Author Archives: Editors

Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized-By Ragnar Fjelland

Posted on by
Reply

(Great article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for basic understanding. Computers can perform Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), such as specific jobs of cleaning robots, or car manufacturing robots, but author argues that computers will never learn Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) identical to humans because they do not have the experience of living in human society and acquiring human wisdom and experience. Computers utilizes only correlations to solve a problem, but humans utilize both correlations and causative reasons to reach a conclusion, especially in AGI. AI has made great leaps in correlations and probability, but still lacks in utilizing causative reasoning. f.sheikh)  

“I shall start with Dreyfus’ main argument that AGI cannot be realized. Then I shall give a short account of the development of AI research after his book was published. Some spectacular breakthroughs have been used to support the claim that AGI is realizable within the next few decades, but I will show that very little has been achieved in the realization of AGI. I will then argue that it is not just a question of time, that what has not been realized sooner, will be realized later. On the contrary, I argue that the goal cannot in principle be realized, and that the project is a dead end. In the second part of the paper I restrict myself to arguing that causal knowledge is an important part of humanlike intelligence, and that computers cannot handle causality because they cannot intervene in the world. More generally, AGI cannot be realized because computers are not in the world. As long as computers do not grow up, belong to a culture, and act in the world, they will never acquire human-like intelligence.

Finally, I will argue that the belief that AGI can be realized is harmful. If the power of technology is overestimated and human skills are underestimated, the result will in many cases be that we replace something that works well with something that is inferior.”

Full Article

Supreme Court’s Decision on President Trump’s Tax Returns & November Elections-By F. Sheikh

Posted on by
Reply

It was a shrewd but fair decision by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court basically ruled that the President is not above the law and has no immunity from subpoena, but at the same time he has the right like everyone else to fight the subpoena in the lower court and the lower court has to decide it. In the case of congress, the court ruled that congress has the right to subpoena the tax records, but it has to justify it by meeting certain standards. This gave President Trump enough time to fight it out in lower courts without releasing taxes before elections. The Supreme Court was able to extricate itself from politically hot situation.

In the long term, it may not be so good for the President. If he loses elections, and he has some illegal activities in tax returns, he may be in hot waters legally in 2021 and beyond when he has no Presidential immunity protection.

Vice President Joe Biden is in a stronger position and may put a pressure on Donald trump by refusing to debate him unless he releases his tax returns. President Trump may still may not release the tax returns, but it may further highlight the issue in voter’s mind.

We all think that in 2016, it has already played out and did not make a difference. But there is one crucial difference-in 2016 many independent minded voters gave him benefit of doubt and had a hope that as being a businessman and developer, he may bring progress, especially in building infrastructure. This time these independent minded voters (not blind die-hard followers) will not give him benefit of doubt as they have already seen his performance, especially his incompetent management and inability to mentally grasp complex issues facing the nation.    

F.Sheikh

Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History By Ryan Best

Posted on by
Reply

They were installed as symbols of white supremacy during periods of U.S. history when Black Americans’ civil rights were aggressively under attack. In total, at least 830 such monuments were constructed across the U.S, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which maintains a comprehensive database of Confederate monuments and symbols.

The biggest spike in Confederate memorials came during the early 1900s, soon after Southern states enacted a number of sweeping laws to disenfranchise Black Americans and segregate society. During this period, more than 400 monuments were built as part of an organized strategy to reshape Civil War history. And this effort was largely spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who sponsored hundreds of statues, predominantly in the South in the early 20th century — and as recently as 2011.

Full article

posted by f.sheikh

Failing States-by Pankaj Mishra

Posted on by
Reply

‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan; strategies deployed by nations that responded early, such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, Johnson boasted after a visit to a hospital treating coronavirus patients: ‘I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.’

Narcissistic intellectual habits, which credit moral virtue and political wisdom to countries such as India because they appear to conform to Anglo-American notions of democracy and capitalism, will have to be abandoned. More attention must be paid to the specific historical experiences and political traditions of Germany, Japan and South Korea – countries once described (and dismissed) as authoritarian and protectionist – and the methods they have used to mitigate the suffering caused both by manmade change and sudden calamity. The idea of strategic state-building, historically alien to Britain and the US, will have to be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.

The pandemic, which has killed 130,000 people in the US, including a disproportionate number of African Americans, has now shown, far more explicitly than Katrina did in 2005 or the financial crisis in 2008, that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. An even deeper and more devastating realisation is that democracy, Anglo-America’s main ideological export and the mainstay of its moral prestige, has never been what it was cracked up to be.

Full article

posted by f.sheikh