Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "11. Introduction to Machine Learning" video.

  1. Pred, I worked at the MIT AI Lab in 1970~71 -- and AI was already about 40 years old by then. "Started AI in 1975" would only mean the time somebody started their own career in it.
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  2. Why is MIT still using the Internet to broadcast people talking, rather than to illustrate ideas being taught? People talking is only useful where the person talking can also listen and adapt to what their audience is thinking about what they have said. In all other cases, broadcasting an old lecture is useless as a teaching modality. It may be of historical interest: we want to watch Hitler speaking not to understand what he is saying but to understand his speeches and their reception as a historically important phenomenon. It is of no historical interest that some guy spoke in a classroom at MIT. This has happened hundreds of thousands of times. There are teachers at MIT who have lot s of important knowledge and the occasional useful or interesting idea. OK. What are those things they know? Put them on the screen. There's a fast way of doing this. It's called print. You want us to hear the guy's voice? OK, let him tell us the ideas. But "Welcome back to class" is not a useful thing to teach. It is a waste of our time. There is no reason to put it on the Internet.
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  3. Nick, Dodeca and TwentyNine have it right and you're beating a really tired old drum. "X will be all gone in ten years" is pretty much in the same league with that olde "Everything has been invented, they might as well close down the patent office" that somebody may or may not have said back in the 1980's. 'Course it's news to me that programmer is now or ever was a profession. It's a widespread job and sometimes an art. It would be much more plausible, seems to me, to say "If machine intelligence keeps advancing as fast as it has in the last sixty years, programming will probably be reduced to a profession in another generation."
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  4. Mayukh, Well said and good luck. My two step-sons just graduated from medical school in England and Scotland. They got there thanks to exactly what you're doing, studying on lap-tops in refugee camps in Kenya. In the absence of competently made educational software, pointing a camera at a teacher is better than nothing -- and sometimes you get really competent teachers like this guy. You're right that we should be grateful, and I am. On the other hand, we should not pretend that this is anything but the stone age of the Internet. MIT should be ashamed of themselves for not doing better than this: ARPAnet and its descendant the Internet has been live now since the middle of 1971. Military and commercial internets were around a bit before that. Isn't fifty years long enough for people to find a successor to this imitation of the lecturer in the Greek amipetheatre?
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  5. Shayar-e-Barbaad, Quite. I usually do. This guy, on the other hand is really excellent, despite the crudeness of the technology he's condemned to use. We don't condemn Euclid for using sand in the market-place. We just wish he might have had a slate or chalk and a blackboard.
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  6. Steve L, Are you trying to insult me, the autistic, or both? Pretty stupid post whichever it, don't you think, Steve?
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  7. Herbie, Exactly. Um, modulo the fact that "personalised" doesn't have a hell of a lot of relevance to the Internet, does it? What do you have in mind? Webinars are an attempt at the idea, but I can't see that they work very well, and from what (little) I know of the science I don't think they eve can be relevant to groups larger than Miller's famous five-plus-or-minus-two.
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  8. An update: this excellent course now available on EdX at https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computational-thinking-data-mitx-6-00-2x-6 You can audit it free, or get it marked and get a diploma for something extremely low, USD$49 now, and likely to be under $149 if you're reading this in a couple of years. The EdX, Udemy, etc. effort is still pretty crude -- but it's a step up from just watching the videos. (The videos are available alongside, so it's sorta YouTube Greek Amphitheatre Plus Plus, or MIT OCW struggles into the 1980's. Gettin' there...)
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