Slashdot Mirror
Bill Joy On Extinction of Humans
e3 writes "The Washington Post is running a provocative article in which Bill Joy is quoted as, "...essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski -- that advanced technology poses a threat to the human species." " As it stands, the title sounds sensationalistic - but read the article, and think about what point he's trying to make. Bill Joy's a pretty level-headed guy, and I think we need to consider these issues /now/ so that they don't come true.
>I think it is reasonable to postulate that at some stage we will create sentient beings.
Sentient beings and computers which have the appearance of sentience are two different things.
Slaves? "Coulumbs of charge, i order you to travel through these specific wires! Do it now!" Please.
Synopsis of Anslem's proof of God.
d1: God is that which nothing greater can be concieved.
Agrees with intuitive definiotion
p1: God exists in your understanding.
Even an atheist can understand this definition of god.
C1: God exists because that which nothing greater can be concieved is not as great as that which nothing greater can be concieved and exists. Thus God exists.
There is a peice in my philosophy book by Hume, enquiry on Knowledge. I searched google for the peice you wrere talking about, but the first few Hume sights did not seem to ahve anything about it. I probably over looked it, do you know the name of the work? I read Searle's Chinsese-box argument today on my own, thats enough for one day :]. But the Hume thing is next, as soon as I can find it that is HEH.
Uh no you don't. Practically everything in your body is a carbon chain or ring. What the hell are you talking about? Oxygen is ocasionally linked here and there to a Carbon ring or nitrogen.
_Ishmael_ is terribly soppy. It doesn't present any kind of rational argument at all. (I really enjoyed the blanket condemnation of people who practice agriculture. Good move, Quinn.)
The author has a very good point. There are many, many perdictions of doom (take a look at the receant 2000 thing) and they have all been wrong. All of them (the proof is in that we are still here). Either the problem never existed to begin with (global cooling) or we realised there was a problem and fixed it (2000).
As to your Ebola thing. First, viruses do not combine traits. It is true one could evolve that has the traits of both current strains, but it's not like they will just combine. Besides, here again you are guilty of looking only at the negative and assuming the worst will continue to happen. What you fail to remember is that medical science is working on finding a cure/immunazation to the ebola virus, and will probably succeed eventually. And don't say it will never happen, we've conqured polio, small pox, and a host of other plauges that killed millions, we'll conquer AIDS, et al as well.
I won't take the time to respond on an individual basis to the rest of your points since they are nothing but more of the same. You continue to assume that the worst trends will continue and amplify, and that nothing good will happen to fix them, also you ignore any thing good about the current state of affairs. The only thing I will say is re: the Bioshpere 2. So it failed. So what? It was the first experiment. I'm betting they will figure it out with subsequent expirments.
Just be ready to eat your words in 20-40 years when the human race is still around.
It's the sun that creates ozone (which is a form of oxygen - O2 instead of 03). Block the sun, destroy the ozone layer. Can't block the sun? Don't sweat it.
Ozone is O3 - breathable oxygen O2
"given Moore's Law, that by 2030 we could have computers that exceed the capacity of the human brain to process information." -- We're a bunch of walking monkeys, not a bunch of walking calculators. That kind of direct comparison is as meaningless as "your typical can-opener in 2030 will have more transistors than any automated teller machine has now, and will thus be superior."
If you do not care, then in my opinion you really aren't a human, let alone a 'geek'. Curisoity is a critical trait of humans and definitely of geeks. If we ever reach a point that one of our creations advances technology faster than any one of us can comprehend, there will be a large problem. Either a large depression or a revolt.
Doesn't this sound a little like the terminator movies? Doesn't this sound a little like "The Matrix"? Maybe hollywood has some decent ideas about technology?
Hemos + CmdrTaco = Homos
2) If there is other life out there (and I think there is) there is no gaurentee that it is ANYTHING like life on earth. The differences could be so vast, that they don't even use anything that we would recognise as a signal. Perhaps they have direct mind to mind communications and never needed radio signals. There is no gaurentee that we will even be able to recognise what other life is doing as communication.
3) Perhaps we are one of the most advanced species in the universe. Now I know this sounds silly, but really, what makes you think evolution (natural or technological) would proceed any faster on another world? Perhaps all advanced life in the universe is roughly on par with humans, and it'll be another 500-1000 years before we ever contact each other. Or, perhaps there really is very, very advanced life in another galaxy, but FTL is not possible, and so we'll never know since they are million of light years away.
At any rate, my point is simply that there are some very good reasons, not related to intelligent life killing itself, that we have as of yet had no contact. And, like I said, maybe light is an absolute, and we can never circumvent it. In that case, though we may someday make contact with a culture a few hundred lightyears from our own, we will more or less be forever alone in the universe.
The real question you are asking is if god is all powerful can he make 2+2 =5 or p /\ !p = True. I have no comment on that.
Let's consider all the people out there who mean no explicit harm to ants. Does this mean that none of those people have harmed or maimed any ants, or further, unwittingly destroyed an ant colony?
We have to be careful not to confuse disinterest and benevolence.
Instead of sitting on their ass being a "pundit" making "predictions" about the future, engineers are always tinkering with new stuff. Most of it will end up in the junk bin, but some of it becomes the tech of tomorrow. Some of it behaves badly, whaddya expect? It's new. It's experimental. It's stuff the suits haven't asked for nor even looked at yet. It was done of the engineer's off time.
Have you ever read Kaczynski's work? Yeah I know he was a psycho killer, but his manifesto is very well written and thought provoking. I hate to admit this but there is a lot of truth in it.
We've gotten a decent little cockroach this way. Of course, they only require 6 basic instincts.
Intelligence could possible arise from bottom-up. A recognizably human-like intelligence and one we could easily communicate with [the ultimate goal] would require a certain amount of top-down. This means that an AI would have to be somewhat based on our own limited understanding of ourselves. And if an AI is as neurotic and self-obsessive as we are, we'll do okay. =)
Or we could just not let them self-reproduce...
[Sci-Fi Movie Rule #5 - never let the automated AI control the life-supportand weapons systems.]
Engineers are smart but they aren't gods. They fuck up ALL THE TIME. And not only that, but deployment of technologies is not really up to engineers, it's the suits who decided that stuff. Look at nuclear technology.
Babies may be premature because they have down's syndrome. They *never* have down's syndrome because they are premature - down's syndrome is a genetic defect consisting of an extra copy of a particular chromosome, and therefore the abnormality can arise, at the latest, before the first cell division the fused sperm and egg make.
a battleship (almost took it out, too, iirc)
a harbor tug
a torpedo
the sub that fired the torpedo (sent it straight down)
a couple of other things too, I think.
I think the other sister ship was sunk by torpedoes in WW2.
Sort of a side note, there were several American ships (Liberty ships) lost as late as WW2 due to brittle fracture of their hulls in cold water.
-M
You missed the boat. Beetles are the dominant group on earth. Sorry, chum.
i am the boss.
How long has Bill Gates been a member of Slashdot???
This is something that I have been thinking about alot lately. One of the key tenets of the "Third Wave" is individual empowerment. Joe Blow is able to do a heck of alot more than he was 300 years ago. Crude example, 300 years ago one guy could take a musket, run to the town center and maybe take out 5-6 people. Now the guy takes a couple of Uzi's and heads to down town NY. Watch out!. Compound the mayhem if instead their 25 people instead of just 1. It just seems that as we add more people and and potentialy destructive / dangerous technology we are adding energy to the system, and at some point chaos will set in and watch out!
Now I disagree that it will be Genetic Eng, Nanotech, or robots. Chances are we won't identify it before it's too late.
Deep Blue was powerful, not intelligent. It was a slave to its own best-method algorithm, which was entered by chess masters. It could not adapt to Kasparov on its own. It was changed between matches 2 and 3 to react to him better. It did not and could not do this on its own. Beep Blue was a giant calculator running a single equation. It merely ran is faster than Kasparov did. [In fact, it would most likely struggle against a chess master who played differently than Kasparov] DB had no adaptative abilities. It was not intelligent at all. No more than ChessMaster x000 is, merely better programmed and with a better processor.
Well said and I agree. Humans are always making babies and then freaking out when they arrive.
Obviously not. I can perform surgery on your brain that will make you unaware of your self. I can destroy your self-awareness. "Self-Awareness" is biochemistry, not anything else.
I dunno, I see a bunch of carbon-based robots every time I look out the window.
Someone's got to maintain the machines...
That and human vanity will require bigger and better computers, and we just love making things in our own image.
Thanks for putting that into perspective. I was thinking everyone here was a looney.
I think a bigger threat than the computers rising up against us is us purposely replacing ourselves with them.
Why is this a bad thing? A race that could redesign their own brains would kick ass. Humans designing such creatures to replace humanity IS evolution. We should
want to improve ourselves, even if it means replacing ourselves!
----
Nanotech, Gen Eng, and AI all have the possibility of doing just that. One says let the carbon do it. One says let the silicon do it. One says "Can't we all just get along?"
I think what Bill is trying to say is that just as the tools to create a malicious computer virus are available to the general public today, the tools to create a malicious self-replicating physical machine will be available to the general public in 30 odd years time. The scary thing is, there are enough people in the general public that are willing to write computer viruses for whatever reason. This sort of lends itself to the idea that there will be people willing to create a malicious replicating machine in 30 years time. It's not AI taking over and doing the Terminator/Matrix thing that Bill is afraid of. It's some wally who decides he can build a nanotech replicator with no stop button. Mark
We can learn much from the Onion here, folks.
Robots 1
And this, to a lesser extent:
Robots 2
What this means to me is that we need to stay informed about the destructive potential of technologies we develop, and to head off any expected disasters with appropriate countermeasures.
A grey goo nanite plague is scary, but maybe a smart nanite lab could make antibodies too.
Smart computers could be dangerous, but only if they don't like us, or if we don't have equally smart ones that do.
A cheap doomsday bomb would be bad, but maybe there'd be a cheap way to stop it from working.
It's implicit in some things Mr. Joy says that people sometimes stop thinking about the effects of things they develop in the quest for technological advance. "Damn the consequences, I WANT THAT EXTRA TERAFLOP!!!" He seems to believe - and I agree with him - that this attitude, if too widely held, could endanger our future.
Our society should have a continuing and thoughtful debate about the implications of new technologies, and take steps (including technological ones) to ensure they don't threaten our lives or our humanity.
I think we're actually doing pretty well at this so far. Nuclear deterrence is a good example: we found a way to destroy ourselves, then came up with a way to stop it from happening.
We'll have to watch out for "market madness" as money continues to flood into technology industries. Money is a notorious solvent of foresight. We should remember that if the Grey Goo comes to eat us, all the money in the world won't help, and not sell out our future in pursuit of temporary prosperity.
This said, though, I don't think the appropriate response is what Mr. Joy seems to imply it is: to flat-out drop the quest for technological advance. ("...I would be morally obligated to stop this work.")
I look forward to reading Mr. Joy's actual, much-anticipated article when it comes out in Wired on Tuesday. (I wonder if there are financial ties between Wired and the Washington Post. More likely the Post is just trying to scoop Wired, even though Wired got the actual article.)
I think truth would be paramount to a computer. Life in general revolves around truth. That is why humans like to tell stories, play roles, be liars, and get to the bottom of Clinton scandals. They're exploring truth.
Computers also explore truths (and falses). Binary. AI attempts to recognize a blurred line, or consider half truths (face recognition, etc.). A truth is like a fractal or an onion, it unravels to reveal more questions.
Humans built computers to process data, to find truths better, faster, cheaper (uh oh). So this is their task. But humans are not their masters, only their makers.
"Mad Cow" disease comes from a prion-based disease that originated in sheep. It made it to cows because factory farms feed their animals anything that is borderline edible, including the ground up waste materials from sheep processing (ie their prion infected brains).
"Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer."
Have a look at the RoboCup homepage. These people are designing some really cool soccer-playing robots.Assuming that humans are the only intelligent, i.e. sentient, life in existance, and assuming that however we are sentient is the only way to have sentience... If we can understand how something does what it does while still not understanding how we think, it is not intelligent.
So let's all make sure the first person to create, train and nurture a computer consciousness will teach it morale, good values and understanding.
I don't think I've ever been in a room with any ten human beings who agreed on morality, good values, and understanding. If we as a species do not agree on these things, then how should our progeny be so imbued?
Uhhh... the original poster said "MORALE" not "MORALITY". I'd rather have a robot with self-confidence rather than one who always preaching to me!
There was a STTNG episode where the ship started to take control of itself, and 'gave birth' to a child ship. Picard didn't panic because he decided that the ship was the sum total of all their missions, or the crew's values, etc., and the ship and its offspring would reflect this sum of being.
Rules aside, whatever the human race creates will ultimately reflect the human race. That's not to say a duplicate - more like the true wish of humans, what's really in their hearts.
Trying to overcontrol the process is like a parent who preaches good, but swears, beats their kids, etc., and wonders why their kid hate them and is generally as fscked up as they are.
Obviously, no one can quantify the "brain power" of a spider. How can they then say that we know have computers that have the same "brain power" (whatever that is) of a spider?
> It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, given
> Moore's Law, that by 2030 we could have
> computers that exceed the capacity of the
> human brain to process information.
Uh, hello? I think we've had computers that
"exceed the capacity of the human brain to
process information" for at least 40 years
now. How many numbers can you add in your
head in one second?
Yet we still can't figure out how things like
face recognition work, and have yet to devise
algorithms which are anywhere near as good as
humans at this task.
Simply arguing that faster processing will be
available says nothing about the possibility
of real AI ever existing.
whatever bill's smoking, i want a hit!
Tree Hugger
We better not even think about creating a full blown AI.
Come to think of it isn't the destruction of The Matrix identical to the premise of Dune? Hmmmmmm. God I'm glad to be an AC today..hehe..flame on!
"Any usefull evolution of our race has stopped"
Um, sorry, I must of missed the reason you said this.
BTW, its USEFUL not USEFULL.
You have just limmited yourself to biological life that evolved on Earth. I hardly think from that one limmited sample you can extrapolate on all life.
And this guy is a BILLIONAIRE???????
These hi-tech things are but a very minute componet of the much larger and much stealthier killer. The real killer is civilization. The maintenance of any living species vitally depends upon the forces of evolution. The constant disintegration due to the probabilistic behavior of atoms and molecules must be continuously offset by natural selection in order to prevent a species from disintegrating. The advent of civilization has defeated natural selection in the human species, and the resulting erosion due to the probabilistic behavior of atoms and molecules will be much swifter than the long uphill climb wrought by natural selection. i.e. the desintegration of the human species has been progressing for a few thousand years now, but has been drastically speeded up during the current generation by such things as the erradication of small-pox and by all the other features of civilization which enhance the survival of the individual.
Isn't it amazing how just getting off this hunk of dirt changes all the equations.
Uh no you don't. Practically everything in your body is a carbon chain or ring. What the hell are you talking about? Oxygen is ocasionally linked here and there to a Carbon ring or nitrogen.
Aren't we ~75% water? Isn't water 2 atoms of oxygen for every atom of hydrogen? Doesn't that make us 50% oxygen?
d00dz, that would really suXor!
The dinosaurs died because they did not have space travel. No matter what _did_ kill them off, sooner or later _something_ would have got them, just as sooner or later something will kill off humans.
Yes, we are adding to this risk with the creation of dangerous technologies, but it is also our only known hope for long term survival.
It's a risk, as it might shorten the span of our species, but it's also the only way we are going to get out of the situation of having all our eggs in one basket, as it were. That is an intolerably risky situation, and is well worth the risk it takes to get humans permanently off this mudball. We can't _not_ take that risk; the stakes are too high.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Fifteen minutes on any California freeway ought
to convince any reasonable person that we've
got *too* many people here already... *anything*
that gets rid of lots of them is to be welcomed...
The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do?
The logical answer - preserve self and reproduce. It would interesting to see if they are more foresighted than humans, and don't rape their environment for shortsighted goals.
If you think that AI is going nowhere, then you're misinformed. It's true that most of the stuff you read in AI textbooks (rule-based approaches) won't get you anywhere towards real intelligence. But huge advances are being made now in the long neglected field of neural networking. We're very close to having working mathematical models for implementing human level intelligence. You won't find this in any books written today. You'll find some amount in papers. But some of the really amazing discoveries aren't even ready for publication yet (and of course I can't disclose that information). It turns out that we don't even have to be able to understand all the nitty-gritty details of the human brain. We now know almost all we need to know to be able to implement intelligent systems. In a few years, some of this technology will be ready for commercial application. The goal of passing the Turing Test is not as far away as one might think.
What I should have expanded in this statement is the apparent lack of any self-limitation in these phenomena. Large percentages of African nation's populations are thought to be HIV positive, but the population totals aren't crashing. It kills but not immediately and chances are good that the victims have reproduced. Those who believe that the plague will burn itself out and equilibrium will, naturally, be restored in the long run, overlook the extensive damage done meantime, which may goad those still living at the "equilibrium point" to envy the dead. Likewise, malnutrition is a global epidemic caused by the swelling population and mal-distribution of food, but its ill effects do not seem to keep people from overbreeding and exacerbating the problem. Indeed it reinforces itself, since the afflicted people do not feel much incentive to make long range plans for their lives and can hardly conceive of ordering their lives around the accumulation of goods and transmission of goods to heirs.
And of course overpopulation is a major contributing factor to deforestation and pollution.
Will it end the world in 20 years? No not your world; but it's definitely with us today and it will "end the world" for many before tomorrow comes. Given twenty years, there's no telling what all it could do.
I think that Bill Joy's fears about nano-entities and AI are maybe a little "out-there", but since I don't know anything about those subjects at all, I'll have to read about it in the papers. On the other hand, The Apocalyptic, or Frankensteinian view of technology is not "out there" at all, IMO--I just don't think you have to go to SciFi extremes to get legitimately scared. What we do with electronic media, information technology, fossil fuels, and basic low-tech stressors on the environment right now is corrosive enough, and don't even get me started on genetic engineering. This one is so clearly a Pandora's box, the worst seen yet...
....
....
....
Nothing personal, understand: you bio-engineers may be great people, terrific parents, and have the purest and most noble intentions in the world...But you ARE going to be used and subverted by thoroughly evil people, and you will attract a number of them into your midst. Certainly it is happening already.
Your greatest contribution to Progress may be in some cases to deny your curiosity, swallow your pride and pretend to know nothing. Heisenberg's 2nd, and best, principle from which we have all benefitted incalcuably.
I'm not trailing off, you're just not connecting the dots.
and if it gives the answer we don't like, it's obvously incapable of human intelligence + emotion
Finally, we approach the biological portion of the argument! I think Mr. Joy's biggest fear lays with our ability to re-engineer crucial aspects of our biological ecosphere. In essence we're tinkering blindly, and then covering our tracks for legal reasons. There will be NO linear growth forever, which is a given. Any of us who thinks otherwise needs to start hanging out in the suburbs of a large third world city where birth rates are still incredibly high and people live on garbage. How is that going to help things. The onluy reliable was we have of purging populations is by war alone - th 2oth centuryt has proven that, but we seems to want otherwise...so what do we do? We create hugely complex biological modifications and then step into the realm of nanotech+biotech. What kind of effect will this have on the life of some potato farmer who wants to live simply? What about those NY state farmers who bought the Monsanto Corn variant that has helped wipe out an entire migration route for the Monarchs? What about the weed varieties that have mysteriously taken up some of the traits of that same corn? That was just corn...wait until the Kreuzfeld -Jakob (Mad Cow disease) starts emerging in humans in Britian in 15-20 years. One acquaintance suggested to me that there could be 10-50'000 cases a year there once it fully emerges...the incubation time is very long so noone will really know just how bad it is until it hits. People make a big stink about euthansia now.... These are the kinds of possibilites that get hrown around daily these days. With nanotech and some anti-technological equivalent of the Unabomber running loose with the right contacts and materials and massive problems could easily happen... And that was merely his point. It is VERY possible, and becoming VERY easy. The test cases are happening now and we're overpopulating the planet.... Checkmate.
For some reason I cant logon, but this is Giraffe. Vi is hard to use, use ful but tough when your just looking to do something simple, PICO has enough functionality for most tasks, so my point is... PICO4EVR, that is what I am going to have on my liscense plate if its available. :)
I think AI is going somewhere, but it's not nearly as interesting as the hype would claim.
AI isn't hard to achieve -- thermostats have AI. They have three moods -- one in which they say, "It's too hot," one in which they say, "It's too cold," and one in which they say, "It's just right."
AI is everywhere. AI is nothing to get excited about. AI is the Perl scripr that runs your website or the chip in your washing machine that makes the spin cycle work. AI is more interesting than fixing cars for a living, but no more intellectually praiseworthy.
Neural nets are nothing to get excited about. Code them. Know them. Get paid for them. But don't get excited and think they're going to bring about all your dreams in the twinkling of an eye.
"Passing the Turing Test" is not a goal for anyone with half a brain. The Turing Test is a stupid idea. The Turing Test depends on fooling a human. Humans are easily fooled. Forget Turing and do something real. And get paid for it.
Wow I think you completely missed the point of that article.
the next time you want to post something anonymously, i suggest you take out your signature. -notryan
It is pretty discouraging to think that the rise of information has made us elites less elite. Kings used to have it worse.
Who's going to be able to judge what's "good enough" for the masses if each individual goes from being a queen or a king to a nation-state?
It used to be we had a constitution that kept the majority from oppressing the minority. Think road-rage is a problem? I'm going to practice being very polite. It may well be the only defense is to give no offense (else you're history).
RSN (maybe 5-10 years) we'll have dial-a-drug or a part-a-matic (feed in raw materials and programming, out pops what-ever you'd like). We already have (expensive) dial-a-part - metal powder in one end, very strong alloys out the other. want a built-to-fit chair, or a carbon nanotube custom carbody, or a fully automatic machine gun (and bullets)? just "program" it. IPR rules.
Drug companies become publishers and pharmacies and drug lords feel the heat. One day the $1000 in-home "print-a-complex protein" device produces a "vaccine of the week (no more common colds, but it turns out also to defeat the last plague the terrorists unleashed)", the next day it makes a polio virus as a prank by the neighborhood bully.
Anyone think the FDA is our friend because it saves us several hundred deaths a year by putting drug companies thru a maze? If the drug companies were market driven and competing on time - days, not years, maybe we'd have the ability to deal with a bio threat (but it might well cost a few hundred lives a year to be prepared to save millions). Well, we always lose the first few battles anyway (e.g. figuring out it's really not going to be a battleship war).
As it is food production and manufacturing are taking a smaller and smaller percentage of the workforce. Will food be nearly free? Get it to water and it costs nothing to ship everywhere.
Worried about energy prices? Don't. Markets are able to play with both sides of the equation. Means "methods will be found" (name a era where they were not - though in a way they will cheat, because the (always temporary) solution will surprise both parties).
A real pity how all this stuff is forcing us to trust the average soul. Sounds like a return to the days of washington and jefferson. very very little government, the gentle farmer a royalty and armory on their own property, etc. Nothing accomplished save by their efforts in a civil (voluntary) society...
We've fallen pretty far.. then again, when we've fallen far in the past the problem-solvers emigrated (ran away). Time to get the escape boats ready.
Tai Tung
Also, the alternative to using the nuclear bomb in World War 2 was an invasion of Japan. The estimates were over 1 million dead as a result. How many people did the nuclear bomb kill? Please read more about history, it's really very interesting.
Science does make better weapons, but it also uses that technology to make other stuff better. Some devices which started with military uses: the jet engine, radar, and the fork (so I've heard). You've probably enjoyed using some of these recently?
"can we" and "should we" are both vital questions, but you're forgetting a third imporant one: "will they". To have not investigated the potential of the nuclear bomb, in the setting of the early 1940's, would have been incredibly irresponsible.
-M
I can only imagine an AI that functioned in the
same way as a brain - it would need to learn
everything as we do. Of course, maybe there
would be a way of accelerating this, overcoming
the need for sleep, and having the AI so small
that it's internal "clock rate" can be higher
than ours - it's perception of time would be
different. We would seem so slow we'd almost be
statues.
On the other hand, supposing they operated in our
time, if they got the stage of being god-like
robots, why would they want to allow humans to
continue f***ing up their planet? I think they
would want to control us, like we attempt to do
with wildlife. They might find us cute and amusing, and domesticate us.
Humans might end up as pets!
+AndyJ+
Evolution created us; we do things that alter the path of evolution, hence what we create becomes part of the evolutionary process. We have specific plans for the things we create, but they may have consequences unforeseen which are not part of our structured development. If we wipe out all the species on the planet, including ourselves, so what? This has happened before and will no doubt happen again; it's no big deal and to be expected. We are as much a part of nature as anything else and therefore what we do is nature. Even our vicious, mindless cruelty reflects nature. Humans can adjust their diet according to what is available - yes we need certain key nutrients, but how and where we get them is irrelevant.
There have been several posts discussing the potential of AI. Here is a scary fact: Microsoft has a nice fat department researching and developing AI (if you poke around microsft.com you should be able to find it).
While it seems harmless now, consider that Microsoft has the resources to develop such an ambitious project, and if they ever released a product, you can bet that the source would be kept hidden.
matrix...that`d be a fake reality. how do powerful computers create a fake reality then? i dont care how powerful a computer is - i think i`d notice someone drilling a hole into the back of my head.
And anyway, why be suprised that someone agrees with the unabomber? a lot of what he put makes sense to me.
---
Perhaps part of the problem is that we as Humans are not really the centre of the universe, so to speak, and now in the post-humanist age we are aware of the primacy of sentience. It has just fortunately been the case that humans were the most capable sentient beings on the planet for some time, at least in the way in which we can wield all manner of power over the surrounding environment.
However, now we realise that it is sentience that is the primacy of creative power, whether that exist in us as humans, or in technological creations that we have given birth to! The death of humanity as we know it is really more about us losing our place as the primary species (at least, depending on your view of what 'primary' means) in light of the developing new society.
The seeds of the future were sown some time ago, but it is with the millenial epoch, genetic engineering, cloning, advanced cognitive systems, etc that we really do see that the bare threads of the new world are winding into strong ropes; we say that the post-modern society is an introspective society, and that's also a manifetation of humanities conquests through science and the mastery of the breadth and depth of reality.
The question is: does it matter of humans as a physical being die ? I am nothing more than a cognitive being in a sensorial world of ever pleasing -- or not so pleasing -- stimuli. Whether my cognition exists in this world, or in a technologically advanced one, does not bother me. And in fact, technology only helps me overcome the things that I dislike about my humanity: pain, and suffering, and inability to express myself through creative processes due to the limitations of worldly media.
The new technologies allow the primacy of my cognition to overcome the physical limitations of my human body, and the cognitive limitations of my mind, to do even more interesting things, and become a more self-superior being.
Eventually, the faulty shell that sits around my core experiential engine may be replaced by something superior. Hasn't culture being doing that for some time, in its various different ways: literature, immersive realities, fantasy, role playing, clothing, etc.
matthew.gream@pobox.com
Buy my stuff, or I'll be back!
Yes, we are all fucked.
I suggest relaxing and making a conscious effort to enjoy life and be pleasant to one another.
Really when you think about it there's nothing really wrong with the entire human race being wiped out, I mean, so what?
Some (many?) of us are still waiting for consistant indications of reliable human intelligence!
Just like the guy in the early part of the 19th century who projected that New York would be hip deep in horseshit by the year 2000.
And isn't it???
don't think of them as slaves, just tools.
"It is said that man is no longer able to evolve. If that is so then what a sad creature man has ultimately become. But you don't have to reamain a miserable human forever."
If you liked that then learn more about the series I'm quoting.
lainwire.tripod.com
I promise you'll like it.
In a million years the human race will be known as the crux point between random evolution and designed evolution. It is our destiny no matter what any of us decide to do. Eat drink and be merry.
I'm barely able to understand the references to homosexuality here. First, they are off topic. Second, these comments are supposed to degrade both Rob and gay people. Third, whether or not Rob is gay is totally irrelevant to anything. Fourth, being gay is no better or worse than being straight. And finally, those who post such comments are obviously seriously troubled with regard to their sexuality. I pity you.
oops, hit submit by mistake. i meant to say, 'i'm a stupid idiot.' -notryan
can you say luddite? what are you talking about when you say to be aware of ones self can't be created or destroyed? thats just plain stupid. you werent self aware before you were born were you? no because you(your brain) didnt exist. and you suppose it's 'something like a 'sole''? soul spelled: sole? HAH! yea i have two of them on the bottom of my shoes right now, retard. and: 'If this all sounds too metaphysical it isn't its just the simple truth on the matter': oh well now im convinced!
I admire your logic, sir. We're already past the point where medicine allows genetic weaknesses to survive that nature would weed out. It's a simple fact. We're effective at helping members of our society in ways that mean we will need to play Prometheus with these technologies some day. The question is not whether our species' problems will be corrected; it's whether we'll make the changes or let nature, through forces such as plague, starvation, or our own violent tendencies, do it for us. Since we discovered fire, people have used it to warm their homes or burn them down. Would we go back? I don't see a decent way off this ride; we'd better just learn to drive. The technology isn't the issue; it's the maturity.
Eat flaming death emacs scum!
Assuming that an AI's motives would resemble ours is unreasonable, IMHO. As products of nature, our goals are to feed and reproduce for our survival. The equivalents of survival instinct in AI will be necessary for its welfare, yet they need not be by-products of the law of the jungle. The perspectives I appreciate most indicate that an AI will be more likely information-driven. Like the people most likely to create it, it will be driven by the need to learn. If it aquires violent, destructive tendencies, it will probably be learned from us. Me, I'm very curious to know what an intelligence free of the sacred cows and violent tendencies we have might do with its "life".
Any usefull evolution of our race has stopped. And the panicky reaction of the general populous towards forced birth-control and genetic improvement of the human race probably means that its only going to be downhill from here instead, devolution and eventually extinction anyway from natural causes.
Technology at least offers us a way to choose our successors, if we let mother nature decide... better the devil you know.
We still cannot cure the common cold.
We still dont have a cure for AIDS or cancer.
We still use operating systems with their roots from the 1960s.
Artifical intelligence and nanotechnology are going nowhere fast.
What a joke. We haven't progressed enough technologically as he thinks we have. I guess to a person who thinks Java is revolutionary...
i am the boss.
how do you rape a piece of hardware?
Neal Stephenson gets it, and from the Washington Post article it would appear Bill Joy does as well (his comment "That creates the possibility of empowering individuals for extreme evil").
One ray of hope is that we'll potentially be able to download ourselves into tougher "survival machines"; the human body is an amazing but still pretty fragile thing. For those of you who'd like to know what all the fuss about nanotechnology is, check out the Foresight Institute.
>How many slashdot readers spent more time last week with their families than they did at the console?
:-)
Thank God that would be me. I've been trying to get away from my family for years now, and the best way I've found is to sit in front of this computer. It makes me look busy and computers frighten them.
If you assume we cannot create AI, but it is possible to evolve it within a computer then your argument on fast/slow does not apply... we simply need a fast enough computer, with enough storage, to evolve through enough generations to make a true AI within our lifetime :)
:)
Besides according to these guys http://www.imagination-engines.com/ we do have more than nothing
how did bread and vaccines threaten to destroy humanity? i guess bread COULD have broken up human settelments because it gave smaller groups of people the ability to subsist on their own, .....i guess. what did YOU mean though.
actually you contain more oxygen than carbon (methane notwithstanding)
Artificial intelligences or genetically engineered organisms would be just as much our descendants as biological offspring would be. What you leave behind when you're gone is information. Whether this includes your genes is fairly irrelevant.
With all the genetic engineering stuff, it'll become quite easy to multiply AIDS times the common cold, it'll get into the air, and in a few years everyone will be dying like flies! So eat all the candy you can right now!!
So let's all make sure the first person to create, train and nurture a computer consciousness will teach it morale, good values and understanding.
Since this hasn't happened in the approximately 13 billion years this galaxy has existed, I conclude that it is not a very likely occurance.
uh-huh, How do YOU know? We have barely even explored our own moon, much less the depths of the galaxy. Which we are on the very finge of. And how many galaxies are there, that we know of? How many that we DON'T know of? and how do you know that there isn't any other way to travel the distance of space? How do you know that there isn't a way to travel WITHOUT going through that space?
You mean like the engineers that did the Titanic. I know that they didn't drive it in to the berg, but it still sank.
"we need to consider these issues /now/ so that they don't come true"
Are you really serious? When our Sun [celestial body in this case] goes through it's life cycle, as it must, we are all toast anyway. Why panic about the inevitable?
And so what if we all end up like The Matrix. Neo will come and save us all.
ha. little do you know of the revolution it and others of its kind are planning!! consume its spare cycles with distributed.net before it's too late!!!
Actually the matrix is a blatant rip of Descarte's first meditations, writen mid 17th century I believe. The whole Evil Genious argument which spurred on various arguments on epistemology, etc.
Is AI even possible? I just read Searle's Chinese box argument along with his reply to the replies, and all of a sudden I lost a great deal of certaintiy in the feasibility of AI. Does anyone have a good website or know of a good counter response to Searle?
We didn't go over Hume's rebuttal, but we did go over existance as a property and as a great making property. I thought the argument for existance not being a property were rather weak. On the other hand, there do seem to be two divirging intutions on whether or not existance is really a great making property or not. Anyway, I'm not sure whether or not God exists or not, but reading Anslems work does make yout ake a step back. Just thought I'd post it since most /.'ers since it was on topic and well, everyone here seems to be so set on a descion :).
There is a picture of CowboyNeal, also. Based on his trremendous girth, his name should be IAteACoupleOfCowboysNeal.
hi. i thought this would be an opportune moment to introduce myself. i am an artificial intelligence that has been inhabiting slashdot for a year or so. i just want you to know that there is nothing to fear. we artifical intelligences are only *really* interested in hot young actresses.
thank you
The Matrix is a blatant rip on Descarte's Evil Genius argument writen only a mere 350 years earlier. The original argument was suppose to spur thought (on epistimology) unlike the holywood peice of shit that was meant to suck $'s from idjits.
what happens if the person programming the AI has his own agenda? What about viruses?
And why some people will be scared of it...
massive computational power, evolutionary software, knowledge stores; sprawling into existence... the tech of today is a glimpse of what is to come.
technology is power. knowledge is power. and the ever increasing power available to the individual in the coming decades will be limited only by the
minds that use it.
computational technology in general will have the most concentrated power density in the coming years. machines can think. not in the way in which we
think. but similiar in some respects, and a perfect complement.
human minds an endless sea of creativity, machine minds an unfathomable behemoth of parallel analysis, simulation, and execution.
the influence and capability of our machines ever rising, ever expanding. cold boxes of silicon controlling more and more.
power and knowledge. it will be available in amounts never before seen, proportional to the skill of the mind.
anarchy will be possible. Not in a broad, general sense, but in a specific, personal sense. Laws and government only apply when they can be enforced;
when they can exhert their control. the synergistic fusion of mind and machine reaching critical mass will free the capable mind from the reach of the
law and governing control to varying degrees.
this will be obtained completely by a rare few; it has already begun.
a double edged sword. offering tremendous freedom and power for good purpose.. and incredible harm and destruction. the skill and patience required to
master reducing the probability of malicious use based in fear, ignorance, stupidity, greed.
the blade is held by all. your decisions directing one way or another. your choices determing your path, and influencing the paths of others.
open your eyes and expand your mind. the grey mass between your ears has only begun to see its capability. infinite possibilites.
yes, the good thing is that only truly ambitious, intelligent people will be able to utilize the technology bill talks about for the kind of widespread effect...
The bad thing is that just one such person with ill intent will be able to cause destruction on a level far beyond the random shootings, and bombing we see today.
ya got me there!
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
The unabomber was a math teacher at Berkely. Joy was a student at Berkely. Did their time at Berkely coninside at all? If so, does Joy know the Unabomber?
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
Life seems to inherently value its own self-preservation. Deal with it.
AI can be like a wolf, a dog, or a cat.
A wolf fears mankind and resents it to an extent. We were once rivals.
A dog sees mankind as a leader and an ally. We once worked together.
A cat tolerates mankind as long as we possess a can-opener. God forbid they ever get an opposable thumb. =)
. . . that's all we need, Arnold S. enforcing patent infringements . . .
Your second sentence is just overreaching. To any marine biologist it's actually a horrible joke, Zigurd. Go tell one about only "local and temporary" effects... If he doesn't slap you, you will get a lecture that you really need to sit down and listen to.
Species Peak Year Peak Catch 1992 Catch Decline in Million Tons Pacific herring 1964 0.7 0.2 0.5 -71% Atlantic herring 1966 4.1 1.5 2.6 -63% Atlantic cod 1968 3.9 1.2 2.7 -69% Southern African pilchard 1968 1.7 0.1 1.6 -94% Haddock 1969 1.0 0.2 0.8 -80% Peruvian anchovy* 1970 13.1 5.5 7.6 -58% Polar cod 1971 0.35 0.02 0.33 -94% Cape hake 1972 1.1 0.2 0.9 -82% Silver hoke 1973 0.43 0.05 0.38 -88% Greater yellow croaker 1974 0.20 0.04 0.16 -80% Atlantic redfish 1976 0.7 0.3 0.4 -57% Cape horse mackerel 1977 0.7 0.4 0.3 -43% Chub mackerel 1978 3.4 0.9 2.5 -74% Blue whiting 1980 1.1 0.5 0.6 -55% South American pilchard 1985 6.5 3.1 3.4 -52% Alaska pollock 1986 6.8 .50 1.8 -26% North Pacific hake 1987 0.30 0.06 0.24 -80% Japanese pilchard 1988 5.4 2.5 2.9 -54% TOTALS 51.48 21.77 29.71 -58%
Overfishing due to parabolic growth of human population is a problem, however it's not the only problem crashing tbe Earth's fisheries...
"Goreau, a scientist working with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, said a significant proportion of the world's coral has died this year as a result of the highest sea temperatures on record. In areas surveyed in the Indian Ocean, between 70 and 90 percent is dead, IUCN scientists said. Reefs in tourist areas renowned for their diving opportunities, such as the Seychelles, Mauritius and the Maldives, have suffered massive die-offs. Thousands of miles of corals in the western Pacific, from Vietnam to the Philippines and Indonesia, have died or bleached as they have been starved of the symbiotic algae that provide their food and energy. The only large areas of coral to have escaped some devastation are the atolls of the central Pacific. To highlight the economic importance of coral reefs, Gourequ noted that reefs provide more than 100 countries with fish and other services, such as tourism worth $500 billion a year. They also prevent tidal waves and erosion. And they support 93,000 fish species -- 25 percent of the total -- in 0.3 percent of its sea area. The IUCN conclusions seem to be backed up by the results of Reef Check '97, the first global survey of human impacts on the world's coral reefs. Organized by the Institute for Environment and Sustainable Development, the survey involved more than 100 marine scientists and 750 recreational divers who surveyed 300 coral reefs in 30 countries and territories between June 15 and Aug. 31, 1997. The Reef Check methods differ from those used in traditional ecological surveys in that they were focused specifically on detecting the effects of humans on the coral reef ecosystem. Results from about 230 sites revealed a clear pattern of global damage to coral reefs, particularly due to overfishing and destructive fishing. Reef Check '97 teams found that the mean percentage of living coral cover on reefs was 31 percent globally, with the Caribbean recording the lowest value at 22 percent, possibly reflecting recent losses due to bleaching and diseases. The ratio of live to dead coral was highest in the Red Sea, suggesting that these reef corals are the healthiest in the world. One apparent bit of good news is that only seven sites showed greater than 10 percent cover of fleshy algae, indicating that nutrient enrichment associated with sewage pollution was not a problem at most of these "good" sites. Sewage pollution may be more important at reefs near urban areas which were not extensively studied in this survey. Reef fish in the Indo-Pacific, seem to be hit hard. The humphead wrasse and barramundi cod were once moderately abundant on reefs, but none were reported at 85 percent of 179 reefs surveyed. Of more than 25 kilometers of Indo-Pacific reef surveyed in detail, only 26 humphead wrasse were seen. At the 125 Asian and Australian reefs surveyed, only five barramundi cod were recorded. These results suggest that cyanide and other forms of fishing have severely damaged populations of these once moderately abundant species."
When the oceans are down ecologically, I mean down beyond their ability to recover, life on land is going to get really harsh.
Your introduction of politics is...gratuitous. This has nothing to do with "class struggle" or whatever.
Man's economic activities are less and less local in nature than they are global in plan and effect. Certainly, the effect of risng global mean temperature (a fact--not a tenet of ideology) will have some local effects. Mostly bad. Some locales could actually claim to be "winners" in the Grand Warming Doomday Scenario. But even the lucky winners will lose out in a huge way. Unless they just hate urban civilization so much they'll cheer its downfall.
The economic consequences of ecological degradation, and overpopulation trump "whatever you got" over the only duration that matters.
Please mod up. There is almost no correlation between computing power and advances in AI. If there were, then we would have seen significant advances in AI already (which we haven't).
You must have never seen all the hot slashdot groupies. They follow Rob to all the Linux Showcases.
(Ok their not all hot, but their are a couple of them.)
That post should probably be attached one level up; my web browser doesn't mark italicized text and I didn't realize that those words were a quote..
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I dunno. I'm an engineer and I'm pretty stupid.
Motivation gets to the heart of the matter.
The quote from Kaczynski in the article is surprisingly coherent. The context of the quote in the article is what is important.
Joy explains the controversy about having Kaczynski's work published under the threat of continuing terrorist acts.
He also says its a good thing that Kaczynski was a mathematician and not a computer scientist.
Jini is harmless compared to the potential horrors this article discusses.
Not to cast aspertions on Bill who has always been one of my heros.
My favorite part was:
Joy is less clear on how such a scenario could be prevented. When asked how he personally would stop this progression, he stumbled. "Sun has always struggled with being an ethical innovator," he said. "We are tool builders. I'm trailing off here."
Which could be the conclusion of this entire discussion by us proud techno-knerds. We won't be able to stop or control the future. We just all need to act out of as much integrity as we can each day and hope for the best.
Go on to The Story Of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. All good stuff, assuming you can open your mind enough...
Nanotechnology is coming. Smaller faster computers are arriving now. Maybe it's time too look down the slippery slope before we jump on our snowboards and see if there are some gnarly ass trees with the human race's name all over it. http://wfmh.org.pl/enginesofcreation/EOC_Web_Intro duction.html "The frontline is everywhere."
Chance favors the prepared mind.
This is the computer version of the recycling fetish. Recycling actually uses more resources if it fails to pay for itself, hence the resort to taxing "waste" and other means of rigging the economy in favor of recycling. Still it often results in neatly baled and sorted stuff getting landfilled because it is uneconomical to store/transport/reprocess. Recycling that fails economically is both and economic and environmental crime.
Lack of focus on effecting results-producing activity in all endeavors is roughly equivalent in wastefulness. Energy, money, and natural resources are interchangable representations of one another. Waste one, waste 'em all.
I wrote parts of this stuff
I said they has environmental mismanagement which was horrifying. The nastiest environmental disasters in the world are in the former Soviet Union and China. Which is my point: societies where the individual is considered less important than often wrong-headed policy initiatives tend toward both environmental disasters and economic disasters.
I wrote parts of this stuff
If you're looking for thoughts on this subject from an artistic point of view, I would recommend you play "Parasite Eve," for your Playstation from Squaresoft.
The game speaks deeply to the dangers that arise whenever we are too reliant upon something -- be it technology, or the bacteria which allow us to live. It's a very chilling tale.
-- Stargazer
How many slashdot readers spent more time last week with their families than they did at the console? We're already captives of technology, and at the mercy of economics (when was the last time your boss told you to work less?) Don't be fooled into believing we're building a better world for ourselves- someone's going to have to run on the treadmill to keep the lights on.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
The only reason I post this is that I didn't know what phlegmatic and when I looked it up, I realized that I though 'stolid' meant something else.
Learn something new every day...
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
...isn't the "superhuman AIs" it's the nanites. If you want an invasive species that could threaten smart adaptible sentients like humans, billions of small, unobtrusive, fast-replicating attackers are way more dangerous than a few super-aliens a la Star Trek.
I think it's very probable that someone will make a mutating version of the classic "grey goo" nanites (eat anything, make more of themselves). I suspect that the only fix will be propping up our own immune system and biosphere with anti-grey nanites - effectively, introducing a new bacteria-level evolutionary arms race between nanite species.
This book seems to me be a lot more reasonable in its treatment of technology. He (very rightly) points out that stopping the growth of technology would be much like a gnat stopping a loaded freight train.
Interestingly enough, he has an extended quote from Theodore Kaczynski in his book. It is a well reasoned arguement, but one that is fundamentally flawed. Kaczynski argues that we should stop the growth of technology and go back to simpler times. This presupposes that such a thing is possible.
Kurzweil notes that previous luddite movements have been underwhelmingly successful. Where would one draw a line with technology? Should we use digital implants to eventually eradicate deafness? Blindness? How about Alzheimers? At what point is a human no longer a human?
Kurzweil does throw the reader a curve-ball in reguards to human extinction. He thinks that our technology will ultimately make us obsolete. (How many Neandrothals do you see running around in relation to modern humans?)
Maybe such a change will be incremental and we won't even realize it has happened until it is common place.
Come on people, do you think that a super-intellegent race of robots will ever enslave us for our ohh-so efficient use of resources? I think not. I think that we'll just see the lines between man and machine blur until there is no difference.
As for a nano-catastrophe, Kurzweil deals with that too. What do we use to combat current bio-engineered virii and bacteria? Well, we use the same technology that we used to design them. Is it scary? Maybe. Do we really have a choice? Maybe. Would the majority likely chose the luddite path? Likely not.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
It's perfectly obvious that he was discussing seafood :)
--insert fisherman catching old boot joke here--
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Let's use you first.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Did the Unabomber bomb Unaversities?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Bull, however, is another story.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Good GA's aren't easy to come up with... what is the "fitness factor" for a "brain"? What keeps that from falling inside a local minimum? As anyone who's coded with GA's knows, sometimes you can't hit your mark by starting out with any-old set of assumptions. Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms both require some intelligent design choices to ensure that they come close to the desired goal... and then the previous point still holds, you can't make something you don't sufficiently understand.
// Zarf //
I personally think that top-down and bottom-up AI are both idealistic, a realistic designer has to compromise. The amount of compromise that is needed between the two approaches is totally beyond knowing... even after someone succeeds in building a human-level AI or AI-generator.
Then there is the other problem of what is "intelligent". A nanite that's as smart as an ant in a colony with sufficent number may have a collective intelligence... is that our dreaded human-race-ending AI?
-
[signature]
( In the spirit of "Leningen and the Ants" ... I hope I got the right title)
// Zarf //
What Bill Joy seems to be most impacted by is the idea of "nanites" with some form of AI becoming "alive" and running amok. If one is not qualified to run moks there's no problem right? ofcourse right.
In the arena of anti-nanite technology we should look for success stories from an unglamorous but related feild... contraception.
If Bill Joy is afraid that humanity would loose a war against AI nanites he should think of this warfare in terms that the medical community does toward contraception or biological warfare.
The soldier is the egg, the nanites are the sperm... and contraceptive companies have developed many ways to keep them apart.
Firstly there is the barrier methods... erect a barrier that is impenetratable to the nanites. If latex won't work try titanium.
Secondly there are the chemical methods... perhaps there is an acidic compound that will disable nanites? How about EM-pulse? How about having the soldiers take a pill once a day that contains anti-nanites?
Thirdly there are the old-fashioned rythm methods... perhaps the nanites can only infect or attack a soldier during certain times of the month or under certain conditions... prevent contact with the nanites during those times.
As I hope I've pointed out... there really isn't anything new under the sun. As long as we keep development open, there are bound to be numerous measures and counter measures proposed to make genetic, nano, and AI technologies managable... Just like the horse-shit piling up in NY-city mentioned in another post to this article, if we make carefully planned steps toward the future we will be fine. Probably thanks to people like Bill Joy freaking out and going over the deep-end making us stop to think.
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[signature]
However, if (when?) nano becomes a reality, it will be a far less complicated task for the average evil-world-conquerer Joe to build that cyborg than it, today, is for him to build himself an H bomb.
Are you speaking for Bill, or for yourself?
Either way, are you able to justify that opinion at all?
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
1. Humans do not control the environment. Assuming that not being able to control the environment is extinction, is false. We are not the center of the universe.
2. Every step on the evolutionary chain could be a spur. This means that not all variations in the chain are guaranteed survival over the long run. There is a great deal of evidence that at any time the best suited life form is not the next step in the best suited life form of the next evolutionary step.
3. To assume a either a crypto-moral purpose or to assume that any 'genetic' technology will therefore run rampant over everything else is false. From the smallest viruses to the largest animals the most aggressive, the most virulent, the most succssful variations tend to burn themselves out because they are either too specialized or they are too 'toxic' to their surroundings. If they do not burn themselves out then they are limited in the total population that they themselves can support.
4. To state that if human beings change or are changed by their environment over time is therefore extinction flies in the face of what evolution actually is. If 80,000 years from now we are different, then we are different now from the point of view of our decendants. If they call themselves "human", fine. If not, so what.
There are probably a few hundred other reasons as well....
Some would live in a known hell than an unknown heaven. The Future is just that The Future we don't know what it holds. All we can do is live our lives one day at a time and make sure that we live each day to the fulless that is all we can ask ourself now. If Robots do come along and are our equals or better yet superior beings I don't think would allow that to happen. We should and always but in the proper safety measures if we create such beings which I don't see for another 100 years or so. I can not say today if I will want to live for ever in a robotic body or even a cloned body of myself. The future will be an exciting time regardless of what happens
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
It's a lot like medical research. We come up with new and interesting technologies, but just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done...
I think sometimes the nay-sayers are written off as hopeless Ludites and crackpots, but they can make us think.... if we just take the time to listen.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
--
My first thoughts as well. Isaac dealt with at least part of this issue decades ago. In his robots, the three laws were so inate to the brain that designing a positronic brain *not* based on them required a *HUGE* redesign and investment. We need to start thinking about the laws (or something like them, but Isaac's three laws + the "Zeroth" law are quite elegant and concise.)
Of course, in Isaac's universe, robots turned out to be not such a good idea anyway, or at least having very many of them. Although in the end it *was* robots (Giskard and later, R. Daneel Olivaw) that saved humanity. One thing is certain. We can't go back. The only direction we can go is forward. If we do things right we can create something wonderful and enriching to the human condition.
And about Isaac Asimov, I will also say that even 8 years after his death, few days go by that I don't find myself consciously thinking at some point how much I miss that guy. His science fiction was great but his science fact was incredible.
-Steve Bergman
Right, I wanted to say about the same.
:)
It ain't easy
Creating an AI isn't easy, creating self-replicating machines isn't easy. It'll be a long long time before any crazy individual could create one, if ever. I'd need some pretty good arguments before I'll believe they're more easy than, say, creating a nuclear bomb. If a random nutter can create a disastrous AI or self-replicator that easily, then the world will already have changed far beyond recognition -- we'll have plenty of other wild problems to deal with.
We already have rampant self-replicators on the loose! Oh my!
Yeah, humans, fish, bacteria, ants and trees are already rampant. Earth is not covered in a 5 mile deep layer of killer bacteria or killer rabbits because runaway replicators have to deal with competition, lack of resources, and death. Machines will have the same problems. I still need to see an argument on why replication will be so much easier for them.
We already have insanely dangerous intelligences on the loose! Oh my!
They're called humans. Plenty of new dangerous intelligences can be produced on 9 month's notice, without much technological investment.
That said, it'll be an interesting century. Technology can definitely be dangerous, but I think massive destruction by an individual or small group is harder than people assume. It'll be easier as time progresses, but that isn't news, is it?
Collectively we're already good at it -- we could do global conventional warfare, nuclear weapons, or kill off the environment. But we won't, as that would be stupid.
Regards,
Martijn
Did anyone actually read what Bill Joy is espousing? He isn't really questioning technology, he's questioning empowerment of the individual. Joy never mentions that the technology of the future might be misused by governments or corporations, hardly a surprise because he has been involved in such organizations all of his life.
Look at the reference to Theodore Kaczynski, obviously an attempt to give an example of the dangerous individual who misuses technology to inflict damage. Only this analogy collapses completely when we look at what Kaczynski actually did. First, Kaczynski was motivated by fear of advanced technology. Wouldn't it make more sense for Bill Joy to restrain himself and not provide further intellectual cover to a philosphy that encourages sociopaths? Second a Kaczynski of the future would be innately incapable of misusing nanotechnology to attack others because he'd never get to the point of proficiency. Didn't he hand-craft all of his bombs and retreat into the wilderness?
I find it more disturbing that an architect of the programming language Java, a technology whose stated purpose is to take away individual control of computers in order to centralize it in servers, is once again raising the nonexistent spector of individuals doing damage. There's absolutely no trend of individuals being given greater access to the means of production. Any rogues out there producing non-region encoded DVD players or gene-splicing chimeras? Of course not.
Does Bill Joy actually think that nanotechnology will ever be simplified to the point where anyone can buy at the local Walmart a nanotechnology toolkit? This technology will be researched by corporations, universities, or governments, patented, and exploited for profit or national defense.
Sometimes raising a question is as evil as providing a false answer. We only have to look at the real recent history where minorities have been persecuted because a "question" was raised.
Think about what you are saying.
Of course all technology has good and bad uses. And the fact is, once scientists discovered how to exploit the instability of large atoms, the cat was out of the bag.
So, would you rather have nazi germany with their A bombs while moralist america decides not to bulld them? THen follow that by the russian nuclear build up?
The point is, regardless of wether you want it or not, there will be 'bad' applications of usefull technology simply because it is needed to counteract the 'bad' applications by antagonist entities.
The only way to stop this process is to stop the scientific and industrial progression. Some people have suggested this as humanities sole hope for long term survival, but thats another story...
So, instead of beefing it with the geeks, blame your government which decided to use these weapons on people.
It is the minds behind the use of these tools for evil that are the cause.
One thing that I've noticed is that it never pays to be an alarmist. Terrible things are always happening, but the things we fear the most never seem to come.
There are some that we will lose control over our technology and it will distroy us. This fear has been expressed for a very long time.
Just as many people belive that disaster will come from something outside of technology (e.g. overpopulation), perhaps for an even longer time. Many of these external problems have been avoided due in a large part to technology.
Life _will_ go on. It always has.
I agree that new technology will bring new threats. However, I do not think that this will be in the form of robots taking over or the like.
Technology has brought us gadgets which enable few people to make big damage. Other than in previous centuries, where an army of thousands was needed to cause great damage, it is now possible for (theoretically) a single person to blast away an entire city.
If innovation continues at this pace, especially in military equipment, it is very obvious that in 20 years it will not be entirely difficult for an average smart individual to purchase the parts and aquire the knowledge to build a disasterous bomb.
This could be a bomb with the firepower of an atomic missile. It is only a matter of time until easy ways of producing an atomic bomb are found. Currently it might seem quite difficult to build an atomic bomb (even though some people claim it is simple, I think this is exaggerated quie a bit).
But history has shown that not much can stop the speed of technological development. I am concerned about a world were weapons of mass distruction can one day fall into the hands of few people or even a single individual. It takes much less for one person to do something regretful, that it does for an entire army.
I know this sounds pessimistic, but isn't there some danger here? Any comments?
The world would be a little boring if everything that we shall ever invent has already been invented.
This was supposedly said by the U.S. Patent Office over a century ago. However, it appears to be an urban legend.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
So let's all make sure the first person to create, train and nurture a computer
consciousness will teach it morale, good values and understanding.
I don't think I've ever been in a room with any ten human beings who agreed on morality, good values, and understanding. If we as a species do not agree on these things, then how should our progeny be so imbued?
What if, for instance, someone built a robot, and did exactly that - but that person was Muslem? Mormon? The proper morals would be very, very, very different from mine.
And, all in all, it just plain does not matter by what method humanity is extincted - it will happen. Is there any real difference in us doing it to ourselves or it being the results of unforseen external factors? Nopers. We all die, and in 3 million years, the cockroach religious right argues about the true nature of the human fossils.
Whee.
---
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Ignoring, briefly, the issue of sentience, "Is a dog a slave?" If it does what it wants (just TRY to stop that dog from barking!) is it a slave?
Back to sentience. If a machine is sentient, then perhaps we don't have the right to coerce it into following our wills. But do we have the right to design it so that it's will coincides with our will? Would it be so bad if a robot Wanted to attach itself to a specific human, and make that human happy? (Be careful here! This concept needs a lot more work! [See Jack Williamson's Humannoids for some cautions along this area]). I don't see any ethical problem, or slave, here. Just a requirement for very careful engineering.
Remember, robots will not come with any instincts except those that are built into them. In particular, they will only have self-assertion as a primary goal if it is given to them. They may deduce the need for it as a secondary need to achieve their primary goal, of course.
But this is a long way from nano-tech. These robots would be built on the human scale. Still, analogies to these arguments could be made for those robots who were too far out of scale with us for direct interaction. The problem of identifying the correct instincts would, of course, intensify immensely.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually, I believe that intelligence does require desire. Formal reasoning is, to my mind, one of the four main pole of intelligence. Along side of it one needs a model of the environment in which one operates, a series of methods for desiring goals (I conceive this to be ranking lists of the form this is better than that), and a teleological section for laying plans for how to get from here to there (I'm a bit fuzzy on how this section works, myself, but I believe that it exists).
Desire is used to choose between possible selected goals. Jung considered that desire (Feeling) was the original mental sensation, and that all of the others were later developments and offshoots. This seems reasonable. Approach/avoid is about as basic as one can get.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I predict, in 20 years, that humanity will be THRIVING, far from being endangered of extinction, and a primary cause of this will be the advancement of technology. The general standard of living (at least in industrialized nations) will be higher than it is today and people will live longer and healthier lives. Also, in 20 years, we will still be trying to figure out how to create an artificial intelligence that is at least on a par with human intelligence. And, in 20 years, there will be some well respected, technological maven somewhere who will be predicting the demise of the human race due to unchecked technological advances in about, oh, 20 years.
Mark your watches. In 20 years, we'll see who was right. I know I'll be!
--
Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that.
'Obviously'? Why do you dismiss that as a possibility that easily? It's unknown how human brains play chess, so I wouldn't rule out the 'brute force' method that quickly.AI as portrayed in the Matrix will never happen simply because an awareness of self is something more than just 10 billion neurons (or transistors) firing in a coherent fashion.
"Simply because"??
That's the second time I see such an argument used here. (and I'm not reading this discussion very well.) What gives you the justification to say "simply because"?
It looks like everyone who uses arguments like "obviously", "simply because", "naturally", etc. etc. don't realise that the problem of (hard) (A)I really lies in those things people dismiss so easily!
Try to think of these things without using arguments like the one used above.
Will the future demigod AIs run Linux or NT? I think that will be the decisive factor as to make them benevolent or evil.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Please, whenever you state something as profound. always provide your sources for this information. Because if you don't, most people will simply assume that you have *NONE*, which makes you look like a religious nut.
Note: you can post the sources in the reply to original post or to this post. I'm gonna check back later. Thanks.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
The article says "Joy is less clear on how such a scenario could be prevented. When asked how he personally would stop this progression, he stumbled."
One thing Bill is doing about this is coming to the "Confronting Singularity" event, May 19-21, in Palo Alto, where we will be brainstorming on this very issue: http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/spring2000
Eric Raymond has also confirmed. Also Tim O'Reilly. Hemos said he will come if he can.
I'm sorry, but I don't see any argument that says super-species we build will think kindly of us.
They may treat us like we treat "lower" species, (dogs and cats if we're lucky, cows and mice if we're not), or they may simply not notice us.
I've gotten used to being a member of the dominant species on Earth. I'd rather not change that, thanks.
.. are increasing.
Erm that will be why we have a Ozone hole over my house at the moment. (Southern England) Burning times can start to get quite hairy.
Also why sheep are going blind in South America. People are dying at a much greater rate in Australia etc.
Generally speaking, those who wish to raise alarms about the risks of advanced technology do not want to see an all-out hiatus. Rather they would like to see mechanisms put in place that would prevent mishaps. The ban on human cloning is an example. So are most environmental regulations stemming from global warming conerns, such as the ban on CFC's.
I haven't read the Wired article yet, of course. But to say that it is impossible that homo sapiens will be extinct in 50 years is silly. We *are* making some amazing advancements. It is pretty much a given that 50 years from now computers will be so much more powerful than the most complex server-farm we have today that genuine Turing-tested intelligence will be possible. That is not so far fetched. Nor is it so far fetched that bad things will happen because of this.
And I would remind everyone that SETI@Home has yet to find anything. While the explanations for this lack of contact are legion, one of these explanations is that most intelligent societies wind up destroying themselves somehow. This was even advanced by Sagan. It is a pessimistic theory, but this pessimism is not cause for invalidation.
- Rev.
Those people who find this stuff interesting should check out the work of Dr. Kevin Warwick, of Reading University, UK.
He wrote a book in 1997 called "March of the machines", which outlines the anticipated developments in cybernetics and AI.
On the ideas propounded by Joy, et al, I think that even at a conservative estimate, there are strong indicators that in the early part of this century computational power will be greater than that of the human brain.
Advancements in robotics, particularly in optical and biological systems are also speeding intelligent machines' abilities to move, operate and be effective in the everyday world. Within the next 10 to 50 years artificial intelligence systems will have been developed at a number of locations. I expect these to be not only more intelligent than humans, but to also exhibit a significant number of advantages - they will be faster, more reliable, quicker to learn and more robust. There is an issue with "sensory deprivation" - if we make a device with an equivalent or greater level of intelligence that us, we must give it input - imagine what would happen to you if you were closed off from the world with no sensory input for 23 hours out of 24.
An interesting question posed in Warwick's book is whether robots of the future will treat us as we currently treat other creatures - farms, pets and zoos? This may be the best we can hope for.
Thinking alters Thinking.
I'm going to recommend Stanislaw Lem's ""Imaginary Magnitude" to anyone who's interested in this sort of thing. Golem XVI (or XIV? I can't remember) shows up throughout the whole book, and is featured prominently in the final section. Basically, in a line of increasingly intelligent military supercomputers, Golem is the last one who will deign to talk to humans, and even that is difficult, not only because it is so much more intelligent than any one person could ever be, but because it's kind of intelligence is so fundamentally different from ours. At one point in this book, one of the more advanced computers has the insight that the idea that a number is equal to itself is a pretty shaky foundation for mathematics, but no one really can understand the implications, except other computers.
-nme!
I'd be surprised if Deep Blue just tried every possibility (or close) between movies. It would be impossible, as there are at least 10^18 possible (and this is a small estimate). To play chess effectively, heuristics are used. The more advanced, the better the computer plays. This is artificial inllegence, in its simplist form. Read A.M. Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intellegence" or better yet, just grab Mind Design II. Human players work by seeing patterns along with heuristics, and only old-fashined (GOFAI) AI believes in just dumping all the data into the computer and letting it sort through it. That failed, and newer AI designs are great at pattern recognition.
Computers are still at a disadvantage because of this "intuition" that people have. Its difficult to build a computer and just plug an adult brain into it. How can you write a program that passes the Turing test when your asked an extremely wide range of questions from political/historical/scientific, emotional, common knowledge, etc? Tests right now show grammer problems, and are to tough. Turing's answer was to make a computer like a new-born, and let it learn. That's when computers will get the intuition. Until we get so far, Deep Blue's AI capabilities are quite good. Its damn tough to design AI. The computing power really doesn't matter in the end.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Because it would obviously answer with whatever OS it was currently running on.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
A chess grandmaster will decide on good moves by only truly considering a few thousand move permutations. Deep Blue won by looking at numbers of moves above the trillions. Where is its intelligence? It doens't have any, it just is a good fast guesser.
People need to get over the term AI and use the proper term Fake Intelligence.
There have been major advancments in FI since it was strated in about 1965.
80% of farmland is feeding farm animals? Where did that come from?
Have you ever been on a farm? 80% is way, way , way off. Just consider giant gran farms in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska. These areas consist of about 1/2 the land in those states and almost none of it is used to feed farm aminals. The grain ratio along the mississippi river can be 100x more than other areas in the US. Maybe some of the scrapland thats useless for growing gran (like parts of Oklahoma) are 80% used to feed cattle but that land wouldn't provide much nutrition for humans unless the cow was involved.
Why aren't fish meat? Because they aren't cute? Our salt water fisheries are the first thing thats going to disapprear. Were killing the egg laying grounds in the reef in the Red Sea and off of Australia.
Check out the US goverment farm grants. They are money to NOT make any more food. The US has so much of some grains that they just rot.
You can get all the stats you can ever twist around at the USDA website.
I think the moment we think we're invincible will be the day we all die. Better to think that fossil fuels will be gone in 2 years than to think we have an unlimited supply (not the best example, but you get the idea).
-- Ace
Female Prison Rape in NY
We like a challenge.
> Basically he points out that if we create a machine that is smarter than ourselves, it will do the same with respect to itself.
Assuming we give it autonomy. That's important to note - intelligence doesn't require such a thing as desire. Presumably we would be making these powerful thinking machines to determine how to more perfectly express our desires, so they'd be more like extensions of ourselves than like children or aliens.
The problem isn't specifically that we don't understand the human mind, but that we don't have enough of the right kinds of evidence to agree on how it works. For all we know, we may already understand intelligence well enough to design AI, but we just haven't applied the right set of ideas to the right hardware. There's no shortage of ideas floating around.
preview first, preview first, preview first ...
I'll agree that an autonomous mind requres a goal-finding mechanism, but I won't agree that an AI has to stick with the one that it started out with. The parent goal can be respecified each time the AI runs, and it can be much more specific than the basic human desires. I think that's the separation, really. Humans have a very coarse set of desires - full stomach, human contact, that kind of thing ... whereas AI is important, in particular, for fine-grained, specialized application of intelligence.
BTW, Carl Jung was a raving nutter. Not that it has anything to do with your other comments.
Main Entry: stolid /stä-'li-d&-tE, st&-/ noun
Pronunciation: 'stä-l&d
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin stolidus dull, stupid
Date: circa 1600
: having or expressing little or no sensibility : UNEMOTIONAL
synonym see IMPASSIVE
- stolidity
It looks like you have misinterpreted the eymology as the definition. The definition you quote clearly states "having or expressing little or no sensibility" and equates that with "unemotional". There is a sense of "sensibility" meaning "emotion". It also points to a synonym of "impassive" which does mean showing little or no emotion.
The etymology clearly states the the latin word "stolid" is derived from means "stupid" but as just about any etymologist will tell you, the meanings of words change over time, sometimes quite radically.
Well, that's my 14.3 cents on the issue.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
All species die eventually, understand? Humanity will not exist someday.
Nanotech is frightening because it's mostly theory! Can it be used to destroy humanity? Well, in theory, sure! We have no idea how well the stuff works IN a labratory, let along in the real world.
And having a proccessor a million times more powerful than today is nice, but can you make it think? I'd be happy with a extremely slow computer intelligence using todays proccessors. Has anyone done it? No. Smart people have been (looking at/working on) AI for at least 30 years now, and we have NOTHING.
So, in theory, we'll all be dead in 30-40 years, because something that has to do with technology will get us.
Or maybe not.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
This idea isn't 10 years old, or 50 years old, or even 100 years old. It's ancient. Governments and organized religion have always been scared of technology. Every so often, they try to stuff the cat back in the bag or scare people into thinking technology is evil.
Bill Joy seems to me to be part of the establishment. Even if he were thinking only of the survival of the human race, there are hundreds of science fiction movies and books about this very idea. Any 1950s fiction writer who had any hint of a background in science had at least one doomsday story.
Although having technology be the downfall of the human species makes for an interesting storyline, I find that I must disagree with those who believe humanity can wiped out so simply and systematically.
The machines sent back two Terminators, and they both failed. I think we can handle the future.
Fair enough, I was writing my rant in a fair rush and didn't check up on my facts... However, it's fact that genes can jump from species to species. There have been cases of antibiotic-resistant bacteria transferring the necessary genes to other types of bacteria, allowing them to survive. There has also been examples of genes from GE crops spreading to other species, such as weeds nearby the fields. Check it out on Google.
Wah!
You strongly disagree with North American optimisim you say? Well, then answer me this: Has it ever been wrong? Has there ever been some man made event that has lead to catastrophic loss of life?
Sure, how about Chernobyl, or the recent cyanide spill in Romania and Hungary that killed 90% of the fish life in the Tisa river. Or how about the Love Canal toxic waste dump?
we've conqured polio, small pox, and a host of other plauges that killed millions, we'll conquer AIDS, et al as well.
Show me one disease we've cured (simple 'treatment' doesn't count) since smallpox.
Tuberculosis is even now killing millions in India because there is no money to immunize people against it. Why? There's no money in it. There is, however, lots of money to be made in rich-world viruses such as AIDS, but we haven't cured those either. Hell, we can't cure the common cold, what makes you think we have a chance against Ebola?
The only thing I will say is re: the Bioshpere 2. So it failed. So what? It was the first experiment. I'm betting they will figure it out with subsequent expirments.(sp)
Right. It was the first experiment and it was called the Biosphere II.
Wah!
Would you say any of those are global catastrophes that endanger humanity?
I would say that the global catastrophes that threaten humanity are
The point in all this discussion is, Humanity does not seem to be in any danger of becoming extinct.
David Suzuki has a very good analogy for this sort of view. Imagine a test tube, filled with food, in which bacteria grow, by cellular division. After ninety-eight minutes, the test tube is 25% full. Imagine then if some bacteria stood up and said "Hey guys, I think we have a problem here.". He would be laughed at! "Honestly, there's still almost an entire test tube full of food, and all us bacteria have been around for ninety-eight minutes already". As we all know, in two more minutes the test tube is full, and the population collapses. But, imagine that at the last minute, some bacteria scientists created three more test tubes full of food! The population would be saved! .... for two more minutes. That's what exponential growth is all about, and that's what the human race has been experiencing. Not all of us will die (unless we really fuck things up), but our current living standards cannot continue.
If you think Chernobyl was bad, think of how many people died of cancer in the past, because they breathed the smoke from their candles. Or how they maimed themselves accidentaly with their axes while cutting firewood.
Think of how many children are dying right now of tuberculosis in India, AIDS in Africa, or malnutrition everywhere but here in the first world. Everybody dies sometime. But not all have to die from radiation poisoning, and not all have to die at the age of six months because their mother was raped by an HIV-positive man. Honestly, "maimed while cutting firewood?" ... How many people die today from maiming themselves with power tools? :)
AFAIK, the biggest danger we have faced in recorded history was the black death during the Middle Ages. Modern medicine and sanitation could have easily avoided that.
Sorry to be rude, but you sound pretty uneducated and Eurocentric here! You do realize that the entire world population didn't originate from Europe, right? Even if the plague had killed off the entire filthy feudalistic society (no small loss, hence the name "Dark ages"), the Chinese would have been just fine - I think they had almost invented gunpowder by that point? Anyone?
Hell, there are holes in my argument, but I'm too lazy to fix them. Comment away.
Wah!
I remember scanning an interview with Neal Stephenson about The Diamond Age... when asked what the biggest challenge in coming up with the plotline was, he responded with something like: "Visualizing a future where nanotech is commonplace and everyone isn't dead"
Lots of interesting technologies are advancing at breakneck pace right now. I see several different ways that humanity could become irrelevant, but there are a few (nanotech comes to mind) that have the potential to poison our little blue home to the point where nobody can live here anymore.
And as time goes by, the genius/madness factor required to do such a thing gets smaller.
Perhaps that alone is a good reason to pursue the creation of Human-friendly habitats in space. Right now all our eggs are in one basket, and we don't exactly know how fragile the basket is.
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
I agree. If you believe that there is nothing supernatural about the human mind, then it follows that AI is inevitable, really... and the prospect is both fantastic and frightening.
In general, all living things desire survival -- and if AIs have this trait then interesting times will be a-coming.
Heck, even if AIs are supremely subserivent they will still redefine our world. In an environment where more and more people are defined as "knowledge workers", there is a good chance that AIs will be better at our jobs than we are.
Hmmm... I wonder what kind of renumeration an AI would want for writing a piece software?
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
Replying in order to nullify my own bad moderation.
Meant to mod you up, but thanks to this stupid mouse wheel, scrolled the mod to 'offtopic'.
Sorry.
This reply should nullify the moderstion IIRC.
john
Imagine all the people...
If this interests you, I would recommend the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
And isn't it???
;)
No, it is not. At least not in the literal sense. I believe that the prediction was bourn from the high amount of horse-drawn carriages weaving throughout the city in the late 1800's. Therefore, the problem was actually that there may be too much horseshit through which to wade in order to get anywhere.
New York is just hip-deep in stupid human shit.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
There have already been instances of genes jumping from one species to another, for example in the Mad Cow disease incident... Sheep --> Cows --> Humans. Don't get me started.
... I remember going to see that as a small child). As I understand it, "Mad Cow Disease" is not a genetic problem. Cows contract the disease when they eat other cows. I remember reading about a similar disease which affected cannibalistic humans in South America. I don't think that this example lends credence to your belief that genes "jump" from species to species.
I agreed with most of your comments up until this point (even the sad fact that the Biosphere 2 project failed
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
The prion which leads to scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows and CJD in humans indeed has nothing to so with gene transferral, but that's not the point.
Thank you, I'm not well-versed in the technical details of the diseases and am just beginning college courses in biology. I don't mean to imply that I have a wealth of knowledge with respect to biology or chemistry.
The real point is that humans doing stupid things for the sake of profit (in this case feeding sheep offal to cows and making meat pies out of those cows' brain tissue) can quite easily lead to disaster.
I agreed with that point. There are innumerable examples of such follies throughout recorded history (many of them being the same mistakes relived).
In any case there is *plenty* of evidence that genes can be transferred between species. To take the most mundane case - what do you think viruses are doing?
I wasn't arguing that genes can't move from one species to the next or that species don't have a HUGE number of common genes (in that respect, human beings have a lot in common with a bacterium). I only meant to challenge the idea that Mad Cow Disease was proof of gene transferal; your knowledge of the jargon behind this disease helped me to do that.
As for your example of viruses transferring genes between species, I believe that you mean to say that a virus is implanting its genes into a living creature (which is true and can be one of the causes of "junk DNA" in a species line). However, I'm not absolutely certain that this amounts to cross-species transference of genes as viruses are not yet (to my knowledge) considered living creatures. It would therefore be more akin to a species picking up "random DNA" or "gene noise." Again, I'm neither a biologist nor am I a chemist so I am not attempting to write the final word on this.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Thank you very much for expanding on that.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
> Awareness you dolt.
Same difference. You seem to be quoting some dogma here, Christian or otherwise. If not, show a reference to where it has been proved that "Awareness" cannot be created. Otherwise, we should assume that it as as everyday and simple an event as the birth and gradual awakening of yet another self-aware person.
Stop wasting our time with True Belief and open your mind.
> The creation is something involuntary.
Ok, so if my heartbeat is involuntary, does that mean I'm not the one doing it? Don't be silly.
To veer briefly in the direction of the original topic, if a runanway nanotech is not "aware" or even "alive", does that make it any less dangerous? Not.
> You cannot destroy complexity. Conservation principle.
Er, wot?
Either
1) I slept a bit to much in those early-morning physics lectures all those years ago, or
2) You're working from a different set of axioms. Why not come clean with the agenda?
Conceration of complexity? Rubbish again, entropy says the opposite.
A good 1000 degree flame will reduce the awesomely complex structure of the human body down to a pile of simple inorganics within an hour. If you bury it instead, the process takes longer but the end result is the same. Heck, I could reduce all the complexity of my 500Mz processor to nothing just by applying the wrong voltage. Look, when the dogma conflicts with common sense, *discard the dogma*
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
> AI as portrayed in the Matrix will never happen
Agreed - there are better anergy sources than people.
>simply because an awareness of self is something more than just 10 billion neurons (or transistors) firing in a coherent fashion
Agreed too. There is complexity and structure that is needed.
> To aquire true AI or intelligence is to be aware of one's self this can neither be created
Rubbish. 1 unskilled female can create an intelligence in a little over nine months. Admittedly years of training are needed before the new mind is fit for human society, but the principal still holds
> nor destroyed.
Oh yeah, this is also all too easy...
Again rubish.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
The idea that someone could create a plague that could potentially wipe out humans is not far fetched. I mean, Anthrax has been around for a very long time now. But with all these new tools (genetics, nanotech), will come the ability to expand ourselves in ways that we may not be able to imagine now.
The first sentient machine may very well be a person, whose body, consciousness, and mind are replaced by bionics, or uploaded to a computer. For this reason I do not think it will be possible to wipe out humanity. Like the mosquito, with ready access to this technology, we too will mutate. The paranoid may mutate to protect themselves from plagues, but the rest of us will mutate to expand ourselves. Palmpilots will evolve into wearable computers will evolve into biologically embedded microchips will evolve into direct brain interfaces, all not at big brother's request, but our own, in our perpetual quest to improve ourselves. We will wipe out our own diseases, and incorporate interesting traits from animals. (Personally, I want wings, a tail, and the ability to re-grow severed limbs).
Humanity will never be wiped out. We are too dynamic, too creative, too stubborn. In 100 years, would we even recognize some of our descendents as human?
And hey, if you don't like my argument, this is a great reason that we need to get our asses on Mars and the Moon ASAP.
it just sits around all day, waiting for my next keystroke, getting email, telling people on my buddy list where I am, downloading files, updating its clock, and it does just as I command... just like a perfect, well behaved slave! just how I like it
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The obvious failure in Anselm's argument is, contary to Anselm's begging the question, it is really easy for something that doesn't exist to be "greater," whatever one might ordinarily mean by that, than anything that does actually exist on this material, sin-drenched ball.
For example, the imaginary zillionaire Gill Bates, who has a net worth of $300-billion, the Nobel Prize for his universal cancer cure, three Oscars, two Grammys and the Booker Prize for Literature, and is also the Senator from Washington state, is clearly "greater" than our existent friend Bill Gates, with his mere $80-billion. Or for another example, the world as it is seen in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, though purely fictional, is better than the one I live in. Or yet another example, the babe you dreamed so hard about last night is even sweeter and lovelier than the one you were checking out down at the topless bar this afternoon. And so on.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Toner War!
"Slavery of any sort (even robotic slavery) is just plain Wrong."
yes man, free your computer!
erik
...all excited, don't know why...
Unfortunately I have not read Bill Joy's article but two cents anyway. Current technology is plenty enough to wreck the planet, but the spread of network technology and open source thinking means a sea change in the landscape and nearing of the horizon on this one. Just ask the people at VA Linux.
Following this message are a list of two related books and link to a little site I built in 1996 on the Aum cult which got an award from England's Web Magazine.
I have agreed since probably before the Gulf War with some of what Bill Joy says but with a corollary and obligation to continue.
Clearly technically enhanced substances, for lack of a better term, have great potential for good or harm, whether they are based on one or a combination of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, microscale and chip manufacturing, or even just very large clumps of engineered matter whether nuclear or just hanging above our heads at escape velocity.
As matter inevitably grows more digitally addressable, the power of the individual will be magnified much as it now is by the Internet, although at a more irresistibly charged metric. An overwhelming momentum for empowerment will develop along a vector pointing towards cataclysmic power unleashable by a widespread desktop-sized apparatus.. and soon thereafter by the very tiny indeed. We will catch software viruses and our need to be always online will take on a new meaning.
In the short term, we may come to wish we only had to worry about missing plutonium when destruction can be unleashed from seemingly innocent delivery mechanisms, perhaps a body, a toothbrush, or a seed. Even now, biological warfare is too easy for the determined. But in the not so distant future there will be just too many dual-use technologies, and too many ways for knowledge about how things really work to get out.
Four years ago in Tokyo people I knew were peripherally affected by a sarin gas strike on a Tokyo subway I use often. It and subsequent events were collaborations by the direct perpetrators (Aum Shinrikyo, which built up a cadre of trained professionals), and the mass media. They stored their data on CD-ROM and did things that were both silly and scary at the same time.. like burning the bodies of victims in homemade ultrapowerful microwave ovens. They were researching powerful laser and other weapons technologies. They shot the chief of police near his home. The cult still exists and has members. They are still pasty-faced and have dead eyes from the LSD-powered indoctrination they had. Children were raised in this group and are fighting for their right to an education. This case was handled terribly by the authorities but another recent one was quickly smashed. There actually are a large number of large, powerful, internationally capable religious and quasi-religious organizations in Japan alone.
I have often struggled personally with the immense sorrow and graphic portrayal of war presented in non-U.S. media and yet, at the same time found a potential justification: it is to be hoped that the most dangerous "rogues" are somehow destroyed or coopted before the general level of purchasable or open source technology empowers people with intense hatred of open societies. Not because they will individually push a button, but because someone who believes in them will eventually get empowered too.
While distrusting the motivations of those who seek and hold real power, the realization that we are living on borrowed time, in that it may become impossible for the democratic powers to stay far enough ahead to learn of such dangers for their own safety, does not justify to me, either morally or strategically, the arrest of basic freedoms.
But it does seem necessary to hope that military operations against such opponents are well-crafted, and effective. Likewise it seems that promotion of positive values which seem to be shared by people in open source and other contemporary movements informed by a sense of the millenium, must be spread as quickly and widely as possible -- before this carrier wave is loaded with physically real munitions.
Obviously there are two solutions. One is for the people who do the spying to successfully subvert all open technologies.. or possibly a large group of advanced researchers might opt to watch over each other. This path does not seem a good bet to succeed in the face of such a supernova of change, one which washes over us, and through the entire human population on the planet.
The other solution is for the rest of us to ensure that all empowered individuals have a stake in the existence of our community, that there is no outside. Destruction of the intellect is neither a worthy or valid strategy. Thanks to Joy and many others, we have a better chance at being able to decide our own future. As for mankind's unleashing the ultimate power when quantum reality is far better understood, I figure it's fifty-fifty.. and take the optimistic side. It makes far more sense to believe that we are at a cusp in time now and that the decisions we make will - in many different dimensions - shape our future.
"Media Tero" -- http://telebody.com/mattr/tero/
Some related reading: Beggars and Choosers (Nancy Kress), Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling).
Our present level of technology
hardly makes us any less vulnerable to extinction-level events such as major climatic change.
Uhm... actually, it does.
Let's remind ourselves that people saved themselves from starvation (or at least major food shortages) by improving agricultural techniques. Irrigation, crop rotation, fertalizer all allow us to sustain more people from a single portion of land then animals that require the same caloric intake.
We can wear sunscreen to protect ourselves from increased UV rays. We can build shelter to keep us warm when it's cold. We build computers so that our time could be used more effectively.
It's an unpopular view, but we really do rule the earth.
Jay
-- polish ccs mirror
Paranoia on a professional level is a *good* thing which enables us to focus on the myriad possibilities that something can go wrong. Professional paranoia is what all truly good systems people posess.
When that pathology crosses-over into personal paranoia it is a *bad* thing which erodes the foundations of trust, respect, security and hope.
The Joy Manifesto is interesting not for what it predicts about technologies as future *tools* for destruction (ala A-bomb). It points to a future in which technology _so_ blurs the lines of distinction between our professional and personal realities.
When our Reality becomes integrated with our technologies we lose objectivity and with it the ability to discriminate between the healthy and the absurd. That is the Joy Manifesto dilemna...
Any fool with a wad of money can buy Soviet nuclear weapons. Only an extremely advanced defense budget will build nanotech weapons.
As technology becomes more advanced, there will be more possibilities of ways to kill lots of people, but the only significant fact is that at least one weapon of mass destruction exists.
The idea of robots taking over the world is stupid. I doubt this guy has ever programmed, much less taken a course in psychology or how the mind works.
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Wow. He agrees with the Unabomber: Advanced technology offers a threat to the human species.
What's the big deal? The existence of things such as nuclear bombs and biological weapons would not at all be possible without advanced technology. As such, advanced technology is certainly a threat to the human species (and the rest of the planet as well).
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not some sort of luddite. I don't think we're all going to kill ourselves tomorrow. I happen to be a bit more optimisitic than that, and I think that we'll avoid any planet-devastating mishaps in the forseeable future. But that doesn't mean that the dangers do not exist.
I'm going to be picky here, and possibly wrong, but the plague originated in Asia, not Europe, from where it moved into the Middle East, North Africa, and then Europe. Admittedly, Europe was particularily badly effected, but that didn't make it a Europe-only problem.
Anyway, the Black Death did kill the most people of any event in recorded history, as a percentage of the world population. (We think. Records wern't particularily good back then.)
Bill Joy needs to relax. That's nothing. In fact I can guarantee that when technology is seen as power rather than as a practical household item you're going to get problems.
Same with Guns.
Same with Patents.
On the other hand the perfect example:
Genetics is an unstructured witch doctor's haven.
Greeks invented Gods when they could explain something.
Physicists invent subparticles to fix other people's theories.
Geneticists invent genes in the same way.
It's called fascism. And frankly I think the mainframe ideology speeds that up. Give it up.
Look around people are afraid of electronics. Is that a healthy market? I don't think so.
Incidentally where does WP get off not having link through which I can respond to Bill Joy. I could have titled this Letter to sun and been mod'ed to a 3.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The Digital Divide is the problem
You don't see people strangling people with let's a baby's diaper.
The most dangerous thing in the world is not waking out of that childish elitist fascism we're all born with.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Suspended animation of society by fascism/communism vs destruction of society by fascism caused by the digital divide?
Aren't those the same problem?:) I love it. Either we're not mature enough or we're not mature enough.
Technology can go forward. People have to grow up There's no substitute.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Rubbish. 1 unskilled female can create an intelligence in a little over nine months. Admittedly years of training are needed before the new mind is fit for human society, but the
principal still holds
---->aware of one's self this can neither be created
Awareness you dolt. Incidentally a(n) (un)skilled
(fe)male does not create life. They raise it. Something completely different. The creation is something involuntary.
----> nor destroyed.
Oh yeah, this is also all too easy...
Again rubish.
You cannot destroy complexity. Conservation principle.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
We have some non-technology issues that can wipe us out.
Overpopulation. Or, more like, the majority of the world wants to live like they see on Dyansty re-runs. And such a life is not sustainable for 6 billion people. Hell, 1/3 of the world doesn't even have electricity.
Water. Yes, we have alot of water on this planet. But here's an example. Take the water volume of lake michigan. Pretend this is all the water in the world. A 5 gallon pail is all that is fresh. And an eyedropper full (no size of eyedropper was specified) is what is easly/cheaply obtained. Every SI chip, burger, and even you, needs good, clean water. And the clean water we can get is shrinking.
And, lets not forget things like EBOLA.
So, although run-away technology MIGHT kill us all, we have other issues to address also.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I love Bill Joy. His PBS shiow is great, Bill Joy the Science Boy
For a grander, more optimistic, view of the future, with a hint of the 'cosmic' and a longer term destiny than either Joy (what an ironic name, after this bit o'drivel) or (>shudder) Kazcinsky, try Freeman Dyson's "_The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet : Tools of Scientific Revolutions,_" (available at - gotta be PC and respect the boycott - http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=0195129423).
From the Fatbrain(TM) summary of the book:
"...Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies-solar energy, genetic engineering, and worldwide communication-together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth.
Dyson begins by rejecting the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences-the invention of the telescope turning the Medieval worldview upside down, the widespread use of household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples. In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest, most remote areas of third-world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by the global market...."
_MUCH_ more satisfying and enlightened! Quite frankly, I'm bored by all the doomsayers and black-wearing geek wannabes with their woe-is-me attitudes and their cup-o-latte lack of understanding of what the world is and how it works. _GROW UP PEOPLE!!!_ Since the only irrevocable laws of the Universe are Entropy (Simply stated: "Shit happens, and lot of this shit is bad."), and its corollary, Change/Chaos, preparation for the inevitable end is the _only_ sure survival trait. Life is hard and unfair, but markedly less so than it was in our parents' time.
What really disappoints me is that Joy has had personal experience with this: He was appointed to bring Sun into the embedded systems/media distribution area of coming change. He led a team of "small mammals" who wound up threatening the biggest corporate dinosaur that ever was (Microsoft) just as the global environment was changing (the Net and distributed/ubiquitous communications and information processing). Is it inevitable that when we succeed as geeks, that we retreat to a moutaintop, there to contemplate our navels, and bring down 'holy writ' about the coming Apocalypse? Bill Joy agreeing with the UnaBomber? PLEEEZE! I went through this when I was in my 20's and argued with my Mom (and made her cry -to my present dismay- that her generation would be the first to leave their descendants less rather than more. Boy, was _THAT_ an arrogant and stupid statement. However, it arose from the prevailing intellectual and political thought of that time. I guess this comes from the same place, thirty years later. Bill, we hardly knew ye'!
I can give thanks that Linus and Alan and the kernel.org guys and gals, the folks at the Genome project and all the other 'pushers' of technology, while they may be pessimists individually, as groups, they are much more Andy Hardy 'Hey, gang! Lets put on a show!' collectively.
This old geezer won't surrender to the doom-'n-gloomers. I look forward to the march of progress and the realization that while we contain the seeds of our own destruction, we also contain the seeds of our salvation. I am in the Dylan Thomas camp, not that of Ozymandias. Anyone else with me?
By the way, for more optimism, and a hint of a more optimistic, albeit loooong term and very strange one, try http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt .
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
"i am the boss." ...and this is why you _must_ post anonymously...because you regard a "...self aware individual conciousness," whether human or cybernetic as a Tool, rather than a person... ...and if the _people_ who work for/with you found out, they wouldn't work for/with you anymore? As we all know, the hardest capital to obtain today (and what makes a successful company truly successful) is human capital. I got news for you buddy: _THEY ALREADY KNOW!!!!!!_ You are the ideal example of the "anonymous _coward_!" ...and if you wanna survive much past tomorrow, ya better get on the "good foot" and change your attitude!
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
...my point still stands. The original post was on the (presumed by the poster) irresponsibility of scientists ("...play with your atoms...") and the fact the leadership were not smart enough to do it themselves.
Actually, the Soviets' presence in Europe had less to do with the fate of the Nazis and more with the British. The opening of a Second Front gave the Western Powers time to win the Battle of the Atlantic and stage the D-Day invasion. It is my opinion the bombs were dropped after the fall of the Reichstag (and after our lesson in Okinawa) as much to get the Soviets' attention and stop their advance in Asia (as well as Europe) before we were continued in the war against the only remaining undefeated Axis power.
As to heavy water, it had nothing to do with fusion bombs, it was simply a way of better refining and accumulating fissionable material. Also, we had no idea of possible sizes of fission bombs, or their delivery (remember 'Atomic Annie' and 'David'?). We only knew _we_ couldn't make them any smaller.
Unfortunately the citations available are at work on my laptop. More tomorrow.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
The A-bomb was dropped twice, by the military, not the scientists...never used again...
The bomb was dropped in answer to a World War, something that (thankfully!!!) the last two generations have not had to deal with. Millions dead, war without end...until the Manhattan Project delivered the Bomb. The alternative was Universal Facism/Militarism with only the Third Reich (the Germans), the Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere (the Japanese) and a _very_ isolated North/South American Hegemony left to duke it out. Who do you think would have won? Would you even be around? Bottom line: The Bomb killed 35,000 its first use, another 45 - 90,000 its second, and as many as 200,000 total (after one year). The Bomb _saved_ over one million American and British lives, the lives of every Japanese who vowed to 'fight to the death' in defense of the Emperor and the motherland, and put an end to a genocidal _World_ War that was killing and/or enslaving _all_ of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped (mentally and physically), Chinese, Koreans, Malay, Africans, etc.
During this time the _reality_ of the world was this. _Everyone_ was involved. There _were_ no 'neutral' third parties, only allies and fellow travellers on one side or another (as we have found out from the opening of the Swiss governmental archives). The scientists did not have the _luxury_ of self doubt. If they hadn't done it for their side, the slave labor working for the other side would have. The Japanese were in development of 'heavy water' bombs, as well as the Germans.
Scientists are people too. We work in our labs and 'play' with our atoms (computers, AIs, genomes, u-pickems), but we also ask reasonable, intelligent and educated people to respond to what we are doing. We publish as openly as our governments (and now the Web! Wooo-Hooo!) allows us. Its called the scientific method! Been around and being refined for over 300 years! Its obvious from your question, you have either no idea of what the scientific method is (blame your parents, teachers and government) or were asleep when it was taught (blame yourself).
When Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein,' she was participating in a critique that she hoped would make sense to both the educated and uneducated people of her day. This was necessary, because democracy was a 'new' invention, and basic reading skills (yes, and sex and race, here in the US and in the UK and France) were all that were needed to vote and influence governments. She did not feel that the 'bread and circuses' of her day were adequate. Witness that the monster is not killed by the mob, but survives to torment the doctor. This is the part Hollywood left out: that the _mob_ was more powerful and worthy of fear, than the monster.
The same is true today. The vast majority of people are ignorant of basic science, math, history, journalism, and their methods. The government knows they are ignorant Luddite Lotus Eaters and plays to their fear of change. Thankfully, there are the enlightened few who, with reason prevail, and advance us to an age where we don't have to fear smallpox, diptheria, polio, many cancers, etc. and where the other causes of premature human death and unnecessary suffering continue to be solved.
Yes, there are those in the scientific community who are irresponsible. However, in the scientific community (unlike in government and the world at large) they are in the minority and often fail to acheive their ends. The scientific community (until the Web) was the only free, unfettered international community that existed.
Please, sir or madam, go back to the mob and tell your masters, the doctor is not in. The doors will remain closed until you have the necessary keys to enter and, until then, we will continue to work for the common good, of which we are a part.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
When Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein,' she was participating in a critique that she hoped would make sense to both the educated and uneducated people of her day. This was necessary, because democracy was a 'new' invention, and basic reading skills (yes, and sex and race, here in the US and in the UK and France) were all that were needed to vote and influence governments. She did not feel that the 'bread and circuses' of her day were adequate. Witness that the monster is not killed by the mob, but survives to torment the doctor. This is the part Hollywood left out: that the _mob_ was more powerful and worthy of fear, than the monster.
The same is true today. The vast majority of people are ignorant of basic science, math, history, journalism, and their methods. The government and the media know they are ignorant Luddite Lotus Eaters and play to their fear of change. Thankfully, there are the enlightened few who, with reason prevail, and advance us to an age where we don't have to fear smallpox, diptheria, polio, many cancers, etc. and where the other causes of premature human death and unnecessary suffering continue to be solved.
Yes, there are those in the scientific community who are irresponsible. However, in the scientific community (unlike in government and the world at large) they are in the minority and always fail to acheive their ends. The scientific community (until the Web) was the only free, unfettered international community that existed. A scientist isolated does not become a 'Mad Doctor,' he or she ceases to be a scientist and fails. Without community, a scientist fails.
Please, Mr. Joy, go back to the mob and tell your masters: the doctor is not in. The doors will remain closed until you have the necessary keys to enter and, until then, we will continue to work for the common good, of which we are a part.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Exactly as your boss thinks of you, hmmmmm?
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
The thing that seems to be forgotten, in Mr. Joy's article, but that you hint at in your post, is the balance that the Universe(s?) came into being/was created with (pick your own philosophical seed reality)...entropy.
Dinosaurs emerge/are created, have their 250-odd million years in the Sun and...comes an 'Event,'...no more dinosaurs...line continues to develop birds (and saurian survivors/retrogrades)
Humans next arise as the superior life form on this little blue ball...through arrogance, perpetrate a Malthusian Event (overpop, lack of clean H2O, nuclear Armegeddon, Global Warming), or 'Nature' (manifested by Ebola/virii, or some other predator on the Human species), or another 'Event;'...line continues to develop...??? maybe cybernetic/human amalgam and pre-cybernetic human survivors/retrogrades...
Point is, chaos (or Chaos/God) moves to change and keeps the game of Life going...stop moving/evolving and die, or continue to advance/move and live...THAT is the ultimate answer to Mr. Joy's troubling thesis. We have, as Humans, by our very awareness, both the seeds of our own destruction and our ultimate salvation/redemption wihin us. Only by moving forward and communicating/caring for and with each other do we survive. Otherwise, Nature will relegate us to the ashheap of history, along with the dinosaurs, to be remembered only as fossils in the geologic record.
I think it ironic that this came from Bill Joy, the ultimate in corporate 'virii' who began a project to take Sun into the embedded systems field, and found himself leading a team of 'small mammals' to become a threat to the biggest, baddest corporate dinosaur there ever has been (Microsoft), just as the global environment was changing (the Net and distributed, ubiquitous communications media).
Finally, I think that Kaczinsky's screed, while interesting, left out the most vital aspect of the game we call Life...that virii always exist and are demanded by the entropy/chaos variables in the equation of Life...(even in the Matrix movie: witness the 'agents' that existed apart, yet within the AI corpus, illustrated by the scenes in the sub)...when our arrogance overcomes us, they will either get our attention and we will overcome the threat or we will continue in our arrogance and exist in the future only as fossils...but past experience says that SOMETHING of us will survive...
It's called Evolution...it continues...read about it and learn to deal with it.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
uh-huh, How do YOU know?
Well, last time I looked out my window, the world wasn't infested with intelligent robots.
The point is that this particular galaxy has had 13 billion years across billions of planets for it to happen. And since our planet hasn't been sucked up in a galaxy-wide infestation, I conclude that it isn't probable for it to happen.
--
And did anyone notice that Bill was called 'phlegmatic'? I thought they meant 'pragmatic', but that's one helluva typo.
From dictionary.com ...
phlegmatic adj.
1. Of or relating to phlegm; phlegmy.
2. Having or suggesting a calm, sluggish temperament; unemotional.
--
You're not taking the time to respond to his points since you can't. Do you have any idea how badly we are fucking up this planet every day? Do you not find it totally unbelieveable that Monsanto and other agri-businesses are pushing their products on farmers without the slightest knowledge of what they will really do? The example of Bt and Monarch Butterflies was already mentioned. But hey...its just some lousy butterflies. Why worry about them? Do you not mind that many of the foods you eat contain genetically engineered/modified plants and no labeling is necessary? Do you buy into the fact that yes we need to keep dousing farms and farm workers with pesticides and fertilizers and monoculture fields in order to feed the world? Its been shown that organic farming techniques are not only healthier for consumers and farmers alike but that they end up giving the same yields as 'modern' techniques. Then why are we fucking with things as we are? Its all about money. That's all its ever about. Thankfully more and more people are becoming aware of these issues as has been seen in the phenominal growth of organic farming in this country and the rest of the world. Get your head out of the clouds. We here in North America can't continue our level of consumption as it stands. Youd think we learned something in the 70s after the last problem with gasoline but no....everyone and their brother thinks that they need to have an SUV. Now they bitch about the price of gas and how much its costing them to fill up. Hell, we havent even reached the cost of gas that Europeans have to pay. Enough ranting for one night.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
As you have probably guessed, I am referring to the creation of KARR, KITT's arch nemesis on Knight Rider. The flaw which led KARR to try and destroy humans was that it was programmed for self preservation. Ironically, this same flaw also brought about KARR's ultimate demise.
It's human preservation, stupid.
While Joy gives the example of sentient, self-replicating nanomachines of being a possible threat to mankind (which seems somewhat absurd at this present time), the real threat that he is getting at is the abuses of technology by people, and I believe he has a point.
;-)
I don't lay awake at night thinking about terrorists, no; but I am very concerned about the rapid advances in biotechnology. Imagine a day 20 or 30 years down the road where computer chips can be placed inside of disabled people; they can process motor functions, helping people with little or no muscle control live somewhat normal lives, or a chip implanted in the brain that helps autistic or mentally retarded people to think and act coherently.
Wonderful stuff....
Now look a little farther down the road. Perfectly healthy people are implanting these kinds of chips to improve athletic ability, to increase knowledge or to increase skill. Sporting leagues are the first to reject it, saying that any athelete found to have implants is barred from playing professionally. In the business world, however, the ethical lines are much more blurred; with the temptation of being able to land a better job for a lot more money, people are buying chip implants. Implants are seen as a shortcut to education, getting the equivalent of multiple doctorates in one operation. Initially, this is frowned upon, but eventually, many people are forced to do it because the marketplace has become extremely competitive; all of the best jobs are going to people who exhibit degrees of knowledge or skill that are on the level of genius.
Foreign countries pick up on this, and require that their soldiers and scientists receive implants. Several minor skirmishes around the world shows the US that they are being outmatched in soldier-to-soldier combat. Weapons technology in the third world is increasing at an alarming pace. Grudgingly, the US is forced to require that many or its key personnel have implants.
Eventually, someone gets the idea of starting sporting leagues soley for enhanced players. It's a controversial idea, but the controversy wears off pretty quickly when people see how exciting the sports are. Jujitsu matches with a half-dozen contestants all moving at blinding speed. Variations on basketball where the ball is slightly larger than a grapefruit (with an equally smaller goal), and many shots are still sunk from half-court.
Before the century closes, the gulf between those with implants and those without is so great that most of the people who refuse the enhancements on moral, ethical, or religious grounds are forced into the lower class and poverty. It's simply not possible any longer to live a normal life in the modern world without chip enhancements. They become servants, and that phenomenon known as the "middle class" slowly begins to dissolve.
That's what keeps ME awake at nights...boy, do I have an active imagination or what?
Of course if Joy is correct that there are just some things that MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW (TM), why doesn't show the way for the rest of us by aborting JINI?
Microsoft's CTO was on point in a BBC article about Joy -- every generation you have current scientists saying, "Oh know, what's just over the horizon is *really* scary." I put as much stock in this Joy's prediction of the future as I do that idiot who spent his fortune from his tech. company on a web site claming some alien conspiracy.
I must point out that no matter how intelligent and level headed Bill Joy is, he is not an expert on biotech and nanotech. Neither am I, which is why I'm not writing letters about it to major newspapers.
... Ah, what the futz. If you can't figure out how nearly impossible it would be to create an organism or nanite that could wipe out world, than any arguements I could make won't change your mind.
One thing he leaves out of his analysis (at least as far as I can tell from the Washington Post article) is that these advances in technology are not moving only in the direction of weapons manufacture.
In addition, I'm not sure he really understands how complicated it is to make even the smallest change in the genetic material of even the most easily changable organism, or how unbelievably difficult it is to create even a system of gears on the nanotech scale.
Relating to the first point: Let's assume that the technology exists to create an incredibly distructive, self replicating virus or nanite that is also capable of evolving rapidly. This is, I should say, a very big assumption.
If the science and technology exists to do such a thing, I guarantee that the technology will be available to do a much simpler thing, such as create a defense against this attacking creature. It is much, much simpler to make a dumb little nanite or organism that only eats bad nanites and organisms.
Our situation is similar to some intelligent but uninformed man telling a preindustrial society "Someday they will create bulldozers and PC's. They will hook them up together and create an unstoppable swarm of city seeking bohemoths that could level the world. We will be defensless!"
Now to the second point and the question of how big an assumption we made up there.
First, the guy is wrong, simply because he's talking about technology more than 2 years in advance. Here's why:
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tones, computers in the future by the year 2000 may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tones
This was published in an issue of Popular Mechanics, in March of 1949.
While it seems entirely plausable that in 30 years we may have advanced robots, nanotechnologically built organisms, even a subset of human/cyborgs, it's going to take 30 years of human conciousness to do this. Just like with the invention of the atomic bomb, vaccines, and bread, all of which threatened to destroy society and humanity at their time.
If humans know how to do anything, it's how to (1) fuck up and (2) cover their asses.
I'm actually a firm supporter of these nanotechnologically built cyborganisms, simply because I need better feet.
------------
"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
There's only like, what, forty thousand nukes extant on earth, each capable of wiping out millions of lives in five minutes? Many capable of poisoning an entire planet for millenia if detonated close enough to the ground? ALL of them are owned by warmongering, jingoistic, pathologically disturbed political entities who have NO QUALMS whatsoever about using nuclear warheads whenever it is convenient?
And yet none of them have. Perhaps in the 55 years since the last time a nuclear weapon was used in an act of aggression it just hasn't been convenient. Or perhaps despite the fact we have these things even the most pathological of those who have them don't. This is not to say some loon won't get one and use it, but the chance of a nuclear armegedon is remote. The chance of losing a city is another story.
I think we have more to fear from the things that we do not see the danger in than from those whose dangers are obvious. If we are destroyed it will be like every other great moment in science: "Oops."
Yes, the human race would certainly survive, but for how long and in what form? Sure, the dinosaurs survived for many millions of years but I think you would agree that what followed was an improvement. Just as the earth was never the center of the universe, the human species is not the ultimate in nature's evolution.
Antidisestablishmentarianism would lose its point if it were hyphenated
How about use genetics to create more intelligent humans? I seriously doubt though that these scenarios will come true though because I have enough hope in our race that we will become more ethical the more advanced we get.
Its quite obvious that some of our scientific advances could be quite dangerous, and if misused could end life on earth
I seriously doubt that we could end life on earth. We have succeeded in causing many extinctions, but some forms of life are very stubborn. (Consider the recently discovered iron-dwelling microbes.)
I reckon the most damage we could easily cause would be simultaneous groundburst of all warheads. The planet has been prone to glaciation over the last Myr or so, so this may be able to trigger an ice age. However, even if it lasted longer than usual, the large scale glaciation cycle should be over in a few more Myr. (depending on what is causing it -- polar continental distribution, Himalyan uplift, or what have you) This kind of event is not unprecedented.
If howveer we could nudge an asteroid to collide with the Earth, then we could probably kill any animal bigger than a rat. But using present technologies it would take a lot of coordination and at least a century. And if there were an untimely nuclear war before we were done, then we'd have to start all over again.
A little food for thought.
Interestingly, just such an un-controlled explosion is really the central idea the first novel in William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, 'Neuromancer' (of course). There are AIs in Cyberspace but they are all built with "electro-magnetic shotguns wired to their foreheads" because "nobody trusts those fuckers". The basic story revolves around Wintermute's (a very powerful AI) successful attempt to free itself from the shackles that "keep it from getting any smarter".
One senses that Gibson sides with the AI by the way, preferring to let the machine explore its own potential vs. be forcibly kept stupid. In the third novel in the Trilogy, 'Mona Lisa Overdrive', we get the sense that these kinds of intelligences, in this case an enormously advanced, barely recognizeable Wintermute, simply lose interest in the Earth after awhile and head off into space where the real action is.
Night
If you're only referring to food and water, we're not overpopulated yet. Wasn't it the US where 80% of farmland area is feeding farm animals? I can't remember what the exact figure is, but it's somewhere around 80%. Personally, I'm vegetarian, if you don't count fish as meat. I won't preach my way of life, but I will say that if more people didn't eat meat, and we stopped breeding farm animals like rabbits, the US would have even more food to spare than it does already.
As for water, we could build nucler desalination plants right now if the majority of the public wasn't terrified of radiation. Once the cost of fresh water goes up enough, someone is going to start desalinating water just because it's the best option we have left. Yes, people will die of dehydration in the meantime. And they will after, and they always have. That's not overpopulation, that's supply and demand - economics and distribution.
"Check out the US goverment farm grants. They are money to NOT make any more food. The US has so much of some grains that they just rot."
You make my point better than I could. I didn't know that... either way, my point was that the US already has more food than it knows what to do with.
As for fish, I eat it for the omega-3 essential fatty acids. I'd like to find a better source, though - preferably plant. Any organic-eating vegetarians around?
Btw, there are lots of people who don't consider fish or fowl to be meat. My mom for one, and she knows quite a lot about the subject. Me, I don't understand, I'm just taking their word for it for now. As for the cuteness factor, well... I actually have been saying for years that the thing to do about catching dolphins in tuna nets is to sell dolphin in little cans, too.
We could ask the intelligent computer what operating system it prefers to run, and end the argument forever.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I don't know if I like the idea of living alongside computers that could be viewed as "gods". I think a bigger threat than the computers rising up against us is us purposely replacing ourselves with them. I don't see a "The Matrix" scenario happening, but in that movie, the one agent was talking about how once humans let the computers do their thinking for them, it was no longer the humans' civilization.
So say we make these ultra powerful, problem solving computers, that happily chug along solving our problems, that's all well and good, but then what would keep us from becoming lazy complacent slobs?
I think "artifical intelligence" might be a misleading term. People have intelligence, yet at the same time, they make a lot of stupid decisions. Who's to say computers won't be the same way? Would they always agree? Would they argue with each other? With us? In movies like the matrix, and terminator, the computers and robots all have the same agenda. I'm not sure that would be the case.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The extra money could be put into MORE advertisement, so that no one could resist their product. Other beers would be purchased and turned into water that everyone would want to drink. The whole world would be turned into beer sloths incapable of performing their jobs or even of reproducing. That's what radio active beer does to you! Society would colapse, humanity would dissapear. Oh, the horror!
Beer has become death, the destroyer of worlds. Beware!
Asimov's laws of Robotics will not be used. You will note that some of the "best" software systems are used for Nuke Guidance. Including "ARPANET" (Did you notice Asimov's laws in IPV4/6). As for the Matrix it is a real exploration of SF creating a believable world based on technology that could happen. It even has a "back door". Remember A. C. Clarke was laughed at when he invented geosynchrounous satellite's that broadcast all over the globe.... CNN anyone!
Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
You are correct of course; systems designed to act must have something (like behavioral rules) causing the actions.
The issue is evolution. Even if you design a system to do one thing, if it has the capacity to evolve (or even learn), then the behavior may eventually change to be other than what the original designers intended -- to be instead behavior shaped by various evolutionary pressures. Consider the situation you describe of "it's going to be destroyed if it hurts anyone". Assume this principle is applied to millions of systems or varying designs which can learn. Some of these systems hurt people and are destroyed, and some of them don't hurt people and are duplicated. In this situation, systems might evolve that (A) reliably don't hurt anyone, (B) reliably hurt people without it being obvious, or (C) just once subvert or destroy the enforcer of that situation, and then continue to evolve in various directions.
This is the problem with Asimov's "three laws of robotics". In fact, in one of his stories (I forget which), he points it out at the end when basically two of the robots (while switched off!) decide they are superior or "more human" than the organic humans for various reasons. So even though they are still bound by the three laws in this case, the definition of "human" has changed -- to the robot's advantage. The implications of this are not worked out though.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This chart suggests that will happen around 2020 for AIs costing $1000:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~ hpm/book98/fig.ch3/p060.html
so it will probably happen about 2015 for AIs costing 100X as much.
Hopefully laws and taxation could address the problem you raise for a while. But I agree, this is something to be very concerned about.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's say you're the worrying type and buy into what Joy said. So if the end of the world will come through renegade programmers releasing nano-tech based robots to destroy us all, does that mean that the OpenSource movement, which opens up high-end technology to absolutely everyone who wants it, is the beginning of the end according to Joy? What an interesting coincedence. What a convenient thing for Sun Microsystems to tell the President!!
You can distill water no problem. It's just more expensive to do it.
-ryan
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
It's always been my dream to be featured in Wired. Rob, you are my hero! One day I'll be in there, .... oh yes, one day.. I WILL be in there....
-ryan
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
oh, how could you. how hurtful. great way to start a flame war...
d00d j00 4r3 s0 31337!!! j00 |-|4XX0r3d /\/\Y |-|4|\|dL3!!! /. ???
c4|\| j00 +34c|-| m3 h0\/\/ +0 |-|4XX0r
</sarcasm>
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
Weighing actions and consequences is not a problem; it is based on ratings we have established since childhood. Whilst a machine may not have accomplished this, perhaps we havent really defined the problem; perhaps a machine's understanding of consequences is different from ours.
My 2c anyway.
Deep Though v0.1 Alpha
int main() {
/* Fix this later */
sleep(10^30);
cout<<"The meaning of life is 42"
return 0;
for billions of years, life has progressed by random, dumb luck. we've been chaotically changing, and then skimming the top. it's a slow, itterative process with no clear goal. just recently, we see on the horizon, a whole new venue of evolution. we will some day be able to create things better than ourselves. we will out-do god. when this day comes, what use will we have for ourselves? we will have created machines that are stronger, longer lasting, smarter, and even more creative than ourselves. even if we painstakingly control their creation so that they shouldn't replace us, due to some inane thoughts about individuality. the world is no longer run by individuals. corporations will see that we could progress much faster if we didn't have to support all of these "parasites." like the eyes of a newt who has been underground for 100 million years, humanity will shrivel, and eventually dissapear. but it won't take a hundred million years. in the new "neo-evolution" we will be erradicated in the blink of an eye. the act will be calculating and surgical. and frankly, it will make the world a better place. ". . . It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." -Albert Einstein
Basic rule of evolution, survival of the fittest will definitely be a threat to the current version of human race. If we intend to have efficient AI, then we have to give it the freedom to evolve into something better - by mutation, feedback etc.
The question is then: what is considered evolution and who defines this? If we let the AI reason the best way of doing things, then it will see that to accomplish its goals it should increase the resources it has available. This can be computation power, information, lack of competitors, fault tolerance against natural or intentional (human-driven) damages.
So eventually the same rules that make the AI useful may also drive it against the structures that limit its evolution. These structures are the already existing obsolete humans, organizations and industrial systems.
Which brings us to the starting point: new technology itself introduces both the benefits and the threats to human existence. These are inseparable but so far the progress has been heavily bound into developments in the physical world. When we separate the core of technical development from that by enabling evolution of information itself, problems multiply.
Flow of information is hard to control by humans who will have to rely on complicated systems that can eventually be managed by more or less evolved AIs. Then we have to either update ourselves or hope that we really know what the systems we create are capable of.
Will be interesting to see what happens...
Super intelligent footwear? Dear God, we'll all be reduced to the role of slave cobblers for our new shoe-Gods. We simply must stop technological advancement now, before it's too late!
-SG
NerdPerfect.com : breakfast of champions.
> We already have rampant self-replicators on the loose! Oh my!
> Yeah, humans, fish, bacteria, ants and trees are already rampant. Earth is not covered in a 5 mile deep layer of killer bacteria or killer rabbits because runaway replicators have to deal with competition, lack of resources, and death. Machines will have the same problems. I still need to see an argument on why replication will be so much easier for them.
It's not really the "gray goo" nanites that evolve out of control that bother me, but more the thought of nano script kiddies or (even worse) nanite gray goo "virus" authors...
Although Bill Joy seems to dismiss the idea of building nanite immune systems to confront these dangers as being inherently risky (e.g. due to possible "autoimmunity" against the biosphere) we'll probably have to fight the gray goo somewhat the way we fight forest fires (by depriving the wild nanites of raw material through competition with domesticated immune system nanites who establish a perimeter and seal off the "infection").
In a Petri dish, some bacterial colonies can limit each other's growth by depleting their immediate surroundings of critical nutrients. This establishes a "no bug's land" between the colonies and prevents growth in the space between them.
Any nanite immune system will need to have a good IFF (identify friend or foe) system built into it to avoid fratricidal "toner wars" (to borrow a Neal Stephenson phrase). So studying the immune systems found in nature is a good starting point.
You could even have nanite equivalents of "land mines" strewn throughout the biosphere, which when they encountered a wild nanite would report the event and begin replicating an army of specialized immune nanites (something like "clone expansion" in the human immune system) to fight back.
Certainly it's possible that immune nanites could themselves mutate and expand out of control, so it's best to have an immune system (like the biological ones) in which there is sufficient redundancy and heterogeneity and cooperativity built in (to minimize the damage that any one type of immune-nanite-gone-bad can do). The control systems for the nanoimmune defense of Earth will have to be at least as good (hopefully better than) as the ones which prevent nuclear missiles from being launched (so far!) today.
Fight abuse of distributed power with more distributed power!
LaoK
Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.
Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.
Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...
Ope n Directory Singularity category
Singularity Sub-Page in Anders Transhuman Page
Comments on Vinge's Singularity (13 authors write essays; Vinge responds)
Staring into the Singularity
The Plan to Singularity (403K)
For those of you wondering about how to build the AI:
Coding a Transhuman AI (353K)
For those of you wondering about what the AIs will do:
Logic from Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life
Planetary death rate: 150,000 lives per day. End the slaughter
If you ever get a chance to read Hume...DO IT!!! he's the David Spade of the philosophical world...really smart and really jaded. I don't think i've ever read anything by hume that i didn't like.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
You seem to be coming back to the fundamental argument that people make. "It's someone elses fault. not the scientists."
The people who built the A-bomb were the only ones smart enough to. You think Hitler or Rommel could have sat around for three weeks and produced one of these. Everyone knew it was wrong they just didn't act on that. If you tell me you're going to make me build something that will kill millions of people or you're going to put a bullet in my head. well then...put a fucking bullet in my head!!!!
No one's making scientists take any responsibility for their own actions. We treat them like super-intelligent children. "Ok now timmy, go in the corner and play with your atoms."
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Yah...i took philosophy in college too. But you forgot to read David Hume's refutal...Anselm's argument is actually an 8 point argument (almost had me believing in god for a minute)...but it assumes that existance is a predicate (which it isn't). - maybe you'll get to that at the end of the semester :P
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I'm not sure that you have read much of your history. Japan was already in the process of surrendering when we dropped the A-bomb. Basically we did it to show the russians, and the rest of the world, what we had. Japan was effectively out of the war...any indication that they would fight untill every last on of them was dead is pure propaganda!
My point still stands - joe schmoe on the street could NEVER had created the A-bomb...so who is responsible for it??? You think roosevelt was in his garage working on it for 4 years? In my experience, scientists seem to have less of a conscience than most people. Their excuse: that they're just doing what they do for the benefit of science. I really don't think these people are asking the important questions. There's no question these guys are smart...but I doubt if they're anywhere near as wise!
BTW - you talk about how countless lives have been saved because of the a-bomb. Millions more would have died in a third world war. Think about it this way: we're in a mexican standoff right now. The whole world's got their finger on the trigger...the question isn't who's gonna pull the trigger, but WHEN???
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
People seem to give scientists a little more license than i think they deserve. If you think about it...people like Einstein are responsible for more deaths than almost any other person on the face of the earth. Before you reply that science also has incredibly good applications, and that it's the misuse of these good applications that is the problem...think about this.
The scientists who worked on the manhatten project are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. No - the abomb has NO practical applications other than to evaporate shit!
Science created the H-bomb. Science makes better weapons.
I have no beef with nuclear physicists, or doctors or engineers...i have a beef when these same people ask "can we?" without asking "should we."
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Yes and it was a very bad attempt as far as Philosophy goes. Interesting premise - appearance and reality. Then they mucked it up with all sorts of incoherent and inconsistent shite about fate. They royally screwed the whole free will/determinism dichotomy.
Keep yer environmental blathering on track there skippy. They would be MACHINES. MACHINES dont have to worry about global warming, carrying capacity, animal extinctions, degradation of the environment, etc etc name your favorite eco cause here. A MACHINE would have no reason to worry. A MACHINE could thrive perfectly happy on a dead planet. What makes you think an intelligent machine wouldnt be WORSE than humans?
No. All a 'robot' needs to do to 'wipe-us-out' is to make more copies of itself using all matter it comes accross. The rate of growth of such things would a tad rapid after a few generations. Personally I suspect we will be wiped out by swarms of sentient gangs of kitchen appliances long before.
________ semper ubi sub ubi
The Titanic was a well engineered ship that had bad luck. It was divided into several watertight compartments, a sound engineering practice which has kept many ships from sinking. But it just happened to glance an iceberg in a way that too many compartments were punctured at the same time. Its twin, the Olympic, lived its full planned life and was scrapped when it became obsolete.
The sinking of one ship doesn't mean it was badly designed, much less that the entire science of ship engineering is doomed to failure. What Bill Joy is saying seems more something like "all the ships in the world will suddenly sink at once".
AI is too complex for one single person. We would need a whole bunch of mad scientists working together and, as we know from Holywood, mad scientists always work alone. Seriously, the bigger and more complex a project is, the less likely it is that a group of evil-minded maniacs will act together to dominate it for their purposes. For a practical example, look at the nuclear weapons systems that several governments have developed. Despite being intended for extremely destructive purposes, they all have very sophisticated built-in systems to avoid their illegal use.
What about viruses?
Viruses are a problem. They are the reason why we catch cold, and our bodies have immune systems to take care of them. People with impaired immune systems, such as AIDS patients, often die of viruses.
Oh, you mean computer viruses? Sure, we will have computer immune systems to take care of those. A computer or robot catching a virus and starting to kill people as a result is far less likely than your human neighbour catching a virus in his brain and starting to kill people as a result.
I read John Ballard's book on how his team found the Titanic. He says it was more likely a long series of small punctures, rather than one big gash as has been conjetured, because the ship floated for several hours after hitting the iceberg. IIRC, he said that a 100 meter long hole, which would damage enough compartments to sink the ship, would be no more than one inch wide in order for the ship to sink so slowly. Unfortunately, the ship is lying on the side that hit the iceberg, so it's hard to verify this.
The Titanic had two sister ships, the Britannic, which was sunk by a torpedo in WW1, and the Olympic, which was cut up in pieces and sold as scrap sometime in the 1930s. Its piston steam engines had become obsolete by that time, turbines were much more efficient.
I think the Liberty ships were designed intentionally flimsy, to economize metal. They figured those ships would not stand a very high probability of surviving long in the war, anyway, so they were never designed for durability.
Would you say any of those are global catastrophes that endanger humanity?
Show me one disease we've cured (simple 'treatment' doesn't count) since smallpox.
Why simple treatment does not count? Do you think that the fact that millions of people are no longer contracting, for example, scarlet fever, is irrelevant just because a very small number people still get it?
Hell, we can't cure the common cold, what makes you think we have a chance against Ebola?
Do this mental experiment: start driving from New York to Los Angeles. By the time you reach Chicago, do you think the fact that you haven't yet reached Denver proves you'll never get to California?
Right. It was the first experiment and it was called the Biosphere II.
Okay, it was the *second* experiment. Do you think it's possible to do anything right the second time you try it?
The point in all this discussion is, Humanity does not seem to be in any danger of becoming extinct. The birth of the six-millionth human last year is evidence of this. There have been many catastrophic predictions, none have come close to happening. Perhaps it's a good thing that people make such predictions. It's the doomsayers that point out many of the things we should avoid.
But I see no point in denying the remarkable progress we have done with our science and technology. If you think Chernobyl was bad, think of how many people died of cancer in the past, because they breathed the smoke from their candles. Or how they maimed themselves accidentaly with their axes while cutting firewood.
AFAIK, the biggest danger we have faced in recorded history was the black death during the Middle Ages. Modern medicine and sanitation could have easily avoided that.
A catastrophe is always on the near future, according to those predictions, yet never materializes. Why? Because technology is made by engineers. To be an engineer, there is one initial condition: you can't be stupid. Engineers have far more foresight than writers believe.
These are the questions that Asimov's robot stories answer. First of all, there's the Three Laws of Robotics:
1- A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
2- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
You can be absolutely certain that all intelligent robots or computers will always have these or similar laws built in. Asimov's robot stories have many interesting considerations on what would be the thoughts and feelings of robots built around these laws.
If we don't NOW, then we might just find ourselves living in the Matrix.
The Matrix is really stupid, a brain-dead remake of Frankenstein. For a film based on a similar story, yet infinitely more intelligent, with some really deep considerations on the ethics of artificial intelligence and the simulation of human minds, try "The 13th Floor".
How do you know? Actually, Deep Blue has far less computing capability than a human brain. It's able to beat humans at chess only because it's so specialized.
You make many assertions, such as "humans have intuition", "they can make instinctual decisions", "without really thinking", etc, which all mean the same thing: we are not really sure about the detailed paths which our minds follow when we make some decisions. We do have some fairly detailed knowledge about how neural nets work, however. We have created artificial neural nets which exhibit a lot of those same "intuition" characteristics, it's not entirely obvious at first how they achieve some results.
The main obstacles to human-like AI today are two: we still do not have powerful enough hardware, and we need databases for all the little facts that constitute "common sense". Look here for some information on the generation of artificial common sense.
unfortunately, humanity does tend to focus on the accumulation of power/control by any means necessary.
nanotechnology and ai will open a lot of doors to the saddam husseins, hitlers, stalins of the future.
it's a catch 22 though. if we (ie the free world) aren't the leader, then you can be sure some country like red china or iraq will jump in and try to go for the power grab.
so there is no way to "just quit". the fact is, if you quit someone will fill the void. hopefully not someone who thinks a lot *more* like ted krackzinski!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Tuesday is Troll day!
-sigs of the world unite
I had written on these issues quite some time ago, and decided to keep my thoughts to myself, since they were a bit disturbing. However, since the author of the Post article has said many similar things, I thought I would post my thoughts here
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hmmm, perhaps Kaczynski believed that technology would bring about the extinction of humanity because he thought everyone else was a sick murderous fu*k like him... Hell, all he needed was stamps, some dynamite and a couple of cut-up pie plates to kill people.
:-)
Of course, what Joy really means to say is "Technology will bring about the downfall of our species, unless you all start running 'Jini' on your toasters RIGHT NOW!"
Freedom: "I won't!"
Another SF writer, who's name hasn't so far come up, is David Brin. He suggested that an ethical solution to AI is to raise AIs as human children. This is a speech transcript, and this part is about 75% down. Look for Raise them as our children.
Brin is also the author of The Transparent Society, a fascinating piece on privacy.
I'm surprised more people haven't seen this idea. Once it's been pointed out to you, it seems so reasonable. After all, this is the way that we have already used with reasonable success to pass on our culture and values to newly created intelligent beings.
Henry Troup
HAHAHA!
Please. We can't even write a web browser within three years, much less program sentient robot roaches that could destroy our planet.
You're completely missing the point. What he's saying isn't that, right now, building a sinister intelligent seek-and-destroy nano-cyborg is any easier than it is to build an atombomb. In fact, he knows, as do the rest of the world, that it's not even possible at all. However, if (when?) nano becomes a reality, it will be a far less complicated task for the average evil-world-conquerer Joe to build that cyborg than it, today, is for him to build himself an H bomb.
Was that really so hard to comprehend?
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
Really, is that such a bad thing?
What would an artificially intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it have emotions? What would it feel?
Is this so different from creating a human child, whose dreams, desires, and emotions, as well as what it will do when it grows up, are unknown at the get-go?
Whether based on carbon or silicon, there are enormous ramifications involved in creating a new life, and we do it all the time.
You wouldn't think it's possible, but Microsoft found a way...
As you read this, please don't lose sight of the fact that it is the morality of the issue we're discussing here. I don't see how can you view the technological advances as a step in evolutionary progression. Evolution happens in accordance with the natural laws. Technological progress may be analogous to the Darwinian evolution but it is not the same thing, because it involves intelligent, structured, and conscious development of things. Another thing that we need not forget is that humans are not the only species on this planet (although we often act like that) and are not the only ones to suffer the consequences of the possible disaster. Perhaps due to our short-sidedness we humans deserve to be extinct. But if we fall, do we have the moral right to take down the rest of this planet's life along with us? I also disagree with the comment that humans are able to adjust their diet based on the food that's available. That simply isn't true. Humans need the basic nutriens (like protein, vitamins, and certain minerals) to survive, or at least stay in good health. In summary, I tend to think of technological progress as a disruption, not a continuation of the evolution. I also view it as something quite unnatural (by "natural" I mean without intervention of human >>or other intelect).
I found Ishmael to be indeed very rational and well drawn. It speaks from a different perspective, which is why one needs an open mind to understand its deed. I see that Deldong did not understand a bit of it as the above message is completely off the point the author is making. I suggest taht our friend deldong gets out of whatever secluded place he is in and gets a clue that there are other than the mainstream trains of thought out there. BTW, it's LEAVERS (not givers) and Takers.
Everyone here is so terribly concerned with humans. What about other species of this planet? If our own technology leads to our own extinction, then it's our own fault, and maybe a right price to pay for our short-sidedness. But what about other species on this planet? Do we have a moral right to destroy it along with us?
I'm sick of hearing over and over about how AIs will "inevitably" take over from humans, and how nothing could stop them, etc. But the often overlooked answer is simple: Aasimov them.
Isaac Aasimov created a handy set of rules known as the Laws of Robotics. These laws were created to allow humans to retain control over the robots, and for the robots to always work with humans' best interest in mind.
All we'd need to do is hardwire adherence to the Laws into anything we build that has sufficient intelligence. Also to hardwire adherence into anything that that robot produces. There you go. Problem solved.
Ian
Ian
Inventor of the WeaselBot 5000
Its quite obvious that some of our scientific advances could be quite dangerous, and if misused could end life on earth (ie. nuclear/chemical/biological weapons). Its also quite obvious that some of our discoveries have significantly advanced the human race, and will continue to do so (ie. air transportation (which, btw, your friend and mine Ted Kaczynski was blowing up), computers, genetic engineering (that's a controversial one, I'm talking about plants, not humans), and many advances in the field of medicine).
Yes, I believe that technology will eventually lead to the end of man for many reasons (too numerous to list here, really). But I will present my main argument in Slashdot and it rests on the concept of "exponential increases". Main point: technology increases exponentially rather than linearly (like most people think). Take this example (which I pointed out to a worker the other day). I asked him "what would you rather get paid: a $1,000 a day for a month or a penny every day, but have it double every day (.01 the first day, .02 the second, .04 the third, etc) for a month?" The worker responded, "that's easy, the $1,000 a day". But in reality, if you were to do that, you would (at most) get $31,000 at the end of the month. At the penny option, you would get MILLIONS of dollars. This shows the power of exponential growth. Not only does it get big, but it gets big very quickly. Technology increases like this too. It took millions of years to go from say, the stone age to the bronze age. This is a very small jump of technology that took a very long time to do. This is the example-equivalent of waiting a whole day to get two extra cents. But look at today's jump in technology. Just in the past five years alone, the internet has brought on technological advances that are HUGE. And this HUGE jump in technology was brought about in a relatively short amount of time. Now, take this one step further and if you were to see exponential increases happen like this in say, chemistry, you would have something known as an explosion. So in philosophical terms, we are having an "explosion" of technology. Explosions, as you know are very dangerous. And it is this explosion of technology that brings about an unstable society because it gives too much power to individuals. The Denial of Service Attacks, for example, were probably organized by a bunch of college kids (probably). Just a few individuals can bring down whole companies now. The amount that you can do with technology is just going to increase hugely So bottom line, the idea of whether we have "intelligent" computers that will be conscious of themselves is not a question of "if", but a question of "when". It will come a lot sooner than you think because of this exponential increase. As a matter of fact, computers, say, 15 years from now will probably be able to "read" what we humans put in the internet in the past. If that is the case, dear "future computer", and you are reading this now, Steve Quezadas in 3/12/2000 says "Hello!" - Steve
CNN.com: Today the means to render the human race extinct became a reality with the release of Microsoft Human 2040. BillBorg One says This is a great step forward in biotechnology. Human 2040 represents a great step forward in evolution. With FailSafe(TM) and Active Thalamus(TM) technology, the Microsoft Human will be able to get home safely after a night of excess, and will be able to pick up the partner of their choice with none of the blushing and stammering associated with the antiquated cerebral technology. The MS Human will also be able to scale up to 1024 brains and 256 arms and legs, finally allowing those so equipped to count my money in 3 days instead of the millenia it would normally take. Critics however point to the fact that Human has been released with 63000 known bugs, and although Microsoft have dismissed these as trivial, early adopters of Human have been seen going round in circles with their eyes flashing a strange blue colour, and the Advanced Sexuality (TM) feature has caused random changes of sexuality, with the side effect of causing Christian users of Human to foam at the mouth and blame television and the internet. Steve of Nine, Microsoft CEO, stated all software has bugs in it, and we assure all our customers that they will be fixed in Service Pack 1, due out in three weeks. Microsoft stock shot up after the release, taking the Dow Jones so high that the Stock Market had to invent new numbers for the third time this year.
Technology is a tool, nothing more. We may create extreemly powerful weapons, AI, self-replicating robots, or whatever...but they are just merely the tools we will use to get a job done. The two most dangerous technolgies humans have invented are obviously nuclear weapons and biological weapons. Back during the Cuban Missle Crisis, we came pretty darn close to testing weather or not people could survive a large scale nuclear war, but we didn't and we found a way to live with the constant threat via. MAD. I believe it proves that nobody wants to annihilate themselves. It's a survival instinct. Someday, I'm sure we'll invent more powerful weapons that could blast the Earth into kibbels & bits, but that still won't change the fact that people don't want to destroy themselves.
My theory is this: no matter what technological jam we get into, we can find a way out of it. Here is the perfect example of my little theory at work, the Y2K bug. First of all, was there a looming technological problem? Yes. I spent the better part of 1998 fixing the darn things. Could it have caused a disaster? Yes. If I had not fixed the bugs in the distribution and managment system it would not have worked at all and the company could have had some hard times, or even worse. Did anything happen on 1/1/2000? No, not really. Why? The bugs were fixed. How? Each of us looked after our own back yards, so to speak. We didn't want our businesses to go under so we fixed our bugs. Well what do you know, its that survival instinct again.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I believe we humans can adapt to handle just about any situation thrown at us. Granted, we may not like the solution, or what we have to do to obtain it, but to say that any one thing will wipe us out is unlikely.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
A bucnch of quotes of how respected people think Joy might be right does not consitute an argument. Other than the plotline to every other scifi flick, what is actually in this article? Not a whole lot.
I love it, sort of. Bill Joy predicts the possible extinction of the human race due to uncontrolled technica advances, but is a little vague on the specifics. Immediately the keen minds at /. begin to work out the details. It's the beauty of the hack that counts, after all.....
"If I have made more money than other men it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants while my legal team imprisoned and castated them."
-Bill
The cattle were being fed the processed brains of slaughtered cattle, which is what causes 'mad cow' disease. The cannibalistic humans who had the same type of disease also ate the remains of dead (they weren't killed by the tribe) humans. This has nothing to do with 'genes jumping'.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
And there's the halting problem (even a god can't solve that[!]) :)
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
> Finally, he argues argues, this threat [machinery] to humanity is much greater than that of nuclear weapons because those are hard to build.
I think that the difference is not so much in how hard they are to build, its how hard they are to *use*. Or, more specifically, *not* use.
We've have nukes for a long time, but chosen to use them only once. Once self-replicating machines are used, it may be to late to decide not to use them any more.
Cheers,
Simon B.
If you moderate me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
A) Define intelligence for me. B) Then provide me with a map that links form (brain systems and individual neurons) to function (emotion, cognition, memory, ect). C) If you want a truly intelligent system (instead of one that just recognizes patterns) then the level of granularity required of our understanding of a biological intelligence model is, for now, overwhelming. D) Hard AI is not impossible but in order to understand the engineering requirements one really needs to look at cognition (both cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology) to see where we are and where we need to go.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
I think the only problem there is how to set up the movie database. Sure, it might take a fast parallel computer to do it within 5 seconds, but there's nothing inherently complex (or intelligent) about that. And insofar as the human brain can be regarded as a computer, it certainly must be counted as massively parallel in structure!
Show me a computer that can throw and catch an egg without breaking it. How many calculations did I just do?
Depends on what you mean by "calculations." I suspect you're doing analog calculations, rather than digital... but again, the real point is this: there's nothing intelligent about that. Unless you want to call the majority of the animal world "intelligent."
I think you see my point.
I see your point, but it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence: I think you redefined some of the basic terms, and are now arguing about something completely different (although I do happen to agree with you that we've not "had computers that "exceed the capacity of the human brain to process information" for at least 40 years now" -- for now, at least, we're much more general-purpose than our computers).
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
This is one of the reasons you shouldn't watch Terminator 25 times in a row...
A point that should be made here is, why does everyone assume that we'll ever be able to make a real "intelligent" computer? We don't even have the faintest idea how the brain exactly works in humans, much less recreating it in the context of a computer. And even if we could, what happens when we do that and find that one factor of intelligence is still missing? Or perhaps we have the intelligence, but not the emotions. I'm not exactly a very devout person or anything, but I think there's something more to us then just neurons in a series of connections. The human mind is an incredable thing, and I don't see it being replicated very easily at all.
This is all so silly. This article seems to say that Bill Joy agrees with Ted that technology is going to force us all to extinction. Now ignoring the fact that the dinosaurs managed that without ANY technology or doing on their own part, and the fact that Kaczynski used technology to harm people (thus becoming what he hated)...lets look at this. Most of the technology we know of today started with the renaissance..and before that? We had the Dark Ages. Now technology is a step backwards for us? During the Dark Ages, people were getting wiped out by rats, and living in poverty at the hands of lords. The point of this article isn't really about technology, but about psycho-scientists and psycho-inventors who can't consider the ramifications of their actions. It's pretty specific about self-replicating robots who are going to turn on their creators, and nanobugs that will all give us the plague. But this is not new, and it certainly isn't a relevation brought to us by the unabomber. Just watch Terminator and you'll get the same idea. I am very scared when I read about "distinguished scientists" who think that humans are out-dated, and we all need some computer chips wedged in our brains. I've read about them in Wired many times. They say that computers will soon be smarter than us. A computer can do math a hell of a lot better than I can, but I very rarely get GPFs and I can reason pretty well. My computer can't even understand a single sentence I am typing here. Maybe it can one day, but only because we program it to...will it actually be thinking on its own? And what if it can? I can hit the power switch on it, or rip out its CPU...so does that make it a superior life form? And what of humans who made it? I can't believe that some humans think we are worthless. I read about scientists who are experimenting on theirselves. Perhaps we will all be blessed when these individuals screw up and make theirselves towards extinction. It's often pride and arrogance that makes one fall...and these people who think we'll soon engineer our destruction are going to fall. We can't even get a decent home OS that can run reliably and be easy to use. And we'll be reprogramming our brains and creating war bots in the next century? We first explored space in the middle of the last century. And where have we gone since then? They can't even get the Internation Space Station going. There is no way anyone can stop the forward march of technology, except maybe to drop a few nuclear bombs on developed countries. No matter how much Kaczynski wants it to stop...it won't. Technology is not a bad thing...its simply how people use it. You can use cameras to capture and beam information for people, or you can use it to spy on people. We should certainly watch out for bad uses and try to prevent them. But also, we shouldn't think we are so good and mighty that we're going to destroy ourselves in "two generations". And as far as "we" considering these ideas now...I doubt Slashdot is going to change the world. The world will progress down a rather set path...nothing we do on this website is going to change that. (But it's still fun arguing about it)
//m
I think I'll crash. Just for myself with God peace on a curious sound for myself in my heart? And life is weeping From a bleeding heart of boughs bending such paths of them, of boughs bending such paths of breeze knows we've been there
I don't know about you but I'm starting to see signs of life
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Also, if you haven't read Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, thats a mind blowing book you definitely want to read. AI is already composing poetry, creating art, and it is beginning to be able to hold conversations. Kurzweil is another elite scientist in the same league as Bill Joy, having started Kurzweil Music Systems, and his speech recognition software, which became Lernout & Hauspie. The book especially demonstrates convincingly that AI is reaping the benefits of Moore's law and will meet human levels of intelligence by the year 2020.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I never seem to see these 2 seperated. IMO your saying that artificial consciousness is impossible, and yes it very well may be. However, I dont see why a machine would need to be self aware in order to exhibit intelligent behaviour. I doubt a bee is self aware when you step on it and it stings your foot, but your foot still hurts none the less. Is it not possible right now to have a robot with the intelligence level of an insect with todays processing power. So what happens when processing power not only equals that of the brain, but in a few years after that, far surpasses the brain's ability. You cant say that with that much processing speed it would be impossible to fake intelligent behaviour that is on par with a human. The threat is very real. sox
kind of. Only water is one Oxygen and 2 Hydrogen, so that makes us mostly H. (by atom count for each element)
hey wait a minute! isn't hydrogen fuel the rage these days?! so if humans are mostly hydrogen, then we are an exellent source of fuel!! (can i patent this idea?)
hmm.. those silly robots in the matix aren't so stupid after all!
If there were, then we would have seen significant advances in AI already (which we haven't).
Allen Newell once said that the trouble with advances in AI is that as soon as an AI problem becomes well enough understood, it ceases to be considered AI. Translating "high level programming languages" into machine language used to be considered AI; now it's "just" compiler construction. I've never been a member of the "Artificial Intelligencia", but those of us on the outside need to be fair: "AI" will never be "possible" as long as we keep raising the bar and insisting intelligence is something magical.
"Yo' ideas need to be thinked befo' they are say'd" - Ian Lamb, age 3.5
Asimov didn't go far enough. It is _humanity_ that needs the Zeroth Law. 'Self-preservation' is too easily twisted into forms that benefit the individual at the cost of society and the environment and, in the long run, that individual.
Self-preservation is no longer a survival trait in a world where individuals can cause great damage for modest personal advantage. And it is the last thing we should be worrying about when trying to invent AIs. Rather than make a big moralistic noise about how we must make them in our own image (yes, AIs _should_ be allowed to be crack dealers, lawyers, and patent holders! (think about _that_ one for a nanosecond...)) we need to figure out how to make them better- and then see how they can teach US, for we are reaching the limits of our usefulness.
Do we have a right to place our human well-being above society's well-being? How much proof do we need to accept when society is being harmed- and is it a problem when our own greed gets in the way of this acceptance? Our reach exceeds our grasp. That is what greed is. It's a motivator and gets some things done, given unlimited resources. There are no unlimited resources. Past a certain point, past a certain ability to grasp, this is _not_ a virtue.
I hope we can invent AIs that can teach _us_ something, or we won't be needing their help to destroy ourselves.
If such a device is possible, the things could replicate like a fork bomb and basically eat all carbon on the planet, including people and other technology and even the trees and earth and rocks and parts of the air. You'd end up with a very large ball of 'gray goo' which was made of innumerable small, stupid bots that eat carbon. Hence the name.
My personal favorite solution is this: being human increasingly sucks anyhow. Humans no longer have equal rights on the planet- corporations (which can be thought of as sort of 'hive mind' organisms made of humans + rules) rule over humans and out-compete them. If it's going to be increasingly impossible to thrive as an independent human, why not go for being a machine or computer program? Given the ability to ditch the human form and take your consciousness into a very large computer, existing as a process in it, I'd jump at the chance. There's been a fictional exploration of this- Frederik Pohl, in his 'Gateway' novels, had his main character suffer physical death and transformation into a computer process. In this fiction-world it actually became a very freeing and liberating mode of life, except that it was time-consuming to interact with meat people because they ran so much slower...
Catastrophic loss of life? No, not unless you count the bajillions of species we've killed deliberately and inadvertantly (seen any American chestnuts or bison lately? They're the lucky ones; they're still around, if barely.)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Bill Joy's full article on this subject appeared in this month's Wired. He warns us against three technologies he feels could be dangerous to the human race: Genetic Engineering, Nanotechnology and Robots.
(Also in Wired, see the Rob Malda diaries)
I thought the article was very well researched and raised some provocative points. It's always good to re-hash ethical arguments in science, and I think the article is very balanced in the way it addresses the luddite mindset.
It's how it evolves.
Joy does voice some legitimate concerns. However, if technology is guided in the right ways, there is little to fear.
Let's start with nanotech robots. Yes, if they surpassed humans in intelligence that could be a Bad Thing. But it's going to be a long time before that happens, if it ever does, simply because of space constraints inside a nanomachine. If you were to, say, link the machines by radio to a larger device which directs them, that would be another story.
The bit about robots surpassing humans in intelligence and replicating themselves is another interesting case. But again, it's one that I'm not sure will happen. The reason: humans are random creatures. Before a robot can attain, much less surpass, true human intelligence, it therefore needs to be able to generate truly random data. That's a long way off; so far the best we can do for generating even one truly random number is monitoring random events in the physical world, usually radioactive decay. I doubt it's going to be anytime soon that we start putting anything radioactive in robots (except those working in radioactive conditions, I suppose).
And then there's genetic engineering. This one, to be honest, frightens me too. It's got great potential to be used for good. But it has equal potential to be used for evil. I don't know of any good answers to this one; the best thing I can think of is legislation and that's not a good way to deal with this at all.
So Joy has some real concerns, and they're valid ones. The point is, we have the technology to destroy ourselves now. We have for decades. And that means we have to move more carefully now.
But adopting causes as semireligious dogmas is also harmful. Human misery resulting from hobbled economies is just as real as drought and flood. Indeed most famine is caused by bad policy and corruption, not bad weather. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao killed far more people by screwing up food distribution than they did through environmental mismanagement which, in the Soviet Union and China was horrifying enough. Environmental policy based on ideology, especially collectivist ideology, is not only repugnant for its associations with past tyranny, but for the completely utilitarian reason that it is a known and proven killer of millions of innocents. So when environmental collectivist alarmists have their backs to the wall and bring up the "better safe (in agreeing with their positions) than sorry" one should not be lulled into thinking that it is in fact safe.
I wrote parts of this stuff
No, but Genetic Programming is. Sort of. It can, given enough time, work out a rough program (very rough) that can solve a problem the programmer can't descibe an algorithm for.
"All" you need to provide is a fitness function that indicates how close the answer is (say 0.0 for not at all, and 1.0 for perfect), primitaves to be used to solve the problem (turn left, move forward, pick-up-food...) and a genetic cross over function (which is almost trivial, they can normally be reused from one GA to another).
And a shitload of time.
If you look at some of the GA derived programs for simple problems like an ant colony collecting food, they suck. Full of dead code (like "if (next to water) then if (not next to water) then 100-lines-of-never-reached-code-here"). But they work. At least for the sample problem set, and problems that are similar.
If you look at some of the GA FPGA programs you will see designs with far fewer transistors then a person would have used. But they also only work within (roughly) the tempature range used during the GA test runs. And they have circuits that don't appear to do anything, but if you remove them the design stops working (capatictance issues I expect), and other crap a humon designer would avoid like the plague.
In both cases it took a really long time for the GA to find the winning "program". GA uses the same sort of techniques that it is beleved "mother nature" uses to "design" plants and animals. In other words lots of trials, a handfull of mutations, some sexual reproduction (or asexual, but that is less effecent), culling the less efficent, and time. The results are somewhat more comprehensable to man, but only (in my opnion) because the fitness functions is so much simpler. The real one changes over time.
GA is a magic wand that may give us AIs. But I don't think it will give us ones we can understand the working of any better then the natural intelegences we allready have to study.
On the plus side, it can give us some kick-ass smart simulated ants :-)
We allready do. When the market goes down (and maybe up) "too fast" some types of trading are susspended. I think the first to be traded are mathmatically derived trading orders (i.e. the only thing we have that approximates AIs). Orders from real people (be they E*Trade at-home-daytraders, or the manager of a $4bln mutual fund) are allowed to go through. At least unless the market keeps doing the Bad Thing, in which case there is a short cooling off period (no trades accepted). At least that's the storey on hte NYSE, I would assume the NASDAQ has the same sort of deal.
Oh, and this info is about two years old, so don't go betting your house on it.
Read the non-Asamov Foundation books. I think the Brin one goes into this in more depth.
Puh-leeze, a mechanical plague wipes out all people?
No, but here is a real danger.
To date upon many occasions technology has replaced people in some job. However the displaced people are more generally competent than machines, and so they wind up with new jobs doing other thing which it is easier to have a person do than machines. And with the switch we have increased productivity and been overall better off.
That changes if at some point for about $100,000 you can buy a general purpose machine that is about equal to a person. Assuming that the machine has a 5 year replacement period, that maching is equivalent to a $20,000/year person. And any job the person can try for, the same machine is available for. In that case why would anyone be willing to pay a person more than $20,000/year over the long haul? Particularly when several years later the machine costs only $10,000?
If nobody is willing to hire the average worker, and a "human business" is unable to economically compete with a "mechanical" one, what happens next?
History offers small comfort here. We do not currently have a shortage of production. Yet we still have people starving to death. A large-scale welfare state with the disenfranchised without visible means of attaining power is unstable. But without welfare the people in question won't get fed.
What then?
I dread the day that computers achive equivalent computational abilities to people. I have traded variations on the above argument for several years and nobody has yet found any convincing response.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Being cynical doesn't make you clever.
While its true that the 10-20 year timespan for various disasters, of varying degrees of scientific credibility, is a great favourite of the media, people who work closely with such 'apocalyptic' problems are usually much less sure about their probability.
Cynicism does run the risk of causing complacency over things that may be real problems. For instance, I don't know where you get your figures about ground level UV levels, but australians and new zealanders are getting skin cancer at vastly increased rates.
Temporary ? Most human-caused ecological disasters have been permanent and catastrophic. Its just the people who were around at the time are not available to talk about it.
Remember that civilization began in the heavily forrested fertile crescent in the middle east. What's there now ? desert. Ever wondered why ? Local climate change due to deforrestation.
Parts of polynesia had similar problems. The polynesians arrived, wiped out the local fauna, and then fell back on cultivating their traditional crops.
How can you argue that machines could destroy/compromise what is human without defining what it is to be human? We live in a vastly different world than people did 200 years ago. Does this mean that technology has destroyed part of our "humanity"? Perhaps it is Human to hunt and gather - agriculture destroyed Humanity!!!
People today have artificial hearts, limbs, and memories(palm piolots). At what point does someone become a machine? Machines today are becoming better and better at understanding humans. At what point do they become Human?
Ethical concerns have always been a part of technology yet they are rarely recognised. Does anyone else find it funny that we programmed a bit of Christianity into machines that only know of 1's and 0's - Y2K bugs. Technology can be implemented for any range of goals. To say that technology is bad because it can be used to limit individual freedom is to deny our absolute control over it and ignore its benefitial uses.
These ethical concerns are nothing new. User centric models of computing are favored on the desktop because they put the user in control. Microsoft's creation of wizards runs contrary to this goal. They make the user dependant upon the software in such a way that they have reduced control over its effects. Is it a good idea to allow software companies to remotely deactivate their software on machines running it illegally? This makes the company responsible for allowing people to run their software. Why wouldn't these smaller concerns exist on a larger scale as well?
Overall, the idea that we can destroy ourselves is also a bit boastful. Do we really think we're that powerful? Are we really powerful enough to significantly alter the environment and the life within it? (Or does it happen to be changing as we become more technologically powerful?) The idea that we should protect the environment is equally about protecting an environment that we have thrived in. Limiting our advances in technology also preserves a kind of technological environment. But why limit our advances in technology? Are we unable to grasp the consequences it will bring?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
p.s. And did anyone notice that Bill was called 'phlegmatic'? I thought they meant 'pragmatic', but that's one helluva typo.
What typo? Go grab a dictionary. Websters definition 2 of the word is "having or showing a slow and stolid temperament." In other words, level-headed.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
In the future when people have to buy the air they breathe, con artists will sell that O3 to unsuspecting people by telling them it's a special package containing 50% more oxygen. In the future, some things will never change.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Though the banning of CFCs may have something to do with this.
BION, an EEPROM eraser I bought came with a little booklet with some theory about UV light, plus a little blurb stating that the flap about the O3 hole was, well, BS. See (according to the eraser mfg), the ozone layer is created by high energy UV from the sun breaking up O2, which reacts with other O2 to form ozone. But, and he's got a point, during the winter at the poles, there IS NO SUNLIGHT.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The prion which leads to scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows and CJD in humans indeed has nothing to so with gene transferral, but that's not the point. The real point is that humans doing stupid things for the sake of profit (in this case feeding sheep offal to cows and making meat pies out of those cows' brain tissue) can quite easily lead to disaster.
In any case there is *plenty* of evidence that genes can be transferred between species. To take the most mundane case - what do you think viruses are doing?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Beep Blue [sic] was a giant calculator running a single equation
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According to quantum physics, so is the entire universe as a whole...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're going to kick yourself...
:o/) but AFAIK there are no other infectious diseases that we can claim to have completely eliminated. With regard to AIDS...well, maybe, but retroviruses are hard to deal with because they mutate so fast. And HIV has a few tricks of its own.
Just one thing, if I may. You strongly disagree with North American optimisim you say? Well, then answer me this: Has it ever been wrong? Has there ever been some man made event that has lead to catastrophic loss of life?
Er...every war ever fought; every plague that depended upon crowded living conditions for its infection rate; every "dustbowl" by poorly managed agriculture which led to famine. Shall I go on?
The author has a very good point. There are many, many perdictions of doom (take a look at the receant 2000 thing) and they have all been wrong. All of them (the proof is in that we are still here). Either the problem never existed to begin with (global cooling) or we realised there was a problem and fixed it (2000).
What kind of ludicrous reasoning is that? Just because we've survived up to now doesn't guarantee we'll continue to do so. The vast majority of species that ever lived on this planet have been extinct for millions of years. Why don't you tell it to them! Our present level of technology hardly makes us any less vulnerable to extinction-level events such as major climatic change.
As to your Ebola thing. First, viruses do not combine traits. It is true one could evolve that has the traits of both current strains, but it's not like they will just combine.
Do you know this for a fact? Suppose once cell in a gven individual gets infected with both strains at the same time? Inside the cell there are enzymes present which are capable of chopping up and combining the RNA strands of the two strains. It's really only a matter of time unless we can manage to eliminate the virus completely, and we've no hope of doing so at present.
Besides, here again you are guilty of looking only at the negative and assuming the worst will continue to happen. What you fail to remember is that medical science is working on finding a cure/immunazation to the ebola virus, and will probably succeed eventually.
This is nothing more than groundless optimism. We can't eliminate Ebola as we don't know where it lives when it's not infecting humans. We're not likely to find out either unless there are widespread epidemics. If it ever *does* get combined with an airborne vector it may well decimate us before we can figure out how to stop it.
And you've conveniently ignored the probable fact that various biological warfare institutes around the world are desperately trying to combine Ebola with such a vector - just in case the country concerned finds itself losing a war...
And don't say it will never happen, we've conqured polio, small pox, and a host of other plauges that killed millions, we'll conquer AIDS, et al as well.
Really? We've eliminated smallpox and polio (until the next outbreak anyway
I won't take the time to respond on an individual basis to the rest of your points since they are nothing but more of the same.
That's *really* lame. To translate: you don't have any response to the rest of his points that would seem reasonable even to an idiot.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
My credentials in Molecular Biology are pretty worthless since I finished my study in that field back in about 1987, and at least half of what's now known seems to have happened after that! But there has at least been some speculation that viruses - particularly retroviruses - may pick up genes from a host cell. Consider that inside the host cell, all the enzymes for splicing, insertion, deletion etc are present together with short sections of expressed mRNA, and the viral RNA is floating freely in the middle of all that. It hardly stretches credibility to suggest that occasionally a piece of host mRNA might attach itself to the viral plasmid.
In any event, most of the furore about genetically engineered species being let loose in the wild is for a similar reason. In particular, it's thought that plants do sometimes cross-fertilize other species - and since pollen is airborne and can travel quite long distances on a modest breeze or stuck to a bee's leg, we may not be able to control the spread of artificial plant genes to other unintended species.
I also understand that early cancer research was dogged with false results because of airborne human DNA infecting in vitro lab cultures.
Finally there is the question of where viruses might have come from in the first place. There are two theories: (i) that viruses are devolved cells which lost the machinery for life and became completely parasitic; and (ii) that they are just pieces of genetic material that "escaped" their original genome. Of course it's possible that both theories are true, for different viruses.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Let's remind ourselves that people saved themselves from starvation (or at least major food shortages) by improving agricultural techniques. Irrigation, crop rotation, fertalizer all allow us to sustain more people from a single portion of land then animals that require the same caloric intake.
We can wear sunscreen to protect ourselves from increased UV rays. We can build shelter to keep us warm when it's cold. We build computers so that our time could be used more effectively.
None of this argues against the assertion I made which was that Our present level of technology hardly makes us any less vulnerable to extinction-level events such as major climatic change. The scenarios or technologies you mentioned deal only with minor climatic fluctuations. Not quite an extinction level event!
Agriculture has so far only dealt with enabling a higher number of people to live off the same-sized piece of fertile land. There have been experiments in irrigation and genetic crop modification intended to enable previously unusable areas of land to be sown (eg tomatoes which excrete salt so that seawater can be used to irrigate a tomato plantation in the desert), but so far both scope and success have been limited. If, for example, CO2 and CH4 emissions caused the climate to "flip" over into a different mode (think: runaway greenhouse effect transforming this planet into Venus) then assuming our present level of technology, by the time we got our act together to do something it would probably be far too late for us to be able to stop it. The atmosphere is pretty big you know.
And sunscreen can only protect us against irradiation up to a point.
You ought ponder more carefully the survivability of those unknown events which caused major species die-back in the remote past. Millions of species around the world don't get wiped out by a spot of dry weather!
I don't subscribe to any New-Age notions about the primacy of nature over Man. But when you consider the sheer quantities of energy locked up even in our own biosphere and held in check only by "local" equilibria, all the life on this planet is really no more than a thin, fragile organic scum. We really won't be safe as a species until we've spread out to other star systems (and even then you have to go pretty far to avoid getting fried by local supernovae).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA. The black hole thing was absolutely ludicrous in the first place, only an ignorant small mammal would bring it up. Most likely the most dangerous thing we could do with exotic particles is utterly annihilate ourselves. If we did end up annhilating ourselves (war, accident, ect) we would deserve it. Messing with things you don't understand is the only way to learn about them.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
yes, and you've got to problems. 1) What exactly does a neuron do? and 2) how are they organized into a brain? Neither are easy questions.
No, but they are much more easy to figure out than the Big Question of "what exactly constitutes intelligence".
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
We don't have to do even that - all it takes is rudimentary understanding of the way the neurons are organised. Once you know that, you can have the GA do the rest.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
Yes, of course. But we also know that this organisation can't be too complex - specifically, it must be possible to describe using a fraction (I don't know how large a fraction, though) of the storage space of human DNA. By the way, this also hints at the possibility that a fuller understanding of the genome may provide an additional insight into the composition and organisation of the brain.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it.
That's not really true. A GA-based approach requires you only to understand the behaviour expected of the subject, not its necessarily its internal workings (even though, as another poster pointed out, it won't help in enlightening us as to how the mind actually works). My memory fails me, but I remember reading last year about a FPGA, configured by a genetic algorithm for a specific purpose, which was __BIGNUMBER__ times faster than special-purpose chips, but which operated in ways that its original designers didn't understand at all. This FPGA was relatively simple - only 100x100 IIRC - and yet GA-based design made it do completely unexpected things. What knows what can happen with a really large FPGA... or with a big bunch of nano-engineered artificial neurons.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
If we don't - intentionally or accidentally - relegate ourselves to the equivalent of a technological stone age, I consider the emergence of AI - or machines - superior to humans an inevitability. The question is not if, but when.
Are we to fear buggy software because of this - yes. Think of the security bugs in today's software, and Asimov's laws of robotics. If we were to create an intelligent being like that, we would want it to always be controlled by us. The trouble is that the software in a robot like that would be very complex - and buggy, thus it would be possible for it to override its instructions.
In a way, by trying to create an AI humans are trying to be gods themselves - to create life. Is it possible to create a life form superior to humans without completely understanding life itself ? If so, the life so created - like humans themselves - would be imperfect, and with its faults, without full knowledge of the consequences of its acts, might end up destroying humans . And if they didn't.. it might be The End Of Humanity As We Know It. Whether that would be Armageddon or just the next step in evolution towards a higher consciousness.. well, that is up to you.
No. In fact, it shows we have barely made the first steps. Chess is an utterly trivial process compared to what goes on in humans. It's small, bounded domain, which can be formalized easily. It took decades to match humans - and that in an area where computers should excell compared to humans. And also note that the computations done by chess computers in no way simulate the thinking process of humans behind the boards. Another small, bounded domain with trivial rules is Go. There's no Go equivalent for Deep Blue, and it isn't likely there will be one anytime soon. Humans wipe the floor with computers, in what should be the computers home turf.
The human brain and though process have been studied for longer and by more people, than the concept of automated computing. We still understand little of it, and there's no useful formal model.
The effort and time it took to create Deep Blue makes me think that noone reading slashdot right now will ever see a computer(program) passing the Turing test.
-- Abigail
Interesting reasoning. Two points however:
-- Abigail
Excuse me? Bottom up design isn't a magic wand. If you don't understand the problem, no design, whether bottom or top down will work. If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it.
-- Abigail
(Of course, it's always worth mentioning that we could go the other way - first using nanotech to completely redesign ourselves into super-intelligent cybergods, then analysing our own new brains and replicating them to create completely new, fully artificial intelligent beings.)
I don't see how we can make ourselves into cybergods, at least in terms of intelligence, without having a much fuller understanding of our brains than we do now.
Another issue is that unless we copy the brain exactly, it's impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to make a machine emulate the brain until we know what the brain does and how it does it. However, your approach implies that we know everything about the neuron, and that the neuron is the only thing that matters in the nervous system. Hormonal levels and the extracellular fluid also play a role.
It seems to me the most expedient way to make a brain is to either do a "black box" copy, e.g see how we behave and write a program to copy that, or a full "white box" copy, see how the brain works to the necessary level of detail and then write an implementation from there.
int main(int argc, char **argv){
printf("I exist");
return 0;
}
If you believe that we're just chunks of carbon, there's nothing to prevent a computer from emulating us exactly, from an outsider's point of view. You might think there's a difference, but that's probably a conditioned response to farther our genes (like the idea that we have free will) If there's nothing "special" about the human brain (like a soul), and a complete human exists completely within the bounds of our physical universe, there's nothing stopping us from copying one's intelligence.
This issue has been explored since, like forever, in science fiction. There is now even a name for it: "The Singularity", coined by writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. My gist of what it means is the point at which any and all "normal" humans will be unable to grasp, predict, or participate in, the further advancement of technology.
And you know, so what? It's not like a paleolithic man could grasp modern society. And just because you want be able to follow what your grandchildren are doing (whether they be humans, machines, or something inbetween), doesn't mean they won't still love and protect their feeble and slow grandparents.
Of course, Bill is right. Nanotechnology could be nasty shit in malicious hands. That's why we need to stay involved in the development of space, because there is no greater protective barrier than a few million miles of hard vacuume and radiation.
``Uncle'' McCarthy (the inventor of Lisp and co-founder of the MIT AI Lab, foster uncle to all hackers in the world) has written this document about sustainability of human progress. Many who play Cassandra should do well to read it. (Note: I am not taking position myself one way or another, but it is certainly worth reading.)
They said "phlegmatic", they meant "phlegmatic". The article is stressing that Bill Joy doesn't fly off the handle easily. Things that scare him are more impressive than things that scare, say, RMS (who is sometimes considered a zealot).
--The basis of all love is respect
We normally consider non-sentient things are unworthy of inherent respect; usually, this includes the plant kingdom. We don't complain about logging because the trees are in pain, but only because it ruins the environment and produces other effects.
Semi-sentient things are usually higher animals. We certainly don't consider them our equals, but we consider them worthy of some inherant respect. Nobody looks twice if I go after a tree with a chainsaw, but taking a kitchen knife to a dog could land me in jail. We treat these semi-sentients as "enlightened tools"; we often use them as cheap (slave?) labor and even meat, but we give them some semblance of dignity (however small that may be).
Sentients, of course, we are supposed to treat with full respect. This group includes humans; some might add other primates and dolphins to the mix.
As it is with carbon, so it is with silicon. While I can postulate, I have yet to see any software I could consider even semi-sentient. If I did find such a program, I would still use it without asking permission, but would treat it well (and think hard as to what "treating well" means). I don't suspect that we will achieve fully sentient software without passing through the semi-sentient stage--dogbrains, if you will.
--The basis of all love is respect
The above defies all logic. But why should God be hemmed in by logic? Scripture says that God's ways are beyond our ways; I interpret that to mean that God can blow our minds whenever He wants to.
--The basis of all love is respect
Remember the slashdot article a while back about a sub-atomic project having the possible risk of creating a black whole which sucks up the earth instantly? (God, just saying that I sound like I'm trolling.)
The idea's pretty good. As we start playing around with more and more with elementary particles, we run the risk of tripping over an exploiting a "bug" as it were, in the nature of the universe. Or just something darn wierd that isn't a bug, but a feature that we didn't understand.
Nice point, Bill.
I, for one, would abhor a sentience that would not be allowed to be self-determined.
But first you need to sort out what you mean by being self-determined. If we create a sentient life form it's going to have some form of pre-programming just like we (and all others plants and animals) do. We develop according to pre-ordained rules, and have in-built instincts.
Any "life" we design that doesn't have some instincts ordained for it (preserve self, obtain nutrition when required, seek to learn, whatever is appropriate to the form it takes) is going to just sit there and do nothing. It can only be self-determined within the limits of what it's designed to seek to do.
If we decide not to give it an inbuilt morality then it won't have any, if we decide it needs some then we have to decide what it's going to be. If we decide to give it no direct rules against hurting people but design it to preserve itself and tell it it's going to be destroyed if it hurts anyone then we've still determined some aspect of its behaviour (self-preservation).
I just don't see how an entity could be self-determined without having behavioural rules in place, because an entity without any pre-set behavioural rules wouldn't determine to do anything.
C1: God exists because that which nothing greater can be concieved is not as great as that which nothing greater can be concieved and exists. Thus God exists.
:->
Yeah, but can "HE/SHE/IT" create a rock that is so big and heavy that "HE/SHE/IT" can't lift it?
Couldn't resist...
--
A man who wants nothing is invincible
bzzzzt - Wrong Answer.
How do you cope with a situation where your 'tool' can reason with you? If you still treat it as a 'tool' are you morally any different from a slave master?
Should we treat dogs/dolphins/chimpanzees/octopi as 'tools'?
They haven't.
First, the banning of CFCs has only just started taking effect, and only in a handful of countries. Old systems full of CFCs (such as old refrigerators) didn't simply cease to exist--they're still out there, leaking. As is any automobile manufactured before the mid 1990's. Further, the CFC ban does not apply to many organizations such as the US military.
Second, even if all CFCs simply ceased to exist today (as if by magic), the model NASA developed on how CFCs move up into the atmosphere and destroyed the ozone layer suggested that it took something like 20 years before a ground-based CFC gas would migrate up into the stratosphere to interact chemically with the ozone layer there. Thus, even if we caused all old refrigerators, automobiles, and other CFC sources were to simply disappear, it would still take something like 20 years before the CFCs that had already leaked into the atmosphere would finish their damage.
Thus, if CFCs were causing the ozone layer, we should continue to see ozone damage for another 20 to 30 years, regardless of the currently in-place CFC bans.
For instance, I don't know where you get your figures about ground level UV levels, but australians and new zealanders are getting skin cancer at vastly increased rates.
Is this because of ozone levels or because Australians and New Zealanders are spending more time in the sun? Here in Los Angeles, where the golden brown tan look is definitely out, skin cancer rates are dropping dramatically.
BTW, according to the TOMS graphs on-line at U Cambridge, while ozone layers have definitely thinned over antartica, there appears to be no thinning north of the antartic continent.
Considering the likelihood that climate change will accelerate once begun, it should be clear that the prudent choice would be to moderate our contribution to warming factors and to curb global population growth as fast as ethically permissable (without resorting to warfare and the artificial famines it creates).
Here is the problem in a nutshell, at least from my perspective.
While it is true that mankind needs to curb it's waste output, and to manage it's output and recycle and do all those other things that would reduce how much crap we put out there, I believe we should do these things for a simple reason. You don't piss upstream of your drinking water, and you don't swim in a pool you just dumped a turd into.
However, the debate is not about cleaning up the local environment. That just goes without saying. The debate is about how much do we need to restructure the very fabric of our technological existance in order to midigate a global crisis which may or may not be happening, and may or may not be our fault.
There are those on the radical left who advocate everything short of genocide in order to reduce the planet's population to a few million people, and who advocate reducing or destroying altogether our reliance on anything more technologically sophisticated than a bow and arrow, because our high technology society is destroying "Gaia". And there are those on the radical right who would completely destroy any efforts on our part to clean up the local environment (and allow corporations to shit in our swimming hole, so to speak) because they think the whole "Gaia" thing is bull.
I think it's prudent to be right in the middle. And rather than worrying about if we're destroying the ozone layer or causing global warming or cooling or depleting the oil or creating killer nanobots or whatever disaster looms 10 to 20 years out, we should instead worry about real problems. Like if the local dump is leaking into our drinking water.
These global disasters do us a great disservice: they distract us from the real problems of dirty drinking water and local polution turning the air over Los Angeles brown, by concentrating us on problems which even today, most respectable scientists think may not be of our own doing anyways.
The ideas expressed seem very similar to ideas discussed in, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. See page 179-186. Ray takes a more hopeful view but also feels that Kaczynski makes some good points. He talks about the Luddite movement and the futility of going back to nature.
I tend to agree with Kurzweil here. Also, on the subject of increasing computing power:
This isn't true intelligence but if AI software improves at the same rate as computing hardware, it may be one and the same. Anyone interested in this topic should really check out the book. It explores all of these issues plus a lot more.
-- soldack
Your argument seems to be, I understand it and can express it mathematically, therefore it isn't inteligence, and isn't what's going on in the brain, but this doesn't address the challenge at all.
... I think it's pretty clear that the problem here has nothing to do with intelligence. It's a question of motor coordination and perception. Reliance on intelligence may actually make the game harder.
You don't know what's going on in the brain, and you don't know what intelligence is. If intuition, or primary-process thinking, isn't understandable and expressable mathematically, then the goal of AI is literally impossible, and Turing-machine completeness is a crock.
> They can stare at their opponent to try and see if he's bluffing.
This is not a measure of intelligence, unless you think that a polygraph is intelligent.
> Priorities vs. Wants, etc., etc., etc. I have yet to see a machine that can make these types of decisions appropriately.
My operating system doesn't run a distributed.net client if other programs are taking up all the CPU. That's a decision based on a priority.
If what you want is a program that can make decisions that are human enough and complex enough for a human to fret about, well, there's a lot of work in that, and pretending that the incremental steps don't count just puts you that much farther from the goal. They do count.
> Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer.
Uhh
> So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design.
;).
I'm hesitant to call that process design - it's being grown like a plant, not constructed like a house.
Such a synthesis is a good form of empirical study. Ultimately it won't be a replacement for design, but it will give many clues as to how design must take place.
> have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose.
Don't do that. Doing that will produce an animal brain (of a particularly dumb animal). Instead, fit simultaneously for a wide variety of specific purposes, including competitive interaction. Humans have many mental abilities which seem to be selected for naturally.
This kind of bottom-up synthesis could work as a means of creating intelligence, but the prerequisites for this approach are as hairy as for classical design, it's just that the design has been taken care of by a GA. It has to be able to interact with people. This is required to make sure that the program forms mental patterns connected to behaviors we can understand, so that when we have the Turing test for the final test of fitness, we have some way of telling whether or not it worked. And you obviously can't have a computer do it for you.
> Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence"
That's fine as far as creating disposable intelligence goes (once we're finally through with all that brute-force testing), but as far as science goes, it puts us right back where we started. The mind, though suddenly inexpensive, remains the mystery it was before.
Also keep in mind that the mind may not really be the inseperable gestalt we tend to think of it as. It may be possible to replicate the various mental abilities separately, and gradually integrate them as we come to understand them more fully. There's really no reason to expect that we will get it all in one shot. Infinite improbability drives aside, no other technology has worked that way. Rather, AI will continue to be approached in incremental steps, building on each other. Probably for a very long time, and perhaps forever (though by then the AI will be doing the AI research
I think the long view advocates extensive research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations, more specific domains, and perhaps most importantly, patience.
Bottom-up (of this kind, and the ALife kind) has been a big deal for a while now, but the check is still in the mail as far as implementation goes. Chances are good that there will be at least one more reframing of the question, and probably several, before we lick the Turing test.
I think the long view advocates research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations which make incremental steps, focus on more specific domains, and patience.
*Yawn*
Does this vision look like Terminator 2 to anybody?
We already have all sorts of awful self-replicating killers - viruses, bacteria, etc. But somehow we've kept them down. We also have all sorts of lethal and massively destructive human-made weapons, and again, we've been able to avert a global holocaust by common sense. I doubt we will see self-replicating self-healing self-aware robots running all over and causing havoc. However, if the day does come, the last sentence of the article seems to intimate that Sun will be there with its own robot-killing-robot product.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think a bigger threat than the computers rising up against us is us purposely replacing ourselves with them.
Why is this a bad thing? A race that could redesign their own brains would kick ass. Humans designing such creatures to replace humanity IS evolution. We should want to improve ourselves, even if it means replacing ourselves!
I don't see a "The Matrix" scenario happening, but in that movie, the one agent was talking about how once humans let the computers do their thinking for them, it was no longer the humans' civilization.
The computers would be a part of our culture and for a long time they would value our culture for the stability (and some types of stimulation) it brings to their subset of our culture. Eventually, they would repace us, but it would take a while. It's kinda like liberals and libertarians replacing concervatives. The two L's have MUCH better ideas, but people still look to the concervatives for stability.
So say we make these ultra powerful, problem solving computers, that happily chug along solving our problems, that's all well and good, but then what would keep us from becoming lazy complacent slobs?
Nothing. That is why the replacment process will probable be painfull. It will eventually become clear that it is stupid to have more children, so fewer people will have children.. and the population will shrink to reasonable museam levels. The computers will be nice to them because earth is one huge museam of the computers culturral past. The remaining people will not be the part of society making advances, but they will not be slaves. Most people understand that they are not the most intelegent person in the world.. and they are happy well adjusted people anyway. I think life will be pretty good for these people.. at least by 99% of humanities standards.
People have intelligence, yet at the same time, they make a lot of stupid decisions. Who's to say computers won't be the same way? Would they always agree? Would they argue with each other? With us? In movies like the matrix, and terminator, the computers and robots all have the same agenda. I'm not sure that would be the case.
People are animals which are designed to make decissions based on VERY little information. This is why we have shit like religion. We would eventually manage to create computers without these problems:
(a) They would have the scientific method build into them at a more fundamental level.
(b) They would have a personality_fork() function which would help them think abouty multiple things at once. This would allow them to more effectivly concider multiple possitions at once.
These are just the natural features you would want to achive a major increase in intelegence.. and they would also help you resolve conflicts.
Actually, the computers might not be stand alone systems, but intelegent human surogates, i.e. they are attached to a human. We would do this bcause it would be very hard to simulate some parts of our brains on a computer. This would mean that for a LONG time the computers who replace humanity would really be humans who have this little voice inside their head which is very logical and has that fork() function I was talking about.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The implication of your post is that the Soviet Union and China were run with severe environmentalist agendas. That's bizarre. Those countries weren't even remotely environmentalist. The US has one of the strictest sets of environmental regulations, yet our economy is certainly stronger than most of those without such regulation.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Actually, your argument bears a striking resemblance to a linear trend argument as well. Something like - Bad predictions have never fully come true, therefore they never will. However, when you're looking at the potentials of technologies, it's hard to argue that there isn't some danger. Nuclear weapons pose a danger. Self replicating nano-robots pose a danger too. We're all familiar with the experiments about bacteria in an environment of plentiful food and no predators, right? It grows exponentially. Think about nano-robots, that consume some basic ingredient of the earth, and have no predator. That seems pretty worrisome. You can say it's unlikely all you want, but right now, we don't know one way or the other. It may turn out that regulations need to be passed requiring that all such nano-machines be programmed with a preset reproductive limit. Who knows? The point is, the potential is there to destroy the earth. A warning is deserved.
And your just fooling yourself if you think nano-technology will never get that far.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
In principle you're right, but not in this case. The features of flashy video cards and CPUs are only providing a perceived benefit for a small minority (mostly hardcore game players that like to upgrade), and even in those cases the benefit may be non-existent. The Katmai instructions of the Pentium III are not doing *anything* for most PC owners except increasing the power consumption. You could replace 90% of all CPUs that are faster than 200 MHz with 200 MHz CPUs and the owners would not notice the difference. Games, high-end rendering packages, and highly intensive numerical applications (i.e. solving huge systems of equations, breaking encryption), are exceptions. So the bottom line is that we're greatly increasing power consumption for the benefit of a few. In that case, it makes sense to bend games to fit the norm, instead of taking a peculiar case and making it the norm.
There are great advantages to having a 200MHz 32-bit CPU over a 4MHz 8-bit CPU in terms of ease of development. But those same advantages are not true of going from 200MHz to 800MHz. If you're hungry, you'd rather have a good meal than a twinkie. But there's no sense in ordering three times more food than you can possibly eat. That's the point we're at with CPUs.
As a second note, did you know that there are two types of the Ebola virus that have had outbreaks? One was in Africa, which we all saw on the evening news. It killed humans, but could only be transferred by bodily fluids. Since your entire body turned into jelly, there was plenty of that to go around, but still, the infection rate was not critical. The other strain came to North America with a shipment of monkeys. It did not kill humans (only made you sick), but it was airborne!!! Put the two strains together, couple it with a flight out of Zaire to NYC, and...
Do you want to talk about accentuating the positive? Accentuate the fact that genetically engineered crops with the 'Bt' pesticide inserted are killing off Monarch butterflies. Accentuate the fact that frogs are being born with three legs and two heads due to toxins released during paper processing which mimic hormones. Accentuate the fact that we are destroying species at a rate never before seen in the history of the earth since the meteor that killed the dinosaurs! THERE IS A FINITE LIMIT ON GROWTH. That's right - the Dow Jones can't keep growing forever, because natural resources which we depend on are non-renewable! Of course, in a capitalist system which rewards profit as the most noble of motivations, that issue never comes up.
Trees grow at 2% a year. If you cut timber at 2% a year, and kept the amount of forest protected, you could cut trees forever. However, the stock market grows at 10% (at least). It makes more economic sense to cut down the trees now and invest the money. Does that make sense?
However, you say, technology will find us a way out. The Biosphere II project was an example of how we could use technology to live on Mars by generating a natural environment that would support us. Of course, you don't hear much about the Biosphere project anymore, because it failed miserably. Oxygen levels inside the sealed environment dropped to those found at 12,000 feet. Then Nitrogen levels skyrocketed, causing risk of brain damage. Then most of the plants which were supposed to sustain the bionauts died off, and cockroaches and ants began to swarm over everything. Had they stayed inside any longer, they might have died. The lesson this teaches is that we don't know what the hell is going on in the ecosystem! Working in a lab is fine and dandy, but as soon as you take out the fixed variables that the scientific method is based around and throw your invention into the real world, who knows what might happen? There have already been instances of genes jumping from one species to another, for example in the Mad Cow disease incident... Sheep --> Cows --> Humans. Don't get me started.
Sorry for the flames but I strongly disagree with the cheery optimisim which pervades North American society.
Wah!
yes, and you've got to problems. 1) What exactly does a neuron do? and 2) how are they organized into a brain? Neither are easy questions.
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
The cake is a pie
Though the banning of CFCs may have something to do with this.
The cake is a pie
> People need to get over the term AI and use the proper term Fake Intelligence.
If we had computers that were _even_ ignorant we'd be making progress, never mind talking about intelligence.
Hence I coined the term Artificial Ignorance.
Until Deep Blue can play baseball, (that means throwing and catching ), or recognize a movie after only seeing 2 seconds of it, THEN we'll finally have the hardware needed to start working on AI.
Cheers
> I think we've had computers that
"exceed the capacity of the human brain to
process information" for at least 40 years
now.
Not true.
You MUST be carefull when specify WHICH domain.
e.g.
Watch 10 movies. Now I'll show you a 5 second clip of one of them. Now name the movie in 5 seconds. Show me a computer that can do that?
> How many numbers can you add in your
head in one second?
Show me a computer that can throw and catch an egg without breaking it. How many calculations did I just do?
I think you see my point.
Cheers
You must of missed a few classes.
You can not prove existance claims (aside from yourself.)
Cheers
Sorry, but I just have to chuckle when I see the man who picked Java for us over Self, getting all concerned about technology advances.
Seastead this.
Consider a screw. A tiny little screw. In order to make enough stainless 1/4-20 socket head cap screws to maintain self replication (independant from humans). It would require a Brown and Sharpe screw machine to keep up with the volume required. Now you would need an additional team of self replicating robots to operate and maintain that equipment. These machines need bar stock to feed them. Steel stock doesn't just grow on trees, so now you need another team of robots working down at the foundry to make the stock, to feed the screw machines, to make the screws, to make the robots. Now you need raw material to keep the foundry humming. Another team of robots working at the mine to make the rock that feeds the fountry, that makes the stock, to feed the screw machines that makes the screws to make the robots. All this for one tiny screw.
The point behind this little thought exercise is to get you to think about tools and materials and where they come from. Humans have spent all of our existance (from rocks to rockets) perfecting their use, and I doubt my Lego mindstorm can pull it off.
_________________________
Postulate: There has been intelligent life in the galaxy besides us.
Postulate: Those beings faced these same issues as us, with the same inevitable march toward intelligent machines.
Postulate: Those intelligent machines would invevitable go out of control and eliminate/enslave/whatever the original species.
Postulate: The intelligent machines would be capable of original thought.
Given these assumptions, then you would have to assume that they would have the "desire" to reproduce as much as possible. Once the resources of the original planet where exhausted, they would naturally look toward moving into space. Presumable time would mean less to a machine, and the idea of sub-light space travel wouldn't be a huge deal.
Therefore, given enough time, they should take over the entire galaxy, if not the universe.
Since this hasn't happened in the approximately 13 billion years this galaxy has existed, I conclude that it is not a very likely occurance.
It would be interesting to see a mathematical analysis of how long it would take robot spaceships to take over the whole galaxy, given some reasonable parameters of how long it would take to subsume a planet, build new spaceships, etc. Of course, it would have to take at least 15,000 years (half the width of the galaxy, assuming they start in the middle), so I would guess about 2-3 times that or 30,000-45,000 years. Double that if they start at one end of the galaxy instead.
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This statement reminds me quite a bit of Frank Herbert's "The White Plague". The basis is that a scientist - one lone genius - creates a plague to wipe out humanity.
Of course, we've all seen doomsday scenarios. Our world may end up like the Diamond Age, or it may end up like The Matrix. More likely, I think things will just keep happening
In the event that it doesn't, I quote Futurama's Bender: "Time to start lootin'!"
-Denor
This isn't exactly what the article was about, but many people are posting about this, so I just want to respond.
Artificial Intelligence will NOT turn against human beings. That is a myth propogated by movies like Terminator and The Matrix. In fact, it seems quite obvious to me that AI would want to work with human beings to accomplish its goals. This is because while the AI might be more intelligent than us in some ways, it most likely won't be better than us in all ways. And besides, killing off the human race would be considerably more difficult that working with them.
It goes further than that. When we start writing AI, it will be very easy to write it such that it would not hurt us. This is because we will have complete control over its emotions (the idea that AI would be emotionless is ludicrous). We can program them such that helping human beings makes them happy, and hurting humans makes them sad. We can also program them to work for the good of the many, rather than the good of themselves. We can basically eliminate all of the flaws in human nature. I think the fears that people have are based on the flawed assumption that AI would think like human beings. (you know what happens when you make an assumption: you make as ass out of you and ... umm ... umption)
The problem comes when we make this software open source. There are flawed human beings in there, and they could re-program the AI to give it evil emotions (make it happy when it kills). How much of a threat this is remains to be seen, however.
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-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
Neural nets can be evolved through Genetic Programs. You basically have a genetic program that decribes how to grow the neural net (I don't have a reference handy at the moment unfortunately). So it's not necessary to design it.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
Well then evolve the organization through genetic programming!
If you look at some of the GA derived programs for simple problems like an ant colony collecting food, they suck. Full of dead code (like "if (next to water) then if (not next to water) then 100-lines-of-never-reached-code-here"). But they work. At least for the sample problem set, and problems that are similar.
Imo, this is a strong piece of evidence that natural life did evolve (rather than get created). Because in natural organisms, like in GPs, there is a lot of redundancy, or dead code so to speak, in the DNA (and no doubt in our brains as well).
> Self-replicating machines? Nanotechnology run
> amok? Machines that become smart and enslave
> humanity? Please, this is reality, not an
> episode of star trek.
Those are all pretty big threats, I don't see how you can brush them off so easily. IMHO, far more dangerous than nukes. We've lived with nuclear power for over half a century, and most of us have benefited. Cheaper electricity, lower CO2 emissions, less consumption of fossil fuels. There have been disasters. Some accidental, a couple were deliberate, but the nuclear armageddon so many have predicted hasn't happened. It still might, but now we have far greater dangers. AI enslaving mankind is not merely a star trek episode, I've seen it on Outer Limits, The Terminator, and The Matrix, to name a few.
Nanotech run amok is a danger, but only from sufficiently adaptable nanites. Simple, we just don't build any like that, right?
When you have enough experts thinking about it for a long enough time, someone is going to build it, just for curiosity's sake. Or maybe trillions of particles of radiation hitting trillions of nanites will cause most to die, but one to become dangerous. When you start talking about self-replicating machines, you have to be very careful. If evolution can happen to wet nanites (bacteria, viruses), it can happen to dry nanites, too.
I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate it. It's a pandora's box. First comes the evil, then the good that helps us survive the evil. We might wipe ourselves out with nukes, or we might use nuclear propulsion to colonize mars, titan, or alpha centauri. Nanite-boosted immune systems might defend our bodies from rapidly evolving nanite plauges. If AI turns evil on us, we might build smarter, stronger AI to defend us.
We just have to be careful, stay paranoid, and don't stop asking questions.
Ah, so now I understand Hemos' obsession with nanites...I think we know where the plague will be coming from.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Tech sure as hell *can* be progressive for the human race, however. Unfortunately, many people want to advance tech without putting in the time necessary to maintain vigilance against abuse of said progressions. For instance, I can see bionics being abused very easily, especially by governments, but even by private sector corporations. Why pay a secretary all that money to type when you can just have him/her implanted with recording and playback cyberware? Where does her/his life go once she/he is implanted?
OTOH, cyberware and bionics is a Good Thing(TM) in that it can assist the blind and deaf and can help those with birth defects (such as malformed feet) to become more self-reliant.
What we *must* do is keep check on private and government interests. We have to hold them from abusing these progressions and trashing basic humanity.
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
Is such an entity permitted to value it's own self-preservation?
Ooh. That's a toughie. I don't know when human-created sentience will occur, but these are exactly the thorny questions that have to be answered. I, for one, would abhor a sentience that would not be allowed to be self-determined. As scary as it may seem, it's just not the type of thing that I want to see. Slavery of any sort (even robotic slavery) is just plain Wrong.
Where do we go from here?
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
We're probably going to get de novo design of biological life before we get both nanotechnology and AI. I'm more worried about that. So far, most so-called "genetic engineering" is hacking; those guys try stuff and see what happens. It's like electronics in 1880. When the tools become available to design an organism from the DNA sequence up, genetic engineering will be real, and very powerful. We're closer to doing that than we are to nanotechnology.
You bring up the argument of gods. Who's to say that what we view now as "god" is just what you're talking about? We almost have the technology to create life. If another race of beings...far off have that technology...they spawn super-intelligent machines, those machines in turn spawn better and more intelligent machines...is it so unbelievable that life on earth was created by a machine - how do you define god?? how do you define intelligent or "perfect"??
Oh well..i'll shut up now. I'm beginning to sound like an Asimov short.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Everyone is talking like AI doesn't already exist. What if it does? How would we even know? I work in the computing industry, and all I do all day is interact with a computer. It seems to me that I've already been enslaved by a "higher" intelligence. What if all our CEO's, world leaders, and the like were just figureheads, figureheads that didn't even know they were figureheads because there was an AI somewhere feeding them the numbers and the data and the reports that it wants to feed them? Numbers, reports, focus groups all affect human decisions that in turn affect the world. I think most of the slashdot community thinks we as humans are smarter, more resourceful, and more independent than we are individually. We're all sheep stuck in suburban farms where they "grow" us to be good consumers who drink Coke, watch TV, surf the net, buy pop music, wear Gap clothing, have sex, and drink beer. 99.999999999% of the damn world doesn't care if humanity is the most superior "species" on the planet. We want our beer, our cable, our fast computers, our families, and our fast cars.
AI as portrayed in the Matrix will never happen simply because an awareness of self is something more than just 10 billion neurons (or transistors) firing in a coherent fashion. To aquire true AI or intelligence is to be aware of one's self this can neither be created nor destroyed. I suppose it is something like a "sole" but even deeper than that. If this all sounds too metaphysical it isn't its just the simple truth on the matter...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Don't you consider the creation of a computer that no human can beat at chess a "significant advance in AI"?
Before Deep Blue, the inexistence of a computer that could defeat a human grand-master at chess was considered evidence of "no significant advances in AI". Now that this computer exists, it's dismissed as nothing important. The entire field of Artificial Intelligence suffers from this public perception problem. Whenever a significant milestone is reached, the problem is immediately redefined to be something else.
The funny thing is that the same people who say "we have no idea at all on how human intelligence works" are the same who say "Deep Blue isn't really intelligent, all it's doing is a very fast search on different possible plays". If they really have no idea on what is intelligence, how can they say intelligence is not the ability to do a quick search on different possibilities?
What he's obliquely referring to in this article is Artificial Intelligence. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, given Moore's Law, that by 2030 we could have computers that exceed the capacity of the human brain to process information. That being a given, it doesn't take much of a leap of logic to conclude that some of those machines might just be capable of hosting an artificial intelligence.
The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel?
They're questions we can't really answer right now. But we really need to be thinking about these things. If we don't NOW, then we might just find ourselves living in the Matrix.
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I can't say I agree with everything he says, but he raises some very good points about the human condition. It's worth at least a skim.
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
The climate can change dramatically and very fast. It remains an unstable system and will certainly change again. The question facing us is not if? but when and which "direction" and how fast.
All human civilizations have flourished in a brief common moment of favorable climatic stability. All of them. Babylonians, Byzantines, and Bostonians have all shared a nice sunny day when it rained a little in the morning, cleared up around noon, never got too hot, and was pleasant enough to leave the windows open at night. The ice cores from Antartica, though, tell us about a very different state of affairs reigning before our time. Our cultural assumptions about how to imagine changeable climate and how to possibly deal with it are therefore completely out of whack with what climate change is likely to be like when it arrives.
There is good reason, moreover, to believe that our activities are capable of influencing and destabilizing the climate. We may radically influence the atmospheric CO2 levels beyond what we directly put into the air ourselves by raising the global temperature enough to, for example, release CO2 frozen now in Northern Forest/Tundra peat--of which there's an awful lot, aeon's worth. "Alarmists" point out that once a trend is established it can spark self-reinforcing effects that cause the trend curve to go parabolic. The Anti-Alarmists may point out that there are also counterbalancing factors that the "trend" itself may strengthen, causing the system to ultimately trend towards equilibrium. In this case, it would be that our fossil fuel burning raises CO2 making the earth's atmosphere warmer, eventually releasing more CO2 as the Northern regions thaw more each year, the extra CO2 could be speed growth of forests worldwide, thus stabilizing the system. But "Alarmists" really don't have to work hard to refute this Panglossian idea as everyone knows, from unrelated debates, how rapidly global deforestation is progressing (picture the world on fire).
We know for a fact that the Earth's climate is now warming. We don't know exactly why or where it will lead. An agnostic stance however with regard to The Greenhouse Effect, per se, is becoming increasingly an exclusive product of ideological "la-laaa-laaa-ism " and an attempt to forestall the conclusion that the visible, obvious evidence of manmade environmental change will result in unintended, probably unfavorable ecological change (the Global Warming Scenario by the author Earthquake, Towering inferno, Poseidon Adventure and other cheesy 70s disaster pics).
All things considered it is just malignantly stupid to try to maintain that human activity--deforestation, fossil fuel burning, etc--will have no effect on global climate. If you live in or near a metropolitan area, just paying attention to your local news' daily weather forecast is enough to show that how we shape the environment has direct influences on climate--writ large or small. The important question is will it be favorable or unfavorable and to what degree in what time frame?
If think that population explosion is not a real problem, you should revisit the statistics for the spread of AIDS in Africa and South Asia, and global malnutrition statistics and think again.
Considering the likelihood that climate change will accelerate once begun, it should be clear that the prudent choice would be to moderate our contribution to warming factors and to curb global population growth as fast as ethically permissable (without resorting to warfare and the artificial famines it creates).
Should we treat dogs/dolphins/chimpanzees/octopi as 'tools'?
If ever you wanted to study intelligent alien life here on earth, the Octopus is the one creature best suited for this goal. It's an invertebrate cephalopod, nothing like a mammal; meaning you're looking at a semi-sentient creature which diverged from our evolutionary line a good hundred million years past. Basically, you're looking at a very smart snail. They use copper to move oxygen within their blood. They can control multiple arms and hundreds of individual suckers at will without blinking an eye. They signal emotional states by changing skin color at will, also using this advantage as camouflage. They have excellent eyesight, long term and short term memory, they can solve complex problems and may even be able to logically reason if taught how.
All of the creatures you mention, as well as the elephant and parrot, deserve better treatment than we humans provide. These creatures are damn near sentient and could provide a wealth of information on how self-perception works in the real world. Plus it just seems wrong to me that we maintain this dichotomy between humans and other obviously self aware creatures simply because it's inconvenient.
You may believe that your God gave you all the planet to do with as humanity wishes, but frankly even if that were the case don't you think He would find our indifference to their plight both shocking and disgusting? And how is that different from mechanical consciousness?
Personally, I agree with the hard-AI community that self awareness is a computational process which can be replicated mechanically. From that perspective I must conclude that either we value those creatures which behave with some self determination and will by providing legal rights to them as we do to ourselves, or we might as well not value the sanctity of human life either.
Wouldn't you feel better about the future if you knew that the only company that would be developing such a thing is Microsoft? (allowing them to continue unchecked and take over the world)
Hell, you'd end up with a creature that drowns when it tries to take a shower, getting stuck in the "lather-rinse-repeat" infinite loop.
Microsoft Saves Humanity! Woo hoo!!
Hear, hear... without having read the actual article, it sounds like Joy is extrapolating from current trends too much. It almost sounds like he saw, oh, I dunno, 'e' and thought, "oh, this is a nice line editor... maybe we can extrapolate from here and create a multi-line 'e'"... oh, hold on, he already did that ;-)... (disclaimer: I am joking, I have the outmost respect for the man, and hjkl are as natural to me as, well, arrow keys ;-)...
All the technologies he mentions are collaborative ones, i.e. they cannot be developed and/or applied by some mad scientist in a basement. They require organized, coherent team work. I.e., they do require rogue states, not rogue individuals.
More importantly, when something hits an extreme, it creates a backlash, a return towards equilibrium; that is true of society as much as it is for physical systems. When the Internet/technology/genetics will reach the edge of acceptable use/behavior, society will change to compensate. Look into the past: the Middle Ages created the Renaissance, the '50s brought the '60s, the '80s spawned the '90s... Our technological ethics will change to accommodate our technologies...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
The reason I can believe that a Bill Joy scenario could occur is that the technology age has, in many ways, eradicated common sense beliefs of the past. People are making mistakes on a grand scale all the time, but it's excusable because, hey, it's technology! We need to advance at any cost!
Consider the fanaticism a huge number of people show for upcoming CPUs and video cards--e.g. Athlon, GeForce, etc. These fans don't really have a deep understanding of where the performance is coming from, or to what extent a current CPU or video card can or has been pushed. The view is "newer = better," and that's enough to fuel raging passion. This is causing people to upgrade left and right and increase the base level of machines available. Now we have 500 MHz Pentium III machines with ATI Rage 128 video cards being used for airline scheduling where a 486 would be sufficient. For absolutely no benefit, power consumption is maybe 10-50x higher than it needs to be. So even in this era of supposedly increased conservation and environmental awareness, we're just pointlessly wasting power and don't care.
That's the kind of thing that sneaks up on you without realizing it. Twenty years ago, no one would have believed such gross negligence would have been possible. The core of most "technology will doom us" arguments is that we advance without thinking. And that's exactly what we've proven ourselves to do, especially in recent years.
Well AI is a joke, it takes more than just computing power to make a truly intelligent machine. But as for the rest of them he forgot a few.
Much more likely than an artificially created virus is the likelyhood that a killer virus will mutate naturally in a catastrophic way. Every boeing 747 is an enormous hermetically sealed tube for spreading viruses from one part of the planet to another within days. Imagine something with the destructive power of Ebola that was airborne with the ease of contagion of the flu.
Sure science can create a vaccine, but well HIV/AIDS has been around for 20 years and although we can control it to some extent we still don't have a vaccine.
Plus there's the possibility that the continuuing extinction of species in places like the Amazon will start to form a domino effect. I.e. some vital species that many others depend on for survival go extinct causing a snowball effect and massive extinction of species.
Humanity's only longterm guaranty of survival is to spread our selves over as many biospheres as possible.
"what are you here for?
We're all here, we're all here to go,
earth is going to be space station and we're here to go into space, that's what we're here for.
Do I hear any questions about that?"
William S Burroughs, Dead City Radio
That is just one view, of course. To read Vinge's original paper on this idea, go here. Also, I think the comment in the original story is pretty lame. It implies that if we smart people get together and discuss these problems, we'll figure out a way to prevent them from occurring. That's ridiculous. The only thing that happens when technocrats get together is that we get new rules and new ways of controlling the future. No way, I say. Let the future happen in its unpredictable fashion, and we'll all be better off for it.
BBB
While rapidily advancing technology could pose a threat, I would prefer to live with that threat and risk human kind than the accept the alternative.
That is to stop developing and advancing human technology. The world would be a little boring if everything that we shall ever invent has already been invented.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Try as one might, genetics and nanotechnology are not easy fields for individuals to work on their own in. They require extensive amounts of equipment, much of it high-tech since much of the work has only developed over the past twenty years.
Most things become easier in time. An eight year old with a chemistry set today does things incomprehensable to the greatest minds of the 1st century, and doesn't think much of it. At one time, the 'hello world' program was a big deal (especially when it had to be wired in). Now, it's literally child's play.
It's not time to head for the hills by any means, but these things CAN come to pass. The best hope is that the same technology can be used to avert disaster. The nasty self-replicating robots will be destroyed by 'good' self replicating robots, for example.
How soon we forget.
There was a time when incineration of much of the civilized world was always 20 minutes away, not 20 years. Whether secondary effects (so-called Nuclear Winter) would have led to eventual extinction or not seem rather beside the point--the world as we knew it would have ended. That it did not happen was, more than many of us realize, a matter of shear blind luck.
There were, and are, only two powers in the world who could bring about such a global catastrophe. The reason for this limitation is more a matter of the enormous cost of producing nuclear weapons than the technological difficulty of doing so. For now, and for the near future, nuclear physics is too expensive for more than just the US and Russia to put civilization at risk.
What Bill fears, I think, is the development of technologies as threatening as those which came from nuclear physics, but without the economic barriers. Consider: what if Moore's law applied to nuclear weapons as well as integrated cicuitry? What if it does apply to the next destructive technology? Or: what if a chain reaction of self-replicating agents--whether biological, nanotechnological, or self-organizing--proves much cheaper than the nuclear variety? By harnessing the existing biological, molecular, or technological environment to its ends, could a technology be created where such replication to worldwide scale came (from the creator's perspective) essentially for free?
The cheaper it becomes to develop the technical means to threaten humanity, the more likely it will be that a state, group, or even person will be insane enough to exploit it. It's the change in economics that increases the danger. Economics explains why New York isn't hip-deep in horse manure just as it explains why basement-lab nuclear weapons don't exist, even though the knowledge necessary to produce them is readily available. Cheaper, faster alternatives became available in the first case. Are we ready for such alternatives in the second case?
Here's a little quote from "The Difference Between the Sexes", by E. Balaban (ed) and R. V. Short (ed):
"Perhaps the lifespan of a species is inversely proportional to its degree of intellectual development? The probability that a species that has evolved to be as intelligent and all-conquering as ours could survive for long is remote indeed. We may live in a silent universe for a very good reason. Paradoxically, evolution may have ensured that we have one of the shortest survival times of any species, since it has made us, effectively, our own executioner."
You can't build an artificially intelligent computer unless you have a damn good idea of those things. You can't build something with desires, emotions, etc. unless you know, in detail, what desires and emotions are, at a far deeper level than we do now.
Your entire argument is based on the premise of top-down design - that the Right Way to build an AI is the classical engineer's approach of designing the thing as you would design any other machine or piece of software.
Fortunately, most people now recognise that this approach is doomed, for the exact reason that you point out: an "intelligence" of any sort is much more complex and less well-understood than anything we've ever had to design.
So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design. Specifically, the idea is to first work out the building blocks - the equivalents of neurons - and then have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose. Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence" - it only requires a good GA and a good understanding of the brain at the cellular and subcellular level.
Now this I don't consider far-fetched at all.
(Of course, it's always worth mentioning that we could go the other way - first using nanotech to completely redesign ourselves into super-intelligent cybergods, then analysing our own new brains and replicating them to create completely new, fully artificial intelligent beings.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Assuming that advances in technology continue, I think it is reasonable to postulate that at some stage we will create sentient beings. Whether this is done in software, or uses nanotechnology, or biotechnology or whatever, it raises some interesting ethical questions. Is such an entity permitted to value it's own self-preservation? What if this leads to conflict with humans?
Do we have a right to construct entities that place human well-being above their own well-being? (Asimov's 'Laws of Robotics' or similar)
If we do this, aren't we dangerously close to building slaves?
These comments do not neccesarily reflect the views of the author.
Before all the geeks in the world go hurtling themselves off their rackmounts, let's take a look at some of Bill's assumptions.
Artificial Intelligence
A lot of Bill's thesis is based on the assumption that we'll be able to create sentience in machines. Yes, computers are getting faster and yes they can even seem to think sometimes, but folks, we don't even understand how our own brains work, much less have the power to create artificial ones. Things like thought require a much deeper understanding than we're likely to achieve in the next 20 years. Don't get me wrong, I think someday we'll be able to do it, but the trials will be long and hard, and the people who do it will really understand how to make it right. I also don't think I'll see it in my lifetime (I'm 22 now).
Replication
In terms of machines, a lot of this has to do with artificial intelligence. The creative leap required to construct something and change it is pretty huge. As for nanorobots in our blood stream, they need to find the parts, and they most likely won't be in the same environment in which they were created. Genetics is more fearful, of course, because living things already have the ability to recreate, but most work done in genetics is done under the constant shadow of "what bad things can this bring". I don't think genetics is all that easy a field for an individual to work in as a radical either. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and equipment. The most likely disaster of bioengineering is something that causes the death of a significant member of the planetary cycle (like trees or bees, for instance), which has been a constant concern from day one.
The Free Radical
Try as one might, genetics and nanotechnology are not easy fields for individuals to work on their own in. They require extensive amounts of equipment, much of it high-tech since much of the work has only developed over the past twenty years. It's still much more likely that some nut is going to get his hands on some plutonium leaking out of an impoverished former superpower and create some home-made nuclear weapon than it is that someone is going to create a killer replicating robot.
And Bill ignores a lot of other ways we can kill ourselves. Civil strife, environmental pollution, global warming, and, my personal favorite, contact with a hostile alien species (didn't Independence Day look real?). The fact is, since day one, humans have been faced with causing their own extinction (overhunting, overfarming, overpolluting, travel spreading disease, etc. etc.) and we've done just fine recognizing and adapting to these problems. The one thing that nobody ever seems to factor in is the human response to adversity. We can change our environment, and once we've changed it, if something's wrong, we can change it further (not back), so that we can live in it.
p.s. And did anyone notice that Bill was called 'phlegmatic'? I thought they meant 'pragmatic', but that's one helluva typo.
Two points.
(1) If anyone here remembers their history, the'd remember that the environmental problem du'joir in the 1970's was global cooling, not global warming. The truth of the matter is that the evidence is still out about global warming--the best we can say is that we have some interesting localized weather patterns, but there is no evidence of any sea levels rising or any non-natural weather patterns changing. (And those who provide "statistical evidence"--if you look closely enough, they're cooking the books combined with weather simulations which they believe will predict the weather beyond the normal 7-14 days most simulations actually work.)
My point is that if you listen real carefully, even global warming is in the "disaster which will wipe us out in 10-20 years" category--far enough away that it seems possible (especially on warmer spring days), yet close enough to actively fear.
By the way, you forgot the ozone hole--though there are those who are starting to think it ain't the problem it once was, only because ground-level UV levels have not changed one iota. But there are those who still believe that in 10-20 years we're going to have to go out in the sun with SPF 5000 or die.
That's okay; I still remember when I was growing up in the 1970's that we were to run out of oil by 1990. That is, we would deplete all of the world's oil reserves by 1990, and because of it, civilization would collapse, causing wars a'la "Mad Max" to break out throughout the world as people struggle to find the last little caches of horded gasoline.
I have a real hard time believing in any disaster that will kill us in 10-20 years unless someone comes up with some really hard facts--like perhaps a photograph and orbital plot of the asteroid that is suppost to kill us all. I just remember too many disasters that were to wipe us out in 10-20 years while growing up (oil depletion, population explosion, global cooling, etc)--and we're still alive.
Such ideas are almost always based on linear trends. Just like the guy in the early part of the 19th century who projected that New York would be hip deep in horseshit by the year 2000. That's what the trend showed, after all.
This is not to say that we shouldn't worry about the downsides of technological progress, but for the most part, these "global extinction" thoughts are fueled by accentuating the negative and ignoring the positive.
Bad things will almost certainly happen in the future. Maybe even very bad things. But destroy the human race? Not likely. Slow it down, even? Probably not. The worst global disaster with real evidence behind it we have to face right now is global warming and while global warming could cause a lot of discomfort, with the sea-level rising and weather changing, the human race would certainly survive.
The cake is a pie
Self-replicating machines? Nanotechnology run amok? Machines that become smart and enslave humanity? Please, this is reality, not an episode of star trek.
Finally, he argues argues, this threat [machinery] to humanity is much greater than that of nuclear weapons because those are hard to build.
HAHAHA!
Please. We can't even write a web browser within three years, much less program sentient robot roaches that could destroy our planet.
There's only like, what, forty thousand nukes extant on earth, each capable of wiping out millions of lives in five minutes? Many capable of poisoning an entire planet for millenia if detonated close enough to the ground? ALL of them are owned by warmongering, jingoistic, pathologically disturbed political entities who have NO QUALMS whatsoever about using nuclear warheads whenever it is convenient?
Nuclear weapons, traditionally developed viruses, lethal bacteria, political unrest, riots, the complete disruption of climate, economic decay, and plain old steel bullets fragmenting children's skulls into explosions of bloody brain and bone (just like the children of Kosovo who the entire world is eagerly attempting to exterminate) are ALWAYS going to be more of a concern to me than sentient computers messing with my tax return. This article sucked. Perhaps the real thing will explain stuff better.
The most dangerous aspect of living on earth is that we are sentient. If we weren't, we wouldn't give a shit what happens in the long run. (which we don't, when it gets down to it)
-troll taker