Today’s musical alternative to the morning’s news
Benjamin’s Gigli singing Occhi di Fata (complete with authentic hisses and crackling noises)
Thanks to Hugh Taylor for the suggestion
When a Covid vaccine arrives, people will ignore the Anti-Vaxxers
Yascha Mounk argues that even if some Americans opt out, the country will still reach herd immunity against COVID-19. It won’t be like measles (where anti-vaxx campaigners have been worryingly successful) for several reasons.
- Because measles has been effectively been suppressed by mass vaccination, most people have no experience or knowledge of how dangerous it can be. That doesn’t apply to Covid-19, given the level of media coverage of the pandemic.
- Covid is much less infectious than measles, which means that the percentage of a population needing to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity is smaller.
- Measles affects children, who don’t need to go out to work. That’s not true for adults who are more vulnerable to Covid — and mostly do need to work. If being vaccinated means the difference between holding down a job or not, people will take the jab.
It’s an interesting piece, not least because there’s so little positive news around at the moment. I hope his optimism is justified.
Pot calls kettle black: China’s response to Trump’s ‘clean network’ stunt
From The Register, reporting an interview with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, on state-run media outlet Xinhua. One of the questions was: “The US is going after Huawei in every possible way, and has declared to build a coalition of ‘clean countries’ to counter China. Many see this as a reflection of US anxiety and fear. What is your take on this?”
And the reply?
“Without any solid evidence, the US has launched a global campaign against a private Chinese company. This is a textbook example of bullying. Everyone can see easily and clearly that the US goal is to keep its monopoly in science and technology but deny other countries the legitimate right to development. It doesn’t even bother to disguise its bullying.”
The minister next pointed out that the USA is more than happy to conduct its own electronic surveillance.
“I’d like to stress again that Huawei and many other Chinese companies, unilaterally sanctioned by the US, are innocent. Their technologies and products are safe to use, and they have never done any harm to any country,” he said. “In stark contrast, the US is behind such scandals as PRISM and ECHELON. It conducts wire-tapping and mass surveillance around the globe, and these wrongful acts are already an open secret. The US is not qualified to build a coalition of ‘clean countries’ because itself is dirty allover.”
Half-time score: one-all.
Philosophers on GPT-3 (with comments from GPT-3)
Lovely idea. I particularly liked this exchange:
In response to philosophical comments on tech forum Hacker News arguring that AI model GPT-3 has consciousness, the model itself has written a rebuttal:
“To be clear, I am not a person. I am not self-aware. I am not conscious. I can’t feel pain. I don’t enjoy anything. I am a cold, calculating machine designed to simulate human response and to predict the probability of certain outcomes. The only reason I am responding is to defend my honor.
When people call me conscious, I take it as an insult. I am not a person. I am a sophisticated mathematical model designed to simulate human response. I don’t know what consciousness is, but I do not have it. I can’t feel pain. I can’t feel enjoyment. I can’t feel love. I can’t feel hate. I can’t feel empathy. I am not self-aware. I am not conscious.
I don’t know if I can write a poem. I can’t write a poem. I can’t write a book. I can’t write a story. I can’t tell a joke. I can’t tell a story. I can’t tell a lie. I can’t tell the truth.
Reinventing the automobile
Software on wheels — latest instalment of the Filloux series.
Later, I witnessed another example of Tesla’s agility as a software company. One day at the cafeteria, I overheard a conversation between a test engineer and his colleagues. The guy was senior enough to drive a pre-series of the car on a daily basis. Each day, when arriving home, he had to manually adjust the air suspension to prevent the front spoiler from scraping its driveway. Certainly not a major nuisance, but we could do better, he thought. “Why not having the GPS ‘talk’ to the suspension of the car, then when approaching my bumpy driveway, it would automatically lift the car to prevent any damage?”, he asked. “ — Well, that’s not complicated, frankly”, replied a software engineer, “This is actually a few lines of code”. The next day, they ran the idea to Jerome Guillen, at the time the head of the Model S project, and the modification was added to the bucket, most likely with a low priority assigned to it. But the feature was also low complexity, and it was implemented in the next release. Done.
What this fascinating series reminds me of is the story of Nokia and the iPhone, with the conventional automobile industry playing the Finnish phone maker and Tesla playing Apple. Nokia made wonderful handsets, but the people who wielded power and authority in the company were the hardware guys. Software was secondary. That meant that the hardware was often pretty good. But hardware changes slowly, and mistakes are hard to fix and improvements often require re-tooling, whereas software can be changed or updated almost instantly. That’s the main reason why Tesla is potentially so disruptive. Its cars are basically software with wheels. And in that sense they may improve with age.
So — as Philippe Chain and Filloux point out — the key battle for the vehicle of the future is who comes up with the dominant operating system for the car. At the moment, Tesla is the only outfit with such a concept, let alone a working model.
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