If you want a scientific biography, "Subtle is the Lord" by Abraham Pais, but you need a degree in physics to understand many chapters (unfortunately for me a degree in engineering was not enough).
Abraham Pais wrote also "Einstein Lived Here" a non-scientific biography, but I did not read it.
I actually have a degree in Physics but I am not sure it is what I want (I don't remember much :D). But I will take a look. Thanks a lot for both recommendations!
Not a biography but I like Einstein's book "Evolution of physics". It is supposed to be popular scifi book, and covers same topics as high school physics for layman. But, it is still good to hear his perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Physics-Albert-Einstein/dp/...
You should watch season one of "Genius" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5673782/) docuseries which is quite an accurate life events (professional as well as personal) of Einstein
At times the going is tough even if you are a physics professor, because Pais accurately captures the process of discovery which was often messy with unfamiliar equations, strange logical jumps, or subtle mistakes.
I would not recommend the book unless you have taken courses in quantum mechanics, statistical physics and general relativity.
(Historically quantum mechanics and statistical physics were developed together, even though now we see one as more fundamental than the other.)
mmm not sure if it's fully true tbh. I'm from Italy and currently live in Germany (so maybe together with France would be the stereotypical drinking countries) and was always a bit horrified by the stories of people drinking in the US...
In the US the average adult drinks 9.6 liters of alcohol per year. Germany is at 12.2, the UK at 10.8 and Italy at 8.0. So some European countries drink more than the US and some drink less, but all in all the difference is not that big.
I'd take a guess and say the US has more extremes: puritans who don't drink at all and heavy drinkers.
Isn't it, for example, pretty common to have a glass of wine at lunch in France? If 50% of french do that, that average is already way more spread than in a country where 30% don't drink at all.
The first comparison by country do not make any sense. There are parts of Spain that have never seen a tourist, let alone foreign. Also China has an enormous amount of national tourism. People should stop thinking countrywise and start thinking more localwise for certain measures.
Everytime I see something like this I am more convinced that deep learning/AI focus should go away from language into other domains where it can make a bigger impact on less compute.
It already has. Language is just the most accessible by most people. But deep learning is not new and is not newly applied to problems. But it’s unclear how much of this article is hype or new.
Gigafactory was also supposed to be 100% automated in a much more difficult assembly than putting a few boards into a metal case and gluing a screen on. They failed in practice and balanced into something more practical. (I’d not even in this article they eventually nod that it’s not fully automated just the “important parts”)
Playstation factory was also almost fully automated: "PlayStation 4 units come off the assembly line at a pace of about one every 30 seconds." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23748664
Of course it will. AI is driving a flood of development in robotics. A home robot is definitely coming in the next 10 years and an assembly line worker is going to be an extinct job.
We already have home robots in the form of vacuum cleaners. If you're referring to humanoid robots for domestic chores then forget it, 10 years is way too optimistic. The safety problems alone of having a powerful heavy robot moving around with people and pets will take decades to solve. AI in the form of LLMs is effectively impossible to test for safety critical applications with so few system constraints. The risk of product liability lawsuits will prevent this technology from being sold anytime soon. Some limited industrial use may be feasible because there the robots can be carefully monitored and have limited interactions with humans.
Plus there are remaining hardware problems in terms of power and actuators that will take longer than 10 years to solve in a cost effective way.
Seems pessimistic. I already have an oven that can burn the house down, a dishwasher that might flood out my kitchen, a refrigerator that can fail and ruin a fortune in perishable foods. Hell, my lawn mower might remove a foot!
Why is a robot that might step on the cat, somehow inconceivably more hazardous?
Those examples are unlikely to kill you. A humanoid robot can. Let's say it quickly moves its arm on a collision course with your head. The arm can weigh around 10 kg. The impact can easily kill an adult.
I'm a bit less pessimistic than OP. It's possible to run safety checks (e.g. collision avoidance) on a lower, deterministic level, and use generative, black box, 'AI' for higher-level planning.
The definition of "quickly" for roboticists are different from how it's usually interpreted. I'm not a real one, but to me it seems this tree of comments contain couple more such definition disagreements.
Like animals the robot arm should also be compliment and not always be moving with full force because it is going to hit things even with active collision avoidance.
Static home appliances don't move around and the space of possible dangerous failure modes is limited. This stuff is easy to test for safety. And a refrigerator failure isn't a potential safety issue.
LLMs tend to fail in novel ways that are impossible to reason about. What is the expected failure rate for mistaking a human infant sleeping on the floor for a large doll that needs to be picked up and put away? You can't prove that the rate will be zero. We don't have good ways to model and estimate those failures rates in such complex systems.
My point is, robots are not essentially new in their home-environment risks. We accept some level of risk now. The pessimistic view that home robots are impossible to deploy until their risks are reduced to zero, is nonsense.
My theory: we'll have home robots as soon as they're affordable and have a market demographic. Like any other technology.
We have higher standards for designed devices than sentient ones, especially ones that have a long history like dogs.
I love my dog, but appliance with the QA tolerances of dogs would not sell well. Some dogs were bred for helping you work, others were bred as guard dogs. If I went around selling something like a 75% toaster, 25% gun device, and we don’t know which parts come from which, I think I would go to jail.
