In 1968, the Nobel Foundation accepted a donation from the Swedish central bank to establish a prize in economy, but in hindsight that was a pretty bad idea, and the probability of them accepting future donations to establish prizes in other fields is very slim.
Philipp Lenard had a patent on cathode ray tubes, Marconi on wireless telegraphy, Dalén had plenty of patents on the automatic lighthouse regulator he got the prize for, and many others.
"With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science, they have showed a completely new way for us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many of the challenges our society face. Simply put, thanks to their work Humanity now has a new item in its toolbox, which we can choose to use for good purposes. Machine learning based on ANNs is currently revolutionizing science, engineering and daily life. The field is already on its way to enable breakthroughs toward building a sustainable society, e.g. by helping to identify new functional materials. How deep learning by ANNs will be used in the future depends on how we humans choose to use these incredibly potent tools, already present in many aspects of our lives"
When I went to high school, I'd walk through an allotment garden to get to school. Always great for a snack on the way home, someone had amazing raspberries! Some lovely cherry trees as well as several varieties of apples.
Public? Free? Pschht, everyone knows that what's outside the fence is free for the taking!
But there were also tons of fruit trees in nature in the city. Went jogging one time at a jogging trail, saw chanterelles in the forest, came back with my t-shirt full of tasty, tasty mushrooms.
If you've grown up with always being able to pick fruits and berries and mushrooms in nature, maps like this are so weird. Why would you need a map? Nature is full of it?
Oh, you're not allowed? Oh, you can't access it? Oh, there aren't any around, really? How sad.
Ok, cool, but would you pay a monthly subscription fee for the ability to talk out loud to get lights to turn on, instead of hitting the existing light switches?
One of the most enlightening courses I took in university back in the day was digital electronics. Not because I ever wanted to muck about with it, but because we actually got to build our own super-simple physical 8-bit CPU. We had registers and an ALU and RAM and eight output leds, and we got to write the microcode for the fetch-execute cycle. Clock? There was a physical switch you would toggle on and off to make it step through the cycles to slowly execute the program we wrote in our own machine code. Realizing that instructions are just a bit-pattern saying which unit should write to the bus and which unit should read from the bus was quite eye-opening.
Old minicomputers had toggle switches on the front panel where you could set the program counter, enter machine code instructions, and other things, as well as step the clock.
Every single time an article about aphantasia gets posted, there's always people like you in the comments going "wait, what, when people say they see things they're imagining, they actually do that?"
Yes. Most people do.
> That seems insane.
Think of a song you like. Play it in your head. Can you hear it? Can you tap the beat? Can you whistle along with the melody? Can you join in and sing the chorus when it comes? But you know you're not actually hearing the song, right?
Visualization is just like that, but for your vision, not your hearing. In the same way you can replay a sound you've heard in your head, most people can replay a thing they saw in their heads.
> do people actually see the red star in their head in the same way that I'm hearing Hell's Bells in my head?
Yes, that's a very good description of what the experience is like.
When you're auralizing(?) a song, you can choose which memory of the song you're listening to, and you can tap along with the beat, whistle along with the melody, sing along with the words, while being absolutely conscious of the fact that you're not actually hearing the song, right?
Visualizing something is the same, you can manipulate the image in your mind, rotate, choose different memories of the thing - or imagine new ways the thing could look, while being absolutely conscious of the fact that you're not actually seeing the thing in front of you.
When you said "red star", I imagined a red giant star, protuberances and sunspots and all, floating in space. Then someone else commented about a "five-pointed star", so I shifted my imaginary image to a stylized five-pointed red star icon instead. Same as you would imagine listening to one song, and then swapping to a completely different one with the same title.
Machine-learning of any kind has this uncanny ability to get you really far with very little work, which gives this illusion of rapid progress. I remember watching George Hotz' first demo of his self-driving thing, it's absolutely nuts how much he was able to do himself with so little. Sure, it drove like a drunk toddler, but it drove!
And that tricks you into thinking that the hard parts are done, and you just need to polish the thing, fill in the last few cases, and you're done!
Except, the work needed to go from 90% there to 91% there is astronomically higher than the work needed to go from 0% to 90%. And the work needed from 91% to 92% is even higher. Partly because the complexity of the corner cases increase exponentially, and partly because everyone involved doesn't actually know how the model works. It's been hilarious watching Tesla flail at this, because every new release that promises the moon always has these weird regressions in unrelated areas.
My favourite example of complexity is that drivers need to follow not only road signs and traffic lights, they also need to follow hand signals from certain people. Police officers, for example, can use hand signals to direct traffic, and it's illegal not to follow those. I can see a self-driving system recognizing hand signals and steering the car accordingly, but suddenly you get a much harder problem: How can the car know the difference between lawful hand signals, and some dude in a Halloween police uniform waving his hands?
You want to drive autonomously coast to coast? Cool, now the car needs to know how to correctly identify local police officers, highway patrol officers, state police officers, and county sheriffs, depending on the car's location.
Park rangers, all the fire departments, normal people who try temporarily route traffic around something unusual like a crash, animals, hazardous conditions.
And to detect when someone is doing a prank or just a homeless guy yelling and waving their fist at cars etc
One of the original overpromises from Musk was that you could definitely totally summon your car from NY to LA and it would magically drive all the way, next year, for sure.
Yeah, because if it understands hand gestures, it totally won't be used by criminals, directing it to a chop shop where they can disable it and cut it to pieces. What are you gonna do as the owner?
In 1968, the Nobel Foundation accepted a donation from the Swedish central bank to establish a prize in economy, but in hindsight that was a pretty bad idea, and the probability of them accepting future donations to establish prizes in other fields is very slim.
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