On 21 May 2013 12:36, Ashwin Dixit <[email protected]> wrote: > We already trust machines with our very lives when we fly on modern > aircraft, for example.
Autopilot (which is what I believe you are referring to) is used only in cruise conditions. For take-off, landing and turbulence it is disengaged and the human pilot controls the aircraft. The principle is that in situations that require complex decision making process, the human brain is better-suitable than computers. > I don't want Linux bothering my old mother, with technical questions. > Software should talk to web services, and use some intelligence, and figure > out how/when to handle its own internal functions. I think there is a fundamental difference between your thinking and mine, then. I prefer my computer to not do things on its own, but ask me instead. I consider myself to be the owner of my computer and not the other way round. I decide when it installs updates, which websites to visit etc. > That is a silly example. Use some common sense. > Trading algorithms buy and sell on our behalf already. Trading algorithms don't buy or sell on "our behalf". HFT (which is what you are referring to?) is performed by a subset of traders who fully understand the implications (and have the resources to absorb the monetary losses which such systems go haywire, as have happened several times in recent past). Your or my average mutual fund AMC does not employ HFT. Instead, they employ fund managers who use their human brain to take buying and selling decisions (admittedly, with computers to perform data analysis for them). Having said all this, I find Google Now on my Android phone approaching the kind of functionality that you describe (though it doesn't take decisions, only conveys information. That is, it tells me at about 6PM every day the approximate time it would take me to commute from office to home. It doesn't - yet - call up my wife and tell her I'll be late for dinner :-). Binand -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
