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I’m afraid that’s pretty close to my initial reaction too. When I read the headline, there was an implied suffix of “so we can more effectively intrude on your
by spinningslate 7y ago
I’m afraid that’s pretty close to my initial reaction too. When I read the headline, there was an implied suffix of “so we can more effectively intrude on your privacy”.
It’s a great shame. There are clearly some very talented people at Facebook. But all that work is paid for by a dystopian business model that has moved effortlessly and insidiously from connecting people for benign social good (or at least relatively so) to one that facilitates erosion of privacy and social manipulation on a global scale. As a software engineer I’m deeply troubled that the craft I’ve loved since my teens is being wielded to such negative societal consequence.
- java-man 7y agoyou don't think it was the design goal from the start?
- sporkologist 7y agoIt started as a "Hot or Not" type co-ed rating app....
- skybrian 7y agoThe interesting part of this story for me is that computer proficiency on language tasks is improving so rapidly that a benchmark introduced just last year has become too easy. It seems like there is little reason to think this research will hit a wall any time soon? Will we have computers acing SAT's and writing college essays? It hardly matters which tech giant paid for it this time, since they are publishing the results and the others will build from there. Next year it might be Google's turn again? Here is the part I find scary: consider that they're publishing the models and the code, so anyone could use it. What might malware authors or nation-state actors build? (Sometimes working together.)