Leon on Everything

                                “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” Eliezer Yudkowsky AI is a very hot topic today, mainly because of the revolution in pattern recognition which comes under the heading of Deep Learning. Hollywood conditioned us to think of Artificial intelligence as a dangerous technology that will bring forth the end of human civilization. If you are a fan of these ideas, then Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence will not disappoint. In his book, the author asks the question “What would happen when machines achieve a level of intelligence far beyond anything that humans are capable of?”, he calls this ability Superintelligence. Before we get to the review, a little background is in order. First, there is a wide cons...

I had a recent conversation with an American of my generation. It was about education and inequality in the United States. She explained to me how a young person over there can't afford an education anymore and that without a university degree she can't get employment. I remarked that while this might be mostly true, education in of itself today is essentially free with the likes of Coursera and YouTube. Essentially college courses are available online for anyone to watch and when it comes to the likes of Coursera they also come with some sort of certificate of having attended the course and passed the exams. We shifted to where this type of education might be most useful, and naturally given my background I suggested programming. Programmers for a long time have been self taught. In fact, it is estimated that nearly half of all developers are self taught (1). Therefore as far as I was concerned here was one of the most highly paid professions in the United States with no ...