This weekend I achieved:
Installed a new light in the kitchen. The old one has been growing steadily dimmer over the last few months. It wasn’t the tube, because I changed that, so I replaced the whole strip light, and now the kitchen is oddly bright.
I cut our pumpkins, dug over the area in our allotment where they were growing, and planted garlic there for next year. I planted three rows of garlic. One of the chaps there told me that garlic needs frost to get it started. In any case, I am looking forward to it. I also harvested some sprouts, which I love. There was a car crash on the road next to our allotment and a car apparently crashed through the fence and landed up in the plot next ours. There’s not much to see now, except bit of car scattered over the plot. Quite exciting though.
Bought and installed a new printer. It was £80, but the girl in PC World asked me if it was for business or home use. I said it was for home use, but asked her if it would have been cheaper if I’d lied and said it was for business. She was terribly nice and said that if it was for business she could give me £5 off and free insurance, so we agreed it was definitely for business use after all. It was a pain in the arse to install. Well, it was easy enough to install with a cable, but trying to connect it to our network by wifi caused me all sorts of problems including ip clashes, crashed routers, WPS issues. I have got it working, but it annoyed me immensely.
I spent most of yesterday putting clocks back an hour.
I was going to add a picture of our pumpkin harvest, but sadly I managed to delete it from my phone before bluetoothing it. I may take another.
Update, here are the pumpkin pictures
Elon Musk, boss of Tesla Motors and genuinely smart guy, has been telling anyone who will listen that artificial intelligence is terrifying. He’s only half right in my view. If we start making intelligent machines that can make their own decisions and value judgements, it is indeed a terrifying step to take. However, this is not what I would call artificial intelligence. This is genuine intelligence and self awareness. And we are so far from creating that in a synthetic environment, that it’s not worth worrying about yet. No two people can even agree on what intelligence actually is, let alone create it.
Machines that only appear to think for themselves are a far less frightening prospect, and we’ve been able to produce the illusion of intelligence since the 60s. This is what I would call artificial intelligence. These machines are producing better illusions of intelligence all the time, but it’s largely down to more powerful processing than anything else. I don’t think there have been any serious breakthroughs in my lifetime. Machines like robot vacuum cleaners and speech recognition apps on tablets are getting good, but they are not in any way thinking for themselves. They just appear to, and they’re not dangerous. So, much as I’d love to think otherwise, we’re a long way from letting the genie out of the bottle. Sorry Elon, you’re just being alarmist.
Loading comments...