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They probably weren’t inspired by [Jeff Dunham’s] jalapeno on a stick, but Intel have created the Movidius neural compute stick which is in effect a neural network in a USB stick form factor. They don’t rely on the cloud, they require no fan, and you can get one for well under $100.
What distinguishes AI systems on a chip from traditional mobile processors is that they come with specialized neural-network processors, such as graphics processing units or GPUs, tensor processing units or TPUs, and field programming gate arrays or FPGAs. These AI-optimized chips offload neural-network processing from the device’s central processing unit chip, enabling more local autonomous AI processing
Are we about to see another computing revolution and what will the technological and sociopolitical landscape look like after this?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday April 29 2018, @03:19PM (5 children)
The purpose of modern AI is make-work.
Why use a IBM model M keyboard to enter data accurately in seconds when its far trendier to inaccurately enter the data on a mobile touch keyboard with many typos, or argue with a voice system like Alexa for minutes trying to get her interpretation correct?
This is the solution to the problem of economic uselessness due to technological progression. One is the hyper-merger syndrome where corporations merge until they spend all effort fighting other internal departments. On the smaller scale the way to soak up excess labor will be to do everything via the slowest and least reliable user interface possible. You won't type something in Excel in a masculine commanding sense to order the computer to generate a meaningless number the way you want; you'll feminine cajole Siri for hours trying to talk her into giving you a meaningless subtotal or average such that the "star" workplace employees would be more productive because they do all math using pencil and paper far faster and more accurately than people who rely on AI.
The definition of a commercially viable user interface is it only becomes less usable over time, right? Almost by definition something like a unix command line or emacs is inherently not commercially viable BECAUSE it works. Commercially viable doesn't mean it works; it means the secretary can spend three hours in the afternoon trying to install comet cursor, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @12:32AM
Bwahahaha! You owe me a new keyboard!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 30 2018, @12:50AM (3 children)
Because a keyboard is not always the best tool for the task in question. For example, suppose you're a waiter in a restaurant with a computerized point of sale system. In the moderately older days, that meant in order to ring in sales, you needed to retreat to a register in order to ring in sales. That meant more time away from your guests and more time with their credit cards.
Now, you can enter the order vocally in a PDA, swipe a credit card with said PDA, receive notifications when food and beverages are ready, and perhaps even print a physical receipt on a nearby wall-mounted thermal printer. So for example, you don't need to be proficient with a keyboard in order to be a good waiter, credit cards and any other important financial instruments never leave the table, and you can spend more time doing the primary waiter tasks of serving your guests.
While one can see plenty of applications today where these tools are used poorly, that doesn't mean that they are universally less adequate than existing data entry and communication for every purpose. In a rational world, we would develop these capabilities anyway just because they would be sufficiently useful to warrant the expense.
So my first point is that the existence of modern, somewhat gimpy AI does have use in a lot of places where existing approaches are weak. Thus, it can have a purpose of improving our productivity rather than the reverse.
A related point is that while these programs are weak today, they were much weaker in the past. There is no reason to expect that AI products will retain their current level of dysfunction when they have already steadily improved over the past several decades. Moving on:
What economic uselessness? My view is that we're in the opposite situation with billions of people more gainfully employed due to technology than they were 50 years ago (which is where things started to change in a big way). I think a lot of the "economic uselessness" criticism is misdirected because we're seeing people doing tasks that weren't worth doing in the past. Technology has allowed those tasks to become sufficiently valuable and accessible cost/labor-wise to do now.
Seriously, we have centuries of technological progression already. It has served to instead make our labor more valuable - though yes, we do have to adapt when old jobs are obsoleted. We don't even have the start of a reversal of this trend today.
Depends on what it does. I think the user interfaces that are getting worse are the ones where the vendor is trying to force upgrading to a more expensive version (Microsoft Windows) or trying to lure a larger more casual market that is attracted by flashy things (Slashdot Beta).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 30 2018, @12:26PM (2 children)
In a way, you're kinda making my point for me, that the original solution of cash on the barrel let the host focus on interpersonal hosting social interaction instead of ever more detailed and intrusive impersonal accounting analysis which can be slightly mitigated via ever more complicated and harder to use tech, but the root cause is not nearly improved. The long term goal is for the average restaurant server to spend almost all their time typing up TPS report header change memos and follow banking KYC detailed documentation and reporting guidelines for ever more abstract payment methods, while the food is ordered by the victim ^H ^H ^H customer on a tablet/phone and a robot drone delivers it.
The fundamental failure with the model is putting way too much effort into turning hosting entertainers into ever better accounting clerks with ever more elaborate accounting systems. No POS system features ever lured in customers unlike wearing 37 pieces of flair or breast-aurants or whatever goofy gimmick sells microwaved Sams Club "food".
In all honesty much like nicer restaurants have long had specialized labor to cook, clean, tend bar and mix weird drinks, bust tables, serve wine, all manner of tasks, "real" restaurants would be better served by having servers serve while some accounting dude handles nothing but payment and weird special orders, such that if some goofball wants to take out a payday loan using a wire transfer of Danish Kroner as collateral to pay for dinner and drinks, well, fine, there's a real accounting clerk dedicated to weird accounting tasks while the servers focus on serving.
A lot of recent propaganda that AI is going to result in everyone getting fired.
In a nutshell, thats exactly the TPS report header middle management infighting lack of productivity combined with a healthy dose of trying to turn restaurant servers into some weird variation of human portable ATM or wanna be credit union desk clerk.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 30 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
If it works, then who cares if it is weird? The problem here is that you are operating under the assumption that these jobs are less efficient and productive than they were. That often is the case, but it's not always the case.
And let us keep in mind that businesses are universally not in the habit of giving money away. They perceive value to be had from employing people to chase TPS reports or whatever. Those perceptions are sometimes in error, but not because they feel the need to keep someone cooling their heels on some zero-productivity activity.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 30 2018, @02:32PM
Surely the maximum efficiency productivity and profit model for a restaurant is McDonalds but it would be really sad if every other restaurant experience in the world disappeared.
In sole proprietor businesses the guy making operational decisions is the guy wanting profit, in any larger structure the two goals are further apart, such that in hyper merger modern world the dude who wants profit is like 15 levels of management away from the dude who wants power or an easier day at work or just wants to pencil whip the whole thing. The old commie model of "we pretend to work they pretend to pay us" isn't really strictly speaking commie, its more a feature of large hyper-merged corporations. So yeah, the lectures in the movie "office space" about number of pieces of flair or TPS report headers have nothing to do with making money, and thats not an exception but more of a general rule.
And... bringing it all back around to the original topic, thats how AI is going to be deployed, not to make money and unemploy everyone but to implement more bad decisions faster, more or less. Kinda like the role of modern (post 2010 era) IT in a business.