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Dec. 9th, 2014 12:12 pmNormally, my job primarily entails stalking the wealthy, but yesterday and today I've been on loan to a more mathy department, testing some pretty next-level predictive modeling data integrity, which is at once really exciting and incredibly tedious.
What we're doing is a bit like building an artificial intelligence, and for civilian work, especially not for profit, it's pretty advanced; nothing compared to what, say, MIT or the military are working on, but special in its own way. What we're doing right now is making sure that Baby is reading the data we're giving it correctly (protip: so far it is not) which makes me feel a bit like Howard Finch from Person of Interest must have felt while building the Machine. It gives me a new appreciation not only for the genius of fictional people like Finch and Tony Stark but also a new respect for the level of tedium they are willing to tolerate.
On the other hand, they probably had a lot of interns to do blind data validation for them.
So, if in ten years Skynet does rise, and it rises out of Chicago, odds are good that I helped teach it how to talk. Know that we had the best of intentions and the most horrifying of spreadsheets.
What we're doing is a bit like building an artificial intelligence, and for civilian work, especially not for profit, it's pretty advanced; nothing compared to what, say, MIT or the military are working on, but special in its own way. What we're doing right now is making sure that Baby is reading the data we're giving it correctly (protip: so far it is not) which makes me feel a bit like Howard Finch from Person of Interest must have felt while building the Machine. It gives me a new appreciation not only for the genius of fictional people like Finch and Tony Stark but also a new respect for the level of tedium they are willing to tolerate.
On the other hand, they probably had a lot of interns to do blind data validation for them.
So, if in ten years Skynet does rise, and it rises out of Chicago, odds are good that I helped teach it how to talk. Know that we had the best of intentions and the most horrifying of spreadsheets.
