Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
To be surrounded by Zuck is to be in Zuckerspace? 
Maybe that’s what their 3D Horizon Worlds should be renamed to 
A group of Jeff Jarvis are Jeff Jarvi.
Thank you.
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A few years ago I signed up for Google Opinion Rewards, It asks me questions about things I’ve searched, including the Discover page when I swipe left on my phones home screen. I also allow it to track my location so it will ask me to upload my receipts to stores I visit. I get some money to use in the Google Play Store in return. I use it instead of real money for Marvel Puzzle Quest and the like.
Apparently it also can listen in because as I was near the end of Intelligent Machines when Paris was asking about what digital camera to get, I got a notification. Google Opinion Rewards thought I was either Leo, Paris or Jeff!
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Regarding restrictions on using calculators: fair enough, if there’s a genuine need to form the neural pathways that make mental arithmetic reliable. But 40+ years ago I was part of a group of assembly language programmers, and while we might have done the odd bit of hexadecimal address addition in our heads, or more likely on a scrap of paper, everybody used a calculator for hexadecimal subtraction. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
We learnt how to do the arithmetic first, then we were taught to use a calculator, then we were allowed to use the calculator in class. But, for exams, for example, we weren’t allowed to use calculators. A few years later, simple (non-programmable) calculators were allowed in the exams.
I use a calculator for many things these days, but as I am entering the numbers, I am doing the calculation in my head at the same time. If the calculator comes up with a wildly different number, I know I have made a mistake entering the numbers.
Using a calculator to make things quicker and easier than doing them manually is one thing, using a calculator, because you can’t do it yourself (even long hand on paper) and just trusting the results are correct is another.
The same goes for search engines, AI and other tools - especially Autocorrect, which has a tendency to go back and change words from earlier in a sentence that you have already checked were correct. You have to have some idea of what the results should be, so that you can tell if the answer is correct or totally fabricated (or based on incorrect information).
Such as the sodium-bromide story that @Leo came up with on TWiT this week. Having basic high-school chemistry and using common sense would have told the guy that the advice he got from AI was bogus and dangerous, but, like navigation systems, people all too often follow them blindly.
Our street is now one way, since June. There are still people driving up it the wrong way, because they don’t look at the big red and white no-entry signs, they either follow the navigation, which hasn’t been updated, or they have driven that road for 20 years and never look at the signs…
I’m sure, if you had done your hex calculations on the calculator and the answer was wildly wrong, you would have spotted something was off - because you learnt how to do the calculation and your brain would be trying to do the summing up as well, you might be a little off, but you would know it was correct, because your rough calculation was in the same ballpark. E.g. if you had done a calculation, where you were expecting something in the 0x309AAA range and it came out at 0x100000 or 0xC00000 range, you would instinctively know something was fishy and run the calculation again.
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You’re right, a certain familiarity with the basics is needed to give that ‘ballpark’ feeling for whether something is way off or not. But in an environment where you needed to get an exact address to find the one-byte field in an inch-thick memory dump printout - the value that had halted a mainframe process with a fatal error - we went for whatever would give us a correct answer as quickly as possible. I don’t remember anyone’s hex subtraction abilities being so good that they didn’t need the calculator as the voice of authority.
By contrast, my mental arithmetic capability was fine (then!), because there were no pocket calculators available when I was at school. Got my first one in the early 1970s when I started my first permanent job. It was a Dixons Prinztronic - and it still works! It’s the size of a very fat wallet, and it takes 4 AA batteries.
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Regarding the digital twin debate, Mirror by Karl Olsberg is well worth a read. I suggested it a couple of years back for Stacey’s Book Club. It is about a world where nearly everybody has a digital twin and then a few people think that the twin is giving them bad advice and what happens then.
Very interesting and creepy read.
He also has a newer book, Virtua, about a company racing to make a general intelligence, although I haven’t read that yet.
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