It's nice being one of those people who wasn't using React because of its strange licensing. Facebook has its history. Now I can say it's really good to see that Facebook make the right call.
I will still not be using React. It's just too heavy, same order of magnitude as jQuery.
Yeah, there's no reason humans can't interact with the physical world through auxiliary VR worlds. We already do this with websites, VR will eventually be an interface to interact as a connected robotic device.
At the same time, the person in VR would be giving learnable information to the robot while they are controlling it (e.g. like a driver for a self-driving car). Eventually, you could wade the robot off of VR and it would be able to carry out the task. So, VR could also be a way to teach robots.
I can see this being interesting in traffic applications. Instead of the red/yellow/green traffic lights we have at intersections today, instead imagine a "laser counter" system that would "tag" various vehicles as they approached and would send a special signal to the car whose turn it was to go. The car, being self driving, would be integrated into all of this and then proceed, assuming the other cars follow the same contract. All it takes is one car to not understand the contract for this to be pretty scary though. Maybe the road could be tolled: the spike-track or barrier won't go down unless your car has proven that it can cooperate in the intersection protocol.
It would be interesting to automatically generate the training data and feed it to the ML module in real time.
You could hard-code an interactive agent that periodically peeked and coerced the input (between itself and the ML function). This way the ML module is coercible.
It would even be more cool if the ML function itself learned the interactive agent function as part of itself.
I find it slightly weird and offensive that the products contain sexual orientation information. Are the products being bought to be paired with other products, sexually? Or are they being bought to perform labor? Does the labor in any way depend on the sexual orientation of the product? Isn't prostitution illegal in the country where this company operates?
The beginning of this article is interesting. If I was from the distant future, maybe I'd ask these questions followed by the answers I'm expecting from 2017:
Q: Why are people still working? A: You need to work to live.
Q: Why do men and women appear so different? A: They are biologically very different.
Q: Why are people trying to increase, rather than decrease, the amount of jobs to be done by humans? A: Idiot, clearly we need more jobs, otherwise everyone will be poor!
Q: Why are people waiting for signs and lights in metal cages with wheels? A: Those wheels in metal cages are one of our most prolific forms of transportation right now.
Q: Why are people eating other animals? A: Who doesn't, meat is tasty!
Q: Why do people have different skin color? A: You are racist.
Q: Why are some people so round? A: Are you making fun of fat people?
Q: Why are some people in a rolling chair all of the time? A: Some people are born with disabilities or break bones.
Q: Why are people still cutting other people open to fix them? A: How else do you stop internal bleeding and remove tumors?
Q: Why do 51 people decide what happens to 100 people instead of 1 person deciding what happens to 1 person? A: Ever heard of democracy, (unfortunately) the most fair system ever created to date by our founding fathers (who also owned tons of human slaves)?
Q: What is a border and how come I can't see it? A: Ever heard of the nation state? You're already subject to it just by being here. Didn't anyone tell you that?
Q: Why do people get thrown in cages for misbehaving? A: What else would we do with misfits and dangerous people?
I agree, this is the sole reason why I am no longer using React for anything serious. Facebook is bad news, no pun intended. Thankfully, there are other solutions that don't have any strings attached.
In its current state, even cutting-edge machine learning is pretty accessible if you have a good understanding of linear algebra and calculus. If you want to do have a deeper understanding of machine learning then vector calculus, tensors, graph theory, etc. can only help you.
If every known resource acquisition task was automated, and the discovery of unknown non-automated tasks could be automated to be automated, we'd be post-scarcity and the concepts of working and income wouldn't be useful metrics anymore.
So, yeah machines are a big black hole and our jobs are doomed asteroids spiraling into the black hole. As they spiral into the singularity, humans will be displaced at an accelerating rate, and it will take more ingenuity and effort for humans to maintain "work". And, for what? In the asymptotic limit, the outcome should be no more jobs and "work" in a the way we currently define them, and humans will be truly free to creative pursuits. Never shall a beautiful human mind be wasted on labor which a machine can do.
At some point, machines will be the dominant species pushing civilization forward, not us.
Until then, we're forced to work, we're forced into employment because our world does not simply give us what we want. Food and spears don't fall out of the sky, so we will waste our time hunting and farming until we figure out how to make those things "fall out of the sky".
It's not so much that humans are intelligent as it as that machines are just really dumb, which is really just because humans are still too dumb.
You are entitled to be skeptical based on your personal experiences. That one smart guy has had terrible experiences with 100% automated pre-2020 systems is not a good enough reason to shy away from the idea of pure automation.
Our life force diffuses over the options we perceive as viable and available. Many years from now, when we are all gone, kids will look back and wonder how humans could have ever been doing such jobs. Much in the same way we look back and find it hard to imagine how humans could spend the entire day chasing down prey and running from lions. It's that much of a leap that is required.
Like MS Paint, but for VR. Interesting, the "websites" of VR will be worlds... I can totally see people throwing in this kinda stuff "just because wow new technology" in the same way that websites back in the 90s threw in snowflakes falling on the screen, custom pointers, epileptic lighting, audio, flash, etc.
Lately my Pixel has been achieving sub KBps speeds on very good Wifi connection (laptop in same room 100MBps), and it reminded me of the old days with dial-up on win 98 -- but worse. The estimated download-time for the LinkedIn app (70MB... gg) was a whopping 6 months! What a great way to get me to guzzle up my mobile data.
I will still not be using React. It's just too heavy, same order of magnitude as jQuery.