>but definitely options for professionals that make their living outdoors
My thinking was also that this makes a great platform for professional tools that are currently standalone devices. Multimeters, surveying equipment, thermal inspection tools. Maybe a microscope or even a microfluidics device.
The physical world is so slow to give you feedback, I think DeepMind has the right approach with video games, you can move to 3d games, then games with physics where the agent directly controls artificial muscles, while iterating much faster than you can in the real world.
>While it seems intuitive that most individual "intelligent" systems in animals can be seen as unsupervised, isn't life itself driven in a reinforced manner?
I think apparently unsupervised systems could be explained by models that predict a future input given their current state and input. Correct predictions are reinforced. An RNN-like model.
(If the network is small, it should learn some compressed representation, which can be used as an input to a more abstract layer that makes more general predictions over a longer time period)
>What we don't know is whether there is a logistic curve on technology as a whole. Belief in the Singularity is premised on this not being the case.
That's a version of the Singularity to extreme even for Kurzweil. It's premised on technological growth not hitting the log portion of the curve before machine intelligence passes humans.
Look at how the plastics industry handled the scientific evidence that Bisphenol-A affects development. They switched to closely related chemicals with less data available, Bisphenol-B, Bisphenol-S. Unsurprisingly, studies are now finding that exposure to these chemicals has similar effects.
I suppose we'll ban those now too, and we can see we can test some other plasticizer out on a few billion people.
Hold on. Turn this around. You just read an entire paper about how arguments are completely unreliable, to the point of causing you to contradict yourself, and your response is to argue semantics and declare, "Hey, arguments are great! Let's put more things in the 'argument' category, and spend less effort trying to figure out more reliable and accurate ways of reasoning! Yay arguments, and by entailment, yay self-contradiction!"
The West Antarctic Ice sheet is still flowing into the ocean, and accelerating. It's actually not even clear atmospheric warming is the ultimate cause. But it is clear that it's reached a literal tipping point. The glaciers have retreated past a point where the slope tips inland, and warm water is running down hill, melting the bottom. No amount of emissions reductions can stop it, we would need to pump heat away from the underside of the glaciers to slow it down.
