One of my favourtie authors, Charlie Stross, has posted a blog entry I highly recommend you to read in full!

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modern CPU/GPU performance is ridiculous. … [a] framework which, on a new Apple M1 Macbook Air (not even the higher performance Macbook Pro) could deliver 900GFlops, which would put it in the top 10 world supercomputers circa 1996-98. In a scripting language inside a web browser on a 2020 laptop.
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The point I’d like to make is that ready-trained NNs like GPT-3 or CLIP are often tailored as the basis of specific recognizer applications and then may end up deployed in public situations, much as shitty internet-of-things gizmos usually run on an elderly, unpatched ARM linux kernel with an old version of OpenSSH and busybox installed, and hard-wired root login credentials. This is the future of security holes in our internet-connected appliances: metaphorically, cameras that you can fool by slapping a sticker labelled „THIS IS NOT THE DROID YOU ARE LOOKING FOR” on the front of the droid the camera is in fact looking for. And in five years’ time they’re going to be everywhere.
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I’ve been saying for years that most people relate to computers and information technology as if they’re magic, and to get the machine to accomplish a task they have to perform the specific ritual they’ve memorized with no understanding.
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With speech interfaces and internet of things gadgets, we’re moving closer to building ourselves a demon-haunted world. Lights switch on and off and adjust their colour spectrum when we walk into a room, where we can adjust the temperature by shouting at the ghost in the thermostat, the smart television (which tracks our eyeballs) learns which channels keep us engaged and so converges on the right stimulus to keep us tuned in through the advertising intervals, the fridge re-orders milk whenever the current carton hits its best-before date, the robot vacuum comes out at night, and as for the self-cleaning litter box … we don’t talk about the self-cleaning litterbox.

Tagged as: iot, magic, quotes, rant | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Samstag, 20210306, 12:10 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)