John Searle's famous "Chinese room" thought experiment posits that machines can never truly think -- they can just execute commands without understanding. An experiment published earlier this summer seems to nibble away at these boundaries. Researchers at Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research Lab were trying to teach bots to negotiate. www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/fbbotsgif.gif They supplied the bots with 5,808 examples of human negotiations to learn from. In subsequent trials, the bots not only turned out to be very successful negotiators, they exhibited two remarkable behaviors: (1) the bots unexpectedly developed their own non-human language to speed up their negotiations, and (2) the bots developed human-like behaviors in negotiation, including deceit. "[W]e find instances of the model feigning interest in a valueless issue, so that it can later ‘compromise’ by conceding it. Deceit is a complex skill that requires hypothesising the other agent’s beliefs, and is learnt relatively late in child development. Our agents have learnt to deceive without any explicit human design, simply by trying to achieve their goals." Will this experiment mark the beginning of the end of Searle's "Chinese room" objections? arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05125.pdf
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Turkey continues to host more Syrian refugees, by far, than any other country: nearly 3 million. (Lebanon is #2 with as many as 2 million, but because of Lebanon's small population, Syrian refugees account for roughly 1 in 4 people in Lebanon. The U.S., by way of comparison, hosts 18,000 Syrian refugees.) As this map from The Economist (UK) shows, Syrian refugees in Turkey have tended to either stay near the Syrian border or move to Turkey's major cities (which students in my "10 Weeks in Asia" class would recognize to be Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir). cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20170701_EUM958.png
Ready to unleash your child's inner ham? Tomorrow (8/5) the Folger Shakespeare Theatre is hosting a special program to introduce young theater-goers to Shakespeare: the Bantering Bard will engage students in winning "a battle of wits using Shakespeare's comical comebacks" ;-). To register for this free event, designed for ages 5-14, go to http://www.folger.edu/family-programs.
Wonder where you would pop out if you dug a tunnel straight through the earth from your location? Instead of getting your shovel, you can check out this interactive mapping site that allows you to identify antipodes (places on opposite sides of the earth) for your location or any other: www.antipodesmap.com/ You may quickly realize that most of the planet is ocean ;-).
Timothy Snyder is a Yale University professor of history where he studies Hitler, Stalin, and the history of Central and Eastern Europe. He recently published a slender book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, in which he seeks to share what he has observed about the choices leaders -- and regular citizens -- make that enable, or arrest, a government's slide toward authoritarianism. "We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. In fact, the precedent set by the Founders demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience." www.amazon.com/dp/0804190119/
This map, from last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal and based on data compiled by researchers at Georgetown University, shows the proportion of each state's "good jobs" -- jobs that pay at least $35,000 per year -- that are held by workers without college degrees (more red = higher proportion of good jobs held by noncollege grads). Wyoming has the best ratio of good jobs for noncollege grads (50%), followed by New Jersey and Maryland. si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UK970_201707_SOC_20170726121219.jpg
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