I largely agree with you, but answer the reducibility problem. At what point does a network become complex enough to form consciousness? I think the writer of this article likely believes that there is no such point, that all information processing is consciously experienced phenomenon on a sliding scale of complexity
Drones are programmed by numbers and take action in the real world. Some ML-based AI analyze sets of data and perform actions in the real world.
Brains do what? Read signals in different strengths and patterns to take actions in the world.
I'm confused by you thinking there's some great impossibility of code achieving general intelligence. Maybe you're thinking of sentience, or consciousness and view that as an impossibility for AI. I say - an AI can perform actions in the real world as if it were generally intelligent, and whether there's sentience behind really doesn't matter so much from the point of view of humans.
They claim that East Asians develop cognitive capacity at an earlier age than other races and that gives East Asians a compounding practice advantage that gives them the edge in academic scores. The article claims, based on this premise, that universities like Harvard should actually discriminate even more against East Asians.
The article is full of obvious leaps designed to sound smart but are actually logically vacuous.
Much of the article essentially boils down to this:
Young East Asians test highly > The quantity of older East Asian who are successful don't reflect the quantity of young East Asians who achieve academically > Therefore, East Asians start smart and then other races catch up cognitively in adulthood
A) Racism is likely factor here. East Asians are less represented in leadership because leadership perceives East Asians are being less leaderly. Now we're using the symptoms of racism in order to justify the racism itself.
B) Nurture versus nature is a complicated and unsettled debate yet the author tries to claim that because China has a creativity problem, it's proof that East Asians as a race has a creativity problem. Never mind that Japan is a world leader in innovation.
C) Article repeatedly use test scores to say something qualitatively about the characteristics of a race. For example, East Asians test high on math therefore East Asians have more quantitative reasoning capabilities. You could just as easily attribute this to cultural differences in study priorities.
2) "If these children are scoring as high as 120 on average at the age of four (despite being hospitalized for malnourishment) and 110 to 112 at the age of ten, it is implausible that their IQ goes up as they grow older"
Come on. Why? You can't just assume that hitting a high IQ at an early age means that it cannot continue growing. Especially when these IQ scores are being compared against age groups.
What would a $1 a year model do in terms of opening the market up to competition? That seems like the worst of both worlds, no additional competition, and we make these difficult for those without much money.
Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.
You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.
I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.
It's definitely better. Amazon's business model is inherently more sustainable than traditional brick mortar, they essentially remove a step in the value stream.
For a brick a mortar store (and this is a little oversimplified), it goes manufacturer>warehouse/distribution center>store>customer drives to store. Note too, that the last step is usually store(s) plural unless you're doing all your shopping at a place like Walmart.
For Amazon, they cut out that entire last step and replace it with a model where a multitude of people can have their needs fulfilled with efficient routes.