Please Do Not Vote for this Top Level Post!
Introduction
Anyone who has read my On Bots series will be surprised by this post's title, because I am an out of the closet fan of our automated steemsymbionts. I think they are just about the best thing since sliced bread. Why, then, would I want to starve the bots?
Answer: Because I am a huge fan of what bots can do for us, and I want to help them reach their full potential. What bots are doing now is just the beginning. We should always demand improvement from our electronic playmates. Right now, it is my opinion that most bots (including my own) ignore comments and only vote on top level posts. This dysfunctional voting pattern encourages people seeking author awards to only post blog-style articles and it discourages discussions. This is a problem, and I want to encourage the bots to get better. So, I'm going to intentionally try to devalue that voting pattern with this post.
[Image Source: pixabay.com, License: Creative Commons, CC0, Public Domain]
To do so, I thought I would try a little experiment by hijacking the #weekly7 tag from my son, @cmp2020, and adding a couple twists to hopefully create a discussion style post. The first twist is to ask you not to vote for this top level post. Repeat: Please do not vote for this top level post. Instead, please use votes on the comments of this post to express your thoughts about the value that the post contributes to steemit. If we move enough curation rewards from the posts to the comments, the bots will start to get hungry, and they'll have to get a little bit better at voting. This is my tiny contribution in that direction.
How Does it Work?
In @cmp2020's #weekly7 posts, he posts 7 videos on a topic along with a brief discussion of each of them. I'm going to do the same here, with 7 TED talks on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but the second twist is that I'm going to discuss the videos one day at a time in the comments of this post, probably starting Saturday afternoon. So, if you want to encourage our electronic friends to start making better voting decisions, please consider checking back after that for the daily commentary on the videos and voting on those comments. Please also consider voting in the comments of other peoples' posts whenever that option is available. Until the bots catch up, any sizeable comment votes will divert curation awards away from bots and towards human/manual voters.
Also, over the course of the week, discussion from others is vigorously encouraged.
Videos
For this experiment, I have chosen seven TED videos on the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To the best of my recollection, I haven't seen any of them before, so this might go off the rails fast. ; -) I have also put the videos into a youtube playlist. Here they are:
7 (Saturday)
Don't fear superintelligent AI
Grady Booch
6 (Sunday)
How computers are learning to be creative
Blaise Agüera y Arcas
5 (Monday)
The rise of human-computer cooperation
Shyam Sankar
4 (Tuesday)
Can we build AI without losing control over it?
Sam Harris
3 (Wednesday)
Machine intelligence makes human morals more important
Zeynep Tufekci
2 (Thursday)
The rise of personal robots
Cynthia Breazeal
1 (Friday)
Get ready for hybrid thinking
Ray Kurzweil
Conclusion
What happens next? Probably nothing, I guess. After all, my daily comments won't show up in anyone's "Follow" feed, and the guilds aren't going to be voting on comments either, but a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, right? And this is all moot with the second curation pool for comments in hardfork 17, anyway. But even so, there's one final point that I wanted to make by structuring this post the way that I am. We can change things on this platform through our own individual decisions and actions. We don't need to call for "them" to change rules and try to dictate our preferences to others. When we encounter a problem, we just need to apply our ingenuity to propose a solution and set an example for others to follow. If we're not willing to start by changing ourselves, then maybe we shouldn't be trying to force changes upon others.
So let's just see where this goes.
@remlaps is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has also been awarded 3 US patents.