timmillea

rob53 said:

It's about time Apple drew a line in the sand. I'm sick and tired of countries dictating how a product is designed especially when those countries have nothing worthwhile to offer. Yes, the UK and EU make some cellular devices but nothing compared to what Apple produces. The removal of end-to-end encryption is simply a ploy to allow governments to capture all kinds of personal information without even having a warrant. The UK wants to go back to the days of the telephone party line so they can snoop constantly. 

Apple produces most of its products in China - a country not exactly known for its free speech, unfettered access to the WWW or any encrypted communications. 

As a UK citizen, I would like to make it clear that the current Conservative party government is in its dying days looking for provocative, popularist legislation to minimise the scale of its defeat at the forthcoming general election. This unworkable piece of legalisation is carefully designed to make the opposition parties appear to support child pornography if they oppose it. The British Conservative Party are historically the most successful political party in the World. Their means are ruthless and for only one purpose - to be in power and reward their financial supporters. Usually this is blatantly by giving titles and membership of The House of Lords. Only power, not morality or anything sensible matters. To put a bookend on this, the House of Lords has the most members of any governing assembly in the World after the Chinese National People's Congress. The House of Lords is always stuffed with as many 'friends' of the Conservative Party as they can get away with in any year - there are currently around double the numbers of members than there are even seats for in their chamber. 

This stupid piece of legalisation is unworkable and has nothing to do with its content. It is about painting the opposition as supporters of child pornography as we go in to the election season. 

mayfly said:

Other than that, you're right, I'm probably unqualified to opine about the resources necessary to advance AI to pass the Imitation Game.

Yes, Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science, created the first actual computer, shortened WW2 by at least a year and set the goals and tests for artificial intelligence before he was convicted of homosexuality, chemically castrated, shunned by society and committed suicide.

Even now, the mathematical proof required to demonstrate that something is a 'computer' is if it can implement the purely theoretical 'Turing Machine' - published decades before any actual computer existed - 'Turing Machine Equivalence' is the necessary proof. In AI, the 'Turing Test' is whether a human cannot discern whether they are interacting with a human or a computer. 

The adage regarding computers goes, "junk-in, junk out" and that is precisely what current machine learning is - it learns from junk. ML is a tiny branch of AI which can at its very optimum, perform at an average level but is very unlikely to ever get even to that level. There is so much more to AI that can theoretically do so much better than ML. Let the big corporates exploit rather ancient tech for profit but they will never produce a Beethoven, a Shakespeare or a Da Vinci. AI theoretically can but not with neural nets and big data. 

There was a time when Apple always led with new technologies - mostly a deeply unprofitable time. In latter years, they work in secret, study what the competition is doing, innovates on top, patents to the hill, then embarrasses the competition. 

My first degree at Durham University starting 1992 was 50% in AI and 50% software engineering. Then no one I met outside the University had even heard of artificial intelligence nor believed in it when I explained what it was. Now AI is on the main broadcast news all the time. Even now, Nick Clegg of Meta was on the airwaves this morning explaining that the current generation of AI is simply predicting the next word or 'token' from big data. Back in 1992, Durham had a huge natural language processing system called LOLITA which was based on deep semantic understanding - an internal, language-independant representation based on semantic graphs. LOLITA read the Wall Street Journal everyday and could answer questions on it with intelligence, not parrot fashion. For my final year project, I worked on the dialogue module including 'emotion'. Then the LOLITA funding ended and that was the end of that. Had it been in the US, I can't help feeling that LOLITA would have morphed into one of the top corporates in the World. We don't support genius or foresight in the UK. 

It is truly depressing that 30 years later, the current state of AI is still neural nets trained on mediocre data sets. 

thedba said:

Personally I think a better program would be to charge an extra amount (say 50 euros) per device and at the end of life of said device you exchange it for a newer one and get reimbursed or apply that deposit to the new one. 

I this is about the most sensible comment made in this entire discussion. Modern devices, especially Apple's, are designed to optimise whole battery life to go beyond the expected lifetime of the device. Some would call this a 'disposable' device but having a deposit scheme achieves everything the EU in this regulation is trying to aim for. Forget about the politics of 'the right to change your own battery' and instead focus on environmental impact. If the purchase price of a device included a returnable deposit towards a new device or simply for returning it to recycle/refurbish then practically all the bad behaviour would be eliminated. 

One of the reasons the UK left the EU was this constant over-reach into every day affairs by people who made mediocre decisions. 

This is stereotypical EU over-reach. The European Economic Community was formed to maintain friendly relations (i.e peace) and facilitate trade between European countries after WW2. Now they are legislating on everything from bananas to buttons and wanting to create a unified European military force.  

The correct route would be to form an ISO standard for mobile phones, including battery replacement, charging etc.,  and let the manufacturer choose whether or not to comply. 

The EU is increasingly behaving like a dictator to the World - the opposite of what it was created for.