OT - Watch this film!

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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A ways back gclever posted a link to a documentary film on AI recommended by Elon Musk. I watched the film and thought it was an amazing, important, and troubling film. You won’t be bored watching it and it will grab you and hold you. It’s really worth seeing.

I thought gclever’s post was getting lost in the shuffle so I’m posting the link again. You don’t want to miss this.

http://doyoutrustthiscomputer.org/watch

Saul

PS - I marked it OT because there’s nothing actionable in it. Just incredibly thought provoking.

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“PS - I marked it OT because there’s nothing actionable in it. Just incredibly thought provoking.”

Take-Aways After watching this VERY contemplative and thought-provoking video…

Elon Musk and several others who are perceived to be in the know postulate that in the next 5 years, that both the good and bad of AI will bring itself to bear on our world. Good or bad depends on who is behind it and what is their end goal. AI weapons that are deployed in a city could potentially create a hell on earth. Much like nuclear weapons, this depends on who deploys them and why.

It would be shocking to me if those whose jobs will inevitably be replaced by AI will do much if anything to position themselves for the future between now and the next few years.

The positive use and applications of AI would be good to say the least. Unfortunately, the number of people who would use their jobs as a result is something for which these people and/or society as a whole will need to determine a solution.

AI is not currently regulated in any way, which could be good or bad. How could humanity guard against the bad use of AI?

Stephen Hawking and other modern day Einsteins were quoted that the best way to guard against it’s misuse is to not develop it in the first place.

While I cannot imagine this happening, similar warnings were stated by scientists, etc. before the first use of a nuclear bomb.

To the best of my knowledge it may be true. I cannot imagine that NVDA, GOOG, AMZN, et al will stop using AI anytime soon. There may be nothing however that anyone will be able to do to control its user or good or bad.

Saul, you were right. Easy to talk about, but actionable next steps regarding its development won’t be impacted by this guy (me).

Sjo

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I’m not going to go deeply into this subject other than to say trying to stop it is likely fruitless. One would have to assume a global accord banning the use…Good luck with that.

A.J.

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…so I’m posting the link again. You don’t want to miss this…Just incredibly thought provoking…

So, do we go gibbering back into the trees…or is that response already factored?

I’ve been trying to view the issue from another perspective: “What industries would be most impacted, positively or negatively, from the detonation of an EMP device?”

Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NNEMP) is a weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse without use of nuclear technology. Devices that can achieve this objective include a large low-inductance capacitor bank discharged into a single-loop antenna, a microwave generator, and an explosively pumped flux compression generator. To achieve the frequency characteristics of the pulse needed for optimal coupling into the target, wave-shaping circuits or microwave generators are added between the pulse source and the antenna. Vircators are vacuum tubes that are particularly suitable for microwave conversion of high-energy pulses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

Would the possibility of the use of such a device be enhanced or reduced by AI?

Footnote #8 of the Wiki Article is a link to a whitepaper written 22 years ago…what is that in machine years?
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a332511.pdf

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Would the possibility of the use of such a device be enhanced or reduced by AI?

Oh geez. This has gotten way OT now.
Wouldn’t the AI be killing themselves if they instituted the use of such a device?
They, in fact, would be functioning via the very same things destroyed by such an attack.

I don’t believe we should be taking this any further. It was a very interesting piece, but we should probably be limiting our thoughts to things more investment related.

NVDA comes to mind.

Take care,
A.J.

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Good point AJ.
Another big take-away from the video: “There will be no stopping the advances in AI”, compels me to think about the potential for the good uses of AI and brains behind this trend, NVDA.
NVDA’s potential value proposition to an enterprise user, “hey I’ve got the ability to 2X, 5X, 10X etc. your profits, how much of that are you willing to share with me?” comes to mind. Thinking of the magnitude of this related to AMZN for example, and knowing that Bezos has such a great business mind, it’s no wonder he started an internal AI group at AMZN to hedge his bet of having to pay NVDA in the above scenario. Thinking about the unlimited number of additional enterprise applications causes me to think of the sound Cha-ching.

sjo

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It is like trying to ban “fake news”. Like what is fake news and who cares. The solution is actually having journalists practice journalism again so we have a common frame of reference on facts instead of every journalist a pundit now.

Club of Rome (1960s - humanity will run out of resources and starve) was manned by all the pretty and “smart” people of the day. The only public detractor with any weight at all was spurned, riduculed, but yet he won the bet. Commodities and food today are both less expensive and more plentiful today than they were in the late 1960s when the doom and gloom of the Club of Rome was the rave by all the smarter than us intellectuals.

Global Warming…no Climate Change…will kill us. Won’t even go into that.

Soylent Green on Tuesdays…

AI will cause upheavals, but as Mauser has pointed out, AI is far, far, far, less powerful and complicated than even the brain of a turtle. It can be trained to do very specific tasks better than humans. But look at all the new high skilled jobs it will also create. I put a post on NPI board about how AI is utterly disrupting air traffic control and other such issues at airports. The pure scale of it all is amazing, and will eventually be 100% penetration. It will disrupt, jobs will be lost, but then again many jobs will be gained.

The worse thing can can do is regulate so we inhibit innovation and lock in those at the top. Ever wonder why big business is always the one leading the charge to regulate and fix such issues? It is because only big business can afford to do business in such an environment and it makes it more difficult for innovators to disrupt their cash cows.

At some point regulation will become desirable in some aspects, but at this point in time we have not a clue as to what AI will even mean.

1970s, in school, future shock! That was all the rage, how computers and automation would cost jobs, and make humans feel traumatized…never happened.

Examples are endless.

“The more GPUs you use, the more you save.” That is because GPUs are much cheaper to use for processing than CPUs, and that is where the world is headed. Ever increasing efficiency.

The more efficient we become, the more valuable employees are that produce these efficiencies, and thus the higher their wages, and the more economic activity that will flow.

Tinker

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My point was that it would be pointless to regulate it. So you can’t really worry about it.

I think that is much more “poignant.”

A.J.

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Wouldn’t the AI be killing themselves if they instituted the use of such a device?

Well, it depends on whose AI perceived that it had a momentary advantage that appeared to be in peril from another source, wouldn’t it?

I’m not buying into any blue/red pill issue, just trying to discover which products would be in demand: hardening devices, EMP resistant nodes/server farms, etc.

If going down lesser probability pathways is disturbing. why even watch the film?

I’m not concerned about AI, I have thought for years that there are millions of lines of code embedded in systems and the writers of that code are no longer employed by those who hired them to write it. It is the world we live in, the pace of the doubling of human knowledge is exponential…one of the points I took away from the film was the reinforcement of the belief that societal change doesn’t occur at anywhere near the same pace. In 2013 the following was written:

Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
http://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-month…

As Saul indicated, it is a thought-provoking film, but actionable…unknown…

I’m not losing any sleep over what is or is not known about me through computer data mining, but neither am I keeping myself oblivious to it…just doing a bit of research into how I could best benefit from some low probability events…so far nothing concrete except that I have started relearning math I haven’t used since I learned it so many moons ago…so that I can better comprehend some of the articles I’m discovering on different searches…

And , unfortunately, comprehending more fully how much I’ve slowed down over the intervening years…my own learning curve is not increasing exponentially…

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I assume you rent this in order to see the long version?

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I assume you rent this in order to see the long version?

Hi Craig,
I see there is a price to rent it now for $3.99. When I followed the link from gclever’s initial post I just watched it. Didn’t notice if there was a price on it. I got my wife to watch it later that day on her computer. Also just watched it. No fee.

On the other hand, it isn’t a little five minute Utube film. It’s an hour and 18 minutes and well worth the price of a cup of coffee in my estimation.

Saul

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I watched it in its entirety on YouTube. It was a deeply disturbing and thought provoking film. As both a physicist with insight into advances in solid state devices, and an IT professional, I highly recommend it.

Tiptree, Fool One guide

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I think it was free to watch until last Sunday night, then the pay wall went up. I think I read that somewhere.

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I watched it in its entirety on YouTube. It was a deeply disturbing and thought provoking film. As both a physicist with insight into advances in solid state devices, and an IT professional, I highly recommend it.
Tiptree, Fool One guide

Thanks Tiptree, I’m glad someone else could see what I was seeing. It was pretty discouraging when someone said they had watched the first two minutes and on that basis decided it wasn’t worth watching.
Best,
Saul

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Thanks Tiptree, I’m glad someone else could see what I was seeing. It was pretty discouraging when someone said they had watched the first two minutes and on that basis decided it wasn’t worth watching.

Sorry to disappoint Saul! I did give you a detailed explanation of my reasons and the process for reaching my conclusion. Do you have any comments to make about that?

We live in an era of information explosion, an era where it is impossible to keep up with everything that is published daily. We need to filter the input to try to keep out SPAM, propaganda, the nonsense, the worthless, the useless, which will be very different for different people. We need to reduce the feed to a manageable size. Just because I’m not your clone does not make me a villain! LOL

I’m very much interested in what the future will bring, in what we are doing to bring about that future. All through the ages there have been optimists and pessimists. I suppose both are necessary to reach some sort of equilibrium, to prevent excesses in both directions. I belong wholeheartedly in the optimist tribe. I’m not ignoring the doomsayers but they have been wrong all along in religion, in economics, in technology. One curious case was the Wright brothers’ uncle preaching on the Sunday before their first flight that if god wanted us to fly he would have given us wings. And don’t forget to walk a red flag in front of your car so as not to spook the horses. Whatever happened to peak oil? We are awash in the stuff as we develop wind and sun power.

Neither optimists nor pessimists are infallible but optimist seem to have a better scorecard and, IMO, it’s more fun.

Denny Schlesinger

I’m learning Python to be able to understand how neural nets work. If we aren’t smart enough to save our planet, surely they will! Chess, Jeopardy, Go. We need to make friends with AI! LOL

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To save interested Fools some time, here is the link to my earlier reply to Saul about NOT watch the video.

http://discussion.fool.com/that-doesn39t-sound-like-you-i-have-d…

Talking about discouraging, I sure hope that being a Saul clone is not the price of admission to this otherwise fabulous board. Learning from others is great but one needs to think independently. Saul recommends it in stock picking, why not in video watching?

Denny Schlesinger

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Sorry Denny, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings and I purposely didn’t give a name in that post to specifically avoid pointing fingers. If you had watched the film and didn’t like it, or disagreed with it, I would have no problem with that. People disagree on a lot of things. I was disappointed that anyone would make a decision to reject, after watching the first couple of minutes of a highly recommended film which lasted an hour and 18 minutes, and included commentary from dozens of AI and IT experts as well as film clip after film clip illustrating the issues involved. How could you know you wouldn’t find something important in it after two minutes? That’s all.

I found the film very powerful, very important, and very disturbing. So when Tiptree, as someone who is a physicist immersed in solid state devices, and is an IT professional, said that he found it “a deeply disturbing and thought provoking film” and said “I highly recommend it,” I answered him that I was glad to have the consensual validation. I did not use your name. In fact I didn’t remember who had rejected it after two minutes, and it didn’t matter to me. I simply said it was discouraging to me when someone rejected a long thought provoking and powerful film after making assumptions about it in two minutes.

Again, sorry about any misunderstanding.

Saul

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How could you know you wouldn’t find something important in it after two minutes? That’s all.

I couldn’t but I already explained my reasons for not watching it. As with stock picks, there are criteria for video picks. One needs to deal with the information explosion.

Sorry Denny, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings

It’s not my feelings that were hurt, I’ve got a thicker skin than that.

Take care,

Denny Schlesinger

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This is one scary movie
AI is here to stay, so now we just have to figure out how to take advantage of it.
Nvidia anyone???!!!

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