Don't Listen to Me. Listen to MIT. Get Out of Facebook.

Don’t Listen to Me. Listen to MIT. Get Out of Facebook.

Short post from my phone while I get the oil changed in my car.

Yesterday I tweeted this.

really well done, but with a scary ending: Machine Learning owned by Facebook… but really well done. https://t.co/3dN5Oo5EAW

— Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) August 10, 2015

I did some work and research on neural networks, artificial intelligence, machine learning and such back in my youth (early to mid 1980s). Thankfully nothing that would cause the world to come to an end or machine intelligence to derail.

This article explains quite well the evolution since those early neural networks to today. And the reason why Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawkins among others are sounding the bell about AI.

It’s getting spooky.

The reason I linked to that article is the same reason I’m staying out of Facebook. I don’t want to feed the machine. The calmness with which LeCun explains deep learning and the implications of it makes it sound like an engineering problem is being solved.

It is.

The problem is that the engineering problem being solved is how imprecise humans are. And it will be solved in the next decade.

I doubt that me staying out of Facebook will stop this. And I also doubt that Google (with whom I share limited information) is not doing the same. I am not stopping the evolution by doing this.

But hopefully you get the threat a littler better.

And stay out of Facebook.