluten-free bun.", …
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We forced an AI to look at thousands of photos of memorial benches. Just because. Here are the results. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 100%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see…
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As part of my MSc I'm taking a short course in Practical Machine Learning via QA.com. The first three days were just about basic stats visualisation using Python. It was great to have a refresher - but I would have expected that to be a pre-requisite. The tutor was excellent - very patient at explaining complex concepts. And the use of Jupyter Notebooks is a gamechanger for taught courses like…
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"Alexa… timer for fifteen minutes." The problem with the English language is that it is full of homophones, or semi-homophones. 15 and 50 sound basically the same. Humans have a hard time distinguishing them. So there's no wonder that voice assistants also have difficulty. Recently, I've noticed that my wife and I have adopted a very specific accent when talking to our Alexa. Certain constants a…
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There's been several long threads recently on Google's crappy info-box. Google doesn't want you to leave the Google page, so Google slurps information up and presents you an answer on the Google homepage. Here's what it typically looks like. OK, that's kinda useful. Search for a thing and get the info without clicking through. But there are times when it goes dreadfully wrong. Sometimes it…
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