Ok, this is probably mostly true (probability for the win!). I suspect it was recommended to me for the same reason (whatever that was!) that a bunch of flat-earth debunking videos were recommended to me on youtube.
I’m not sure why they were recommended to me, but I admit I’ve watched a fair number just out of morbid curiosity of what stupidity the flat-earthers could come up with. The best one I’ve seen so far is someone drastically misinterpreting the double-slit experiment and related experiments to conclude that a camera on Cassini couldn’t possibly take a picture of Saturn because there was no “conscious observer” of the photons that hit the craft’s camera sensor…
…if a leaf drops in front of a motion-activated camera sensor in the woods and there are no conscious creatures around, does the camera take a picture? Survey says… yes, of course, WTF are you on about?
Well, you or I may not be able to check whether the camera is taking pictures without introducing a conscious observer into the system. It takes a p-zombie to check that.
This person’s idea was that if there’s no conscious observer there when the picture is taken, then it’s impossible for there to be any pictures to check, and the only way to get a picture is to have an artist use whatever the camera gathered to create an image from it. Which… is pretty easy to check, p-zombie or not.
This person should keep reading (or watching youtube videos, I suppose) because what they’re missing is that, at a quantum level, the math works the same whether time moves forward or backward. Cassini exists in a superposition of states in which it both does and does not take pictures of Saturn. Both scenarios are true until someone back on earth observes the data stream transmitted by Cassini, thus collapsing the wave function, which propagates backwards in time (from our point of view) such that Cassini will have captured images of Saturn.
It’s just basic logic, really.
Full disclosure: I am not a physicist and I don’t know anything about quantum mechanics; nor did I watch the linked videos; I’m not even very good at math; but I do enjoy reading pop-science articles about the very big and the very small, so I feel qualified to comment definitively on this subject.
What do they mean by “there?” In the same orbit looking at the satellite? Inside the satellite? Inside the camera? Right next to the camera sensor? Between the atoms of the sensor material? What?
“conscious observer observing the light that is falling into the camera, and then falling onto the sensor of the camera”. (yes, actual quote from the original video. You’re welcome for me subjecting myself to that again to get the quote. At least it was buffered, the link above is to a video debunking the original silliness.)
…figuring out how a separate observer is supposed to observe the photons which are striking the camera’s sensors and not the observer’s eyes is best left as an exercise for someone else.
AI turning into not so much a handy server farm running JARVIS as it is turning into major companies within major corporations—
—just so Jeff Bezos can talk to his wall and make the lights come on, somewhat reliably.
Ten thousand people are working on Alexa. Is it to make a big technological thing that works for everyone? Or is it to have natural language AI constantly being backed up by silent spillover humans paid something close to minimum wage? If it’s largely R&D, at what point do they give up and just rebrand the little pod on the coffee table as an always-On call-center, keeping your family safe because we always know what you are going to spend money on.
I think my money’s on billionaires wanting to talk to the wall and finding out that there’s enough money in it to just hire people to work indefinitely “on the project”. That’s some advertising all on it’s own.
It’s therefore perhaps not a huge surprise that Bixby received scarcely a mention during Samsung’s press conference, where it laid out the company’s vision for the next few years, where it waxed lyrically about “the age of experience” and included robotic companions like the tennis ball-esque Ballie.
It’s not clear what the future holds for Bixby. Is it doomed? Or does Samsung have an aggressive turnaround plan? Bringing it up to scratch with its rivals will cost a ridiculous amount of money. For context, Amazon has around 10,000 people working on Alexa.
Potential signs of life may be seen next month, with Samsung planning a spectacular mobile launch event in San Francisco. Given Bixby is intertwined with the company’s mobile strategy, it seems a logical place to give an update.
