

Review our webapp- The Uncertain Future (future world modeling) - apsec112
http://theuncertainfuture.com

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apsurd
ok....

    
    
      Visualizing "The Future According to You"
    

As some non-AI savvy individual, I take this headline to mean "what I think
will happen in the future". But then after reading, it turns out you are
asking me very narrow questions having nothing to do with me, and everything
to do with AI. So .... I - do - not - get - it.

Sorry if this is going over my head, but its on the front page, and I always
take time to upvote and view "review my _" posts. But this one I am completely
in the dark as to why its only about AI. What if I don't care about AI? Maybe
just be specific as to your motives on the front page then.

~~~
rmijic
"What if I don't care about AI?"

\- maybe making AI explicit in the title would be good.

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apsec112
Introduction: The Uncertain Future is a future technology and world-modeling
project by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
(<http://www.singinst.org>). Its goal is to allow those interested in future
technology to form their own rigorous, mathematically consistent model of how
the development of advanced technologies will affect the evolution of
civilization over the next hundred years. To facilitate this, we have gathered
data on what experts think is going to happen, in such fields as semiconductor
development, biotechnology, global security, Artificial Intelligence and
neuroscience. We invite you, the user, to read about the opinions of these
experts, and then come to your own conclusion about the likely destiny of
mankind.

~~~
apsurd
Why isn't this much clearer and concise intro on the homepage?

~~~
apsec112
I added it shortly afterwards.

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drcode
The idea is good, in principle.

The problem is, you've created both a bayesian decision-making tool AND a
dataset for the tool for estimating human-level AI. Forcing a user to learn
both of these at the same time is asking too much from your users.

Also, your thesis is clearly "nothing matters about the future other than
human-level AI." This is a defendable thesis, but you can't use this as a
starting assumption without confusing your users immensely. Maybe you should
also ask questions about other things and then have them discover the
importance of human-level AI naturally. (assuming it really is as important as
you think.)

Finally, your java-ish implementation is really buggy and the
implementation/documentation in general needs a lot of work. I couldn't get
the tool to really work at all on Ubuntu with Firefox 3.5 (The edit fields
keep freezing up)

(Dollars to Donuts, the java applet is written in a Lisp dialect and then
translated/compiled into a very fat java applet :-)

~~~
drcode
Also: I found that almost all my answers to the questions require highly
lopsided distributions, which the app doesn't support... this makes it hard to
get meaningful answers.

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paraschopra
Sorry, but when I read required Java, I immediately stopped. The app looks
super cool but Java simply hangs my system.

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rafd
Worked well for me (shocking for Ffox 3.5 on Ubuntu). I'm particularly
impressed with the interface for manipulating the distributions directly by
interacting with the graph.

However, the 'expert opinions' are not very discoverable (they were off the
screen for me). Perhaps offering them on the side could work? (Since the input
data is pretty fuzzy, the graphical area doesn't need to be so large).

Also, I find the 'rate-increase' graphs are less intuitive than the normal
distribution graphs. Unfortunately, I don't know how to improve upon them.

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pudo
What is the goal of my interaction with this? You're presenting me with a very
short blob of technical gibberish on each item and then you're essentially
asking me to guess at the answer.

The best-case result of this is a scientifically (i.e. in the sense of
empirical social sciences) awkward set of answers but I fail to see how they
would carry any predictive value.

Just because everyone believes the world will be hit by a meteor in 2012 does
not make it happen.

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luchak
Really cool. Would be interesting to break some of these things down further,
into easier-to-estimate probabilities -- probably using some sort of more
detailed graphical model. Seeing some sort of consensus view of the future
according to your users would be neat, too (especially if it were broken down
by demographic).

The interface is a little quirky. I sometimes found it difficult to determine
how to set means / deviations.

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mkyc
This isn't a webapp, it's a wizard for naive prediction of the date of the
singularity (you seem to mix AI with a very narrow form of IA). You're not
quite "modeling" a future world. Java sucks for this - why use it, given the
current state of javascript and canvas?

This would make an interesting blog post if you distributed the various
"viewpoints" on the various questions into a bunch of images.

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physcab
I was thoroughly confused testing this out. What's with all the words on the
front page? You need to distill your goal to one to two sentences max.

Second, I didn't understand the questions and answers even though I know AI
techniques quite well.

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fnid
don't have java installed and don't want to.

~~~
omouse
But I bet you have Flash installed (which performs worse than Java).

~~~
fnid
unfortunately yes.

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gaborcselle
Unfortunately I had to force-quit Safari after about 3 minutes of
beachballing. Looks like your Java Applet had some trouble loading. This is on
Mac OS X 10.6.2, Safari 4.0.4.

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MicahWedemeyer
I quit after 1 question. I try to review the apps posted on HN, but this one
just offered me nothing.

Sorry, guess I'm not the target.

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marltod
Great first run. Keep working on it!

