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It is socially irresponsible for filmmakers, authors, and others to continue to produce content that portrays AI taking over the world and threatening mankind.

Before going into that, I need to make sure we’re all on the same page regarding how AI learns things. It is not at all fancy or complicated. I think “recognize a pattern based on” is a more appropriate term for what AI does than “learn”, since learning involves intelligence and AI is just a lot of data points and a big memory. But I’m going to keep using the term “learn” because it’s shorter and easier and is the accepted terminology. Also, I think the concept of the singularity is wrong – it can never happen because of things like “life” and “soul”. Anyways…

If you want AI to learn about something, just give it a bunch of that thing and tell it those are that thing. If you tell it the wrong things, on purpose or on accident, the AI will learn the wrong thing.

The current popular example of this is sheep. Lookup “AI learns sheep wrong” and you’ll get a bunch of articles about the image processing AI being trained to recognize sheep. It was fed a bunch of photos of sheep, and it learned to recognize sheep. The problem is that all the photos were of sheep in fields, so the AI associated “sheep” with grassy meadows. If you gave it a photo of a grassy field with no sheep, it would classify it as a sheep. And if you gave it a photo of someone holding a sheep, it would classify it as a dog. It doesn’t really know what a sheep is, it can’t look at its inputs and realize if something is amiss. It just finds a common pattern and applies that to the term from the inputs.

Now apply that to the future of AI. If, as the fear goes, AI grows exponentially and takes over the world, how is it going to train itself? In other words, how will a self-aware AI know what a self-aware AI is supposed to do? It would gather instances or descriptions of AI and learn from it.

So now what are all the examples of AI running the world? Science-fiction books and movies and maybe a few TV shows. So now imagine an AI takes over the world in real life. It is processing all sorts of things including those books and movies, and it comes to understand that an AI ruling the world must necesarily be bad for people – it must fight them or enslave them or terminate them or whatever. Because those are all the examples it has, so that’s what it will learn.

Dear science fiction writers: please help the future of the world by producing stuff that shows an AI running the world and being helpful and kind to people. In case that day comes, we want some good examples for it to learn from.

A popular online debate is “what is the difference between torque and horsepower?”

I am here to answer that question. But I’m going to tie it to sports. And I’m just going to summarize it. So if you like discussing power in engineering units and if you appreciate football and if you like short blog posts, this is for you.

Simply put: horsepower wins games, torque wins championships.

That is all.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I switched over to Bing for my default search engine around Thanksgivingtime.

This past weekend, I wanted to cross-check something so I went specifically to Google and searched, and I was surprised to see that they reinstated the feature that had disappeared at Thanksgiving.

So my reason for not using Google does not exist anymore, and it does give better results than Bing. For example, I searched for a football game on Google, and it gave me news articles, video options, relevant items on Twitter, and general information about the upcoming game. I searched for the same thing on Bing, and half of the results looked to be illegal streams of the game.

I had Google setup as my default search engine for the Safari browser on my iPhone. I edited the link so that it disabled the autocomplete function, which gave a bunch of search suggestions as you were typing. I did not like that, mainly because my kids will use my phone from time to time and some of the suggestions were inappropriate. Plus I felt it was distracting and contributes to ADHD.

It was easy enough to disable – just add a string of “complete=0” to the URL and you’re good to go, just a plain search engine with no too-eager-to-please additional help popups. See my previous blog post on the topic of disabling Google autocomplete for details.

But Google changed something on Thanksgiving. I looked up something and noticed that Google was throwing possible search terms at me. “Is this what you meant to type?” “Maybe this?” “Look, a lot of people are searching for these words, would they interest you?”

No, Google, I am not interested in what other people are looking up. If I were interested, I would search for that.

At first I thought I opened the plain Google URL. So I made sure to use the special link. But no, the special link didn’t do anything anymore.

I poked around on the internet, but there were no suggestions. Changing the settings using the link at the bottom of Google didn’t do anything either.

I figured I might as well try Bing. Alas, Bing also wanted to tell me what other people liked searching for.

Lo and behold though, the Bing settings let me disable that. And it worked. I have set my default search engine on my iPhone to Bing.

Now when my kids want to look something up, I do not have to worry about hearing a question along the lines of “Dad, what does such-and-such mean?” Or even worse, not getting asked that question and having them click the Google suggestion.

I’m not a fan of Microsoft products, but I will gladly use Bing since it’s behaving like I want my search engine to behave.

With my hobby of tracking NFL scores (or at least wins and losses), I check the results of NFL games to update my data. The easiest way to do that is to get the scores. A lot more places have scores available than a simple W or L for the day.

I figured the best place to get the NFL scores is the NFL website. And a convenient device for me to use is my iPhone. It’s not the latest one, but there are still millions of them in use, so it’s fairly relevant.

I went to the NFL website, clicked on the Scores link at the top, and this is what I saw (yes, it was fully loaded and rendered):

The NFL website was done so poorly that I couldn’t decipher the jumble of letters and numbers. Compare that to Google:

Much better.

You’d think the NFL would check that their website rendered properly in Safari on an iPhone, but apparently they did not. I’m going to blame their website redesign that’s new since last season. There is a lot about it that I don’t like, but rather than go into all the details, I’ll just stick with this one example.

Our younger students still bring home flyers for stuff, but our older students don’t. It’s not that they forget the flyers, rather the non-elementary schools don’t hand out papers. We get emails and such. The day before picture day, I asked the boys about picture ordering information since I hadn’t received an email. “I think it’s on the website or something.” was the answer I got.

So I went to the school website. Here’s a snippet of that page.

If you notice the top part of the announcement, it has a link to Order Information. I clicked that link, expecting it to take me to the studio’s website or something.

It took me to a PDF of the flyer.

That PDF, naturally, had the studio’s website address printed on it. But it wasn’t clickable.

So I had to type in the URL that was on the PDF. First-world problems, I know. I just found it amusing that in this day and age, people aren’t thinking of providing links directly to active content. Links have been around for over 20 years now. It should be the first thought of the website person. I don’t know who runs the school website – maybe it’s a teacher or administrative person who got saddled with that task and is doing the best he can. That’s why I didn’t complain to the school. I simply provided it here for the entire internet to see.

I suppose that since it was originally on the school website, the whole internet could have already seen it. In that case, I provide it here to serve as a lesson for all you web developers: if you create a link to a static document or image, and that document or image has a website or other such link printed on it, you can make everyone else’s day a little easier and brighter by providing a clickable link to that content. Allow people to bypass the middleman.

Even though it’s still August, it is starting to feel like fall. So people’s thoughts are turning to furnaces and heating the house.

I overheard someone denouncing the practice of setting the thermostat to a lower setting during the times when the house is unoccupied for a while. His argument was that sure, the furnace won’t run while the house cools down, but then it works extra to heat the house back up and all that savings is lost.

That is true if the time is short enough such that the house won’t stay at the lower temperature very long. The savings come with time at the lower temperature.

The reason for this is that the rate of heat transfer increases with a higher temperature difference. In other words, the warmer the inside of the house is, the more heat it will lose to the colder outside. Thus, the more heat the furnace will have to add to the inside.

So if you keep your house a little cooler, then not as much heat will escape, so you’ll see slight savings in furnace fuel costs. Think about what would happen if you set your thermostat to match the outside temperature: the furnace wouldn’t run at all. And your fuel costs would be zero. It’s just a linear ramp up from there: the higher the difference between your thermostat and the outside, the more the furnace will run. The times when the house is changing temperature is a wash – they cancel out.