Because the political party (and the signers) were comprised of Jewish people? I'm perfectly fine if you read "Israelis" there (or "early Jewish politicians"), or find a different reference closer to "an opinion on Jews", as long as it not detracts from the point I was making: Einstein's dated opinion on racial issues is as relevant as Stallman's opinion on the fashion industry. Interesting? Sure. But relevant? No. It's a fallacy to think that smart people have smart opinions on everything they are not an expert in. It's a misplaced appeal to authority. It's a proxy submission to have HN discuss the recent events, and I doubt HN can make sensible points on this subject, as much as HN can make sensible points on women in technology.
Yes, it could have totally gone the other way too. There are smart domain experts that are very naive, politically incorrect, racist, or intolerant of domains they have less expertise in.
Einstein was probably better at science than at debating social racial issues. Likewise, nobody should give more weight to Einstein's opinion on God, bees [1], or the Jews [2], than on anybody else's.
When "normal" citizens can find instructions on how to create IED's and pipe bombs on the surface internet, something is very very wrong. This is what causes naive easily-influenced youth to radicalize. They do not even have to seek it out on the deep web, their social feeds are filled with such extremist content.
Then when the police confiscates their computer and finds Inspire magazine on there, they are branded a terrorist and face jail. While there is a difference between curious rebellious youth and hardcore jihadists, it's very murky when there is such easy access to real damaging stuff.
Driving them underground would make anyone seeking them out a solid suspect. Right now innocent bystanders are confronted with their propaganda and may give in (whereas normally they never would).
I know these are American companies, but they are used world-wide. The bill of rights and American standards of free speech do not have to apply everywhere though. Europe faces the consequences of this unbridled free speech. You want free (hate) speech? Fine. Create your own website and host your own content. Don't (ab)use these big companies who hide behind our-algo's-could-not-find-it and do not take their responsibility, because they have so many users they can never police them all.
Real terrorists use both the surface web (for recruitment and propaganda) and the underground web (for planning attacks). No smart terrorist uses the surface web for planning. The damage of surface web propaganda far exceeds the damage of having no intel on surface web propaganda.
It is not about attacking/opposing political views, it is about attacking/opposing hate speech and inciting violence. If hate speech also happens to be a political view, then too bad.
Yes, Western countries are also guilty of propaganda. But they are a bit more subtle about it and do not go over the edge as often. That edge is: (inciting) violence.
This could be qualified as extremist content (if one were to be as objective as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNCUeItvovs And I would be ok if that were removed.
Google, Facebook, and especially Twitter are used by terrorist organisations for recruitment and propaganda. These videos brainwash young people into hatred of the west, incite them to leave their countries to go join a war that is not theirs, polarize, and are directly responsible for suicide attacks.
Sure, information wants to be free, and all that cyberpunk jazz. At what cost? Apparently at the cost of innocent lives. These companies are directly responsible for giving these terrorists a platform. The free speech-apologists are indirectly responsible for fostering fertile ground for these terrorists.
Yes... blocking this information will also block innocent information. But I rather see that, than see more innocent lives lost. I say: chase them underground. This makes more clear the difference between a real jihadist with bad intentions, and a pious person slowly being brainwashed, because their feeds show nothing but dead children being pulled from rubble, Anwar al-Awlaki propaganda, and anti-Semitic hoaxes.
Terrible Godwin flamebait. Not disappointed, merely amused and surprised. If you can not make a statement about a politician without invoking Hitler and dictatorship, you should really reconsider speaking up.
Indirectly you are calling Trump voters Nazi's. That is pretty damaging to debate and to democracy.
First calling Trump right, then portraying him as a mastermind capable of murdering millions of people, is juggling the very same demagogic tricks you so despise. There is no need to demonize someone, when you can factually, and calmly, attack their xenophobic economy-damaging proposals.
Google partners with these other networks (like Advertising.com and AppNexus). In the end it is their DFP .js code that invokes malicious ads/redirects. I blame the last in the chain, and I do not think that is unfair.
Not all ads on adSense are reviewed. Or, if they are, the reviewers are doing a poor job. Locally, and on mobile devices, I get adSense ads like: "Your device has a virus. Click here to download our anti-virus software for 4.99$." Then the page shows the "404 broken robot"-graphic (it is an ad on adSense network, which spoofs Google, and scares you into downloading a paid, probably worthless, virus-scanner).
I've reported numerous ads to Google over the years: Some competitors who were not playing by the rules, but also redirects to porn websites and the (locally) infamous: Your Whatsapp has expired! Enter your phone number, so we can mine that, and charge you weekly for a fake app.
> I suppose they might block sites that use DFP to serve ads from other networks they can't vet and don't go through good review and were detected to contain bad Ads.
Likely, but this seems weird (fix/penalize DFP partner networks first, don't penalize your users for using your own product). Also from a competitor sense: I am all for protection of users (use an adblocker!), but it does not feel right that a company with the resources of Google, finally manages to rid their own network of these malicious ads (let's say for sake of argument they have), then immediately puts the ban-hammer on their less resourceful competitor networks. Perhaps that is a side-effect of owning both analytics, the ad networks, and the browser people use to view those ads.
The only time I have been bothered with these kind of ads, is when DoubleClick serves me those on my Android.
DoubleClick certainly is not the worst offender of this, but they are the biggest player. Is Google going to block/penalize the sites of their own customers? That would feel weird. Is Google going to block/penalize the sites of their competitors? That would also feel weird.
Marketing, buy-in, monetizing Skype, and product placement: The field of AI is ridiculously hot. A Chatbot is the least complex AI to build, but it still qualifies as AI. Hence, if you want to join the hype, a chatbot is a reasonable start. With a few regular expressions and if-then rules you too can build Tay.ai (but only MS can get the press for it). Compare to Microsoft PopFly and Silverlight with rich media. [1] It's also possible that Google releases personal assistants for Google Business in the next few months, and MS picked up on that 6 months ago.
Competition: Facebook is building "M", a personal assistant-style personal assistant. Apple has Siri. Google has Google Now. And MS has Cortana.
Technology: Some (Weasel-word, but I don't want to list names) say that computer vision is now solved. Convnets can predict 1000-class problems with the same accuracy as humans. The deep learning field is now eating away at the fields of reinforcement learning, generative art, and NLP. Recent papers show that it is now possible to create a conversational bot without any hand-crafting of rules.
Military/defense: Both the AI/ML industry and academics are in bed with the military complex. We did not study convnets, to aid the blind, no, we studied convnets, so we could detect terrorists at the border or in public transit. The people working on guided missile systems in the previous generation are now working on unmanned aerial drones. People were interested in fooling convnets, not for the hell of it, but because it is dangerous when a turret mistakes a tank for a puppy. For NLP: DARPA and IARPA want better defense and intelligence technology. The systems to suck up all these global communications are in place, but it still relies on old "dumb" tech, like keyword-matching. It is not able to detect sarcasm, 1337-speak, or code words. That is a big driver behind the attempt to evolve NLP: Terrorists do not need encryption, when they can talk about butchering goats and get lost in the noise, and no one is the wiser.
The Turing-test will forever be a moving goal-post. Mimicking intelligence does not seem to be enough to call machines intelligent.
I think this is an unfair assessment. The industry talks of AI, not AGI. It's not Microsoft's fault that the public thinks of Terminator robots when hearing "AI", nor that science-fiction stories have been written a 100 years ago.
The general public does not set budgets for AI research.
AI research benefits from faster processors, more memory and more advanced algorithms. Only philosophers (the domain of AGI is philosophy, not so much engineering or maths) are uncomfortable with those details.
Please refer to AGI, if you are talking of the hypothetical strong AI. The current textbook definition is alright.
(And yeah, the hype around AI is palpable and annoying. That's why many researchers called their work "cognitive science", "machine learning", "optimization", "logic" or "applied maths" and avoided "AI". Because else, they'd have to argue semantics, or defend why they haven't build an artificial God yet...)
In 10 years I predict bots like this will do the work of undercover agents. A bot will join a hacker group, or place an order on a deep web site, and will try to get as much identifying bits on its users.
> Tay has been built by mining relevant public data
Which public conversational data was this? Have they already been mining IRC channels and/or Skype? Or more innocuous, like the Reddit data set?
The writing could be one (or many) of many things: Leveling, acting, craziness, fooling, making an obscure point, fnords, trolling, an in-joke, a nod to author identification or woolly self-aggrandizing media reporting, being brash and adversarial for the hell of it, attention whoring, readership selection etc.
I don't think it is supposed to make sense, except maybe for a select few of insiders. We had Cryptome vs. Wikileaks, Cryptome vs. Appelbaum and now Cryptome vs. Snowden. Something-something about letting the leaks do the talking, not the money and spin doctors.
My grandmother was part of a church that heavily depended on gifts. The priest would send her envelopes with 10 cents in them. You can't really buy anything with 10 cents, but you sure feel bad when you spend it. So she would usually send back 1010 cents (10$ and the original 10 cents). Don't know why I am telling you this, but that is a hell of a fundraising effort.
The customers that would buy a bible-app are the same who would gladly donate to their church. Indirectly this app may have already contributed its "winnings" back into the community. Maybe someone got inspired by reading the bible-app and did a good deed or grew spiritually. How is that for a winning!
The biggest Christian publisher in my country has been sending take-down notices to websites offering bible texts for free (vs. their paid access). They rather see money than people strengthening their faith. Mull on that for a while.
Yes, it could have totally gone the other way too. There are smart domain experts that are very naive, politically incorrect, racist, or intolerant of domains they have less expertise in.