A lot of comments here seem to be overlooking the point of the article. That brains predict their sensory inputs isn't new. What seems to be is that a NN where correct predictions are done with small values of the weights and error correction has large weights uses lower weight values overall. That being energy efficient seems to be more a coincidence of how biological brains happen to work - larger weights use more energy. At least that's how I understand it. Doesn't seem quite as incredible as predicting sensory inputs.
Obviously being able to predict the future has value beyond conserving energy.
Did they? I thought slaves were mostly used in the ancient world, the undeveloped world, and for non-mechanized agriculture. None of which is really building the modern world, beyond just providing some underlying value. But if you count that, you have to count women having babies too, and all sorts of human endeavors.
You don't want to live in a city with poor people because it's cruel to have rich and poor living near each other? It kind of is because relative poverty makes people feel worse, but you'll surely bring useful tax money with you too.
You want to replace highest bidder wins with first in first served? Is that really better? How? This sounds like naive market manipulation, which ends up being whack-a-mole or just a disastrous mess.
No matter how many new languages we invent, this problem of surprise sub-languages being parsed from strings never goes away. It's almost as if program code should be somehow impossible to confuse with user-visible text. Maybe there's no good solution though :(
That common problem is the arbitrary classification of false narratives as good and false facts (fake news) as bad. The narrative based journalists can act smug for not directly lying but what they're doing is even worse - they're leading people to have a deeply held feeling about the world which is false. Feelings are more powerful than facts and motivate people to protest and vote in large numbers even if it's wrong. But the anti-fake-news people suck up the fake feelings gleefully.
Though it does seem obvious, it's pretty dangerous to go looking for patterns in the data. More scientific to define the criteria before knowing the results so you can have a hypothesis to test, not just an observation to make.
From TFA: "the people vs things dimension is a continuous scale, but in our analyses we only used categories that are predominantly one or the other. All things-oriented jobs have a clear technical component, ranging from locomotive engine driver to astronomer and all people-oriented jobs have a clear component of providing help to individuals."
It also identified "face to face interactions" as a requirement for being people-oriented. So dating app developer is clearly not included.
100 years later, we're rediscovering what we already knew. Common story in social sciences. Coming up next, Jews are smarter than blacks. Oh no, not yet! It's still taboo to even think that! But maybe in a few decades, the overton window will shift and researchers will allow themselves to study that honestly.
Is that really why eugenics is demonized? That the human race (not any living individuals) is giving up its freedom to some sort of fallible authority?
I guess, like censorship, people only object to an arbitrary subset of it. People love censorship of "really bad" ideas just as they love eugenics of "really bad" genes.
Most people seem happy with asserting our authority of gene selection over animals though :P Conservationism is that. Not to mention actual selective breeding and killing of course. Perhaps we rightly believe humans truly are capable of being benevolent arbiters of who gets to reproduce and who doesn't in animals.
Excuse me. It was this "a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully"
I'm saying no country provides free healthcare for all treatable illnesses. And not providing it is necessary because the cost would be too great.
Its distributedness is still worth something even if only a small number of people control most of it. If they go rogue or get stopped by the government, others can take over. That's quite unlike any centralized system.
Seems like he wasn't a "lowly country rector" since he had a masters degree from Cambridge, was a member of the Royal Society and had many other scientific accomplishments. The rectorship was apparently just a perk that came with being a successful scientist.
I wish bloggers wouldn't try to create a false impression of things like that. It's disinformation - intended to mislead the reader.
Sure, there's balance. The idea that it was working fine so why change it leads to gigantic bloated software that nobody can really understand.
As an anecdote. I developed a product in a field where the main players were extremely well established with codebases dating back to punch card days. Their software could do everything you might imagine wanting it to do. But it was also so complex, you had to take a training course to learn it. But what's interesting is there were customers of those competitors who also bought my product because it was quicker and easier to get common things done. All that power actually let to a worse product in some ways.
It's becoming like USB version names. If you're familiar with them from working with them all regularly, you can just remember what name means what. But for newcomers, it's a massive struggle. I feel that naming things in general imposes a lot of cognitive burden on people. Chrome version numbers are beautiful. Just incrementing integers, the way we numbered things as kids.
I wonder if the naming mess is intentional for marketing or an accident of not predicting the future well enough? They certainly seem to be trying to keep it simple and it's nowhere near the impossible muddle of, say, Intel and AMD CPUs or Nvidia GPUs yet.
Really? Can you point to any hype from the last, say, 5 years that even hints at thinly spread mining or ownership? Individuals were mining on their PC in its first couple of years, but that ended long ago.
Obviously being able to predict the future has value beyond conserving energy.