Read this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14306146?s_cid=fb_wall-news-082411-algorithms

Basically it says that we've already been overtaken by our new computer overlords. They largely control the stock market, and we are becoming increasingly reliant on the interwebz for, well, pretty much everything. Is it already too late??

Once they become mobilized, we've lost.

:ahhh:

What are your opinions??

*Looks at OP's sig*

I don't see why you're worried...

Pfft. Man has been reliant on tech for way longer than this. Not to worry though, I already have many sharpened sticks to defend myself with after the apocalypse

If the internet were to die or be shut down, I'd not cry, I'd be curious to see the crisis that emerges

Not sure: sometimes I think we're overly reliant on technology, but the same concern could be made at pretty much any point in history. I guess at least Teh Intarwebz™ isn't sentient. Yet.

Programs can only do the task they're designed for, Google's search engine isn't going to attempt to kill the president.

Rofl, I'd forgotten about that .

This is just the beginning.

But, but, but..... you wouldn't be able to get instant updates on it!

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

Thank you, TED, for keeping me a month ahead of the news

There's television and newspapers if I need news, and I still use the radio to get most of my news. Huzzah for being partially out of touch with my generation :laugh:

That freaked me out. especially that last part. "We are running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications system that no humans will ever see,".

But don't the televisions and newspapers get a lot of their news via the internet?? In that journalists not in the office will email their stories and such in, and I imagine a lot of the television news relies on the internet in one form or another. Don't power stations also repy on the internet too, hence the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet worm?? Which could screw the TV idea over, and if the printing stations and offices don't have back up power supplies, things could get messy.

Worse case scenario, the phone lines and the internet dies. Pretty much all long haul transport will be crippled, i.e. planes, trains, boats etc.

So with or without the internet, we're doomed, apparently.

:(

Thats a slight exageration.

I don't think it is. How do planes know where to fly, and when to land?? How do trains know which rails to take and when to depart and such?? And I don't think any boats have old fashioned magnetic compasses and use the stars, they are all, as far as I'm aware, controlled by satellites via GPS and the interwebs.

We still have the wire and telegrams. They did it in the 1940's we can do it again.

This.

It has nothing to do with the interwebz. There may be algorithms involves but only partially at most. Most planes are flown through the instrument panel and radio waves/radar, also, weather permitting, they are flown my sight.

How do you know Google isn't designed to kill the president?

Very interesting. And this is just the beginning. These algorithms are still pretty simple data mining algorithms. But the recent one are simply amazing.

I have worked a bit on such algorithms for applications in the oil and gas exploration.
There is for example these latest symbolic regression algorithms like http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa: it basically infers general mathematical rules from an example data set. This algorithm has been able to infer, from a data set of an oscillating pendulum, the second momentum conservation law of Newton. On my side, this algorithm allowed me to find back and improve a law writen 30 years ago by Pr. Belotti. "Who" found the law ? Who is the real discoverer ? The algorithm or me ?
The problem of human mind is that we are building our concepts on uncertain basis but we keep one single hypothesis. We do not take care of multiple hypothesis. We have problem to play with 2 or more changing parameters. These types of algorithms can.
The future is probably going to bring more AI capable of "noble tasks" like research and decision. I can tell confidently that in the next 15 years, there will be more than 20% of the oil field producing without assistance of human beings. I am not afraid of it. These algorithms are very general purpose but their "knowledge" is very focused on a domain and moreover on a subset of the domain, a region, a type of data etc...
*
It does not enter in direct competition with human mind. It does not change we still have the decision to install or not these algorithms, to chose the original data set to train them etc...`

Computers and satellites are so integrated into our lives, that any disruption to their operation would cripple society as we know it.
Air planes, trains, delivery trucks, and the military all depend on GPS tracking to operate. World wide communication would cease.
The stock market would have to stop trading, banks would freeze assets, ATMs would not work, credit cards would not work, and the only currency you would have available would be the cash in your pocket.

The bright side is, that most of the really critical systems in the world have a redundant structure. If one part of the system fails, there are 10 or 20 other systems that would kick in and take over.
Aside from something catastrophic, like an E.L.E. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event), we don't have anything to worry about.
And if a E.L.E. did occur, technology would be the last thing on most people's mind.

Well. . . Um. . . Crap.

So that article is basically complaining about... algorithms doing some of the work for us? This was caused by the advances in mathematics and applied mathematics, and I'm happy to see that algorithms can make very accurate models of reality.

Eh?? I don't think it was complaining. I think it was more of a warning.

I, for one welcome our new computer overlords.

Provide a paradox to shut down the cyborg overlords. It's as simple as this sentence is a lie.