Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard · 19 Apr 2018 · 245pp · 83,272 words
push the button in the elevator, or open a stairway door, or push an intercom bell? These are all mundane tasks that are easy for humans, but insanely difficult for computers. How might a tacocopter be co-opted to deliver other, less nutritious and legal substances? What would happen when it inevitably gets shot
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo · 3 Apr 2017 · 733pp · 179,391 words
top down. Logic is a form of narrative, after all, and computers are extremely good at logic. It turned out that many tasks humans found very difficult were relatively easy for computers. For example, the first computer program to play a convincing game of chess, “Kotok-McCarthy,” was developed at MIT in 1962 as
Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner · 29 Oct 2018 · 688pp · 147,571 words
Abbot contemplates establishing this standard by “considering the industry customary, average, or safest technology”.34 In practice, applying a “reasonable computer” standard may be very difficult. A reasonable human person is fairly easy to imagine. The law’s ability to set an objective standard of behaviour takes as its starting point the idea that
Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts · 28 Mar 2011 · 327pp · 103,336 words
the moves—and that’s exactly the point. The tasks that one typically finds on Mechanical Turk are there because they are relatively easy for humans to solve, but difficult for computers—a phenomenon that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls “artificial, artificial intelligence. See Howe (2006) for an early report on Amazon’s Mechanical
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay · 5 Mar 2020 · 807pp · 154,435 words
skill which computers are still very far from achieving. Solving the CAPTCHA – the slightly distorted text which is set to distinguish humans from robots – is trivially easy for humans and difficult for a computer. And Google’s research in this area is, fortunately, devoted not to training robots to be more like humans, but to
The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws
by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto · 30 Sep 2007 · 1,302pp · 289,469 words
may also involve recognition of particular animals and plants, orientation of images, and so on. CAPTCHA puzzles are intended to be easy for a human to solve but difficult for a computer. Because of the monetary value to spammers of circumventing these controls, an arms race has occurred in which typical CAPTCHA puzzles have
Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell
by Neal Stephenson · 3 Jun 2019 · 993pp · 318,161 words
and I would be happy to fill you in. But the bottom line is that scientists have identified certain problems that are very difficult for computers to solve but easy for humans. If you can turn those problems into a fun game, then you can get lots of people on the Internet solving them
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie · 25 Jun 2018 · 390pp · 109,519 words
itself. Large patches of an image that are uninterrupted skin tones might very well be a naked body. This recognition, extremely easy for a human, is quite difficult for an algorithm. The computer understands an image only as a series of pixels, each with a color. But an algorithm can be trained, using a
Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman · 19 Feb 2019 · 339pp · 94,769 words
the first place? Brenden Lake at NYU and colleagues have used these kinds of top-down methods to solve another problem that’s easy for people but extremely difficult for computers: recognizing unfamiliar handwritten characters. Look at a character on a Japanese scroll. Even if you’ve never seen it before, you can probably
The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug
by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer · 5 Dec 2000 · 559pp · 174,054 words
account not only the features of the task itself, but also to reckon with the competency of the person performing it. Is programming a computer difficult or easy? Many people would find even basic programming tasks challenging, complex, novel, and creative. Experienced, well-practiced, and talented programmers might find many of these same programming
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words
The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All
by Mary Childs · 15 Mar 2022 · 367pp · 110,161 words
Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone · 14 May 2018 · 344pp · 104,077 words