“Although the HMM (hidden Markov model) is good at capturing the temporal nature of processes such as speech, it has a very limited capacity for recognizing complex patterns involving more than firstorder dependencies in the observed data. This is due to the first-order state process and the assumption of state-conditional independence of observations. Multilayer perceptrons are almost the opposite: they cannot model temporal phenomena very well but are good at recognizing complex patterns.”

Keep it mind that they are talking about standard neural networks as they are used today and not the state-of-the-art à la Thaler (self-assembling, indefinitely scalabe, generative neural cascades), which are also able to generate language unlike the simple kinds that are taught in universities.

I have yet to encounter a neural-based technology that is as universal and effective.

This of course assumes a solution comes along to prevent or ameliorate the effects of burning carbon to produce power. Otherwise, the robots may have to spend all their time rebuilding stuff and generally keeping us alive.

Here’s a quote from the article:
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.

# # #

It makes you think that these robots are already building these robots.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

8 chapters . . . 4 very dystopian and 4 very optimistic.

The Democrats don’t have a super-majority in Congress, and if the Republicans keep voting down bills to repair infrastructure as “needless and wasteful spending,” then we will have another do-nothing Congress and the economy could stay in the doldrums until the next Congressional election in 2014. The Republicans put up roadblocks before everything the Democrats tried to do to restore the economy starting back in 2008. This lead the voters to throw out a number of Democratic members of the House, so the Tea Party took over the House of Representatives and dragged their feet until now, keeping unemployment over 8% during most of this time.

If the Republicans don’t change their ways, they will drag their feet and slow down progress enough so that they just might win more seats in Congress in the 2014 election.

If that works out for them they will keep on their obstructionist program until 2016 and then things could be so bad that they might take back the White House and both houses of the Congress.

Just imagine that it does happen this way.

This will mean that they will have a majority all the way up until the year 2020.

Now we have seen lots of news here at this website that computer power will keep advancing into the future. Roboticists at NASA have predicted that in the next decade we will see robots climbing up the evolutionary ladder, passing by the abilities of more and more complicated animals until they have human capabilities. Some have predicted that in six to ten years that robots will be able to do any job that people do now.

This leads us to see that robots could create a crisis in employment between the years 2018 and 2022.

If the crisis peaks by 2018, the Democrats could take back the Congress in the mid-term elections, but they would still face a Republican president who would veto everything they try to do to take care of the unemployed.

There could be a great deal of human suffering in the country and in the rest of the world if the robot apocalypse occurs before the Presidential election of the year 2020.

I really hope that’s true, Tim, but I worry that it’s not.

I’ve worked with lots of low skilled workers and when I try to get them interested in the elections, they make it clear to me that they can’t be bothered. They don’t read the newspapers or watch the news and some have even expressed wonderment at seeing me read the editorial page. They can’t understand why anybody would be bothered to do that strange a thing.

These are the people I worry the most about. These are the ones who are going to suffer the most as robots get better and better.

I fear that their only hope will be that robots advance so quickly that the crisis will reach a tipping point in less than two years. A lot of fans of Bill Clinton don’t realize that he took over the ideas of the Republicans in Congress for his own Welfare Reform. Now when you fall on hard times, you can only get benefits for two years…and those benefits are pretty small as it is. It is very hard trying to survive on such scanty funds.

In China, they use teams of workers with shovels to dig road beds, rather than using heavy equipment to “create jobs” If you armed the workers with teaspoons there would be even more jobs! There the state can control these types of business decisions. in America, corporate competition drive efficiency and low cost at the expense of jobs.

Fewer low skilled workers are needed each year as they are replaced by automation. Eventually the number of low skilled unemployable will reach a critical mass where they can vote politicians into office who they see as good candidates.

Where the line is and how fast we get to it is currently unforseeable, but It’s likely only 4-5 presidential elections away.