The restriction is about groups of people being unsafe. It is not about any one group.
The decision makes it restrict one group and not others. No Jedi conventions, but Christian, Jewish, or Muslim churches/conventions are ok?
Utter bullshit, I hope every religious nutjob gets covid and churches are held liable, maybe we can end the stone age superstition that rules and ruins lives.

Stop your divisive ignorance and join civilization.

This isn't really true though and greatly understates how amazing this demo, and current AI actually is.

Saying the agents are obeying a set of human defined rules / freedoms / constraints and objective functions would lead one to imagine something more like video game AI.

Typically video game AI works on a set of weighted decisions and actions, where the weights, decisions and actions are defined by the developer; a more complex variation of:

if my health is low, move towards the health pack,
otherwise, move towards the opponent

In this demo, no such rules exist. It's not given any weights (health), rules (if health is low), nor any instructions (move towards health pack). I guess you could apply neural networks to traditional game AI to determine the weights for decision making (which are typically hard coded by the developer); but that would be far less interesting than what's actually happening here.

Instead, the agent is given a set of inputs, a set of available outputs, and a goal.

4 Inputs:
- Position of the agent itself
- Position and type (other agent, box, ramp) of objects within a limited forward facing conical view
- Position (but not type) of objects within a small radius around the agent
- Reward: Whether they are doing a good job or not

Note the agent is given no information about each type of object, or what they mean, or how they behave. You may as well call them A, B, C rather than agent, box, ramp.

3 Outputs:
- Move
- Grab
- Lock

Again, the agent knows nothing about what these mean, only that they can enable and disable each at any time. A good analogy is someone giving you a game controller for a game you've never played. The controller has a stick and two buttons and you figure out what they do by using them. It'd be accurate to call the outputs: stick, A, B rather than move, grab, lock.

Goal:
- Do a good job.

The goal is simply for the reward input to be maximised. A good analogy is saying 'good girl' or giving a treat to a dog that you are training when they do the right thing. It's up to the dog to figure out what it is that they're doing that's good.

The reward is entirely separate from the agent, and agent behaviour can be completely changed just by changing when the reward is given. The demo is about hide and seek, where the agents are rewarded for not being seen / seeing their opponent (and not leaving the play area). The agents also succeeded at other games, where the only difference to the agent was when the reward was given.

It isn't really different from physically building the same play space, dropping some rats in it, and rewarding them with cheese when they are hidden from their opponents - except rats are unlikely to figure out how to maximise their reward in such a 'complex' game.

Given this description of how the AI actually works, the fact they came up with complex strategies like blocking doors, ramp surfing, taking the ramp to stop their opponents from ramp surfing, and just the general cooperation with other agents, without any code describing any of those things - is pretty amazing.

You can find out more about how the agents were trained, and other exercises they performed here:

https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/

Can you explain what your description text has to do with the video? I watched it based on that, and was expecting something along the lines of a logic puzzle or a look at some of the quirks of the human decision-making process / biases.

I agree that's part of their decision making process, but if that was the only reason for the remakes they would just make insanely cheap movies that fulfill the legal requirements to extend the trademarks but have no chance of making (or losing) much money, wouldn't they?

Every single one? Even Education For Death?

The Orville spillway decision making sounded like a plot for a disaster movie with a happy ending. Interesting and scary stuff. Thought it might interest you and @oritteropo
https://youtu.be/nCgrXPB6Zeg

I think it's an ugly necessity.

Equality isn't about treating everybody the same. I mean, I wish we could do that, but then I wish people wouldn't decide if they are going to hire somebody from their very first glance. But that's what we do. We do nothing and we simply allow our unconscious bias to rule our decision making which, in most cases, would be great for somebody like me.

I mean, I don't like it. I can understand entirely why people feel they have been cheated when somebody gets a job or promotion ahead of them just for the sake of ticking a diversity checkbox. Maybe you're right, maybe it is just adding energy to that pendulum, but then a pendulum without resistance swings forever. I hope conscious decisions to readdress imbalanced caused by unconscious bias works more as a dampening effect, as resistance.

Back to semantics. Like the woman in the video, I probably had quite a knee-jerk response to men's rights. Sometimes probably warranted, but then some feminists have some pretty dumb things to say as well. Anyway, the person that helped changed by mind about it was a woman and a feminist. Don't define a group by it's most extreme edges because I think it just leads you to make uncharitable judgements about people that identify as part of that group before you've even really listened to them.

The deeply conservative (!) "Die Welt" in Germany has two pieces by Sy Hersh, completely debunking the supposed chemical attack by the Syrians at Khan Sheikhoun. It also paints a highly disturbing picture of the decision-making process in both the White House and the Pentagon.

The first one is a rather short conversation that includes all the goodies: the chemical attack in Syria was, once again, not a chemical attack by Syrian forces -- they hit a stash, just like both the Syrians and the Russians claimed at the time.

The piece also details that US forces are keenly aware that it was not a chemical attack, that the response (Tomahawk strike on Syrian airfield) was equally ridiculous and dangerous, and that the bellicose stance of the US vis-a-vis Russia is complete lunacy.

The longer piece by Hersh himself and displays in great details the disconnect between Trump and his military advisers, as well as between the upper echelons of the military and the troops in the region.

Just a snippet about the strike itself:

A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground.

And the media went along for the ride, for the umpteenth time. Remember Brian Williams fawning about the beauty of the weapons?

At some point, this volatile mixture of warmongering and McCarthyism is going to start WW3, and they'll blame it on the Russians.

I think this quote illustrates the issue quite nicely:
“Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria.”

No.
It shows us a pitfall of early voting. Most, the vast majority of votes, were cast before he assaulted the reporter.
He was always expected to win by a landslide both before and after he lost it on tape and blatantly lied about it assuming the Fox reporters would lie with him, but they didn't.
Because of early voting, last minute surprises like this barely matter....unless he gets the maximum sentence, which is appropriate. If ever there was someone the courts should use to set an example with, it's a violent elected official.

That's not to say he would have lost if early voting wasn't the norm there. Republicans have totally sacrificed their morality and rationality on the altar of partisanship. Like Trump said, they could murder people publicly in cold blood and not lose votes. This means they're fine electing people who display this kind of total lack of self control and poor decision making processes along with a proven willingness to bold faced lie to the public to represent us as long as the tie they wear is red.
It's far less about Democrats, the minority there, than it is about a total lack of civility, honesty, or basic self control in Republican leaders and their voters accepting that, even relishing it.

And btw, Democrats ARE Americans....since you're confused again.

Really impressive, but despite the description I'm not sure how this differs from the current, modern approach, beyond using more processing power for the environment assessment and realtime decision-making, weighting and blending. It just seems like a more thorough and complete AI-supported locomotion system.

**EDIT**
I'm finding other sources that say that sterile "terminator seeds" are a patented technique, but that Monsanto has promised not to use it. Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx

So it appears that my info below is wrong. I will try to talk with my family and get the full story. That being said, I'll leave my original comment and the followup below unaltered.
*********


My firsthand knowledge of this stuff was from more than 10 years ago, and also when I was pretty young (early 20's). So I did some web searching to try to get updated since your question is a very interesting one:

http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/about.html

According to that, Monsanto is the company behind "Roundup Ready", and their corn (and other crops in the line) do use sterile "terminator seeds". It also mentions that farmers "must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto" each year.

I was never in the decision-making structure of my family farm, but I did remember that we couldn't just buy the Roundup Ready seed *once* and then hold a small amount back as seed for the next year and continue to get the benefits.

I'm not 100% sure exactly how the modification for sterility works -- I don't know if the plant will sprout if you plant the sterile seeds and just fail to produce any ears / fruit, or if it just won't germinate at all. I do remember that we had to be quite careful to fully clean out the corn grown from the GM seeds from our storage bins, and better yet to store our non-GM corn to be used for future seed in entirely different bins. That was done to make sure that we didn't end up planting any of the sterile stuff.

I'm sure that the seed dealers that sell the GM stuff really push farmers to buy and plant it every year, as hinted to in that link. But you certainly don't *have* to. On the other hand, if you go back to non-GM seed for a year or two or more, you can't use a strong herbicide like Roundup if you have an unexpected outbreak of weeds or other pest plants -- the Roundup would kill the non-GM crop along with everything else.

Basically, I don't specifically begrudge companies like Monsanto for their practices concerning these GM crops. The "terminator seeds" are controversial, but don't seem like a big deal to me. If you could buy GM seeds once and then just hold back some of your harvest for next season's seed, they'd only get your money once AND we'd probably lose the original strains. So I see that as kinda win-win, especially if you don't 100% buy into their sales department urging you to use GM seed every single year.

I don't want to sound like a shill for Monsanto -- some of their other practices are pretty shady, particularly political lobbying. But from the perspective of my family farm, the GM corn that we use was/is a real beneficial thing. Significantly less pesticide/herbicide use over time, and it allows for expanded low/no till farming. Before herbicides, tilling was one of the only ways to kill off pest plants. But, it also makes the fields lose some moisture and nutrients. Expanded farming and ubiquitous tilling was largely the cause of the "dust bowl" dirty 30's. Anyway, I'd say that a lot of good has come out of modernized techniques and technology like GM crops.

Yeah, those ABS bags are pretty amazing, but they are ridiculously expensive ($1000+). I've given it a lot of thought and I know some people say you can't put a price on your life, but they're not without issues.

First, they can potentially put you in a worse situation then an avalanche! Being buried is obviously bad, but being carried over a cliff is worse.

But more insidiously, they can lead to poor decision making. I try to stay in a constant state of, if not fear, at least extreme caution in the back country. I'm actuated aware how easy it is to fuck yourself up, and I would always rather say "nah, let's come back another day" than ride in dodgy conditions. In short, I have all the gear, but I never want to rely on it.

tldr: The decisions made in creating and rearing offspring are subject to a different set of moral criteria than all others because those decisions affect everyone.

Here's the problem with that thought. You didn't just make a decision that affected your life. Or even one that affected the lives of yourself and others you know. You intentionally created another sentient being. Because of human nature, that sentient being is now not just your responsibility, but everyone else's as well. Your decision quite literally affected the entire species. Or should I say infected.

There is no other decision anyone can make that has such an extent of repercussions (with the possible exception of murder). Whether you further choose to be responsible for your offspring is, from a decision making point of view, completely separate from the decision to create that offspring. And likewise, the decisions you make regarding the care of that offspring are entirely separate from the decision to create it. Those decisions are, whether you like it or not, subject to critique. You may not like it, and you may in fact see the entire process (conception, birth, weaning, rearing, etc...) as a single act. Either way, the entirety of the species is now constrained by your initial act of creation. The question is not whether you are a “good parent”. The question is how much of a burden upon or boon to the species will you be.

Just to make this contrast clear…. if I, as thinking adult, decide to consume alcohol in such excess that it causes my liver to fail, I can ask the species to help me to the point of giving me a new liver - which may or may not be granted based on my own words and actions. If you ask a similar favor on behalf your offspring, however, it’s an entirely different moral calculus.

I didn't watch the video and I already know who the man's gonna vote.

What's there to decide? Wether you throw away your vote for third party candidates that never had a chance? Might as well stay at home and do nothing. You're not part of the decision making process. Vote Clinton or stay home.
If you don't want to see Trump in the White House, there's only one thing to do. It's not about a choice between several candidates anymore. It doesn't matter if you don't like the other options. The decision is wethere you'll have President Trump or not.
You want Trump? Then vote everything but Clinton.
It's that simple.

So, he says clearly that if cops think you have a gun, they will shoot first and figure out the situation later. That sounds like a reason to shoot cops first if you have a gun, not a reason to comply. Terrible.
Making a bad decision based on fear or hate that kills another person makes you a bad person. Making them consistently and repeatedly makes you a bad organization. Defending those bad decisions makes you a disgusting pile of shit that's not worth the skin you're wrapped in.

Lets see them get rid of those officers who are disgracing the badge first, then they can start complaining about the blowback it's causing.

Opt-in would be an improvement in many cases, but I've changed my mind on it over the years and no longer see it as a working concept.

Let's put aside all the issues on the corporate end of things: even on the consumer end, it only ever works with competent consumers. Choice becomes a farce if you don't understand the different options, especially if any detrimental effects are indirect in nature, as is the case with the vast majority of information-related issues. The tiniest incentive is enough to sway folks towards pressing the fucking "Accept" button, so to speak.

In the same manner, transparency is all fine and dandy, but nobody's going to read anything longer than a single paragraph, everybody wants the paperwork out of the way so they can get the cookie.

Most folks don't have the time or the motivation to go into the nitty-gritty of personal data sovereignty. Put it up against convenience, and people don't give two shits about their data.

So there it is, the concept of a sovereign consumer is an illusion. The question is: do you take the decision away from the consumer for his/her own sake? Do you manipulate the decision making process by making it massively more inconvenient to give away your data?

Bad options all around...