You're right that this isn't about data collection/privacy, though it would be a bit scary to have our nation's cars remotely shut off at the whims of a foreign government.
Instead, we want/need to be protectionist of our manufacturing industries so that if we were to go to war, we keep our ability to make more missiles, planes, tanks, etc.
Yes, there are ways to speed up your time. When I took the SAT (2011), the main skill I developed was to quickly categorize the kind of question. Since there are only a few different kinds of questions, you could train yourself to do this formulaically/algorithmically. The type of question tells you how to eliminate a couple of the answer choices, and then you apply another question-type-specific algorithm to figure out the answer from the remaining options.
Where are you going to get all that time and space to build a lookup table? Are you sure you're able to measure all state at enough precision to make an accurate table?
Any theory that asserts exhaustive coverage of people would need to take all relevant aspects of reality into consideration, so I suggested some of the trickiest things that are relevant.
Unfortunately for me, they are so tricky that they "don't count" (try, genuinely, to model the reality bending capability of people in a theory, I would love to see that!).
Much to the disappointment of my teenage self who would really have liked the shape-shifting spell to work, I don't see any evidence we can bend reality.
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> consciousness?
I think this is a red herring. We can talk about P-Zombies, but we lack the means to determine if some random human (let alone AI) is one.
Isn't one of the big criticisms of AI at the moment the fact that they do this slight more than humans, and we can point and laugh at them?
(While conveniently forgetting that half of us were Yani and the other half Laurel, that half of us were blue and black while the other half were white and gold, etc.)
> The Science of the Gaps will do I suppose?
A reference to the ever diminishing role for God in the late 19th century onwards, but I'm not sure how you're using it here?
All this considered, and during this process, did you happen to form any conclusions (or ~"update weights"), consciously or unconsciously (in reality)?
I think it's interesting how the human mind can "know" whether things that are unknown can be modeled, or not, and I happen to believe that this phenomenon occurs within reality (where I believe the comments within this thread are), bending that portion of it. I also believe that this phenomenon is fundamental.
But then, there "is" "no evidence" for any of this...and we all know what that means!
Then I would say your theoretical model is wrong or incomplete or makes for a circular argument (it's an assumption and not proven that finite matter evolving through time reduces to a lookup table).
The problem with this specific instance is that the images generated mix and match characteristics that are unique to those ethnic groups. So the models are reducing real ethnic differences to simple stereotypes. In other words, the models are wrong, and wrong in ways that eliminate diversity.
There’s a saying, “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”
No matter how granular you get with specific ethnic groups, it’s not possible to capture the long tail of all the types of people who exist, and all of their appearances.
If you ask Midjourney to draw a man, should he be wearing clothes? A man might be naked. Should he have two arms and two legs? Some men don’t. What about two eyes? What color skin should he have?
The fact that Midjourney will never draw a third degree burn victim when simply asked to draw “a man” isn’t a flaw in the model. The model is biased, yes, but it is biased towards utility.
It's biased towards uniformity. What we observe in the article above is a distinct lack of variance in the model's output. One way this lack of variance comes across is as cultural bias, but it is also striking how flat and homogeneous are the results, even for 100 generations, given the same prompt. You'd expect some variety- but all the Indian men aren't just 60-year old sadhus, they are all slight variations of essentially the same 60-year old sadhu.
For me, the salient observation is the complete lack of any kind of creativity or anything approximating imagination, of those models, despite a constant barrage of opinions to the contrary. Yes, if you asked me to draw you "a mexican man" (not "person") I'd start with a somberro, moustache, a poncho, maybe a donkey if I was going for a Lucky Luke kind of vibe. But if you asked 100 people to draw "a mexican man" and it turned out they all converged on the same few elements you'd nevertheless have 100 clearly, unambiguously different images of the same kind of "mexican man", often with the same trappings, but each with a clearly distinct style.
It is this complete lack of variance, this flattening of detail into a homogeneous soup, that is the most notable characteristic, and limitation, of these models.
> It is this complete lack of variance, this flattening of detail into a homogeneous soup, that is the most notable characteristic, and limitation, of these models.
And yet when hands came back with beautiful variations in finger count, people were unhappy.
Ethnic differences among groups that aren't extremely isolated are mostly gibberish perpetuated with cultural identity politics.
Offspring tends to go in one direction or another so one group may end up inbred, but a mix is more accurate than compiling the beliefs of human cultures about their genetic traits and isolation from each other.
Actually no, they are reducing different ethnic groups to what is becoming the current norm: everyone being mixed.
Inside cities, no one is specifically looking for a member of their own tribe to marry so the ability to identify ethnic groups by facial features is collapsing.
I like that their pieces dig into the backgrounds of the researchers, which humanizes and popularizes the science itself. It has to get down from the ivory tower somehow, and storytelling is a great medium. Most Quanta articles are not "void of any science;" rather, I find them to be great lay explanations of high-level concepts that most scientists (including myself) would struggle to articulate to non-academic family and friends. If you want "just the science, ma'am," you can go read the papers themselves.
Also, not to nitpick, but I thought the crypto article was well-written and covered the subject properly. It seems you are the one misunderstanding the science if you believe that iO is just a form of FHE, which makes me doubt your whole enterprise of discrediting Quanta's work ;) Speaking as a (former) cryptographer here.
iO isn't going to be used in video games for a long time, if ever. For one, even if it had no overhead, it'd completely ruin any optimizations that the devs needed for the game to run in the real world. But likely iO will add a huge overhead, degrading performance by at least a quadratic factor or more. iO also doesn't consider things like syscalls or hardware instructions, which might break the security model anyway.
Video/music DRM wouldn't (couldn't?) change from what it is now: the plaintext bits have to be surfaced to the user at some level (so that it can be displayed/played), so they can simply be ripped at that point.
Not even theoretically possible, as far as I can tell. If iO is protecting your decryption key, then any indistinguishable circuit would also include your decryption key in some form.
I'm having trouble thinking of cases where iO gives you any actual guarantees that matter, because of this property.
If you're interested, check out the paper called "How to Use Indistinguishability Obfuscation" by Sahai and Waters. They were able to prove some very surprising things -- including how to hide a private key by way of iO.
FHE can be made IND-CCA secure in practice (i.e. for specific systems), please stop spreading misinformation. It's impossible in the general case for obvious reasons. Also, TFA isn't about FHE, it's about iO.
I know and have worked with the organizers of RWC and they've done a lot of the kind of work that you're dismissing here (which would be like telling Diffie and Hellman to piss off in the 70s because public-key crypto isn't IND-CCA2 secure without additional assumptions).
> I know and have worked with the organizers of RWC and they've done a lot of the kind of work that you're dismissing here (which would be like telling Diffie and Hellman to piss off in the 70s because public-key crypto isn't IND-CCA2 secure without additional assumptions).
I'm decrying the sensationalist writing in this news story, especially the headline, not dismissing anyone's work.
Maybe should ask your RWC organizer friends if your take is proportional to what I'm doing.
I'm a former cryptographer and the headline and news story aren't sensationalist by any means. iO has been considered the "Crown Jewel" of cryptography (by cryptographers) ever since the 2013 iO candidate by Sahai, Waters, Gentry, et al, and Sahai/Waters' followup "How to Use Indistinguishability Obfuscation." From a cryptographer's perspective, being able to use iO is like having a superpower.
Instead, we want/need to be protectionist of our manufacturing industries so that if we were to go to war, we keep our ability to make more missiles, planes, tanks, etc.