Post #340,257
3/5/11 2:44:25 PM
3/6/11 12:00:22 PM
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"Watson, go away! I don't need you!"
I think it's safe to predict that should Ray Kurzweil's silly "Singularity" ever arrive, it will have been preceded some years before by mass layoffs among the cogitating classes. And while a body may gloat over the particular subset just now in the sights of machine technology, the implications bear pondering. When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of Âdiscovery  providing documents relevant to a lawsuit  the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.
But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, Âe-discovery software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.
Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts  like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East  even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.
ÂFrom a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out, said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. ÂPeople get bored, people get headaches. Computers donÂt. http://www.nytimes.c...e/05legal.html?hp
Machine intelligence, and in particular machine "understanding" of human language, appears to have just lit up its afterburners during the past few years. I've long considered the "Turing Test" to have been a faulty threshold for assessing electronic sentience, and even if it weren't, you can bet that the first time a galaxy of algorithms persuasively holds up its end of an informal and discursive conversation, the goalposts will be moved out to the parking lot. By decade's end, though, we're going to share the economy with a complex agglomeration of automated subroutines that will certainly appear to be sentient (should the actual condition be attained, this will likely be recognized only some time after the fact), and this development will be, to say the least, fraught. What a pity it is to think that such fabulous power and potential will be wielded in the service of ever-more pitiless efficiencies on behalf of late-stage capitalism, the present-day inhumanity of which scarcely stands in need of such literal augmentation...
cordially,
(edit:repit)
Edited by rcareaga
March 6, 2011, 12:00:22 PM EST
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Post #340,269
3/5/11 10:22:17 PM
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someone needs to be able to go to the
data center and plug the power back in and diagnose the absolute shit that programmers do to an operating system. As long as java is king I can make a living cleaning out the king's chamber pot
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
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Post #340,319
3/7/11 8:46:26 PM
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Depends whose doing the measuring
"Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from."
-- E.L. Doctorow
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Post #340,277
3/6/11 8:02:18 AM
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I spent the last 30 minutes talking about how I did that
25 years ago I coded an inhouse system that replaced an out of house system.
30 people (all women) used this system, day in and out, for years.
They liked it. They did not like change, at least most of them.
My system was identical, but local, not over leased lines, and coded 100% by me (in XENIX/Oracle/C). The old system was vendor coded in Pick/BASIC. Yes, I recoded most of of the getlist syntax. Shudder.
All the screens were the same.
All the commands (it had it's own command language) worked.
Identically.
And that was a problem. At least to me. Because that system had bugs. The docs said one thing, it did another. But if I fixed them, it would reduce the acceptance of my system. So I coded the bugs in. It was bug for bug compliant.
They go home on Friday, I work the weekend, they come back in, and they continue working. At 10-100 times the speed.
Most liked. A few really hated it. They lost some down time.
Then the month end happened. It used to take a week. The whole office would be paid for scut-work. No access to the systems during that time.
Mine ran over the weekend. They lost a week off. More started grumbling. Then I started fixing the bugs that I put in on purpose. All of a sudden the system behaved differently. They were not amused. But I wandered around, held their hands, and showed them the new way.
Most were accepting, but there were still some serious holdouts.
So what do you think we do with the holdouts?
Reorg. Poof. Job was gone.
So that project probably quadrupled the office productivity (yeah, I saw the bosses claims on it years later, on his resume, wow) while cutting the workforce by 10%.
And it was only the beginning of my path of destruction against the general working class.
I'm a prick (or so it seems).
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Post #340,296
3/6/11 9:14:34 PM
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Wow, cheap!
"six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 millionsix million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million"
Three docs for a buck, hell, scanning costs more than that.
---------------------------------------
I think it's perfectly clear we're in the wrong band.
(Tori Amos)
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Post #340,377
3/9/11 4:38:37 PM
3/9/11 4:45:16 PM
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With you re the future of capitalist-minimalism ...
Clearly, the worker-drone facilitators, a merely temporary fixture within the Grand Plan of accelerating the Ownership of All Things (and all creatures, by extension.)
--> to fewer and fewer -- They Were Expendable©
Obviously these creatures are mere temps, blow-flies enroute to creation of the final Unified Grand Capitalist, locked within his Iridium-plated blast-proof safe filled with ownership certificates for all Things, thus fulfilling the theology of Greed is Good.. to a T. as in Terminal.
Once the smelly, fragile and multifaceted bipeds are finally replaced with Efficient, Outlook/LookOut-embedded transistorized clones of Donald Trump's wettest dreams:
this minor, nondescript planet shall have achieved metaphorically, that burnt-out cinder status foretold by Klaatu
(following his warning about the consequences of spreading our nukes all over), said warning mentioned
-- after his little demo of Daylight Savings Time, at-will.
All Hail Robert Wise, who limned our sappy demise-via-bizness-theology long before there was even a PDP-8 in-service-to this Grand Scheme.
We must Hope that there are, indeed parallel Universes.. once this test-specimen has winked-out into cold Boolean 1/0 ignominy. Eh?
Carrion
Gort, Klaatu barada nikkto!
oTpy: fixed. That much still, we can Do.
Edited by Ashton
March 9, 2011, 04:45:16 PM EST
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