Microsoft Researchers Offer Predictions For AI, Deep Learning (theverge.com) 102
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft polled 17 women working in its research organization about the technology advances they expect to see in 2017, as well as a decade later in 2027. The researchers' predictions touch on natural language processing, machine learning, agricultural software, and virtual reality, among other topics. For virtual reality, Mar Gonzalez Franco, a researcher in Microsoft's Redmond lab, believes body tracking will improve next year, and then over the next decade we'll have "rich multi-sensorial experiences that will be capable of producing hallucinations which blend or alter perceives reality." Haptic devices will simulate touch to further enhance the sensory experience. Meanwhile, Susan Dumais, a scientist and deputy managing director at the Redmond lab, believes deep learning will help improve web search results next year. In 2027, however, the search box will disappear, she says. It'll be replaced by search that's more "ubiquitous, embedded, and contextually sensitive." She says we're already seeing some of this in voice-controlled searches through mobile and smart home devices. We might eventually be able to look things up with either sound, images, or video. Plus, our searches will respond to "current location, content, entities, and activities" without us explicitly mentioning them, she says. Of course, it's worth noting that Microsoft has been losing the search box war to Google, so it isn't surprising that the company thinks search will die. With global warming as a looming threat, Asta Roseway, principal research designer, says by 2027 famers will use AI to maintain healthy crop yields, even with "climate change, drought, and disaster." Low-energy farming solutions, like vertical farming and aquaponics, will also be essential to keeping the food supply high, she says. You can view all 17 predictions here.
Microsoft polled 17 women (Score:4, Insightful)
Flip the gender, and watch the outraged accusations of sexism.
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Flip the gender and it wouldn't be noted.
You have got to be joking (Score:2)
*virtue_signal*I don't mind these are all women, I think it's great.*virtue_signal*
However, how many times on Facebook now have I seen an image of "Tumps Economic Team" noting that it's all men and a few of them named Steve to boot? (Never mind that he has already appointed a few women for various roles, or that he won the election because of a team of women)
You seriously do not think MS would be roasted if in this ay and age they came out with a think piece like this, all from men?
Heck, you are doing that
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Flip the gender and it wouldn't be noted.
That's because it would more likely, therefore less marked. I'd actually expect "outraged accusations of sexism" to follow in the less-likely scenario. Unless the labs are actually staffed with a female majority, of course. In that case, selecting females is more likely and the less marked case.
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Any article on Slashdot that features women in a positive light ... is immediately attacked
That is rather difficult to believe. You've checked all of them?
or discusses programs or funding for women or girls
Well, unless specifically related to women-specific biology, *that* can easily appear questionable.
boring non-news that doesn't belong on this site
It is still "news for nerds" around here, isn't it? *Lots* of things submitted here get criticized for this reason; you may easily be cherry-picking the complaints.
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Flip the gender, and watch the outraged accusations of sexism.
I'm watching the outrage now. Why did you think I would need to flip the gender to see it?
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I once spoke to a company who had commissioned... an extrapolation of what the next 10 years would look like in their industry... You can guess what happened over the succeeding 10 years: absolutely nothing... And in fact, 10 years later, the room no longer looks futuristic. Against all odds, its forecasts turned out to be largely accurate. And yet, the company had failed to commercialize even one of the recommendations in the attendant specification document. So I asked the company what they planned to do next; they told me they were going back to the original designers and asking them to forecast the next 10 years! The company blamed their engineers and managers for their failure to commercialize, not the designers.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
What I read from their predictions, especially the gig economy and getting more people into coding is that development work as a whole is commoditized, similar to meat packing, or textile making. It is done at the cheapest country worldwide, by the lowest bidders, for only the time it takes to write that module. This makes anything related to CS paying so little that it isn't worth getting into, with the earnings likely being less than working at a fast food joint.
This already is happening. Unless there is a specific industry like embedded programming or programming for a contract that the code can't be bought from the cheapest coding house in the world, the work goes offshore, and if someone has to do things in this country, it is contracted to a H-1B firm.
With this in mind, who in their right mind would want to go into development, unless they are in some niche that is very narrow and requires years of expertise. Even then, there is always the mindset of "it builds with stubs, ship it, fix after release" that is common in the industry.
Microsoft polled 17 women ... (Score:4, Funny)
... because that's all they have.
Sprawl Tech (Score:2, Offtopic)
Sounds like someone has been reading William Gibson novels. This sounds exactly like SimStim or cruising The Matrix with an Ono Sendai.
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Gibson said:
MS have a track record of always being on the future-deficient side.
What does THAT have to do with anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that they ask only women implies there is some reason to do that,
Yet we are left to guess at what that reason is.
The most obvious is that women have a better opinion.
How is that supportable? Why would they?
This is the kind of thing people get slapped in the face with every day but never draw any conclusions from because the obvious conclusion is forbidden socially (forbidden by the media/education system (everyone sees it therefore it's morally correct and the truth)).
Obviously there is a unified a
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Liberalism is a mental disorder we simply don't treat yet.
In much the same way as you cannot see your own eyeball, you don't realise that actually the reason why you're a hateful little cunt, is that you're stupid.
Incapable of nuanced thinking, in other words.
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The only one expressing hatred here is you
Re:What does THAT have to do with anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that they ask only women implies there is some reason to do that,
Yet we are left to guess at what that reason is.
The most obvious is that women have a better opinion.
How is that supportable? Why would they?
Why are we left to guess at the reason? It is explicitly discussed in the source article [microsoft.com].
No, it's not that they think that women's opinions are better than those of men. Nor is it some direct attack against men. Since that idea came from your imagination, there is no need to get hot under the collar about it and attribute bad motives for to the authors of the study.
So remember the next time you feel that the world is out to get you and that the media hides the "obvious conclusions", that it is all in your head. Your own feelings of persecution have coloured your view of the world.
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Why not say "17 people"?
What part of wanting to inspire girls do you not understand? No, you just saw the word "women" and decided to take offense.
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Honestly: how many girls are going to see this, much less be inspired by it?
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Honestly: how many girls are going to see this, much less be inspired by it?
On Slashdot? Not many. The original article on The Virge? A few more. Shares of the article on Facebook? Potentially millions.
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Girls don't read FB.
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Girls don't read FB.
Maybe not on your home planet.
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On my home planet, girls use Instagram, while adults use FB.
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On my home planet, girls use Instagram, while adults use FB.
Meanwhile back on Earth, 76% of Facebook users are female, and 8% of Facebook users are age 13 - 19.
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Neither of your unsourced statistics answer what social media platform that most girls use.
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The stats are there for anyone who cares enough to search them out. But you've moved the goalposts. You originally claimed that girls don't use FB, which is demonstrably untrue. Now you're shifting to "most girls use other platforms"; this may well be so, but is a different matter that I wouldn't have taken issue with.
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#eyeroll
The fact that a small minority of teenage girls (occasionally? your stats don't say) use FB doesn't negate the fact that Instagram and Snapchat are *the* SM sites for teen girls (in the US, at least).
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Honestly: how many girls are going to see this, much less be inspired by it?
You don't know where Microsoft has published this though. For all we know they have distributed it to classrooms or sent press releases to soft news shows/magazines in the hope of combining a tech story with a human interest angle. But it doesn't matter, as I am sure that this will not be the last time that they do this sort of thing to encourage women and girls to choose tech-based careers. If they keep doing it then something will get seen by their target audience. And if it isn't seen by the girls then i
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then they can't address the gender imbalance
I'll worry about a male-heavy gender tech imbalance when the NFL starts pushing "brown shoes/gloves/towels for prostate cancer awareness".
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I'll worry about a male-heavy gender tech imbalance when the NFL starts pushing "brown shoes/gloves/towels for prostate cancer awareness".
It's fortunate then that they declared intention was to inspire girls and not some closed-minded poster on Slashdot. That said, judging by the overwhelming reaction to the stated gender of the surveyed researchers compared to anything that any of them actually predicted, I think perhaps it's not a bad thing to educate the wider community so that they don't have a panic attack when they happen to find a woman in the tech industry.
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I've worked in the IT world (first as a programmer, and then as a DBA) for 30 years. Many of my supervisors and team leads have been women, and quite a number of coworkers female.
Thus, I don't need a snotty left-wing punk to "educate" me about women in IT.
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Thus, I don't need a snotty left-wing punk to "educate" me about women in IT.
And yet clearly you do. Otherwise, why else would you have felt the need to post on this subject and been so riled up enough to start slinging around insults?
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This has zero to do with IT. It's because they explicitly chose only women.
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Oh good. I'm glad that it's not just women in IT that you have a problem with.
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The way that you twist my words is strongly indicative of trolling.
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The true troll is the one who diverts the discussion off topic by fixating on the gender of the researchers rather than the predictions they made. And all this because of one single word in the summary! I have to admit you were very successful in doing this.
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My feeling is that this is a PR stunt. Basically they give the opinions from 17 people at MS that happen to belong to a "minority" group (in IT). They want to show the world that they do have female researchers.
Problem is, the headline says "MS researchers offer predictions..." where it should read "MS female researchers offer predictions...". Why? because if you just say "researchers" people will assume the selection criteria to be "top researchers".
Its like you ask to "offer predictions" to those MS resea
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My feeling is that this is a PR stunt.
Well of course there is an element of PR in this. When does any company put out any discussion paper on any subject that doesn't have PR in mind? But that doesn't mean that they didn't have a genuine concern to encourage girls to take up computer science.
Problem is, the headline says "MS researchers offer predictions..." where it should read "MS female researchers offer predictions...". Why? because if you just say "researchers" people will assume the selection criteria to be "top researchers".
It would be counter-productive to add the word "female" to the headline. Look at how it has riled up all the insecure man-children just because of that one word "women" in the summary. Imagine how much more of a frenzy of feelings of persecution there would
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I take this as a sign that you are frustrated by your general lack of success in persuading people who are suspicious about "social justice".
This is one example, and you assert that it should be taken as a sign above all others and that I should change my mind based on this one, assuming that
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I take this as a sign that you are frustrated by your general lack of success in persuading people who are suspicious about "social justice".
Once again you have created an entire backstory to rant against that is unsupportable. That comment would make more sense if it wasn't my first post for this story. I will admit though, it is the second time this week [slashdot.org] that I have had to reply to some opinionated posters who obviously hadn't read even the first couple of paragraphs of the article about which they ranted.
Do you want to know why I felt qualified to make such a diagnose for someone that I hadn't even met? I recognise the symptoms because I am e
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The fact that you are making such an effort to deny it and ignore my criticism of your argument could be taken as proof that I am correct on all counts.
If you have reason on your side why are you being so defensive and rancorous?
Anyway
You are totally ignoring that affirmative action exists everywhere and is totally unjustifiable. So other than having absolutely no idea what you're talking about, good work.
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The fact that you are making such an effort to deny it and ignore my criticism of your argument could be taken as proof that I am correct on all counts.
The fact that you have ignored everything in the article AND everything that I have said in preference to your mere suspicions about social justice shows that you are not even in the ballpark of correctness. It's also interesting that you consider attempts to educate you (including citing sources) to be being defensive.
So let's see your stunning argument that I can't refute...
You are totally ignoring that affirmative action exists everywhere and is totally unjustifiable.
That argument is completely demolished by all the places that I have shown that this has absolutely nothing to do with affirmative ac
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You are obsessed with quibbling over this specific article when its only significance is in a bigger picture. And you have absolutely NO POINT about the article itself. When your points are refuted you turn to taking things out of context and twisting meanings to fit your point of view, and above all cherry-picking an appropriate scope of things to fit your point of view regardless of any rationale.
If this is "about encouraging girls to choose STEM careers" then it is a falsehood because on its face it says
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You are obsessed with quibbling over this specific article when its only significance is in a bigger picture. And you have absolutely NO POINT about the article itself.
Oh this is hilarious! I'm obsessed with quibbling about the specifics of the article, and yet at the same time I have no point about the article? Which is it??? There is no significance in any bigger picture because this topic was not about affirmative action in the first place. It was presented here about tech predictions for next year and beyond. That fact that this was done as part of a project to encourage girls (which once again has nothing to do with affirmative action) is just coincidental and deemed
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Not reading any of your insane babbling, but you are no doubt denying your obsession.
LOOK AT THE WALL OF TEXT
how do you justify what you're doing?
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how do you justify what you're doing?
I justify it by actually proving what I'm saying, unlike you who simply claims to be right based on guesses and preconceived notions of the "broader picture" without offering a single shred of evidence for anything that you say.
It seems fitting that I finished off by asking you to admit one of your mistakes; that you hadn't even read the article about which you ranted and raved. It seems fitting that you didn't even read that!
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This is what I love about your kind. You love "evidence" but you have no idea what it is.
Go ahead and try to define it.
Then I'll give you the correct answer.
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It doesn't matter if you and I have different definitions of evidence, because you haven't even attempted to provide anything that could be considered remotely like evidence. Your entire argument is that affirmative action exists; they only surveyed women; so therefore this is an example of affirmative action. You managed to do this all without reading the article. When I pointed out that the article directly contradicts what you admitted what just a guess, you said that their stated reason was implausible
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The point is your "definition" of evidence is base completely in emotion. You couldn't define it because it doesn't exist.
You are obviously and seriously mentally ill and probably illiterate. I addressed and refuted every point you tried to make.
For anything I say against you, you then get the idea to say the exact same against me. I don't think you realize how obvious this is.
Your time in your echo chamber has severely warped your mind. Take a break. Forever. You can't handle the news.
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Oh how sweet. You're still around. And you're still trying to peddle that evidence argument.
The point is your "definition" of evidence is base completely in emotion.
Really? Perhaps you can provide some non-emotional evidence for that assertion. You see, I have quoted you before. I have quoted the articles that we are (supposed to be) discussing. I have also linked to other sources to back up my claims.
You have done none of this. You don't quote anything. you don't cite anything. You make off-topic claims that get more fanciful all the time. My "emotional" evidence for my claim i
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TL;DR (Score:1)
TL;DR: It's actually 17 predictions for 2017 and 17 for 2027 predictions on 17 (almost) different questions about technology by 17 different MS female researchers.
TL;DR for TL;DR: some women talking about predictions
TL;DR for TL;DR for TL;DR: sry, no b**bs. only research guesses
An Actual Comment About the Article (Score:1)
Since every other post seems to be eye-rollinging inept trolls or meta-commentary about gender along the full spectrums, I thought I'd actually pos about the content since I read most of the article before I saw it on Slashdot...
It's more interesting than you might think as the people polled are from different technical fields, so the answers are a lot more varied than you usually get in a predictive piece.
If you take a step back though what is really interesting is how much the whole thing together looks l
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its also weird that MS would spell out "17 women" why does that even matter?
unless it was to compare a result from "17 men"
its actually kinda weird thinking that was this a sample of people self identified as "women" and why not other gender tags...
Not so subtle (Score:1)
Pretty thinly veiled attempt by MS to get free publicity from media outlets sympathetic to SJW crusades against straight white cisgendered men.
Looks like /. is as much about culture wars as it is tech news.
In b4 AmiMoJo is triggered by this post.
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Because it's a fact that the 17 people they polled were women?
Are you that insecure? lol
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They did, if you read the entire sentence. Part of the second one help too with the whole 'context' thing.
I know, it's a tough thing to read entire lines of text when you've obviously got a chip on your shoulder. That's a hard weight to carry.
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Not "researchers" or "experts", but "women".
That is demeaning. You know exactly what I mean talking about. Of course you are a fuckwit who will never admit it so I won't even bother.
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They only thing I know here is that you got triggered by the word 'Women'.
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I'm sorry that Slashdot isn't a safe place for you. Should we have "women" listed as a trigger warning?
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I'm sure those 17 women/researchers/thought-leaders will be grateful to be defended by someone whose first instinct is to call people abusive names. Did you ask those 17 people if they actually felt denigrated to be called women? Did you even read the blog post that inspired the article (listed at the bottom of the /. summary) to find if there was a reason why they chose to just talk to women and why they wanted to let the world know this? The answer to both those questions is no.
They asked women to counter
Did they make any predictions about Windows 10? (Score:3)
blend or alter perceives reality? (Score:2)
Great, fake news isn't bad enough, now we will wire the fake news directly to our brains?
crop rotation? (Score:1)