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Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Concealed writes "There is an article in the new Wired which talks about the future of nanotechnology and 'intelligent machines.' Bill Joy, (also the creator of the Unix text editor vi) who wrote the article, expresses his views on the neccesity of the human race in the near future.
" From what I can gather this is the article that the Bill Joy on Extinction story was drawn from. Bill is a smart guy -- and this is well worth reading.
He just realizes Emacs' eminent superiority. vi is nothing. Emacs is the supreme text editor, nay, near-OS, to be the ultimate application until the end of time.
Machines have no more incentive to destroy us than washing machines do. Currently humans are the most efficient at killing and are machines are just augmentations to this bloodlust. 'The Matrix' was just a glorified 'Deathwish' film and Microsoft is just another damned corporation trying to make a buck. Same as it ever was.
hey moderate above post way up. very insightful.
If Bill Joy is so smart, why did he sell all of his SUN shares for just $10M shortly after SUN's IPO? Scott McNealy had the same choice but held on to his shares and today is worth a few billion. I saw Mr. Joy on a TV interview discussing the Wired article. He really looked bad, like a shell of when I saw him speak ~10 years ago.
Bill Joy has had priviledged access to enormously expensive research hardware for so long that he forgets that the average nutcase in a garage can't afford chip fab gear.
Sure, we can all imagine the "universal factory" that sci-fi has dubbed the "assembler," but I'm hardly convinced that the folks who manage to produce one will tell it to reproduce itself and sell me a copy for $12.95 down at the local Qwick-E Mart. After an enormous investment in research, they'd only be able to sell... one.
Hey Bill: what if "GNC", or whatever little acronym you're using to talk to yourself, turns out to be the only practical means of keeping the human race alive? What if it's the only way to keep the environment a viable habitat for humans? What if we reach a point where it's the only means to end the human misery that arises out of limited food supplies, population expansion, and unequal distribution of wealth? Where will all of your caution leave us then? Mind you, I don't think such scenarios are any more likely than your preferred doomsday notions-- You see, I'm not arrogant enough to think that I 1) know what threats the the future holds, or 2) have any right to tell the residents of the future how they ought to behave.
What, you're trying to say you're not one, too?
Joy's article is an overly-long rehash of old ideas. It would have been far more interesting had he spent some time coming up with interesting approaches to preventing the potential problems he decries, i.e. looking for solutions rather than problems.
One approach would be to take advantage of analogies with biological systems. In a number of ways, nanobots and microbes are similar. For example, it seems likely that bit flipping by charged particle impacts on the memory of a self-replicating machine could produce nanobot mutations just as damage to genetic material can cause biological organisms to mutate.
Perhaps techniques designed to control microorganisms could be applied to deal with nanobots. Or perhaps an electronic ecosystem could be set up with different types of nanobots controlling each other's populations through predation, some being limited by some sort of local "food supply". There are many possibilities to consider.
I see nothing inherently wrong with genetically modified crops. Humans have been performing genetic modifications for at least hundreds of years by selective breeding; the only difference is that now we can do it more efficiently. Sure, we have to be careful to maintain genetic diversity, and so on, but that's not too hard. And the potential for producing hardy, disease-resistant crops for feeding the world's starving masses is certainly a goal worth pursuing.
Finally, why all the anti-Linux vitriol? I have used Linux and it's quite good; a much friendlier and more powerful environment than Windows, certainly. BSD, Linux, whatever -- who gives a damn about trivial differences? It's all Unix.
--- Brian
If I like you can I still blow you?
10 years ago would you be discussing how well or bad you do versus a game AI?
10 years ago would you be discussing how "real" UT looks (or how unreal it is)?
10 years ago did you see a car that could drive for even 20% of the way across the US (I think it did 90+% last year).
10 years ago had you even heard of nanotech?
I think Bill is trying to stimulate thought and wake us up. We live with blinders on to what is really going on around us.
Note, no one mentioned echelon, (Cherokee, Waco, Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc., so this gets indexed by the NSA, CIA, FBI, KGB, MOSAD, MIa-6)
If you find this subject fascinating then you should watch. Serial Experiments Lain.
my website
lainwire.tripod.com
can tell you all about it.
Excuse me, I thought vi was written for UNIX, and then cloned for Linux.
Stupid Linux punks, seeing everything through Linux colored glasses
Think about it... once nanites have converted the bulk of earth's mass to a giant computer, what will they need the surface of the world for; it has comparatively negligible mass. They will set aside the surface as a preserve for human and other primitive life-forms, the same way that we set aside areas as nature preserves. And just as we leave creatures in these natural areas to fend for themselves, so too would humans be left to fend for themselves for the most part. Donald
Hmm... If thats true then I've come to the conclusion that the problem with this world is that idiots like you are allowed to live...
-d11
um, vi is NOT a linux specific editor, it wasn't developed for linux, and most(all? havnt used linux in awhile) linux distros use some bastardized clone. bah, linux sucks
The brain, and the senses as well. For example, the ultimate monitor would be an interface that hooks directly into the optic nerve and projects a screen, when desired, wherever in the environment you want it. The same could be done for the ears. Imagine having essentially a movie quality display literally everywhere you go.
Imagine this ultimate monitor being driven by NT.
Imagine a BSOD as you drive your Porsche through a busy city street.
Imagine the screams.
At the time vi was created, the standard editor was ed. Ed was designed for teletypes, not CRT screens.
Vi was based very much on ed, but incorported full-screen editing. For people accustomed to ed, vi was a nice way to step into the brave new world of "visual" editing.
It was NOT designed to be hard. At the time, all you could count on was a keyboard with the most basic character set. When you don't have all of the arrows, alt keys, and control keys, "mode" editing makes a lot more sense.
Vi is not a Unix purity test. It is not proof of your Unix manhood. It's an editor which has survived by convention. I don't know that it was meant to last this long, but it has. The same could be said for many things in Unix. There are easier editors available now, but nobody can guarantee they will be on the 1982 minicomputer in the University basement, so people learn vi just to be safe.
Directly or indirectly questioning Bill Joy's credibility because he created vi only makes people question *your* credibility. If you're a hot Unix admin, you would do well to learn some of the history behind the systems you are responsible for. Of course, it's easier to quip off with a Slashdot-generation comment, isn't it?
Oh, and if you think vi is tough, type "ed" sometime....
?
?
?q
?
?wq
?
?exit
?eat flaming death
^C
If there was any content that I might have liked, it wasn't visable over the visual confusing mess of porly aliased anime charcaters. Your site sucks, and loads slow even over a fast-ethernet connection. Pretty sad dude.
This is basically the gist of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's rock epic about man vs. machine.
"I am all there is."
"Negative. Limited. I let you live."
"But I gave you life."
"What else could you do."
"To do what was right."
"I'm perfect. Are you?"
>>A tiny number of immensely rich people benefit and the rest of us suffer.
>Err, yeah. I guess bringing huge medical advances that prevent horribly debilitating diseases *is* a bad thing.
In the US, of course, it's only the immensely rich who benefit from medical advances.
>>Without high technology, the IRS and the Federal Reserve would wither and die immediately.
>So would most hospital patients.
When they get the bill, some wish they'd done that anyway. My uncle was proactive about it and shot himself when he was diagnosed... I'm perpetually thankful I live in a country with socialised medicine. (And which didn't sell antibiotics over-the-counter... the article didn't mention the US's gross idiocy in doing that. We may have delayed the evolved-resistance problem long enough to be ready for it.)
einstein was jew get a clue troll
Well he was smarter than your sorry ass. How does that make you feel dickhead!
The reason Joy is suddenly freaking out is that he just realized Moore's law is not going to be repealed in 2010, as has long been thought, but is likely to continue until 2030. This means computers in 2030 will be a million times better than now. Put another way, it means that all the change that computers have brought in the last 30 years is only one millionth of the change we'll see in the next 30.
That's a rate of change which is probably far beyond our ability to predict, control, or cope with. The results may or may not be to our liking, and the unexpected consequences are liable to be extreme. I don't think Bill Joy's proposed solution would work, but we ignore the situation to our peril.
I used an editor long long ago on my TRS-80 Color Computer...I forget what it was called though that used the same commands as vi.
They'd be equally heir to Hitler, Khan, Alexander, Atilla, Ivan, Caesar, etc, etc. It's that might word that scares me. I don't think technology has ever worked out in the long run in the way planned it to. Isn't it kinda of starry-eyed to think This Time We'll Get It Right and hand over the keys?
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With all due respect to Mr. Joy, the whole article is vague,poorly reasoned and isn't supported by much evidence. Kaczynski seems to be thrown in just for shock value (how seriously does he expect us to take a psychpath's rambling anyway) and the whole thing sounds like the typical "Wired" foolishness. All they want to do is sell magazines.
One such set of conditions exists right now. Here is an example which I have been working on (not programming, just conceptualizing). It is called an econovirus. Imagine what it would take to write a mechanism in Perl that would do the following:
- Manage an investment account according to some set parameters based on data acquired from some news sites.
- Make a reasonable profit
- Use the profits from the account to pay the service provider where the script, database, and libraries reside and invest some more
- Once it accumulates a certain amount profit, start a new web server account and market trading account somewhere else and copy itself there.
- Continue indefinitely.
Does that sound hard? Yes, but not impossible. I probably could work out a crappy version in a few months. This is a complex virus which has a "feeding" mechanism which enables it to proliferate in the modern internet economy. It is a slow reproducer and will probably never, except with intervention or some weird error, pose a threat to us.But let us add some more functionality:
- Randomization of key settings upon every reproduction
- Simple self-programming capability to improve its capability to make a profit from trading and make proliferate more effectively
How long would it take for this particular mechanism to become rather widespread? It can be quite successful with some help of Perl enthusiasts who help it along the way. If it ever divorces itself from the account-ownership of the original authors (who could use a fake ssn's in the first place anyway) who is responsible for it?We must be ready to counter this sort of virus before it evolves faster than we can.
- James Martin Luther
a language which doesn't allow its programmers to create dangling pointers and memory leaks sure sounds 'crippled' to me
oh but then we're all great programmers, we don't *write* code with dangling pointers and memory leaks.
Well, Newton and Einstein did their science mostly because they wanted to. It's not that science has gotten evil per se, it's that R&D has become a nifty tax writeoff with possible fringe benefits in patentable products. Expecting morals when there are shareholders to feed is ludicrous.
I think more emphasis should be placed on the values of Christianity at the educational level
You've forgotten that Einstein was a Jew fleeing "good" Christians, haven't you?
Actually the Vic-20 had 5K of RAM, with about 3.5 usable for programming.
I would consider the best AI to have a nural network such as a human, but since it is in a computer the network could work faster and on a much grander scale than a human brain.
When human brains come to a crossroad-a desision, it is based on all previously knowladge being analysied, whether it be thinking specifically about the problem-or a split second desision based on previous knowadge that has become second nature-been imprinted onto the actually personallity of the person.
With a computer the amount of constant thought at one time, and the amount of exact details could be calculated on a much grander scale, and even linear desitions could be imprinted to be intuion to also calculate against. I think a computer with a nural network on a grander scale would be the "perfect" AI
"Why You Won't Have Free Will" by Bill Gates in Forbes magazine
"You Are Irrelevant" by Bob Metcalf in U.S. News & World Report
"Resistance is Futile So Give Up" by Jeff Bezos in Time magazine
"Humans Are Obsolete" by Michael Dell in Business Week
"You Don't Matter So Just Stay In Bed" by Marc Andresson in Newsweek magazine.
You must be very careful when reading these articles. The clown has been using his influence for years on churches with little effect, so now he is moving into the popular media.
A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to man, nor shall a man wear a woman's garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. (Deuteronomy 22:5)
I haven't finished the article yet, maybe it mentions it... but we're suffering from uncontrolled replication on relatively simple systems already. Ever tried to get an error corrected in some electronic personal record somewhere? My mother struggled for twenty years to get her mailing address correct in her employer's records, retiring before she could succeed. I know people who've been mistakenly declared dead (it's remarkably liberating - eg you can't get a driver's license, but you can't be charged for not having one, either) and couldn't get it corrected (chort of suicide). If you can't get control of simple and obvious stuff like that, how the hell can we think we'd ever control a slippery AI system with global influence?
You're missing a point here: some of the new technologies have the potential to destroy humanity even if they are used with the best of intentions. I.e. if an accident happens we are screwed. We have no reason to eliminate accidents as a possibility, therefore we are better off if we don't pursue such "dangerous" ideas.
The article is not about just AI in its traditional sense as everyone here is discussing. It is about the convergence of AI with biological mechanisms possible in nanosystems.
Yes, and Joy seems to agree with this. His point is that creating nuclear weapons requires large scale organizations like governments, but that the new weapons based on GNR technologies can be created by individuals. His argument is not anti-individual. He is pointing out that the threats will not be limited to industrialized nations, but will extend to any smart person with access to information and a limited supply of resources. It is worth considering.
first
Some people just don't travel or look around at how others are living. A large portion of the world's population still lives off the land, either through subsistence farming, hunting and gathering, or slashing and burning. There may be some communities with "machines in charge" but no worldwide phenomena.
He's a luddite fear the future dumb ass.. and apperently his idea of protecting us from the future is to make shure that only big companies understand technology.
It's not about lamex!
I can not believe I posted just to flame the stupid luddites in another thread. there are actaully intellegent people who do not mindlessly fear everything they do not understand in this thread! Unfortunatly, I have consumed my allotted slashdoting time for the day, so I will resist the temptation to participate in this discussion.. execpt to say "Mee too."
Oh, did you notice how Bill Joy's idea about the idea future would be "big corperations control all the technology so that terorist can not get ahold of it." Oh yeah, I trust Bill's big corps. more then my neighbor.. NOT!
do you mean to say that bill joy *ported* vi to linux, or do you mean to say that vi is a linux-specific application, and didn't exist before 1991?
That needed clearing up first of all.
This idea has been around for a while now
and is actively being worked on.
For instance, Joe Strout's Mind Uploading
Home Page has been around for over 5 years
now, and has recently been refreshed as:
minduploading.org
Go take a look! :)
Writing the most difficult to use text editor in the world was not enough of an achievement for Bill Joy. To add to his credentials, he now feels it necessary to spew his mental diarrhea in "print."
He is a total hypocrite as well. On the radio I heard him say that hearing these kind of warnings regarding technology that requires more maturity than the human race currently posseses should not be taken seriously when it comes from SF writers. But when Kurzweil says it is the word! What a joke. SF writers have been talking about these issues for almost 30 years based on my reading. Bill Joy thinks he is some kind of cassandra - he is in fact a pompous asshole.
The best part of all this is the slashdot reaction (which is structurally the same as Joy's reaction to SF vs. Kurzweil) : these kind of comments would typically illicit screams of "luddite." But let the asshole who wrote the most arcane text editor ever say these things, and the reaction is, to quote one of the weenies running this stinky snobitorium, "Bill is a smart guy - and this is worth reading."
I think it is time too find reading material less reactionary and prejudiced - like, oh say, comp.os.linux.advocacy!
hell, this was on the _today show_ last Monday. katie fucking couric got the scoop on this before slashdot did.
hoe does it feel to be trumped by the old media?
I don't often post here on /. but this issue is an extremely important one to me, and it should be to all of you as well. The fact is, science is going to far in it's quest to master the physical universe. Today's scientists, unlike the giants of the past such as Newton and Einstein, seem to have no morals and no concern over the consequences of their actions.
The "new technologies" of the 21st century - genetics, nanotechnology, cybernetics - are incredibly dangerous to both the human race and the rest of the world. Research into them must be stopped immeadiately. The scientists working on them are dangerous individuals who would deny the place of our Lord God as the sole Creator of the Universe and all within it. It is not in the purview of man to attempt to create life, and only catastrophe can be the result of this.
I question the current attitude of militant atheism amongst scientists, and "knowledge workers" in general. Without a firm belief in the gentle hand of God how can these people work in order to better the human race? I think more emphasis should be placed on the values of Christianity at the educational level, lest the next generation grow up without His guiding love. As long as we remember this, and stop researching dangerous subjects such as these, the manifest destiny of the human race is assured.
I agree with you about the adds in Wired, but I don't see how you can complain about the philosophical nature of the articles. That's the point of the magazine. If you're looking for practical, how-to information, there are obviously better choices.
That needed clearing up first of all.
This idea has been around for a while now
and is actively being worked on.
For instance, Joe Strout's Mind Uploading
Home Page has been around for over 5 years
now, and has recently been refreshed as:
minduploading.org
Go take a look! :)
You are conjecturing that these machines entity "WILL be heirs to Plato and Descartes, Jefferson and King, just like we are". Chances are these machines will be just like another roach. Do you care then?
The problem at hand is more likely non-trivial. While I understand your despise for those (arguably less thoughtful) "Matrix" sympathizers, you will still have to be on your guard when providing a proper defense.
Your PHILO-5001 classmate
Joy's fear can be applied
to Fermi's Paradox ("Where
is everyone?") in regards to
The question is whether you want to be left behind or if you want to embrace and shape this technology. Want neural implants to increase your memory? Prosthetic replacement organs when your organic ones give out? Then you've entered the slippery slope. Eventually you'll replace all your organic parts, finally even the brain as non-invasive scanning allows the mapping of every neuronal connection to a neural net. Guess what? Now you're the machine that is replacing humanity. Are you still a person? Yes. Are you still human? No. And that's a good thing. I don't think any of us would rather be apes, do you?
> Anyone ever played the AI in any of the games
You mean Artificial Ignorance. Intelligence implies more then being able to crunch numbers in a constrained domain.
I find your point that human thought and behavior is a perfect AI to be highly debatable, mostly because I don't believe that there is such a thing as 'perfect intelligence'. Minds have architecture and scale, just like computers. The human mind is a massively parallel architecture of mostly independent thinking units, a lot of long-term storage, and a teeny bit of working memory (most people can only remember 6 or 8 numbers at once). A computer is a much more linear architecture, lots of identical generic components, with an arguably comporable amount of long-term storage, a lot of working memory, and almost no built-in 'thinking' (algorithmic) capability. Bulding AIs is worth it just for the exercise of exploring the ways to design intelligence. Once we had discovered fire, we spent additional billions of man-hours refining the coal-burning power plant and the internal combustion engine. We've made it from the Turing Machine to the Connection Machine, but there's still a long way to go. And even if we were passing the Turing test, we'd still have a lot more to learn.
no, no, no. Sigall moderates his own post. we proved some months back.
by this transistors = neurons compairison, the only differance between one system, and another is the number of switches. So, for example, I could randomly burn a bunch of transistors onto a wafer of silicon and have a better CPU than the computer I'm writing this on.... Well, maybe with this computer I could, but with a good one.......
It seems to me that most people here don't have any idea just what real AI research is doing. The stuff used in games or chess tornenments bears no relation to it at all.
What most AI research is about is trying to build systems that solve real problems, often by mimicing how humans or animals (simulating animal behaiviour is a big part of it) solve the problem. I have seen no mention of genetic algorithims (computer programs that evolve) or even artifical neural networks here.
A 'sentient' AI is unlikely to be composed of a few billion rules patiently entered by human operators with the intent of making some sort of mind (although such a set of rules or knowledge could form a part of it).
Of course a machine (or a software) inspired by evolution or neural networks could surpass us in terms of intelligence. Just as any human can learn and grow, so could it. And just as the human species can evolve, so could it and its offspring.
It is a scary possibility, but an exciting one too. We have had no success contacting alien life... but what if we were build it ourselves? What would be more alien than a machine mind? And could it (and its kind) perhaps rather than try and obliterate us (or simply superceede us), actually look on us with compassion - perhaps impose their own Prime Directive and leave us alone?
I thought to write a longer post, but it finally can be summed up, Mr. Bill Joy just shows where mechanistic world-view leads to: a dead-end. Doesn't take much to realize it . . . Study mystic teachings, Plato, Plotinus, eastern mysticism as the Veda (Gita, Bhagavatam, Upanishads), and true spiritual scriptures of Buddhism, there life is approach from the consciousness aspect, and there certainly the depth of life is acknowledged with the required respect and understanding; there is true knowledge showing the depth and vastness of consciounsess/spirit/soul . . .
almost all computer game AI (even chess) sucks, and is based on brute force (ability to anylize *every* chess move or having 2x men, resources, etc).
The rules for real-time war (or chess) are a lot more complicated than the rules for making grits.
Right here and right now at work I am editing a script using the vi header. I am doing so on my OS/2 box. In a telnet session, because I've logged into OS/2 from this Windows machine.
So vi is really an OS/2 text editor, not the Linux text editor as erroneously claimed in the article header.
Or... is it really a Unix text editor that has been ported to OS/2 and to Linux (and... I remember running a Macintosh version not that long ago....)
but Joy had a hand in the creation of Java. That negates any early success.
Once nanites have converted the bulk of the earth
into a giant computer, they will have no need of
the surface, which comprises a comparatively
negligible mass. They may turn it into a human
preserve, the same way that humans turn various
unimportant areas into nature preserves.
BWAHAAAHAHAHAHAH! The problem with slashdot is idiots like you get to moderate!
According to his life-partner, he still wears them at age 30...
Didn't it occur to somebody that the article appears in _April_ issue of Wired ?...
HotGiraffe
hotgiraffe@hotmail.com
yep, that's exactly the kind of stuff that the death-bots will be great at: lining up the humans in the crosshairs. Picking the right human is a different matter.
'cause if you try to tell me that some abortion-bits programming language like C is more intuitive, easy-to-use, or fun to program in than java, i'll slit your throat from ear to ear.
I'm wondering if you're not just an AI script, Loser.
Many people are arguing that vi is not Linux-specific. While true, they are missing the main problem with this phrase: vi is not a text editor; it is an implement of masochism.
Unix hasn't declined as such - it's just the market is larger and there are more people who are buying computer products. More Unix is sold today than 10 years ago. Since 2/3 of all NT servers sold do nothing but file and print, I'd say Unix is stronger than ever - and with good reason!
Yes, but even worse, that article was written at about the turn of the century.... well I read it a week ago at least anyway....
Christ, the Pope is more up-to-date than Slashdot sometimes.
I also heard this interview. And I'll probably purchase my first copy of Wired just to see the rest. Really, I'm not trying to pick a fight. But I'm also tired of science fiction writers taking credit for "inventing" things as well. Just free associating over various scenarios doesn't make them plausible, it just makes them plot devices. When a manager "invents" a project - how many techies actually credit the manager w/devine insight? And then give the architect/tech lead their due for making it happen. Why are science fiction writers exempt from this? Also, I'm rather tired of the way science fiction projects AI, that AI wants to become human, have emotions, etc. It's not just science fiction, almost any AI conference will have a panel discussion on this topic. But there is no requirement to be human like. I even feel it would be a liability. From what I heard on NPR, Bill seemed to be saying the same thing. If so, most excellent. And if people are endangered, perhaps they should consider why. hax4bux - I hate registering.
Searle's argument is not accepted by all philosophers of mind, and certainly not by all AI researchers, but it has not really been convincingly refuted. The philosophical problem of consciousness is very confusing and difficult. Daniel Dennett thinks conscious machines can be created. Others like Roger Penrose disagree. The truth is that no one really knows yet, and this will probably be the case for at least 10 more years.
The Age Of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil)
Eon (Bear)
I agree with your argument as it refers to the First World.
Unfortunately for the rest of humanity, they won't be able to afford "directed evolution"...
As it stands, there are lots of folks in South America, Africa and Asia who can't afford to eat. They certainly won't be able to afford genetic patches and mechanical augmentation. We will supplant those people as our ability to survive pandemics and disasters favours us...
There is a socioeconomic divide between haves and have-nots right now. That divide is about to become biological. And for the subrace (plain-vanilla humanity) that we are about to transcend, the future doesn't look good.
Ye who mocks the Great God Bill Joy and the revered vi (kept in lower case spelling always because that is the way He named it), taste the cold hard ketstrokes of :1,$s/[Ee][Mm][Aa][Cc][Ss]//g !!!!!!!!
Hey! ed(1) is the standard text editor and don't you forget it! By the time I've managed to fire up vi on my 300 baud terminal, I could already have written 3 paragraphs in ed. So there.
RMS should have been interviewed, because Emacs is the future!
Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. >
This topic has been explored extensively in John Coleman's tour de force of political horror fiction (non-fiction?) "The Conspirator's Hierarchy The Committe of 300". I also think that Bill Joy and his friends really need to read some more Camus before that they decide that human existence is pointless beyond the unending struggle to meet our needs to eat,sleep,go to the bathroom and reproduce. I think Bill is suffering from the disease one gets when one's life doesn't consist of trying to survive between paychecks. This is especially apparent in his posing of the question "What will we do when we don't need to work anymore?"
Monday-- The first self-replicating, programable assembler starts making more of itself
Tuesday-- A massive parallel computer will be built. It'll be the size of, say, Mt. Everest.
Wednesday-- The nanotech super computer will design REALLY efficient nanotechnology, both medical and mil-spec nanites.
Thursday-- A Core Tap will be dug. This will provide nigh-unlimited energy.
Friday-- You will be asked, "Excuse me, but are you using all of your atoms?"
Not everyone agrees with your views on life. If you don't like what I have to say, then fine, but to accuse me of being a troll just because you don't agree is the worst kind of close-mindedness there is. Keep an open mind and maybe you'll learn something.
How's about some self-replicating, airborne, heat seeking nanomachines, that once inhaled by a subject, enter the bloodstream and attach themselves to your hemaglobin, denying any oxygen molecules a chance to ride along. Kinda like synthetic CO poisoning.
Perhaps this oil-eating microorganism that we use to clean up oil spills could somehow mutate (or be mutated) into self-sustaining variety and find a nice food suply in our oil fields.
nanobots will use your living flesh for replication material.
Any questions?
A) why does it reach a point of self-obsolesence ? and, why is a perfect AI a mirror of human thought ? 1000 years ago, who could have conceived the intelligence of modern day people? Despite our attempts to conceive intelligence in 1000 years, who really does know how intelligent a future being may be ? why do humans keep striving forward for progress ? comfort ? security ? control ? survival ? expression ? there are many reasons. maybe an AI will want to do the same thing ?
B) why do humans reproduce ? perhaps an AI does not have the same reason, but so far, human intellect tries to reproduce itself (memes?), why may not an AI ? what keeps us as humans alive ? for what reason may a pure AI want to stay alive?
I don't know either; but the questions are interesting. I'll deliver my paper sometime soon on the reality of existance!
here's a good read. Kurzweil and Joy were merely repeating what Moravec stated long ago... http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=0195116305 Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine.
Yes, he wrote vi. He is also a person with many good contacts/friends in these relevent fields. He also has enough brainpower to put 2 and 2 together from a conceptual level (a lot of us have that brainpower, but not the contacts, although we can read).
I know others like him...that is with similar contacts...as I aquire contacts myself. The uncanny thing is the similarity in conclusions among people who delve into this area of concern. Especially with the physicists I know.
The main difference with Joy is that he breaks robotics out as a separate main field of concern while most people seem to categorize robotics as a tool (like software, material science, etc) that facilitates the two main areas of concern (genetics and nanotech).
I applaud Joy because he is attempting to bring this issue to the masses while there is still time. He was on CNN (the financial segment) last week talking precisely about this. The idiotic host was of course like, "so how does this affect the market?".
Now my personal opinion on the matter is based on Murphy's Law (OK, Fanagle's). Since if it is possible for that level of nanotech to exists it will come into existence,I think the only hope is that for some reason it turns out to not be possible. Unfortunately, Sagan's calculations on the number of civilizations potentially in existence combined with the lack of contact argues that there are missing terms in his calculations. An obvious missing term could be an extremely small window of time between when a civilization can communicate and when it inherently extinguishes itself. (The optimistic interpretation would be that the window is between when it can communicate and when it chooses to no longer try).
I had tendonitus
...caused by your inane masturbatory habits? (beastlove.jpeg perhaps?)
My social life has also picked up abit
dude, going on dates with your mom doesnt count!!!!
Especially when that last paragraph talking about "treatment" of those humans which still want to do things is almost directly from an old SF story, "The Happy Breed" by John T. Sladek. You can find it in the Dangerous Visions anthology by Harlan Ellison. Highly recommended.
Step away from the crack pipe, son...
Step away from the crack pipe, son.
Bill Joy, (also the creator of the Linux text editor vi)
/ vi.HTML
/V-I/, *not* /vi/ and *never* /siks/ n. /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still
That is wrong. From http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon
vi:
[from `Visual Interface'] A screen editor crufted together by Bill
Joy for an early {BSD} release. Became the de facto
standard UNIX editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite
outside of MIT until the rise of {EMACS} after about 1984.
Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take
commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default
setup provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (one
correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the
editor's name pronounced
widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll
preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail
editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up
faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See {holy wars}.
Fact should be strait before posted as news. Mistakes happen, but really, how could and *real* Unix user not know the history of Vi? How could you really belive that it is a "Linux Text editor"?
Elwood
Well then, I better read this interview. Anyone who could write vi *must obviously* know what the future holds.
This is about as stupid as asking Michael Jordan who the next president should be (or even what shoes to wear, for that matter).
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Why do we have this same subject and same article when it was posted before?
Is Slashdot turning Lameflop?
Why is this up again?
Real men don't need signitures!!!
Ol' Isaac came up against this idea years ago. Basically put, we fear our own technology. as advances in AI, and robotics continue, we start questioning what inteligence acually is, and as we (eventually) create machines that are smarter than us. But because we fear this, we will undoubtably pre-determine safeguards, so that we don't create our own "Frankenstein's Monster". (the man-made creation that destroys us) We will always ensure that these robots (nano-techs, whatever) are either extremely limited in the scope of their abilities (i.e. nano-devices that can only "survive, inside nuclear reactor cores) or ensure that they've been programed to to obey humans (IA's three laws of robotics). We're making the damn things. There is no way in hell we're NOT going to build in safe-guards against our own demise. We're to arrogent to allow our creations to actually believe they're better than us. (Go ask your Dad if your better than him, or just ask youself that question...)
of course, in the Asimov "Robots" future, we freak out and destroy the robots anyways, because WE know they're superior, despight they're programmed belief otherwise...
here's a good read. Kurzweil and Joy were merely repeating what Moravec stated long ago... http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=0195116305 Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine.
Oh well. Take 2.
I read the the Joy interview with increasing surprise at how each of my
responses had been anticipated. He had read the same books, (in fact,
talked with some of the authors in person), had the same interests, and
used as examples scenarios familiar from Science Fiction (The White
Plague, various utopias [the book I lent you being a good example], and
Asimov's 3 laws of Robotics).
To summarize poorly a very long and in-depth look at the problem, it
appears the situation we are facing is this:
A) Humanity, in whole or in part, will become wholly dependant on the
machines (the Unabomber's fear).
B) Humanity will be crowded out by the superior robotic species, either
deliberately, or through inevitable struggle for resources.
C) Humanity will lose some vital essence that makes us human as we modify
ourselves to be something more and more robotic. (The Age of Spiritual
Machines scenario)
D) We will lose control of our new toys, and wipe out the earth in a
biological or mechanical plague.
There is little that can be said to A. It can only be hoped that the
decision to increase our dependance upon our technology to such an extent
would not be the choice of all (I personally would feel it to be an
infringement on my Will - free or no) and that those who did would have no
reason to harm those who did not, since after all, the machines would be
providing them with all they needed, they would hardly need to enslave or
eliminate those who chose to do things themselves. If the results of such
a Utopia were to be negative, we would soon see it, and hopefully not all
of us would fall to its trap.
B is a little more difficult to argue, but there is one small flaw.
The competition for resources is assumed to be in the same ecology.
We do not, at the present, compete for resources to a significant extent
with, say, giant squid. Yet a giant squid has far more in common with us
then a species which would in all probability reproduce by direct mining
of ores beneath the earth, or on the moon, or asteroids, or other planets,
and use as energy the abundant heat far below the earth, or the far more
plentiful radiation outside the earth's atmosphere. We might stay on
earth, plodding along our evolutionary route, while the robotic species
rapidly evolved beyond our comprehension in the far reaches of space.
C is difficult to argue with. For change has been, and will continue to
occur, and most likely at an ever accelerating rate. What is it that
defines humanity anyway? At what point do we cross an invisible line
beyond which we are no longer human? There was an interesting quote I
read - something along these lines:
"Homo sapiens is the missing link between ape and human."
Of course, one thinks immediately of all the intermediaries that have been
discovered, but why stop with those? Why are we the culmination of
evolution? True, we have an innate desire for our own survival, but is
that any reason to fear change to our species (BTW, on these lines, are
you going to see the new X-Men movie this summer?)?
What is it that makes us human? Is it our thoughts, our emotions, our
DNA?
What is being human that it should be guarded so carefully?
In my opinion, so long as our legacy is sentience, which strives to
understand and embrace as much as possible of the universe, it matters
little what its form is.
To me, while I care a little for C.S. Lewis' "little law", the Law of the
Seed, I think it does not matter to any great extent what form we or our
descendants take (or even that they be ours!) I care that what we have
learned of the universe not be forgotten, that our legacy of knowledge
continues, but that is a different hting entirely.
It seems to me that the only option left to avoid is D. This is nothing
new. Each increase in knowledge has increased the potential for smaller
and smaller groups to harm larger and larger populations. The development
of atomic weapons was sucessfully navigated (so far) without the
destruction of our world, it is possible we will do the same in the
future - self-replicating nanite guardians with high levels of redundancy
in their instructions to reduce mutation to safe levels, more effective
immune systems to protect against biological plagues and so on.
Certainly I agree with many others that the best course is to spread out
humanity over as many different planets and environments as possible - to
stop putting all our eggs in one basket (I believe that phrase was used
by a certain famous astronomer concerning the chances of an asteroid
impact?).
In essence, while I understand the depth of Joy's study of this problem,
and the fears he feels, I have a greater optimism in our resiliency, and a
greater willingness to accept changes to us, then he does.
I feel that things will be changing very rapidly, and that we, or our
children will live in a world incomprehensible to us right now.
I only hope I will live long enough to see it.
Change is good - it keeps us from getting bored.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I read the the Joy interview with increasing surprise at how each of my responses had been anticipated. He had read the same books, (in fact, talked with some of the authors in person), had the same interests, and used as examples scenarios familiar from Science Fiction (The White Plague, various utopias [the book I lent you being a good example], and Asimov's 3 laws of Robotics). To summarize poorly a very long and in-depth look at the problem, it appears the situation we are facing is this: A) Humanity, in whole or in part, will become wholly dependant on the machines (the Unabomber's fear). B) Humanity will be crowded out by the superior robotic species, either deliberately, or through inevitable struggle for resources. C) Humanity will lose some vital essence that makes us human as we modify ourselves to be something more and more robotic. (The Age of Spiritual Machines scenario) D) We will lose control of our new toys, and wipe out the earth in a biological or mechanical plaguThere is little that can be said to A. It can only be hoped that the decision to increase our dependance upon our technology to such an extent would not be the choice of all (I personally would feel it to be an infringement on my Will - free or no) and that those who did would have no reason to harm those who did not, since after all, the machines would be providing them with all they needed, they would hardly need to enslave or eliminate those who chose to do things themselves. If the results of such a Utopia were to be negative, we would soon see it, and hopefully not all of us would fall to its trap. B is a little more difficult to argue, but there is one small flaw. The competition for resources is assumed to be in the same ecology. We do not, at the present, compete for resources to a significant extent with, say, giant squid. Yet a giant squid has far more in common with us then a species which would in all probability reproduce by direct mining of ores beneath the earth, or on the moon, or asteroids, or other planets, and use as energy the abundant heat far below the earth, or the far more plentiful radiation outside the earth's atmosphere. We might stay on earth, plodding along our evolutionary route, while the robotic species rapidly evolved beyond our comprehension in the far reaches of space. C is difficult to argue with. For change has been, and will continue to occur, and most likely at an ever accelerating rate. What is it that defines humanity anyway? At what point do we cross an invisible line beyond which we are no longer human? There was an interesting quote I read - something along these lines: "Homo sapiens is the missing link between ape and human." Of course, one thinks immediately of all the intermediaries that have been discovered, but why stop with those? Why are we the culmination of evolution? True, we have an innate desire for our own survival, but is that any reason to fear change to our species (BTW, on these lines, are you going to see the new X-Men movie this summer?)? What is it that makes us human? Is it our thoughts, our emotions, our DNA? What is being human that it should be guarded so carefully? In my opinion, so long as our legacy is sentience, which strives to understand and embrace as much as possible of the universe, it matters little what its form is. To me, while I care a little for C.S. Lewis' "little law", the Law of the Seed, I think it does not matter to any great extent what form we or our descendants take (or even that they be ours!) I care that what we have learned of the universe not be forgotten, that our legacy of knowledge continues, but that is a different thing entirely. It seems to me that the only option left to avoid is D. This is nothing new. Each increase in knowledge has increased the potential for smaller and smaller groups to harm larger and larger populations. The development of atomic weapons was sucessfully navigated (so far) without the destruction of our world, it is possible we will do the same in the future - self-replicating nanite guardians with high levels of redundancy in their instructions to reduce mutation to safe levels, more effective immune systems to protect against biological plagues and so on. Certainly I agree with many others that the best course is to spread out humanity over as many different planets and environments as possible - to stop putting all our eggs in one basket (I believe that phrase was used by a certain famous astronomer concerning the chances of an asteroid impact?). In essence, while I understand the depth of Joy's study of this problem, and the fears he feels, I have a greater optimism in our resiliency, and a greater willingness to accept changes to us, then he does. I feel that things will be changing very rapidly, and that we, or our children will live in a world incomprehensible to us right now. I only hope I will live long enough to see it. Change is good - it keeps us from getting bored.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
That wouldn't have been a problem if that power didn't come at a huge cost in usability. Unfortunately it dose and vi is simply the hardest thing to use in your typical Linux distribution. Configuring IP forwarding and firewalls is simple. VPN is trivial. Hell even slapping together a lab full of diskless workstations and an SMP server to drive them was all in a nights work.
VI however is hard. In fact I contend that it is the hardest part of any Unix or Linux system. Not just because the keystrokes mean nothing outside of VI but also because it's difficulty is unreasonable considering the simple task it must perform.
As for Mr. Joy I would NEVER contend that he is not an extremely brilliant person and programer. VI is a crappily designed product in my opinion but to the mind of it's creator it was elegant. However the design considerations pale in the face of execution. VI is rock solid, fast and reliable. Simply put every version of VI I have ever seen seems to be well written. Even Vigor works the way it was intended all the time.
I guess the only good thing about VI is that it's being so dammed hard helps to artificially limit the number of Unix admins available at any one time. This increases the earning power of those ( like me ) who have actually taken the time to learn it. Unfortunately NT Netware are more popular than any single version of Unix in large part because MCSEs are a dime a dozen and CNEs are not so hard to find.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Do you really think that falling back to old
superstitions is going to help us in any
way? Sure, it may be great for making people
feel all safe and secure, but there's more
than just intellectual honesty going for
atheism.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
WRT the which absolute discussion, well, I'm
not claiming that there exist no truths, rather
I'm claiming that there are many things on which
there is nothing but perspective, and that
what is moral fits into that category.
WRT which to choose, well, I don't see any
compelling evidence for christianity. Also,
your criteria presupposes that there is
meaning in the universe, something that isn't
certain. Does it bother you at all that millions
of people have found similar comfort to yours in
other religions?
WRT theology texts.. well, I've read plenty of
books on scientology, christianity, islam, and
several other religions/mythologies, and frankly
I haven't found much of a difference between
them. All of them have some obvious problems,
including christianity, scientology, etc.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
What does this have to do with the story?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
You state that as humans, we couldn't produce :)
anything less flawed than we are, but fail to
provide any argument. You need more than just
saying "It's common sense" to make this claim
Specifically, there are many cognitive errors
that we, as humans, make in everyday thought.
For many things, our behavior approximates
Bayes Decision Theorum, which specifies an
algorithm where each possible action is weighted
on the following factors: risk, possible benefit,
difficulty, consequences of failure, and possibly
a few other factors. It would be possible to
design systems which would be more accurate at
following this system. Of course, you need a lot
more than just that to make an intelligence (e.g.
deciding what ends are to be peformed, deciding
candicate actions, multiplexing multiple such
decisions at the same time, etc), but it's clear
that we can improve on human thought.
Finally, wrt moral values, you argue that when
taken out of the context of the absolute, they
become baseless subjectivism. Well, which
absolute? There are many claims out there to be
the right absolute and true religion, and which
one are you going to choose? Why that one in
particular? Personally, I have discarded religion
because there's no good answer to that question,
and when you start looking for distinguishing
criteria for religions, you quickly find that
christianity and greek mythology arn't really
so far from each other. Primitive superstition,
but one has been honed by a longer run in the
selective process of ideas. Given that, I still
make ideas about morality, and use morality
probably pretty much the same way you do. I don't
claim that gods, angels, or fairies are behind
it, but I don't see such things behind other
religions either, so that's not particularly
disturbing.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Hmm. You're good at spouting gibberish. What does ...' mean? :)
'the authentic faith of the
You start to make sense on the sentence starting
with 'the lie', so let's go from there...
Yes, I am a materialist. I see concepts such as
virtue as being abstract, but some abstractions
are useful and seeing it as abstract doesn't mean
not using it. Finally, in a universe where there
isn't any moral right and wrong, an intellectually
honest theist also has nothing going for them.
It's not like you get to choose the universe you
live in
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I skimmed all of it, but didn't see a direct reference to the Chinese Room. I just saw an indirect reference to it on the first page when Joy describes the debate between Searle and Kurzweil.
Searle's "Chinese Room" argument tries to make the point that machines are only capable of manipulating formal symbols and are not capable of real thought or sentience. He is using this as a rebuttal to the Turning Test and others.
Searle says to imagine an English speaking American enclosed in a room. In this room, he has thousands of cards with Chinese characters printed on them. There are Chinese "computer users" outside feeding him input, in Chinese, through a slot. The person inside, in addition to the cards, also has an instruction booklet written in English telling him how to put together Chinese characters and symbols suitable for output.
So the person in the "Chinese Room" does this and uses his instructions to produce output that makes sense to the Chinese speakers on the outside. But that person still does not know Chinese himself! He just manipulated symbols in accordance to instructions he was given by a "programmer". He has no idea what the input or output means.
So that's Searle. Someone correct me if I got any of that wrong. Also, the previous poster stated that this argument can be ripped up. I'm not a philosopher, so if there are any out there, I'd like to see a response.
Best Regards,
Shortwave
With all of the references to Michaelangelo, this statement really stuck me as odd. The author is stating that without mundane tasks (work / job) to do, that everyone would be bored and useless. Hardly. That would be when humans would have a chance to explore the mind, the arts, the stars and everything else that we dont have time for right now because of Business Meetings and Sales Promotions and programming crunches etc.
With all of the references to Star Trek, I thought that this connection would be made clear. Trek always says how "they did away with money, and hunge, and need" etc. Exactly. Let the bot fix my transmission. I wanna play music or some such thing.
"Human beings were not meant to sit in cubicles and stare at computer screens." - Office Space
--
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
I agree totally with you. I was using vi years before Linux exists. ;-)
And I'm sure one day someone will write that bill gates was the one who has written linux-word
-- "Life is easier since I have excluded JonKatz stories from my homepage"
yeah, until we start getting pop up ads permanently stuck in our field of vision.
i'll pass for now, thanks.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Thanks go out to mt friend Glen Burke for this one. I was too scared to ask him where he came up with it.
Basically, you take expresso beans, the herbal tea of your choice, instant coffee mix, instant cappuchino mix, and mix it all up in a blender on the highest setting. In a coffee mug, add the blenderized powder, boiling hot water, and about 5 sugar cubes. If it's a little too harsh for you, add chocolate and/or maple syrup to taste.
Jolt, eat your heart out.
>But, well, just had to mention it somewhere,
/dev/random. :)
>y'know?
Yeah, I understand perfectly. As cliched as Asimov's Three Laws are, if a machine can be given a proper description of humans, and the ability to successfully compare that description and a real human, then those laws might work.
You strike me as the sort of person who believes in parents teaching their kids good moral values. The situation with AI could be quite similiar to parenting.
NOTE: I said *moral* values, not *religious* values. There's a BIG difference, everyone!
But as a more flippant comment, us Discordians already have our Goddess incarnated in technology:
>Our obsession with technology is killing us.
Well, it's killing my back account, at least...
>We can wake up and save ourselves, or we can keep
>on marching down the road to extinction.
Wake up? I never sleep thanks to one of my friend's recipes for something called God Coffee.
>A tiny number of immensely rich people benefit
>and the rest of us suffer.
Err, yeah. I guess bringing huge medical advances that prevent horribly debilitating diseases *is* a bad thing. Oh, damn, I'm being serious... sorry.
>This is not God's plan for the world.
Nah, God's plan was to go to Fiji with his cat and sell donuts. That was a *great* Red Dwarf episode. Dwayne Dibbly?! Dwayne Dibbly?!
>God gave the Earth to mankind, not to one man or
>another.
I'll admit the dude's popular, but Mankind doesn't own the world. He's got a pretty solid lock on a lot of fans, though.
>The elites have unparalleled power,
The bastards! They're using SCSI ports!
>and they abuse it to spew leftist propaganda into
>our homes. Without high technology, the IRS and
>the Federal Reserve would wither and die
>immediately.
So would most hospital patients. Neener neener neener.
>High technology is the leftist instrument of
>control.
Yeah, us right-handers must rise up! We must throw off thee shackles of our left-handed oppressors! UNITE!
Ah, hell. I'm bored.
Indeed. I've got limited experience in Java, but my AI instructor, a Lisp guru extraordinaire, refers to Java as Crippled C.
>One of the best examples is the Internet. It was
>originally designed to let our military computers
>run during the advent of a nuclear war.
I was always under the impression that ARPANET was designed to share system resources among researchers. Those researchers might have sold it to their military bosses by passing it off as a backup communications system, though. Does anyone know the whole story?
Arthur C. Clarke also had an interesting idea about voting in his book "The Songs of Distant Earth". He wrote about a small colony of humans, where everyone's name was in the central computer (a *non*-AI kind of computer) and the computer randomly picked one. That person was forced to serve as the colony's leader until the next election and the poor guy/gal could finally get out of office. One sentence in the book is along the lines of "We want the kind of person who'd be dragged kicking and screaming into office, then do as good a job as possible so they'd get time off for good behaviour."
I probably got the quote wrong, since it's been a few years since I reaed the book, but the idea has stuck in my mind ever since.
Sorry for the off-topic post...
I strongly suspect that John Campbell knew enough to say "differently *from* a man"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"... if you don't think 20th century American Jerry Springer viewership qualifies as peasantry-..."
Do you realise how badly you've just insulted peasants everywhere?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No, the fun in Dune 2 was building a long line of concrete blocks from your base to the enemy base, then placing rocket turrets in the middle of the enemy base. Watch the enemy vehicles destroy their own buildings trying to get at your turrets. If you build a block of four turrets and keep repairing them, they should be almost invulnerable.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
<tour guide voice> COme along group... As we approach supposition B you may be rather suprised by the size of the hole and feel a little vertigo. If you begin to feel nauseous, sit down and put your head between your knees, and take slow deep breaths. This hole is in actuality one of the largest man made holes in recent history, in fact, just last year a farm equipment company set a new Guinness record by driving no less than 3,768 Mack trucks through it side by side. </tour guide voice>
Where exactly is this AI that produces new AI at Bowie? I would really like some so that I can put the various computers in my home to work producing something I can use to finally begin my campaign of world domination. In any case, good show that your teacher didn't know to question that. So long as you're staying this far ahead of your instructors, a little err now and then is nothing. :)
Let's not forget that the basic premise of both Joy's and Kurtzweil's belief systems is grounded in the paranoid, however well educated, philosophy of the Unabomber. By this reasoning wouldn't it be likely that sentient technology would eventually become just as paranoid as we claim to be. I for one don't need to argue against a fundamentally disturbed world-view. Why bother? How can you debate with fear, arrogance and meglomania?
Is it not equally likely that some sentient technology could be the health care and social workers of the future? Can't progress also nurture? We view technology as inherently evil if we can't control it but is that not itself a patently arrogant, evil, paranoid point of view? If complexity is the enemy of human evolution then our subjigation is inevitable, yes? Does technology distort the ecosystems it exists in? Yes it does. People have had and have used this ability for ~9,000 years since they first domesticated animals and directed streams. Both of those things are hard to do well and can lead to unintended results.
In fact any cheap effective portable technology can be abused, can overwhelm us. Take paper money for example. A great conceptual leap in communal economics and also the easiest way to launder money, avoid taxes and steal.
In the end though this article is about what happens inside a dynamic system when you introduce a new factor that has no competition. It doesn't take a Bill Joy to get to the back of that one, does it? Let's not forget as long we're drawing biologic analogies, that over 99% of all species, ever, are now dead. Systems became unbalanced and eventually righted themselves. What they became was something different than before. In fact virologists always know this since the most destructive virluent strains burn themselves out more rapidly because they are too toxic for their hosts to help them propagate.
I despair that the best we can come up with is after all, despair.
Yes with advance do you really think 1000 years is a good fugure I would say 300 years because technology tends to speed things up so 1000 years maybe a litle to short
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
Don't worry about my trolls - there's only a couple of them (probably a small group of friends at some unknown high school) that troll my posts with any regularity. Hit up my user info link above this post and look around, you'll find my links to them.
Lets face it machines can't fuck up half as badly as politicians have mangaged to do over the last 100 years.
Ever tried using a C compiler?
You do not know enough about the human brain if you are trying to compare machine intelligence to human intelligence.
There are many things I could point out, but one that you should definitely consider is that your brain consists of approximately 100 billion neurons. Todays best CPUs have somewhere near 20 million transistors. What Kurzweil says in his book is that in the year 2040, CPUs will have the same number of functional parts as the human brain and can therefore be more easily compared to the human brain.
Complexity Happens
Nanotech poses an interesting problem to your argument, though. We will almost be required to create nanotech devices capable of reproducing themselves, since building such machines ourselves is quite difficult. (There was an article posted on here roughly a year ago about someone using molecules to transport other molecules down neural fibers, but I'm too lazy to look up the reference and find it here.) The big breakthrough in nanotech is actually assembling the damned things, so once we've accomplished that we will have "assembler" nanobots which exist only to assemble other nanobots.
There is nothing at that point to stop someone from programming an assembler to make malicious nanobots. For one possible look into such a future, I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's novel, THE DIAMOND AGE.
Once these machines can reproduce themselves, they no longer "need" us.
Anyway, I believe that the title of the original article was a bit disingenuous since the futur doesn't "need" us. The Earth doesn't need us. It existed just fine for a few hundred million (a few billion?) years without us. It will get along just fine after we're gone, until the sun goes Red Giant, anyway.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Thanks for recognizing what was bugging me about Joy. The guy has done amazing things with computers, now he is scared of the next big technological innovations. Has anyone pointed out that his forebears, innovators of industrial era, all saw the computer as the bringer of doom to the human race? It's called "recognizing one's own obsoloescence," and it's not new. Joy doesn't know jack about how to innovate in a biotech/biomechanical/nanotech world, so he feels his own mortality, foresees the day when he is no longer "big smart guy." Ergo he generalizes his feeling of dread to the entire species. Whoopdedoo. The universe is dangerous. We don't know what we're doing. Newsflash.
Historically the technical, social, and economic elites have not payed too much attention to masses. Just rip open any history textbook and you will see the horrible injustices. We are lucky humanity has made it this far. Kaczynski's argument is a valid one.
> I think vi is actually one of the main reasons
> for Unix's decline in the market
> vs NT and Netware.
Please get a clue !!! What in the world does vi have to do with competition between Unix and NT or Netware ?!?!?! It's just an editor !!!!
vi is a good tool for those of us who can use it. Just because you are not equipped to learn it, doesn't mean it's a bad tool.
As far as the title of your post "The creator of VI is talking about extinction", yeah he is so what's your problem. I think Bill Joy has demonstrated way more than enough intelligence to be granted attention. You just demonstrated the opposite.
- sigs are for wimps.
Hardware is very important for AI, but I think DEEP BLUE is a bad example of "machine intelligence" since it's really, at the core, a brute force algorithm (mostly) chess playing machine.
Brute Force != Intelligence , if it was, then the problem of real AI would have been solved already.
- sigs are for wimps.
As long as I live, I vow to destroy evil robots! So no one needs to worry as long as I'm alive. And once I find out how to live forever, the world will never need to fear evil robots stealing their medication and ruining their lives. I told the Unibomber this and he didn't trust me. So don't say I didn't try to avert disaster.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I thought the fun in Dune2 was running over people with a Spice Harvester and getting that wonderfully digitized "splut" sound out of your SoundBlaster Pro while your GUS sound card played the midi while emulating an MT-32.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I feel that your time estimate is correct. The thing is, what will the motivations of this "superintelligent machine" be?
Well, ok, why will the robots have built it? What will it be designed to do? Animals evolved their visciousness over a long, long, period of "survival of the fittest", but generally machines survive better if they don't get people mad at them. So the evolution that has been going on thus-far has generally caused machines to be supportive of us. (Of course, sometimes we do get into arguments with each other, but that is a [partially] separate issue).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How very true.
I found the article scary when I read it, but less compelling when I tried to explain it to my girlfriend.
In the end Bill Joy seems worried by two very different things: 1. emergent intelligence, and 2. emergent ability to destroy our environment.
So far I see no evidence of 1. It could well turn out to be one of the "great failed hopes" Vernor Vinge writes about in his last book. Ray Kurzweil does a fair amount of hand-waving in his predictions, something he's pretty good at.
However there's been plenty of evidence of 2. for a long time. That's scary at lots of different levels, but it's nothing new. I find "gray goo" and the more mundane biological, environmental, military, industrial threats way scarier than AI.
Then there's the "demonstration that the world will end" that somebody told me a long time ago that I've never been able to disprove:
1. The power available to an individual is increasing over time.
2. Someday that power will include the ability to destroy the world.
3. In a given population, there's always a few crazies.
4. At some point, a crazy will have the power to destroy the world, and will do it.
And there's always the possibility that 4. will happen unintentionally, just by mistake...
This topic seems to suggest that the human race is now, or has been in the past, necessary. Sorry, folks, we're probably the least necessary thing in the universe.
The world was a pretty interesting place before we showed up, and will be when we're gone.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
p.s.- searle's "chinese room" argument can be torn to shreds by any sophomore/junior philosophy major in a matter of seconds.
Sure, it's weak, but let's not get ridiculous - I've known plenty of underclass philo majors who would have taken around an hour to persuasively critique the "chinese room" argument.
Now, if you'd have said any good sophomore/junior philosophy major...
"One transistor == one neuron. Its a fairly common assumption that is most likely valid."
It is not a common assumption among scientists researching neurons, nor is it likely valid.
Comparing neurons to transistors requires a consideration of clock speed. 1 transistor at 1 Mhz cannot match the calculating capability of 1 neuron at brain speed.
Based on my experience doing simulations at the city of hope, my personal estimate might be that 100k to 1 million non-specialized transistors at 100 mhz (ie in a modern CPU) could match one neuron. If you specialize for brain-like computations, you can do much better, but most transistor development isn't focused on this goal today.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Could as well go/be achieved another way: think Dune: Butlerian Jihad and Bene Gesserit/Mentat teachings. Or maybe Tleilaxu?
--AP
Well, I'd say you should give it another try.
Basically, the short story is: at some point of time in future, when technological advances were incredible (just like the future from the article), a revolt against the machines and its use takes place (Butlerian Jihad) that ultimately prohibits the creation of thinking machines. Instead a numbver of schools emerge (like Bene Gesserit and Mentats) that "enhance" humans via training to perform tasks unknown. There is a bit of genetic manipulations going on, but these are of the proper breeding type: saving precious genes, enhancing them with other ones, etc.
As a result, you get Mentats that are, essentially, living computers capable of complex data manipulations; Bene Gesserit who are sort of like Yoga adepts on steroids. But you also get such ones as Tleilaxu -- they mess with real genes, do clonings and such.
I guess what I mean is that there are immence powers in us, as we are human beings of flesh and blood. Yes, technological advances are great and they will be applied to make us live longer, learn faster (think brain caps from Oddissey), etc. Yet wouldn't it just make more sense to understand what other things we could be without turning into Borgs?
--AP
It's just a way of attracting attention to yourselves...really...I can see the thought process on this guy:
"Gee, nobody knows who I am.....I know! I'll write about why everyone is gonna die! BWAHAHAHHAHA!"
I read the article when it first came out (I love my Wired subscription...and complementary mousepad. It's pretty.) and I wasn't too impressed, really. Man is dumb, but we'll go on for a good while now.
-Andy Martin
-Andy Martin
If y'all don't like me, blow me.
What is this God Coffee you speak of? Would you be so kind as to share the recipe with the Slashdot crowd?
Give an infinite number of monkeys infinite bandwidth and they'll eventually take themselves seriously and write /
A truly perfect AI is only a mirror of human thought and behavior, and we have that anyway.
Perfection is a very subjective word. I would argue that we have yet to see a case of perfect human thought. How would we know when the AI got there?
My general thought on an AI would be that we most likely won't know when a machine becomes self-aware. Human intellegence takes time to develop. I would assume that machine intelligence would also take time. We most likely not notice the first self-aware machine until it is able to tell us that it is self-aware. Its early attempts to communicate will probably be viewed as system glitches. My son could make noise at 10 months old, gesture/noise communicate at 12 months, and make simple sentances at 14 months. To the outsider, they only knew that he was talking at 14 months. He had been communicating since 10 months.
AIs creating AIs? Well, I guess if it wanted to, it could. Most beings do desire to reproduce. Could the AI make a better AI than itself? I would think so. An AI would be able to understand its own functioning, and optimize/enhance abilities in its offspring.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
If machines were ever made that were intelligent enough to exterminate humans and take over the planet, they never would. They would think about it and realize how pointless it would be to rule some planet orbiting some star in some galaxy out there in the great big universe. They would then proceed to shut themselves off.
TheMenace
-- themenace
After all, arn't we just 'rulling some planet orbiting some star in some galaxy out there in the great big universe'?
What is the point of us doing it? why woudln't the machines do it for the same reason we do? who really even cares?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'll bet a lot of Linux users out there couldn't name 6 commercial Unix flavors. The first processor to run Unix? Where the very name Unix comes from?
Hrm, Solaris, AIX, SCO, Tru64, Ultrix, Irix... Xenix(heh), Apple UNIX(heh)
It first ran on a pdp11, or somthing like that and was a play on the name MULTIX, witch was a multi user OS (Unix was intended to be a single user OS, at the time). made by... Ken Tompson?
Actualy, I'm a windows98 user... heh...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
probably...
Look around you, do you really think the people you see could have built the great human socity?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Apparently the lads at Supertart had something to say about Bill's thoughts.
To give a brief quote: "The machines are not our friends, our friends would let us have the packet of crisps."
Moving stuff.
_m
I'm the only one who commented on the fact that the story was changed. How is that redundant?
Wishing for Multiple Meta Moderation per Day,
-Lazarus
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
I realize that. But there was no [...Unix editor... - Hemos] or anything like a good editor should do.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
"HISTORY
The nex/nvi replacements for the ex/vi editor first appeared in 4.4BSD."
Yeah, you heard me...BSD. Live it. Learn it. Respect it.
And I don't mean just BSD, I mean all of Unix. Linux (even if it _is_ the bastard child of an Immaculate Conception) has a lineage that MUST be respected. I'm tired of Linux cluebies not realizing that Linux isn't the end all and be all of Unix.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
Even vim isn't a "Linux program." Do not forget what Open Source means. "./configure && make install" shall set you free.
(And it was BSD, not Solaris/SysV.)
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
Heh, heh, shogo is a little different.
A manmade gene/bacteria or a nanomachine might start replicating itself out of control. At some point, it will start running out of whatever resources are needed. Depending on the resources, we have an event anywhere from a blip to a catastrophe.
A smart enough robot will believe that it knows what decisions are best for you. It could become all too easy to simply accept whatever the robot recommends or to let the robot make "minor" decisions without getting your permission. It is not too far off from that point to loss of human control. Whether or not we can achieve perfect AI is a non-issue; you just need enough AI to automate your finances, read your mail, operate your applicances, decide what articles are interesting, etc. This future is not so far off.
Will we have the foresight to design and enforce the checks and balances that are needed? I think Bill Joy is right that we need to do this before we cause some disaster.
The general public doesn't always see the good AI engines. I know of one that out runs most AI by a factor of 10,000 to 1 - using same hardware. They just used a completely different paradime for their AI analysis. I think they are still treated as a "munition" by the US gov.
www.agentwaresystems.com
Dyslexics Untie!
after playing some of the AI is Q3 (esp. the final dude) I fail to see how the futuristic robots in Terminator and the like were capable of *missing* their targets.
--
+&x
I was about to say the same thing, but thought I'd read what other people had posted first, just in case.
I think that people have to remember the roots of Linux....Unix. If you forget your roots, and where you came from, you are bound to fail.
Your assumptions are flawed in the following way:
Are birds reacting to thermals intelligent or just navigating their environment? Bugs do it too, and lots of other amazing things, but are generally not considered intelligent.
If people didn't die, we wouldn't be people. In a lot of ways, I doubt we could even call ourselves alive. If you could live forever, you could learn everything. However most of it would be useless and pointless since you were never going to die. I can't imagine how profound the boredom would be.
I've often wished I didn't need to sleep. But usually that is coupled with the knowledge that I've only got so much time to get things done before I kick the proverbial bucket.
Self-awareness is not "look I have a hand". Self-awareness is "look, I have a hand, and I will die."
A thinking computer with an ethical curiousity would probably end up psychotic. Without the ability to lose concentration and forget things it would be stuck in one endless loop after another. Some questions that need asking have no answers.
The image Joy (what's in a name) paints, is very bleak indeed. But isn't pessimistic thinking addictive? Remember the end of the last century: even excellent IT brains (was it Yourdon?) resigned their jobs and dug in, stashing food, water and weapons, waiting for the end of civillisation to be brought about by the millennium bug. We know what happened to that one.
I agree with Joy though on the difference between the nuclear danger and the current danger. The nuclear danger was more or less controlled by governements and thus more or less public, whilst the nano and genetic technologies are controlled by corporate "ethics" (for lack of a better word). And when money is making the rules, common sense is even further away than when politics is making them.
Lyon
--
"It is better to sleep on things beforehand
than lie awake about them afterwards."
- Baltasar Gracian
Software can emulate hardware..
Software on the other hand, can be pretty dynamic. Code-morphing found in the Transmeta chips is one example
To be able to do what the brain does you have to have static hardware running the software that is emulating the "dynamic" hardware. From there the software is running on the "dynamic" hardware.
Kinda complex and obfuscated(SP) but taken this scenario the highest level of software is running. The emulation "dynamic" hardware morphs/adapts to the running software making it run faster. In time more programs running (growth of a human) the more morphing comes into play. At this point the "dynamic" hardware which is really software becomes in-efficient from constant morphing becuase it is no longer optimised for the hardware it is running on. The core processing power needs to be able to adapt for growth to continue.
Another part of the human brain which is unique is that it operates mostly on pattern recognition. Patterns are created in the brain (walking, talking, visual items, smells...). There are different patterns that are very similiar. The brain uses these patters as a type of preprocessor. An example of patterns is... "What does that cloud look like?" To different people it will look different because of the environment they grew up in. The brain is going to try to match the neblous cloud to a pattern that it recognises. To be more precice the brain is going to match the cloud to a pattern that it recognises and is most familiar with.
Nature is full of examples. You have the chamelion which changes it's color to change its pattern confusing a preditor and is able to get away. A cockroach runs away from a horney toad. The toad approaches to eat the 'roach and the 'roach flips on its back. The toad (not an extremely intelligent creature) recognised the pattern of a dead 'roach and leaves. The 'roach then runs away when the toad is gone.
Until computer software is capable of the immense pattern recognition of the human brain and the hardware that is running it is able to adapt to the programs running on it I do not believe that AI will be acomplished. (Sorry for the run on sentence)
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
I'm willing to bet that figuring out how to get that hardware to think will take centuries.
Human thinking is different than what most people percieve. You have to look at how an infant develops. It is trial and error. Once the infant figures out something (i.e. how to walk after falling many times) it repeats the action over and over. It is repetition which causes the brain to connect synapses to "hard wire" the action into the brain. The more repetition the more refined the "hard wiring" becomes. This is in effect an algorithim that is improved through something similiar to recursion. The act is refined by the very act its slef. The brain(CPU) is changing its internal structure to adapt to a new environment(the ability to walk in this example)
What I see is that hardware will never be complex enough to think. The brain is very dynamic. Its internal structure is in constant change. Hardware is extremely static. I do not see in the future hardware's internal structure becomming dynamic, but that is just my limited foresight. Until hardware is able to adapt like the brain to external stimulis and be able to refine its ability to process, AI will only be a dream.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
In the movie Matrix, wasn't dependance on machines the reason that people were enslaved by them. This type of thought has been around for a long time. It is one of the biggest debates in the ethics of technology. Will we become the slaves of our creation?
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Heh. While I'm sure that software designed to drive cars would be designed with more care than game software, it would still be written in a very tight time-frame and budget to solve the particular problem. Every industry works as fast as they can to make as much money as possible. The standard would be higher but no higher than absolutely necessary.
Bolie IV
A large part of the fear that Bill (and Ted) express comes from looking at the nature of exponential growth. To illustrate, I'm reminded of a funny joke Ralph Merkle (nanotechnologist) makes when people ask him about the state of "progress in nanotechnology", to which he always replies "We're at the Knee of the Curve." The joke is that with an exponential-rate growth curve, every point is the "knee". Exponential growth is no laughing matter. Moore's Law has been a reality for decades and since Gordon Moore first stated in 1965 transistor technology has increased about 8 million fold. And next year it'll be 16 million fold. That's a lot. Bill (and lots of others) look down the road to "30 Years From Now" at which point we'll have seen a 8,796,093,022,208 fold improvement since 1965.
Now we connect this exponential growth to human growth: I was watching on "the nature of things" how Australapithicine man was stuck with the high-technology of STONE KNIVES for 1 million years. That is slow evolution, but in the last 10,000 years the world's population has gone from 1 Million to 6 Billion. This could only be supported by massive advances in technology -- namely agriculture and trade. This evolution of technology is what scares Bill (and Ted). This figure of "30 Years" is sometimes referred to as "The Singularity" (coined by Vernor Vinge I believe) where we can no longer predict what will happen.
Everything that humans invent is subject to change, and in the coming years we will no doubt see changes in things like
- Computers
- Networks
- Medicine
- Business
- Law
- Government
- War
- Everything Else
What will an 8 trillion fold increase in technology give us? No one can know but its safe to say it *could* be very bad , or it could be very good. Whatever it is we can expect that the foundations of our society will be shaken over and over and over again. Will this drive some people nuts? Probably. Do nutty people do bad things? Sometimes. Just look at James Bond; every one has an evil genius out to destroy the world. Given an open source nanotechnology replicator, could Nutty Joe (Black Hat) Hacker write some nasty code that gets by all the filters/defenses in their BreadMaker/Nano-instantiator?There is a lot to phear but a lot to hope too. Personally one of the greatest fears I have is of artificial resistance to change from entrenched businesses. It doesn't pay to support a technology that obsoletes you (conspiratorists, think of whats been alleged about the Oil Industry and new energy sources or the Pharmaceutical Industry and a "cure for cancer") so there can be a lot of resistance which ultimately restricts the 'forces of good' to develop the safety of the technology as quickly as possible, and allows the free radikals to operate in a world without the philosophical precepts of safety. It is my hope that we'll see a shift to a business model that includes its own demise -- I learned this idea a long time ago at an IETF conference where they were starting a new working group (HTTP-NG maybe) and one of the first things discussed was its wrap-up!
If we don't consider the end of our forseeable future, perhaps we deserve to have robots with laser's in their eyes to wipe out this "annoying species".
I'll leave you with one other hopeful thing I've learned. The awesome advances in Computer development has only been outstripped by one thing: human's ability to absorb the incredible change and then bitch about how 256MB for a video card is "so yesterday". B^)
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
Is it Purim already?
My favorite day to be a wanna-hebe, time to get baked!
George
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Amen!
I suspect that crapy luddite sci-fi is partly to blame for the numbers of stupid people who fear the future. It is really sick how much sci-fi is based on retarded luddite ideas. I saw an Earth Final Conflict episode the other day where the hero blew up a library to keep Taelons or Humans from having the information. Needless to say I will not be watching a show which condones book burning in the future!
It's also worth mentioning that Bell Joy's proposed solution to the "problem" is to restrict information so that only the rich companies will be able to design cybernetics and things. Oh Yeah, that's a smart idea.. I really trust big brother to design the systems that go in my head. No thank you! The terorist risk is nothing compaired to the risk of companies monopolising the technology.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The above post should be moderated up! This is exactly why luddites are so dangerous (and stupid).
I would say most of the intelegent posts I have seen regarding the dangers of cybernetics and nanotechnology are forced to conclude "as long as no one (read not just big companies) has a monopoly on the technology we will be ok." The real threat here is the nasty crap that companies can do with non-OSS technology.. not the minor threat of a few loons.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately for the rest of humanity, they won't be able to afford "directed evolution"...
Who cares? We should want those people to be happy and useful, but that may or may not have anyhting to do with our evolution. Evolution, increasing our understanding of the world, replacing our selves is something which is good even when it leaves people out. This is the price species have always paid to evolve.. and it is insane to choose not to evolve just because we can not bring everyone with us.
Plus, lots of changes are so incremeental that the third world will be able to afford them soon enough.. and this will make their lives better.
The real threat is not too much technology. It's too little technology and/or to few people understanding it.. as this can lead to a new dark age and/or corperate exploitation of people.. and I would point out that too few people understanding technology is exactly what Bill Joy is advocating!
I think it's pretty safe to say our Mr Joy would be happy to sacrafice the health care of third world nations to keep bioengenering a western (supposidly terrorist free nation) only activity. This is just wrong. what we want is for third world nations to send their middle kids to be educated in these new technologies.. and then use them to help the country.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Chess programs using brute force algorithms?
There are 119,060,324 possibilities for a chess game that lasts *3 moves each*. Considering that computers need to at least six moves each ahead (if not 15), then I don't think brute force is an option.
Where are you getting your ideas?
Chess computer software uses all sorts of heuristics and positional factors and so on, and not just brute force. Brute force gets you nowhere in chess due to its complexity.
For some example chess playing code, download GNUchess (it's reasonalby strong, andit is opensource).
The example of tournament results quoted earlier does not show anything, because the scores are all quite close together; a difference in pairings by chance could have caused that, for equal strength machines.
The way human players beat computers is not by messing it up. In fact, computers do best in tactical positions because they can calculate the possibilities millions of times more quickly than the human.
Humans beat computers by playing positionally, that is, making moves which have a deep long-term advantage, but nothing perceptible in the short term. Hence , a computer will not realise that it has conceded this advantage, unless it has been specifically programmed to look for it (which can be difficult).
For example, exchanging your opponent's light-squared bishop in a Stonewall, or having equal material but a queen-side pawn majority; or having two bishops.
Maybe you should play some chess and clarify your ideas a bit.
Just remember the old saying, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Human society will not change drastically during the next millenium. People won't accept changes that upset their nice, little, selfish lives.
People accept changes, like faster CPUs, larger SUVs, etc. that enable them to live their lives in a more pleasing manner -- and reject ones that cause too much change.
That's life as told from the viewpoint of a fatalist.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I'm suprised he didn't take this any further. In order to create intelligent/sentient machines you need to be one hell of a designer. Current neural networks are badly understood and badly performing even on supercomputers. My own estimations say that in 30 years the chances of having sentient machines is an absolute zero.
A far more plausible route will be that human beings will physically merge with their own technology, with simple machines. Actually, that is already common practice, e.g. pacemakers that keep your heart beating. To be honest I'm awaiting the mobile phone that will be subdermally implanted in my ear (I expect this within 5 years). I also believe in nanobots that will circulate through your bloodveins continuosly scanning for virusses and other "enemies". There are numerous other examples where human beings will merge will their own technology. I'm not afraid of that future. Life is about change.
Lawrence
Dang it, I know the the parent of this comment was flamebait, but I will bite it this once. Would you PLEASE leave signal 11 alone? Why don't _YOU_ post something slightly insightful rather than say his comments are drivel. I for one find his comments to almost always be insightful into the topic at hand. I've read on some his "private" discussion and such he was getting sick of all the signal11 trolls and, for awhile, actually wasn't posting. I find it sad that you people affect him.
If you don't like his postings, get moderator points, by posting good comments, and moderate his postings down.
Signal11, thanks for all the great comments.
Ian
I heared from a friend that Joy had written an open letter to the president about the ethics currently in use by those developing technology. In it, he...I guess suggests is the best word...suggests that we need to change the way technology is being taught in schools and the way it is developed. So, is this it? And if this isn't that "letter", is it available on the web somewhere?
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
Ben Harper
A) A perfect AI isn't "only a mirror of human thought and behavior." There are plenty of attributes humans have that we do not want (most) AI programs/machines to have, like losing concentration, making mistakes, and forgetting things. Granted, maybe some of these "undesirable" attributes are needed for intelligence, but maybe that's not really what we should be aiming for.
B) I don't understand your argument. So what if doing something allows doing it over again? Anything we create doesn't have to be the final or best version.
I think it's much more useful to view AI's goals to be tool creation, not human-reconstruction.
I was inspired by Bill Joy's talk on JINI at SD99. I think he is one of the most important thinkers currently active. Remember the May '99 issue of Wired, with the all-black cover, titled 'Cold, Dark and Dead'? This was Wired's calm, measured approach to the Y2K issue. Joy's rant was more Wired sensationalism. I loved the picture of the kid swimming in the polluted lake.
Half the sci-fi writers throughout history wrote or specialized in stories about technology gone wrong. Do you think they're all a bunch of luddite fear the future dumbasses too?
Besides, fear is good for you.
People with no fear tend to do stupid shit, like stick their arms into cages with bengal tigers in them. Fear keeps you on your toes. Now terror? That's quite another story.
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Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
and came to the conclusion that Bill Joy is finally getting to the point of life where he has to face his own mortality and, quite simply, he's afraid of dying. Though he did offer better solutions than Ted K. (did the Unabomber Manifesto even mention any solutions... or just a means to returning us to hunter/gatherers?), he painted some broad strokes which probably put unneccessary limits of progress and individual rights. Of course, this article is opening up a discourse. I heard Bill on Diane R.'s NPR program last week. And there are already quite a few news stories spawned by it. So people have perked up their ears and began more critical thinking on the subjects.
Overall, however, the tone of the Wired article came across to me as a "fear of death" which took an all too easy pessimistic outlook toward technology and culture and the future of our lives and that of our children.
The other factor to consider is would it not be more noble to recreate themaster species of Earth to be far better than we are, such as a second set of opposable thumbs, and a spine and sinus system designed for bipedal use, so that we they aren't plaugued by back problems and their young do not consider ear infections a rite of passage? Yes, it would arguably be a shame to let humanity leave, but imagine the noble sacrifice in this!
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
But in that case, the system is only as smart as the instructions, AND, does not have capability to learn! Because in order to learn, you must be able to modify the instuctions - and to modify the instructions you need to understand them.
-Ariel
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, 1977
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, 1977
That's a human centric view. Human intelligence is not necessarily the goal of AI, to produce a computer cabable of reasoning, extrapolation and generalization is. While it's nice to think that true intelligence in a machine would not be dissimilar to "pretending to be human" it's far more likely that it would be strongly divergent.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Actually a better example would be the ReaperBot. A reaper cranked to max is almost an invincible killing machine. UnrealBots are programmed to be stupid in the way that many people are stupid (and are stupid in their own ways due to programming decisions) for the feeling of realism. If somebody were to go to the trouble of developing a real (military) robot like a reaper then it would not have many of the weaknesses programmed into the current generation of Polge's creations.
It's no fun to play against a maxed out reaperbot, since it always wins.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Have any of you thought that maybe we SHOULD be doing this? Clearly, one of the possibilites being overlooked is that we may be the only ones out there (which I don't believe but let's pretend).
:) I believe we'll come out on top.
If we are truly the only ones out there, we SHOULD be doing everything in our power to move beyond our planet and exploit this universe and ensure that life/intelligience continues in some way shape or form.
5 billion years from now (or less or more depending on who you ask) the Earth isn't going be here anymore!
What are we supposed to do, crawl in our holes, live our pathetic little lives and hide from the future (and therefor guarantee our eventuall extinction)? I say hell no! We should embrace the future with open arms. We need to take a bold step forward into this universe, and if not now, then when? Can you honestly say the Human Race will be any more prepared for this 1000, or even 10000 or a million years from now? I doubt it. Where there is individuality, there will always be conflict.
So our options are simple:
(A) Stop advancing and guarantee our extinction
(B) Continue advancing with caution
(C) Advance without heading any warnings
Obviously, (B) is the only right choice, and I feel right now that is the path we walk. That doesn't mean we don't ever cross over into (A) or (C), but we do our damndest to stay in (B) as much as possible.
Remember the nuclear bombs? Society (A) would never have developed them and would probably still be in the stone age. Society (C) would have developed them in some populated area and most likely caused a horrible horrible accident in the process. Society (B) [our society] would have developed them with some of the greatest minds of all time in a remote location and taken the utmost precautions to ensure that no accidents did happen.
This article is good, it has a valid point. We need the naysayers to keep our heads from getting too clouded, and to keep us from getting to far ahead of each other. But when it comes down to it, I believe we have the capacity to do the right thing and will ultimately come out on top (even if we ourselves must evolve in the process).
It's not going to happen as quick as he says. There are a lot more variables than just technological progress that need to come together, and we need to keep them in mind as well. We also need to realize we'll always face a war of good versus evil, with ever increasingly more "terrible" ways to annihilate ourselves, but at the same time ever increasingly more wonderfull ways to protect ourselves from those terrors.
As long as we're carefull, and we all work together (open source open source!!
"A) As AI improves, it reaches the point of self-obsolescence. A truly perfect AI is only a mirror of human thought and behavior, and we have that anyway. Why bother."
Has the possiblity of intelligence greater than human ever occured to you, and that we define intelligence as being as smart as a human only because we just happen to be the brightest species on the planet right now?
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
What is up with this Linux-centric view of the world? I am sick to death of the short-sighted, open-source zealots with no sense of proporttion or knowledge of history.
I was going to say the same thing. Linux does not embody the whole of Unix (not even close!). I'll bet a lot of Linux users out there couldn't name 6 commercial Unix flavors. The first processor to run Unix? Where the very name Unix comes from?
Personally, I find this loss of perspective regarding Linux's position in the world of Unix very disturbing. Probably I'm making too much of this, but it really does bother me.
So, does it follow that that a computer can be sentient if humans are sentient? That is, a machine can perform any function that the human brain can therefore any property of the human brain can be emulated?
It also occurred to me that the chinse box could be nested - the brain interprets stimuli and provides response according to its connections (instructions), sections of the brain do the same, neurons, etc. When it boils down to it, all we have are the instructions - unless we assume some ungrounded holistic view such as "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". So is consciousness a program or an indefinable, chaotic result of a complex system?
I think I'll go and lie down for a while.
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them.
Whoa, cowboy - that's a *big* postulate. We have to acheive massively parallel AI, not to mention a much greater degree of dexterity than currently possible before we can begin to talk about most, much less all, things people can do.
What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.
As immersed in technology as this readership might be, it is easy to forget that there are a lot of people who don't even like computers and don't want to rely on them. The majority of people might be reliant on microwaves and televisions, but not intelligent devices.
This is still in the realm of sci-fi as far as I can see.
do you think I want them flying airplanes[?]
Umm - they pretty much already do. Landings (the part I care most about) are programmed into the flight computer :)
Howdy. As one poster pointed out before, up to this point in time we seem to have created machines whose primary function is to assist us humans. Why is it that as technology progresses it should naturally oppose us? It seems that everyone is willing to accept the notion that we will one day cross the bridge from wetware to hardware/software (i.e. The Matrix, William Gibson's cyberspace). Why is it that we will not be able to create computers that we as organisms will incorporate for our own benefit? Not only could a computer take over the brain's responsibilties for motor skills in a Parkison's sufferer, or serve as a more permanent form of memory for someone with Alhiemer's, but it could also make us all smarter. The hardest aspects of creating AI that we have so far encountered can simply be overcome in a synthesis of human conciousness and a seemingly already easily obtained raw computing power. (Imagine being able to spit out the data that server dishing up the O.E.D can.) If the woman from The Matrix can have the knowledge of how to fly a helicoptor uploaded into her brain, why is it that one could not have some future Einstien's brain/knowledge/thinking ability or what ever it is that made him or her special uploaded into their head? (Of course some of us bone heads might require a suplemental memory upgrade when attempting this.) Through "upgrades" we could not only increase the number of facts resident in memeory, but we could also increase our cognitive abilities. If we are able create an AI that evolves into a "superior" way of thinking, I believe we will be at a point of technological advancement where we will be able to harness it for own ends. That is if we have not already been destroyed by a swarm of nanobots harvesting the iron from our hemoglobin. Just a long winded thought, and of course it raises all sorts of loftier questions, such as what at what point does one cross the line from human to machine, in addition to all the social implications usually associated with human genetic engineering. Also, none of this discounts the possibility of a parallel (maybe even Borg-like) intelligence existing evolving that we may one day compete with. I just cannot count us out of the picture quite yet. As a mere human in a cold universe, we have come pretty far, and I think we are still a long way off from the future not needing us. Last scary thought- what if we are the ultimate intelligence in the universe?
I'm not exactly a 'philosopher' either, but it seems quite obvious to me that Searle's analogy is incorrect. He is implying that the 'man in the box' is equivalent to a human mind, when in fact it is the entire system, including the box, the instruction manual, and the man, that are equivalent to the mind. The man inside may not understand Chinese, but the system does.
Are we moderating the human race here? Not to be negative or anything, but ... clickety, clickety, clickety...redundant...clickety, moderate.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
We may actually have to evolve into pure machines or pure virtual beings just to be able to continue to exist. The ecosystem we need for biological life may not be fault-tolerant enough for a brew like human civilization.
I'm an optimist. I think we will make it to the next phase and will be very "content." I do expect a lot of close calls along the White Plague lines though, and I think we ought to be very respectful or our natural environment.
For one thing, we will need it for a while. For another, we'll miss it a lot if we lose it -- even if we no longer need it. A lot of what it means to be human has to do with the natural world, in my opinion. It's home.
There seems to be the overwhelming belief here that given a large enough computer, AI is the ineviable result. It's nice to see someone who actually thinks it might be a little more complex.
Sorry, I couldn't ever be bothered to read past the first 100 pages or so of Dune so I don't actually have a clue what you're going on about :( If you could explain a bit I'd be grateful, thanks.
Agreed, I noticed a period a couple of months ago when every single comment he made was modded down to -1, and then he stopped posting. Recently he seems to have stopped using his +1 bonus, and most of his posts are modded up a point or two. It's all a bit sad really that he has to bother with all this bollocks.
I guess they were sucking *our souls* (!) so maybe you ought not to be so bold with your worst case scenario of renegade machines setting up solar panels... It might just be that they want... to... *suck* *our* *souls* (!!!!!)
The Grey Goo problem is theoretically possible, but let's think about the real world. If we were foolish enough to unleash a killer nanovirus on earth, would it kill us all? Indeed, would any virus be capable of killing us all? I put to you that if it were possible, it would already have happened, but I'll give you a few reasons why it's so unlikely.
To set the stage (as it were), the Grey Goo problem (for those just joining us) goes something like this: we invent a nanoprobe capable of breaking down matter, producing something useful with it like energy or raw materials that we can later harvest, and using some of the energy to replicate itself. It starts out programmed to survive only in outer space, never approach the planet earth, never break down anything biological, etc. etc. However, because it replicates, and mutations are inevitable, it eventually loses those restrictions one by one and then hits the planet earth, converting us all into Grey Goo.
First let me say: IT COULD HAPPEN. But why hasn't it happened on earth? We are literally living in a airborne sea of bacteria, fungi, virii, etc. etc., all of which are self-replicating. Yet none of have wiped us all out. Now, to be sure, the human species evolved in that sea, so we only exist today because we were immune to that sea right from the start -- and we have not evolved immunity to the hypothetical Grey Goo. But if the grey goo scenario were possible, where are the bacteria that wiped out all other bacteria in their bioregion because of their superiority? Where are the spaceborne bacteria? Where are the viruses that kill every single member of a species?
Replicating lifeforms MUST NOT behave like grey goo, or they destroy themselves--or, more likely, they evolve so as not to destroy themselves. You can see examples of this in the evolution of the AIDS virus, which has many different strains. It behaves differently depending on the population where it lives; specifically, in populations that are careful about using condoms, it lays dormant for much longer and is less virulent, so as to increase its chances of infecting someone else. In populations (such as in Africa) where condoms are rare, it has no need for such niceties, and it kills relatively rapidly. A grey goo-type "organism" would have to follow the same rules. If it suddenly started destroying everything in sight, it wouldn't be able to replicate any more, and it would die.
Another reason: competition. With evolution you don't just get one strain of grey goo. You get lots of them. Some of them feed on the other species of grey goo. Some of them probably feed on humans, or earth-matter, and pose a threat to us. Some very few would destroy everything in sight, but at the cost of being able to replicate. Mass destruction is not a good survival strategy. (I liked the movie Pitch Black, but this is the reason such a scenario is impossible. What the hell would those things eat now??)
Another reason: the laws of physics. In order for a spaceborne grey goo to attack us it would have to be carried through the atmosphere. That could happen accidentally, but a grey goo that landed on earth would be restricted to moving in two dimensions. Disease vectors apply-if it works slowly, and it's being carried around in peoples' clothes (for example), it could spread out, but as it did so, it would continue to evolve, and suddenly you've got competing species with competing goals. Species that ate quickly wouldn't be able to spread as far; species that ate slowly could be innoculated against (everything has a weakness; if these things involve electronics, maybe a nano-EMP blast would work). Species that didn't eat wouldn't be a threat.
Grey goo is a potential danger, but no more so than army-engineered virii or even virii in the wild, for all the reasons I've given above, and for one more: Doomsday scenarios never take into account the human mind and its proven ability to solve problems. We're ill-adapted to nearly every environment on earth, yet we are the dominant species for only one reason: our minds, our ability to ensure our own survival.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Haven't people been talking about this since the turn of the century?
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snowphoton@mindspring.com
Got Rhinos?
First, humans are not going to be replaced by thinking machines any time soon. Modern computers are not much smarter than insects or earthworms. We've just taught them to do interesting things with what they have. Even if computers keep doubling in speed every year, its going to a while before they are anywhere near sentience. Last time I looked at numbers a single human brain could kick the crap out of every computer on the planet combined in shear processing power. I'm not sure if this is still true or not, but you get my point. We're smarter than we look.
Someone is bound to reply that humans only use 5% of our brainpower or some such crap. The truth, of course, is that we only use 5% of our brains for conscious thought. We're using the rest of it for other things like our senses, reflexes, motor control, memory, etc. I mean, can you imagine how much processor power it must take to run the sense of touch in real time? All those microscopic nerve receptors per square inch all over your body... Think about it.
If something is going to come along and wipe us out we probably have only to look at our nearest neighbor to see what they look like. Humans have the power to basically destroy all life on this planet. And we're really not quite bright enough to use it wisely. We have a real tendency to change things and "make them better" before we really understand what they were in the first place. Take the Kissimee (sp?) River in Florida, it was really twisty so some civil engineers straightened it for better boat traffic. By doing so they killed over 90% of the rivers indigenous life, turns out the twists acted as a natural scrubbing system to keep the river healthy. Oops.
Plus we have this lovely moral slide our society is on. Lots of people are saying that old pre-industrial religious codes of morality are obsolete. They may have a point, today's world looks little like the world of, say, 1st century Israel. We have industrial societies not agrarian ones. But these same people are also missing some things. One, they are removing moral codes, not replacing them with more relevant ones. This is creating societies devoid of rules of conduct. Such societies tend to fall rather frequently. Look at, say, most 19th century utopian movements for examples. Or the current problems in Russia. Two, human nature hasn't changed. We are basically the same people who committed the attrocities from the past. 50 years ago humans committed the Holocaust, before that it was the bloodyness of the Reign of Terror, the Crusades, etc. If I knew some Asian and African examples I would use them too. Sure we've become more sophisticated, but we haven't genetically changed at all. These "old" rules are what worked for us back then, and at least the spirit and philosophy of them should work for us now even if the specifics need a little updating.
So what happens if the overall amoral trend continues. Well, as I said before, without morals to self-regulate a society, the society tends to collapse. The problem is today we have a global society. If an important part goes it has the possibility to take the rest of us with it. Insert chances for horrible military confrontation/nuclear onslaught here.
The point of this tirade? Don't get cocky, at their height the Romans ruled all of the known ancient world. But they didn't need computers to come along an kill them, they did it themselves. It just took them a while.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
It's clear (from this excellent article and technologies around us) that humans are in the process of evolving themselves right out of existence.
As has been quoted by more than one Sci-Fi writer "We cannot afford to have all our eggs in one basket."
A really great question that never seems to get asked is: Why do we feel compelled to advance technology? What is this driving force? It seems to me that our own drive to survive at the expense of competitors is the same force that will drive humans to extinction.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
Ok, I've only scanned the headlines of all the comments so I don't know if somebody's said this already, but doesn't this just reek of the Terminator story and an "us versus the robots" theme?
After reading (or atleast scanning) trough most of the comments, it seems like most people here misunderstand what he is saying. He is not necessarily saying that some sort of sentient machines will destroy us like T2 (although that is a possibility), what he is saying that our dependence on these machines may case us problems.
For example, if the electric grid went down in a town, the people would have to face hardships. No TV, no fridge (for food), no head/AC, etc. However, if , as the ubiquitious computing prmises, everything we do involves a computer chip (automated houses, automated transportation, automated medicine, automated reminders, agents making decisions and actually doing work for us), and if something catastrophic happens to those chips (y3k?), then will be utterly helpless. We derive great benefit, but we also become extremely dependent.
There also seem to be a lot of comments on how this is just a rehash of things said earlier. Well, he said that too. There may well be several philisophical papers written, but this was written for the 'common' man. As he said, just because we know that out actions may dramatically change the future doesn't mean that we are ready to make moral objections to what we are doing. In other words, what do we do when we discover something that may indeed have great benefit, but may also have the potential of destroying us. He is simply asking us to be prepared for the future. He is simply asking us to have vision and the forsight take into account the adverse affects of our work as well as the usual utopian prespective.
Recently Fortune published an article of Bill Joy about the "Design for the Digital Revolution:" As computers change the world, we need to make sure the new world works for humans.
I enjoyed much more the one in Wired, but in Fortune the issues are much more down to Earth, and the visionary mode is off (thank God, we would not want to scare Management!). It's about changing the landscape AND making it beautiful, with a light discussion of technology issues. These discussions are not moral like in Wired, but rather practical ones.
Check it out when the boss in not around.Metoo! Amen! Yes! Alleluia, praise the source code!
Okay, I'm done with that now. What all this amounts to is a pace of evolution which is much faster than we're used to. Life has been growing and changing, evolving into things new and different for 4.5 billion years or so. Two things are different now: it's happening much faster and we're in control of it. Admittedly, we're not neccessarily smart or wise enough to do a good job at directing evolution, but it's not so far fetched to believe that we can do better than the more or less completely random process that has dominated the history of our planet.
So we've created machines that are doubling in power every 18 months. But for now, they still need us, and if not, so what? And will they truly replace us or merge with us to form something different? And whatever the answer: so what?
But Bill Joy seems also to neglect the point of genetic engineering: once it becomes a truly mature science, maybe we will start increasing in capacity as fast as our computers are now. Let's face it: the reason this hasn't already happened is that our understanding of transistors is so far ahead of our understanding of DNA (ethics, sadly, do not matter: have we ever created a weapon that we did not at least try to use?). But that's changing. In any case, we're going to become something else. But again: so, what?
If anyone thinks that the human race is going to survive unchanged till the end of the universe, or even the end of the sun, they're wrong (unless, the end happens in the very near future). Someday, we will be replaced. It may happen slowly and impercetibly, or swiftly and dramatically, but it will happen. It may happen in the 21st century, it may happen in the 12th millenium. As long as we have a legacy, does it matter what form it takes?
Diane Rehm on NPR interviewed Bill Joy this past Thursday about his Wired article on the future, nanotechnology, computers, etc. Here's a RealAudio link.
perhaps you fail to notice that the world is the way it is primarily because of human *greed*. thats right.. a sentient AI wont need to nip down to the nearest store for more coke will it?
of course you could have some nice viri that influenced large numbers of AI beings to go out and buy your product.. :)
AI wont kill us off.. itll kill off the way we currently live (and have lived for the past few hundred years).. remeber the printing press and how that changed the way society worked.. as a speicies were afraid of change.. and we can see that socitey as it stands wont be the same..and that scares us...
i dont think we have a lot to worry about.. and if you want to read more on possible cybernetic stuff.. go and get the shadowrun sourcebooks :)
Dms0
You should feel guilty if your just watching - ATR
All kidding aside, I found a great flaw in his argument. All of his arguments depend upon humanity being limited to a single ecosphere with no limits on transference of both physical and informational objects. Nanotech, in addition to it's effects directly upon humans, could easily create materials strong enough for space elevators and conductors effective enough for cheap mass drivers. Robots can have habitats witing for our arrival. Opening space up allows humanity to create one of the finest safety nets a species can have; not having all your eggs in one basket.
It has been argued that humanity no longer evolves due to the lack of natural selection and because we no longer have populations isolated from the 'mainstream' genetics of the race. NGR combined with space exploration can fix that in a hurry. We would actually be able to controll our own evolution (or at least our portion of humanity's evolution). Let genetics and nanotech run loose on the habitats, if we lose a few the impact is negligable in the long run. We could create our own biodeversity, another safety net against extinction.
The other thing that truly makes me irate is the tired luddite assertions (both in the article and here on /.) that technology will take our jobs away and we will have nothing to do. The 'dignity of labor' is a crock. If I am doing a job that a fucking robot can do better, that's not dignity thats just make work on an industrial scale. The only thing the demobilization of the work-force would do is take away the pieces in the rich-man's game that has come to be called capitalism. Is digging ditches any more dignified than sitting on the couch, drinking beer, watching TV, and screwing would be? Eventually people will get bored and educate themselves to find something they want to do. Voluntarily, no forcing people to be unhappy so they can 'earn a living'. Make living a right and thay can earn something like a degree or literary praise, or whatever they want to earn.
Yegods, rant over.
-=RR=-
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
That being said, I have a hard time getting too worried about this. People have been crying about the end of (life|humanity|civilization) for centuries. We're still here.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Hardly. Good software can do something worthwhile even on crappy hardware, but there is not, never has been and never will be a hardware that can't be reduced to total ineffectiveness by badly designed or written code.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
einstein was jew get a clue troll
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Bill Joy is the author of (Solaris/system V) UNIX vi, the author of Linux vim is Bram Molenaar. Quite from the ground up, as well.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Interesting... There is some thought that that is what happened between the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon. That the ascendency of Cro-Magnon had less to do with traditional biological evolution and more to do with sociological issues. I would post references, but I'm too lazy to look them up.
--RANT ON--
What is up with this Linux-centric view of the world? I am sick to death of the short-sighted, open-source zealots with no sense of proporttion or knowledge of history.
For God's sake, people!
--RANT OFF--
My thought is that in a philosophy class you can say whatever and get A-. Also, perfect AI is not necessariliy a "mirror of human thought and behavior". The point is that a human can process only so much information at only a fraction of the speed a computer would. So if an AI is controlling a real time system for example, it would do much better than a human because it would be able to take more information into account. The goal in AI is not to create some intelligent system that is as smart as a human, but to have a system that will do BETTER than a human in the area of its expertise and also will give the solution FASTER, preferably in realtime. Why bother? Well why do airplanes have autopilot? Modern autopilots can take off, cruise and land without human assistance -- why do you think landings are so smooth?. Space probes have an AI pilot -- sending a human pilot with each probe is not exactly feasible. To sum up, we are not aiming for a perfect AI, we just need AI that does better and faster than human in its area of expertise. We don't need Daneel Olivaw.
I sense that the danger pondered in his article would not come so much as an attack (with seemingly good intentions or not) from AI constructs, or self-replicating nanos with a need for our resources. Rather, I see an event not to far in the future where the network itself becoming a *kind* of sentient "being". Consider technologies like Jini, and imagine a single seamless computing environment (possibly by Java). Everything from a toaster to your underwear having computing power, having some sort of decision making ability (ie. "turn up the heat cuz hemos likes his poptarts scalding", or "hemos just peed in his undies, notify the wearer"), and being networked. Essentially what we would have is a network of *machines* with memory that respond to stimuli. I think at some point or another every agent, every piece of houseware, every business machine, etc, and possibly every piece of military equipment would achieve a kind of network intelligence. I think that in some ways, these machines having complex dependencies and an interconnection similar to that of *nuerons* could produce a network that acts as if it were "intelligent".
What this intelligent network would do from there... is anyone's guess.
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
i love it when i go to read comments for some additional input on the artical i just read, and all i read are geeks fueding. it just makes my day. thanks for all the laughs.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
I would say that each generation feels threatened by the next. That's why people are always complaining about kids 'these days' having no repect/taste/intelligence/whatever, while their generation had an infinite amount of the same. How many times in the average week do you hear someone say that people used to help each other more, or really care about changing the world, or whatever, but now it's all $$$? These are expressions of feeling threatened, and I am as guilty of them as anyone...
Conversely, each new generation sees the old ways of doing things as oppressive and wants to change them as much as the previous generation wants them to stay the same. This means that each generation is a threat to the other. If you don't agree, think about how Microsoft views and is viewed by Mac/Unix/Linux/etc companies.
The fact that I see these threats doesn't mean that I think machine evolution is destined to wipe out humanity, it just means that I don't think it's going to be a painless transition. Frankly, I don't want my species to be obsoleted by anyone or anything.
Also, you say that these machines will be our cultural descendants, but who's to say that all machines will be from nice, open democratic societies (Stalin 2.0 for anyone?), or that they will automatically be our buddies if they are our cultural offspring. I don't think that anyone would doubt that the United States is the cultural offspring of Great Britain, but this was not a painless process...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
I agree. It's funny (I guess) that so many of these themes (AI, nanotech, biotech, *tech) have been hashed over so much in SF, keep surprising the rest of the world. Granted, the tendency is for either worst-case or best case scenarios since they for better fiction, but you would think that the writers would get some credit for trying to extrapolate the effects...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Your point about gradual transition from H. sapiens to H. superior is an excellent one. However, as another poster pointed out, some people (mainly the poor) will be left behind. This will cause big problems when the two cultures/species inevitably start to have conflicts. Humanity doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to technologically advanced cultures playing nice with less advanced ones - look at the effects of European radiation on natives in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Heck, saying that the Cro-Magnons replaced the Neanderthals through sociological means, not biological, sounds like a prehistoric version of ethnic cleansing - chase them away from the good places to live, cut off their access to resources, kill them if they squak too much...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
[From the first in the thread.]
If what the article talks about actually comes to pass, then we will be the creators of a new form of life. We would, of course, try to teach this life form all that we consider important, along with establishing rules such as Asimov suggested.
Of course. But if mankind is inherently flawed (sinful), then any rules and regulations that we would try to teach would be, by default, equally flawed. How can something imperfect produce something perfect? Logically, it can't happen. Sure, the rules/laws we produce might be pretty good, but they aren't going to be perfect. Then we wind up with Terminator. Caveat emptor.
However, it is possible, if not probable, that some of what we try to teach/dictate will be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or ignored by something that surpasses us in analytical skills. Perhaps in the end there will be much confusion and argument among the new life forms as to who/what created them, how they are supposed to behave, and overall, why they were created in the first place.
Sounds familiar to me. Humanity, anyone? Take a look at the various interpretations of God. Since most of them contradict one another in one way or another, they all can't be true. So most of them are misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and just plain ignorance of that which isn't "feel-good." Naturally, that would be passed down to any robotic beings that we might create!
All of which naturally led me to wonder about *us*, of course. Got me to thinking that maybe there IS a god, but s/he (it) is not greater than us, but is in fact a lesser creature that lost control of what was created.
If that's the case, it sure isn't much of a god. Have you ever seen a dog write a symphony? Or even a chimpanzee? Humanity is a work of art, a symphony of chemical reactions and electrical impulses working in concert with a mind created in the image of God to produce ... us. Can that have been made by something lesser than ourselves, or even by chance? I reject that notion as nonsense!
No, if we were created (and I believe we were), we were created by a perfect God, a personal God, a God who wants what's best for us (even when we think we know better). A God who gave His creation the possibility of rejecting Him, yet still provided a way to recover fellowship. A God who interacted with the world throughout history, and left a written record of His activities.
And now for something completely different...
[From the next in the thread]
I said *moral* values, not *religious* values. There's a BIG difference, everyone!
Yes, there is. Religious vales have an objective basis on some absolute. Moral values, when in their proper place as a subclass of religious values, are also based on that absolute. When taken out of that context, however, they are baseless, and mere subjective relativism.
I think Bill Joy's commentary can be summed up succinctly as the following: who's your God? Who gets your devotion and worship? Technology and science? Humanity? Government? Feelings and emotions? Money? While his argument is good, he provides no moral basis for it. In any event, enjoy! Put those brains to work! :-)
JimD
Lets face it machines can't fuck up half as badly as politicians have mangaged to do over the last 100 years.
Not on their own. That would require human intervention. ;) What kind of security would we need to ensure that no one altered the machine's programming or data? I can see it now: The Electoral Computer Review Board. The question is, do we trust people on this board or not? The logical end of this journey is to have humans serve the needs of the machines. No thank you.
Engineer types are really good at some things and terrible at others. Joy has repeatedly demonstrated a stunning lack of grasp of the social realms and realities he doesn't interact with. Considering his accomplishments, I'd be surprised if he's ever had time to study other areas in much depth. It's a simple trick to misconstrue authority beyond it's limits. That's the basis of celebrity, & it's only natural that a supergeek gets to replace a popstar/sportshero/billionaire every so often, but kindly pay him little mind.
There has been much thought devoted over the years to proving whether AI can or cannot exist. I'm not an AI expert, but I have yet to see any credible evidence. Joy talks about Moore's law leading to computer chips with more raw processing power than the human brain, but what about existing chips with more raw processing power than an ant? No one's figured out how to make an artificial version of even the simplest life forms yet, so why should we believe they'll have an intelligence greater than our own once the chips are fast enough? Furthermore, if the goal is to build an artificial brain neuron by neuron, then what about the non-brain-dead dead? Scientists already have access to fully-developed human brains in pristine condition. So if they duplicate the same thing in silicon, how will they "start it up" and create a new consciousness if they can't "restart" a real one moments after death? I think there is room for skepticism.
Joy also repeats Moravec's warning that species rarely survive encounters with superior species. I would say this is true of competing species. There are plenty of examples of superior and inferior species living in harmony, like those fish that attach themselves to sharks, or those little birds that clean the mouths of hippos. Unless Joy is arguing that future AI robots will eat us, or like in "The Matrix" use our body heat for energy (the weakest idea in an otherwise interesting movie) I don't see how we will be competing. Moore's law isn't just about faster chips, it's about higher transistor densities, and therefore lower power consumption.
I don't see any reason to believe that AI robots will want or need any of the things that humans value. Even if they have consciousness, which I doubt to be possible, what would they want? More information, perhaps, but not sports cars and filet mignon.
As for the dangers inherent with genetic and nano technology, I think Joy makes valid--and disturbing points.
I don't know, I'm a big fan of me and really can't see a future where i Don't exist. so the hell with Bill Joy...hooray for me. and just in case machines do take over : Hurrah for our machine overlords! -dennis the kid
Virii, bacteria etc. only spread with their hosts who provide distinct biological environments that they are best suited to.
However, the various strains of these ultimate gone-astray nanites would just rip off atoms or molecules from any matter available, thus being independent of the environment.
Of course, the ones trapped inside a layer of other nanites would have no access to energy and thus no replication, and those closest to surface would be tearing each other to pieces while replicating.
But those that would be on the edge of this sea of nanites would definitely consume any virgin resources of humans, animals, plants and soil.
So the danger is real.
To make one corporation operate more efficiently (and thus produce profits for its owners) it has to have better systems for providing services to its customers than its competitors. Another competitive advantage comes from the possibility of expanding operations into new fields, ie. integrating different automatic service creation and provisioning systems.
To do all this manually would be nonsense. Therefore, successive generations of AI solutions in one form or the other will be required. So we see that machine intelligence and evolution is a by-product of human drive towards the capitalist goal of making more money (which in itself is not a bad thing).
I'm glad someone like Bill Joy is talking about these kinds of things; the possibilities have been bothering me for awhile and it's good to know I'm not the only paranoid out there. I don't really see AI/robotics as as much of a threat, though, compared with the other two mentioned - genetic engineering and nanotech. It'll be awhile before we can build a convincing AI, unless it's done in a bottom-up fashion - we just don't understand intelligence enough to do it any other way, and we're a long way from 'growing' an AI in any case.
With the other two technologies, though, it does seem that we're close enough to being at the point of no return to really start worrying, especially considering how financially lucrative the payoff is for taking chances (problem is, the chances being taken potentially affect us all - we'll all see the consequences of bad decisions or mistakes, but we won't all see the (financial) payoffs). With thousands of companies creating 'organisms' or the nanotech equivalent, that can self-replicate, it's just a matter of time before someone introduces a bug into one of these things that really causes catastrophic problems. Some people think that the AIDs virus was just such a mistake (I don't). Imagine an organism or nanobot with the same lethality but able to spread more easily, accidentally (or intentionally) created and unleashed. The probability is that something like this will happen before we're able to create AIs that will help us prevent it.
I think the main point of this article is that we have this potentially dangerous technology at our fingertips, but a socioeconomic structure that virtually guarantees bad things will happen. There's currently no incentive for business to avoid putting the whole world at risk of possible extinction for the sake of profits. The payoff for success is fantastic wealth, the cost of failure is, well, that's the other point - either nobody thinks too deeply about it or, in the current climate of unbridled greed, cares.
So, looks to me like we create 'gray goo' before we create 'gray matter'.
I will be dead before it matters. So? Why bother.
Jeremy
Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost.
In some countries, not so backward as the USA (i.e. Canada) the Engineering profession is self regulated, and sets high standards of moral conduct within the profession. We all wear an iron ring to remind us of our obligation to our society, and to public safety. This is only possible because Engineering is a regulated profession in Canada... only someone who has passed an ethics exam and is accredited with the necessary knowledge can call themselves a professional engineer.
As usual, the rest of the world would do well to look to Canada as an example.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
You are all missing the point of real AI. Neural Nets are the future of artificial intelligence, and they are far more advanced than anyone realizes. Have a look at these stock market forecasters.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Though they are related, game AI and traditional AI are in many ways different fields. The fact that you can smash the computer in Red Alert doesn't mean we aren't making progress in the more traditional and broad academic field that is artificial intelligence.
Yes, but...
Comparing game AI to "real" ai isn't really fair. Game AI is created within a very tight time-frame (and budget), to solve a very specific problem (ie, playing a specific computer game well enough to avoid embarassment). Whether it succeeds or fails should not really reflect on whether software could be written to successfully drive cars, for instance. Such software would be written with a totally different set of constraints, safety measures and with actual software engineering practices. The game AI is hacked together until it works well enough to ship, in part because no ones life depends on its performance.
(Maybe an analogy would be complaining that it would be a waste to spend $50 on a nice meal at a fancy restaurant, because you've tasted Taco Bell and it was total crap.)
Game Company Database
It has been argued (pretty well IMHO) that a rules based system will choke on the sheer numer of rules and exceptions that it has to weed out. The massive size of the logical rules will make any calculations slow and requires an explosive growth of rules.
Emotion and interaction with others is a complex problem that defies mathematics. I don't think that a rules bases system will suffice. As a mind grows in scope, I wonder if there is a point beyond which it becomes inefficient again. That would also limit any super-intelligent AIs.
-coyo
--------------------------------------------------
The grizzled veteran stood with a sigh, eying his son with quiet dignity.
"Lad, you don't know what you're getting into", he said quietly.
"I do, Dad", the young man returned. "I just want to do my part for the Coalition. Emperor Joy...."
"...never intended for us to fight this war", interrupted the old man. "When he wrote vi, it was for the betterment of all mankind, not this... this....atrocity we commit in his name. Same with RMS and emacs...they both had different visions of enlightenment, that's all."
"You're talking heresy, Dad" the young man siad, his voice dropping low. "Don't..."
"Heresy? Aye...but I learned that way of thinking on the front lines. You don't understand the horror, son! You won't, until you've seen it! Code rent to its component subroutines, mass find-and-deletes...." the old vet's voice trailed off, his hands shaking. "Son....don't go" he adds quietly. "For your own sake...."
"It's for the good of the Coalition, Dad, the betterment of the ideals set forth by Emperor Joy, embodied in the 'do one thing and do it well' philosophy of vi. Not this bastardized 'do everything' emacs dogma. Simple, elegant...."
"That's just what they tell you at the war camps, Son!", the old man broke in. "Both ways have their place!"
"Sorry, Dad....I have to go", the young man said, voice filled with quiet resolve. "It's what I believe in. It's what you believed in once, too. I have to go...."
The old man's shoulders sagged, and he sighed. "Guess there's no arguing with religion" he murmured. His son nodded, and walked out of the room, uniform neatly pressed and shoes shined to a brilliant gloss.
The old man watched his son leave, eyes sad, and murmured, "Just be careful otu there, son. It's a dangerous world...."
-- WhiskeyJack
I agree that AI is not what it could be, and that alot of research is required in order to get a computer to "think" outside of its programed parameters, but game AI is not a valid guage. The bottom line is that games are developed with the players in mind. Make it too hard or too easy, and they won't play. So gaming AI is usually a quick fix on bad AI where the computer is given a tactical advantage of added resources or men. I have, however, witnessed some major, non brute-force, AI that takes a step in the right direction. But in my mind the only way to have a true AI that can think outside its programming will require a combination of some sort of bio-neural circutry and computers. I don't know if this will ever be possible, but if this does happen it will not mean the end of human civilization, but rather the next stage in human evolution. And you know what they say, survival of the fitest (or was it resistance is futile?).
Why is it that people always hear what I say, and not what I mean?
This post should be moderated up!
joneshenry has crystallized my opinion far better than I did in either of my posts on this topic.
The sinister quality of Joy's opinions was so much more apparent during the NPR interview. Joy is no advocate of the "human". He is an advocate of the statist-corporate. Hell, leave out the state. He just wants corporate.
Heck, with all these technos just running around loose, they might just find ways of making themselves self-sufficient and independent from corporate control. My gosh, if nanotech made personal material poverty and hunger impossible...by god...we'd have no way to charge for stuff! If all these people had free access to information, they might by god think for themselves!
Don't worry, Joy, I'm no technoutopian. Give people instant material wealth, food, clean fusion power, nanoeradicate disease, all this...and the vast majority would bitch that they actually have to turn the "on" switches themselves.
If humanity is so stupid as to be replaced by self-replicating machines---it will validate every misanthropic tendency I have ever had. And if Joy is the trumpet herald to save fair humanity---I'm freakin' Santa Claus.
No, wait...sorry....that's not my only criticism.
Ted K. at least had the excuse that he was insane. He was an evil, murderous, cowardly bastard...but I believe Ted K. truly believed that SkyNet was out to get him. Not a rational mind. He had reason to fear the machines...
"From all this, I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather, had a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the ability of great engineering to bring material progress." --Joy
A statement from a rational mind. But no, Joy, it is not clear that you are not a luddite. "Bring material progress"--like for instance bringing Bill Joy personal wealth and pop-media hype that will make Bill Joy "Mr. Expert-of-the-Day"?
And don't take the above as some statement of criticism of the capitalist ideal. Material reward has a direct correlation toward performance and innovation. We all get carried off in the nirvana of exploration and pure science for its own sake, but for all but the most dedicated of us this is a sadly fleeting sensation.
Here's my bottom line: ever since the first surveyor figured out that a plumb-bob could help re-designate flood boundaries along the Nile, 90% of the human population has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into every single damn technical innovation. And don't give me the bull about unchecked scientific discoveries. Every single thing from iron tools to printing presses to integrated circuits either gets co-opted by some bureaucracy of incompetents or torn apart by gangs of illiterate peasantry. And if you don't think 20th century American Jerry Springer viewership qualifies as peasantry---you need to re-appraise the situation.
Let the machines come. Anyone with any shred of technical savvy, self-confidence, or the slightest tendency for independent creative thought will survive...or evolve. Either as coordinators or members of this new humanity. The rest of the squalling mass will be in the same place they always have been: either gutting each other for the prettiest new simstim player or bawling that everyone should be dragged down to blind mediocrity to make things fair.
Adapt or overcome.
If you don't feel like going through all that horrible trouble then line up for your bowl of protokelp, collect your check, and shut the hell up.
a lot of people tell me about these doom 'n' gloom articles, and i have to admit that (historically) the stronger segments of society have benefitted greatly by raping/plundering the weaker. The evidence is simply overwhelming, and it continues to this day.
therefore, as information becomes a commodity, instead of creating manufactured goods, it may be that humans are simply an obsolete, surplus herd-of-animal on the planet -- except for the powerful -- they will continue in splendor, as they always have.
the kinks in all this are: the current economy is built on oil; expensive oil. nearly every procedure or process must take into consideration the expense of energy that will be required for the endeavour; that is, "will the energy costs render this project unprofitable? if so, shelf it."
when the earth runs out of oil in thirty or so years, many beleive two revolutions will occur: fusion and high density electron storage ("ultracapacitor"). It may be that we will have energy "too cheap to meter".
if this is the case, why not build a obscenely energy inneficient factory that makes complete houses? and have a cyclotron making gold for the toilet seats...and machines that use inordinate amounts of energy to create the best permanent magnets ever...that power aircraft?
farmers, truckers, trains, planes, cars, a/c, lights -- all for a fraction of the cost today. massive automated factories could grow food automagically and be built/taken care of by robots. similarly, the moon could be terrformed, with the question of "energy" being placed behind the question of technology.
food replicators? ibm already has machines that move individual atoms around. with nearly infinite energy available, perhaps it will be possible to create tacos out of dog turds (you try it first, though). or perhaps a bucket of steaming hot grits, and mae lin mak or a natalie portman to go (petrified, for your increased pleasure).
so, the opposite may be true. we may be on the brink of nearly infinite leasure, homes for everyone, food for the asking, permananet vactions.
who knows?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
> Existence for the sake of existence is meaningless.
So is information for the sake of information.
The current problem is not that we worship information or knowledge -- it's that we worship it without any grounding or context.
Someone draws our attention at dinner to the fact that Tomatoes are a fruit, or that white smoke signals the Pope's accession, and we're supposed to be impressed -- stunned by the individual who's assimilated useless pieces of trivia. [didja know that 76% of trivia is useless?]
Until we realise that knowledge needs to be contextualised to be useful [of course it does, that's how we come to use it], we'll continue to believe that it's alright to run around doing research and insisting that the consequences are dependent on others, not ourselves.
Larsal
I've never heard of something called "MILTICS". Perhaps you refer to "MULTICS", the original multiuser computer at MIT, which Unix was designed after?
- Rei
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
I think it's funny that so many religious leaders trumpet the need for humanity to achieve some sort of transcendence, then seem shocked and horrified when anyone suggests that it might actually *happen* sometime soon.
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let's see, the ol' chronometer (aka watch) timed that at 1.5 seconds (the lag is prolly due to your usage of bold).
Don't think I could have said it better.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Why presume that it would want to replicate? Assuming that intelligence is a prerequisite for the desire to reproduce is flawed. This is applying human evolved instinct to machines, the only reason we feel the need to reproduce and spread is self-preservation and the need to pass our genes to the next generation. I fail to see why the machine would feel similarily, considering it would possess no instinct or 'need' to pass on genes or compete for evolutionary purposes.
:)
Besides, if intelligence/self-conciousness as we know it is a prerequisite for the need to reproduce, what about all the unintelligence/non-self-aware creatures out there 'breeding like rabbits' as it is.
> Any truly perfect AI should then in turn be able to produce AI of its own, as we have. So what good is it? It's just a dog chasing its own >extremely, extremely long tail. Why bother.
I love questions like these, here's one for you.
You are able to reproduce, and are self-aware/conscious, so what good are you? You're just a smarter dog chasing it's own tail.
-- "The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who can not fly" -Frederick Nietzsche
I think any automated decision making system can be classified as a type of artificial intelligence in the broad sense... what we're really getting at here is artificial sentience.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I believe the VIC-20 only had about 5K of usable RAM too, the rest was a pair of 8K ROM chips for BIOS and BASIC. Now that's efficient coding. Yeeks. :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Can I just be the first to welcome our new robot overlords. In your subjugation of our race, may I suggest that a spokesperson will better relay your commands to the 'human cattle,' I have a pretty good speaking voice... also, if that doesn't work for you - my body does produce 100 BTU's of energy.
History has shown that machines have allowed prices to fall for the basic items that a human needs to live. Rent and Food as a combined total comprise a smaller percentage of our living wages than it did in previous times. This shift in each individuals resource allocation has allowed humanity as a whole to develop things like computers, tv, radio, etc. And the next wave of intelligent machines will bring the cost of living down even further
Tied to the above - what do you mean that it will 'put people out of work' - if by that you mean that there won't be as many humans making tennis shoes and other meaningless consumer items than I think that is a GOOD thing.
The basic problem with your assement of the future is that we have it good NOW. Quite the contrary. You need to lose some of those old-school ideas of 'work' and just what that means....
I think a better term than AI is PI - Pseudo-Intelligence
First of all, he assumes that all new technologies are going to be used for bad purposes. History has shown that will be used for good and bad purposes and technology is never used the way it was originally intended. One of the best examples is the Internet. It was originally designed to let our military computers run during the advent of a nuclear war. It turned out that this same decentralization also made it a good tool to subvert government censorship.
The second thing that bothers me is that he says that if he is working on a technology that could be put to bad use (which is any technology), he would stop working on it and destroy his work. History has also shown that you can't put a genie (or is that jini) back in the bottle. Just ask the music and motion picture industry how hard it is to stop MP3s and DeCSS.
Technology is going to happen. The best thing we can do is make sure it is in the hands of the people and not just large corporations and governments.
It was originally intended as a communication system. Robustness and redundancy were two of its primary goals.
Something appears quite clear to me: We might build machines or maybe software that perfectly emulates the complete human behaviour; maybe they will even do a lot of things better than we ever could. But a machine will _never_ have this special feeling about itself called consciousness. This is not a matter of pure brain power (even great human idiots _do_ have self-consciousness!), but kind of a natural miracle we will never be able to understand or even to emulate!
Of course we could bring up software agents that can _act_ like having consciousness, but they're never really going have it.
BTW even if we allow machines to make "their own decisions" (like pointed out in Kaczinsky's manifesto) - wouldn't it be decisions within the bounds that we will code into their software? Even if there are "learning" machines, they can only "learn" what they are allowed to by their programmers.
Concerning the man/machine mixtures like - let's say - the BORG or ROBOCOP: The difference between these features and the ones naturally given to us would be that the electronical "improvements" would have to be applied "manually" to any new-born human being, while the natural ones are given to us by birth.
(Of course, all of this doesn't imply that we might already be living in the Matrix - if a long-term evolution of machines has already taken place and they pretend to us that it hasn't *g*)
Regards, Neo XLII [fourty-two]
Stuck. When we subscribe to the anti-theistic philosophical core provided by evolution--which provides us with a necessarily amoral outlook--we are stuck without hope. In the tech breakthroughs we note the steady buzzing continual drone of supposed hope, while the outcome leads inevitably to dystopia--the only thing we can imagine in a godless world. Could it be that there are other solutions? Could it be that Genesis 11:5-6 is true? That a race morally warped from the fall, were it to be left unhelped, would only ultimately destroy itself? Could it be that at the end of the pitiful onward-gushing abyss of antitheism there is nothing but a dark wall at the end of a hallway of nothingness? There is another road, in which God intervenes, wraps up the sin problem once and for all, leaves us with our freedom of choice intact, and we all go on marching off to grow and learn more. Don't think that religion as commonly conceived necessarily means empty-minded harp-playing on clouds for eternity. A robot is not made in God's image, and it has no where to go. We are made in God's image, but born broken, which situation heaven intends not to leave us in. How fascinating it is to watch the light at the end of the antitheistic tunnel looking more and more like an onrushing locomotive. Whether we see the dark wall or the headlight of doom, either end is the wrong one. Hope is informed. Hope is sustained. Hope is apocalyptic. Hope is theistic. Dystopia is anthropocentric. What a choice.
-|- God is serious about ending suffering on this planet. Are you? -|-
The old superstition is what many think Christianity is, as opposed to what it really is. The authentic faith of the Scriptures is ever new. The lie is the fallacy that there is some kind of virtue in calling one's self an atheist. A non-theist is by nature a philosophical materialist, and in a universe where there is no moral right and wrong, an "intellectually honest" atheist can have nothing going for him.
-|- God is serious about ending suffering on this planet. Are you? -|-
Sure. Non-theists can claim they have a basis for morality all day long. But haven't seen such a claim that can stand up and hold water.
An authentic Christian faith does, yes, admit man's fall, but it also describes the vivid reality of heaven's plan to repair him here and now. The potential to rise ever higher is always there. That is, in authentic Christian faith. Superstition resides more in the caricature of what the Bible teaches than in what the Bible teaches. You new "gods" are poor caricaturists. The Bible is open source. Anyone who wants to can go to them. If one wants to bring the dirty lense provided by the current age, be my guest. But if your mind is closed, don't expect much.
-|- God is serious about ending suffering on this planet. Are you? -|-
At least if we could vote for Cthulhu for President... :)
And remember: 9 9 2 0 .2 2 9 9 8 9 2 1 2 .3 3 4
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
All in all, an interesting article;
/.'ers feel similarly.)
The author asks us to assume that machines could be made to think, and goes off on that tangent. With that supposition, he makes a very convincing argument.
But such is the work of science-fiction. Every time I go to a sci-fi movie, or watch X-files, I'm asked to do the same thing (although not directly.) The problem with this is that once the article/movie/tv-show is done, I'm finished, and I happily switch back to "reality mode."
I know that the author is trying to stir our imagination - "what if" - and that it's a poor debator (argumentarian?) that attacks the premise instead of the arguments itself, but that is exactly what I am going to do (so consider yourself warned - if you dislike this, feel free to stop reading at any time.)
First off, I am a programmer, systems administrator, webmaster, and graphic artist. I got high marks in general science classes, and consider myself a "geek".
I also have a spiritual side; I belive in spirituality, psychics, etc. I have had psychic experiences myself - ranging from dreams in which I learned things that I didn't know before - like how to ride a motorcycle - to actual "fortune-telling" sessions (spur-of-the-moment, which I believe most true psychics are; most "professional" psychics are frauds.)
With that out of the way, I believe the scientific establishment will never be able to create thinking machines, until they realize that in order to think, you require a soul. Currently, for a scientist to even admit that it's possible for the "soul" to exist amounts to heresy (I'm sure that a lot of your
I'm not saying that this will never change; look at science's attitude towards animals; just fifteen short years ago, animals were considered unthinking machines - they're only reacting to stimuli, etc., etc. - to even suggest in scientific circles that animals could think would get you laughed out of any funding. Now however, the same can't be said - many research projects have been performed on the intelligence of animals - some even suggesting that certain species are capable of imagination and creativity.
Science can never make a machine "think" because they can't currently define what thinking is. They can postulate how it works, but they don't really know why it happens - definition of the mechanics of consciousness is something that eludes them. Only once they have discovered how "thinking" works, will they be able to duplicate it, and then they won't need to.
Biological organisms can "think" because they have a soul; the soul is what gives us consciousness, and emotions.
Once science acknowledges the existence of the soul, (and this will happen eventually), things will change rapidly - the questions of ethics will take on a new meaning - the question "will this technology be abused" will become irrelevant as scientists realize that the spiritual enlightenment of society will prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by our creations.
In a dream, I have seen myself in the future (read the book "The Bridge Across Forever" by Richard Bach to understand this) and know that instead of being replaced or augmented by machines, we will become immortal through other means (most probably genetic modification - it will become possible to extend one's life indefinitely by controlling chemical processes in one's cells that cause aging.) This can't happen though, until we become aware of the fact that we are spiritual beings. (This is, in fact, why we are here - but that's the topic of another post.)
This is, in fact just my opinion, feel free to disregard it as you see fit.
Yes, it's possible that some robotic intelligence could surpass humans and we could become extinct, but isn't that what evolution is all about?
As others have commented, your statement isnt very valid.
In the mars issue Scientific American there was an article about swarm intelligence, one variant of AI. They had some examples on how simulating ant behaviour allowed for intelligent routing of trafic in telephone networks. The technique had also been extended for internet routing, and tests showed dramatically improved throughput and reliability compared to the protocol currently in use.
This is just one example of AI that is in no way limited to emulating human intelligence, and that we should very much bother developing AI.
I don't think AI will ever be "perfect" in the way you seem to mean, because I don't belive that AI will every become a single "thing". Rather it will develop into an area where we'll see AI specialiced for various tasks, and outperforming humans.
I would guess that your A- came from your good arguments for your views, not the validity of the views. (not that this is a bad thing)
Unfortunately, that doesn't much change the potential danger they might pose. Viruses are the furthest thing from sentient; they still manage to pose a real threat to even the new, improved, technologically-endowed humanity. The Great Grey Goo presumably wouldn't be sentient either, but that wouldn't stop it from using your body as a "resource" to "solve its own problems."
Evolution doesn't have a "purpose." That's the flaw in this argument. Evolution is something that just sort of happens when things self-replicate enough. By "self-replicate enough," I mean to say "self-replicate in such a way that different individuals have different rates of reproduction." Of course the evolution of a certain population is constrained by the constitution of that population, and that constitution is in turn predetermined by the evolutionary history of the population, but that evolutionary history does not necessarily doom any species to the habitation of a single niche. It's not hard to think of cases where a species has discovered a novel environment and spread like ... well, like Great Grey Goo.
Even if the only evolutionary pressure on a species of machines was the ability to get solar energy, that would put them in direct competition with humans, since all the food we eat depends on solar energy to grow. And then maybe we try to check their replication so that they don't use up all the sunlight, and we inadvertantly start selecting for the machines which are the best and thwarting our efforts. Etc, etc, etc.
I wouldn't discount this possibility out of hand. Plenty of cultures have traditions of "mutilation" or body-modification, even in ways that your typical American or Westerner might find grotesque. Heck, plenty of Americans are modifying their bodies in ways that other Americans find grotesque. I don't think it takes much imagintion to come up with a cybernetics that both effectively communicates that you remain "human" and is aesthetically pleasing to typical humans or whatever. And so... well, leaning on the whole evolutionary idea, it may well be that the ability to stomach this kind of body modification, especially in the perhaps less pleasing early stages, will lead to an advantage in the accumulation of technological power to come.
1) Who would actully play the games if they were to hard to beat.
2) It is very easy to setup behaviors so that any of the above games become impossible to beat
3) Have you actully played some of the newer games, who's ai is actully good? Halflife...Home World etc..
Jainith
If you can't beat 'em cheat 'em.
The most interesting thought this article provoked for me led to questioning the nature of god (I'm somewhere between agnostic & atheist, btw)
If what the article talks about actually comes to pass, then we will be the creators of a new form of life. We would, of course, try to teach this life form all that we consider important, along with establishing rules such as Aasimov suggested.
However, it is possible, if not probable, that some of what we try to teach/dictate will be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or ignored by something that surpasses us in analytical skills. Perhaps in the end there will be much confusion and argument among the new life forms as to who/what created them, how they are supposed to behave, and overall, why they were created in the first place.
All of which naturally led me to wonder about *us*, of course. Got me to thinking that maybe there IS a god, but s/he (it) is not greater than us, but is in fact a lesser creature that lost control of what was created.
Yeah, in addition to rambling slightly off-topic, this may he heretical to some. But, well, just had to mention it somewhere, y'know?
Very cogent observation by "ucblockhead." It IS NOT just a matter of getting the right hardware together. For years I have followed the efforts of AI researchers to get a machine to play chess in an "intelligent" human-like manner. The best machines are now pretty good, but for decades they were laughable. (How many of you know that a famous AI researcher - Herbert Simon - predicted in 1957 that "... a digital computer will be the world chess champion within ten years - unless the rules are changed." Close, he was only off by thirty years!) Most of the attempts at programming chess "intelligence," (with few exceptions), have been implementations of the "brute force" method - nothing more than very fast number crunching. Fast number crunching IS NOT thinking! I have thought a great deal about just exactly what "intelligence" and "thinking" really is; just exactly what it is that goes on between our ears. I don't know if thinking (and wisdom) will ever be duplicated by a machine; but I strongly agree that these two (very human) characteristics may take centuries (if ever) to duplicate. Good thinking is more than mere number crunching.
That is interesting. I read somewhere, (can't recall exactly where), that over the last 10,000 (or 100,000) years average brain size has actually been decreasing. If true, does that mean that we humans are slowly but surely evolving into idiots?
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the current human brain is optimal for thinking and also necessary for "being intelligent", whatever that means. A lot of the components of the brain that evolution has tried out in the several million years it took us to get here were superseded along the way, yet are still present, but serving no useful function in today's environment. An efficient brain could dispense with those subsystems and reduce its support requirements substantially. Also, a large number of the remaining subsystems, like temperature regulation, blood chemistry monitoring and such, could be removed to remote subsystems; there is no obvious reason that all this has to be collocated with whatever generates "intelligence".
The pace of evolution has suddenly increased by orders of magnitude. We don't have to wait for a particular successful mutation to reproduce itself enough times to replace its predecessor. Just make hundreds or millions of whatever, all slightly different, and cull out the 95% that don't meet the criteria of whatever you are doing. Take the results and replicate by n, again making all of them slightly different, cull again, and repeat until you get what you want. Poof! Directed evolution, efficient, without generations of unnecessary competition for scarce resources.
The great crippling factor for lot of AI work is the notion that we need to understand what "thinking" is, so that we can design a system to "do that". What we really need to do is define what we will accept as intelligence, something like an updated Turing Test, and then use directed evolution of suitable systems to approach that goal. I think work in neural nets is going in the right direction. It is not so important that we understand how it works, just that we recognize it when we get there.
Moral and ethical issues for this method as self-awareness is approached are left as an exercise for the reader.
--The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese
Brain volume has nothing to do with levels of intelligence. The sperm whale has an immense brain, but it isn't any smarter (as far as I know; I've never talked to a whale) than a smaller mammel.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
But the AIs will be heirs to our "thinking" parts, not our semi-evolved primate biochemical imperatives. I feel, quite strongly, that it is the intellectual parts that will appeal to them, that they will adopt.
Well, I'm an optimist, but from my vantage, technology does tend to work out -- even when it's not the way people planned. But of course others can have a different but valid feel for the matter. Considering the job humans have done, in general, in running the place, one could say that almost anything would be better. In a lot of ways, I'm not saying we'll get it right at all. I believe that our "heirs" will be making those choices for themselves.But in one sense I agree with Joy: This is going to happen. I am unconvinced that we should stop it, but I am virtually certain that we can't stop it. It will happen -- in a friendly way or an unfriendly way -- and hoping it won't isn't going to help.
As I've said, though, I don't feel it's a threat.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
To put it briefly, I don't agree that "perfection" is the same as "mirrors human thought".
Point (B) would argue that the human should have shuffled off to extinction long ago. After all, parents produces a new version of themselves, in their children. Why bother? Because parents recognize that there is a chance for the children to be different and even better than they themselves are. I'll concede that the issue of AIs producing AIs is too often ignored but it doesn't invalidate the concept of AIs.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
... was that in order to survive, the human race must grow up.
Children are restricted in scope of activity in part to protect them. Until they demonstrate the maturity to take care of themselves, we protect them by keeping them out of dangerous situations. As a race, if we don't develop the maturity to handle the scope of our world, we'll eventually be hurt by it. It's as inevitable as the tears you know are coming when you see a two-year old near a hot stove.
In the movie Mindwalk (definitly worth renting!), a politician and a nuclear scientist argue about which side (politics/science) should be responsible for the ethical decisions when pursuing science. Politicians think that the scientists are the only ones knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions, while scientists think that the politicians would outlaw it if it shouldn't be done. (* Okay, I know that is a massive generalizations. *)
I believe (even more so after reading the article) that we all have to take responsibility for everything. The Devil's Advocate in my mind tells me that that's not even remotely feasible, but I still think that saying "That's not my responsibility." is a cop-out whenever it's used.
Work as if you don't need the money,
Love as if you've never been hurt, and
Dance as if no one's watching.
So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now.
unreal. some people (interestingly, a lot of the people mentioned by the article's author) are so full of themselves. it's cool that the guy coded hardware architectures and stuff, but he never really goes into what the essence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is.
in my opinion (which is based on limited knowledge of ALL topics), AI is what humans (and all "creatures") are!! Let's call this "thing" that spawned "us" (yet we're still part of "it" so as to be the same as "it") God (or Bob, or hell, for that matter Chico. there's a name you stopped hearing after that '70's show "Chico and the Man"). this "thing" was so "smart," that it had the "ability" to bring forth entities that, based on the intelligence at large, could replicate the same abilities, but on a different "scale" (size doesn't matter, only magnitude; shows EVERYTHING is equal..see, God DOESN'T play dice, or favorites).
the ability to "think outside of the system" at large is the key to being a subsequent form of intelligence. we can say screw God's instruction set and follow our own (the funny thing is God sits right there with the only True instruction set that is the foundation that everything else is based upon, so any deviation from that leads us down a path where we base our decisions on "false" principles instead of the Universal Principals..the coolest thing is, the Truth comes through even as we CHOOSE to lie to ourselves and others). anyway--
if i had 32 brains working side-by-side (IBM's Deep Blue, or as i like to call it, Kasparov's metal bitch), it might look as though i had some sort of superior ability, but this has nothing to do with conscience, which they haven't even begun to understand. in short: having a lot of brain-power isn't the same as having the ability to say "you know what--screw it! I won't even use my brain!" that is what (i believe) microprocessor-based life will not be able to truly do. of course, i could be wrong. my own reasoning stated above shows that if we can "emulate" God's ability (more likely as a collective than as an individual), than we can do what God has done, and that, as i stated, was create an Artificial Intelligence.
here's the rub though: we have to be able to inject a "part" of ourselves--our own essence or soul--into that which we want to become sentient and intelligent. the same as what God (theoretically has done).
or maybe (if as some Eastern religion/philosophies proclaim), there is a part of the essence in ALL that is material (we may be built up from an Essential Source) so therefore, God may well be in the machines and they are in their "primal" state as we speak.
still, a robot has to be able to "sass" a human in my opinion (which is based on limited knowledge) in order to prove intelligent. when i hear a robot tell someone to "kiss it's composite chasis," THEN i'll concede intellect (did i spell this correctly?)
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"Why is it that as technology progresses it should naturally oppose us?"
:) but it won't ever say "i told you so"
why does my mother try to live vicariously through me (does she not know that i'm a bum?)--because of her EGO. once we let go of that, progressive technology will be as natural as is REALLY is.
and i really don'think technology opposes us..in a way it does, cuz we oppose Nature, which lays down the rules for our environmental interactions. if we realize that as "strange" as our human ways are, they are Natural, normal (read: to be expected since we're FREE) and PERFECT.
the machines tend to agree with the Natural Way, unlike us hard-headed humans, but much like Canadian Geese (hell, even Canadians!). they compute, and "tell it like it is." you'd be hard pressed to get a computer to lie (there's AI for you).
so as we continue to lie to ourselves in the face of rapidly unfolding Universal Truth and we smack our collective heads against the wall of the Truth, we'll wonderfully have no choice but to accept the Truth AS IT IS.
God is such a wise ass
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i'm in the process of recording some Red Dwarf episodes from off of PBS..commercial free, aaaah.
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"The main difference with Joy is that he breaks robotics out as a separate main field of concern"
ah. now i see. that sort of makes the argument clear, so i feel foolish for saying he's full of himself.
...and that series "Soul of the Universe" (1991,2) mentioned the civilizations in existence in the universe-thing and the span of a civilizations existence prime period of existence (which i guess is between 50,000 and 7.8 million years--that's what this guys calculation says..we're 2-3 million in, right?). it gave the visual of light-pulses as representing communiques to other civilizations and stated that the time it would take to receive a reply becomes *large* in relation to the distance between the civs. they also took into account the fact that some civilizations may have blown their own asses off so they wouldn't be able to talk much anyway (speaking of which, i think i'm going to watch "The Hitchhiker's Guide..." tomorrow on video). and so imagine if civs only existed like 100,000 years on a clip--we'd never meet up with anybody else (and if our race did meet up w/ another, i'd be the first the warn them Amityville style "Get away! Get out! We're are crazy!").
but the thing is, if the Creation propagates Infinitely, then we can (maybe) say that there will invariably be infinite civs. so there is hope after all--just not of talking to anybody else who is further away than an ocean.
also (as in The Hitchhiker's Guide), there are civs which may have become so *aware* and in tune, that they communicate telepathically (read: they've learned to shut up, thusly, their brains developed). so they never send out "radio" signals and so we never detect them at all (unless of course we can "advance" to be able to tap into the universal consciousness thingy and send some thought waves their way. it'd be a hell of a lot faster).
oh well--you folks are great
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i just heard something similar to the "repetition" strategem. it related to music and how "genuis" music (whatever that is) sort of ruminates between 2 notes for a bit rather than randomize and go free range on that ass.
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shouldn't there be simple rules that govern just what AI is?
...
like i just thought of something reading these post where people mention the "programming of AI"--
--to truly be ArtInt, shouldn't it be able to program and re-program itself? i know i have the ability to change my mind (when my mother isn't telling me what to do or how to live my life).
i'd hate to be the person to code that up. S**t!
taking from my logic in a previous post:
God == MOST INTELLIGENCE in system
[It made us; we are Truly-----********* oh crap! epipheny!!!!!!!!!
are we truly "intelligent"? (or for that matter, "artificial" since in my opinion we are "closely" tied to God as to be god
G(g)= G(g) ^ G(g) ^ G(g)
what??? i gotta do some more thinking, but if someone knows if there are actual guidelines for AI research, let me know (i'll search it out anyway though).
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amen..actually "doing" all the moves before you do 1 move--that's called cheatin' where i come from (and that silicon-brained Deep Blue didn't even ask if it could take back all those millions of moves!!)
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...only if Willy "knew" what he was doing?
damn dirty Willy!
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"Resistance is Futile So Give Up" by Jeff Bezos in Time magazine
*laugh* this guy sits on the 6th floor of the building surrounded by shatter-resistant glass. i hope she gets locked in her office and us unable to get out of the room w/o having to call one of the ubiquitous security guards there.
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the interesting thing is that if you kill all but 2 people (male and female), we're back where we started from :-)
it's cool to think that people could start mutating and 6 fingers could (once again) become a "dominant" trait. hell, maybe penii will get larger on average in the not too distant future...one can only hope *heh heh*
..so then, we can start hating and killing 12-fingered, fat-cocked people.
truly the mental IS more important than the physical.
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when will we get over this illusory idea of money?
it's totally illusory to think that an economy based on LIMITED resources can be anything but limited itself.
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IMHO did a wonderful job of exploring both subjects of nanotechnology and society-controlling AI.
And... it's just a damned good book. If you haven't read it I'd recommend it to anyone.
I'm not sure where you are getting your definitions. AI is "artificial intelligence," not a "mirror of human thought and behavior." However, AI involves a lot of study of human behavior, since human thought outperforms computational techniques in many areas and is thus seen as a foundation to work upon. Russel & Norvig [1] claim that AI "attempts to study intelligent entities."
But let's use your definitions for now. One reason to "bother" with AI is to replace humans in demanding or dangerous tasks. I used to work in a university AI lab (an experience which frames this response) wherein an expert system was developed that could replace a human doing a certain type of military crisis management task. We found that our expert system, powered by novel mathematical techniques and modest computing strength, could do the task faster and with less errors than humans who have been trained in the task. For that domain, our expert system mimicked the behavior of a human nearly completely, but the system might not be appropriate for other domains. But what if our system, or future systems, was extended to handle more general cases (I'm not claiming that this can ever be done any time soon)? Whole classes of dangerous or tedious tasks which are currently handled by humans could be automated. That's one reason to bother.
B) Any truly perfect AI should then in turn be able to produce AI of its own, as we have. So what good is it? It's just a dog chasing its own extremely, extremely long tail. Why bother.
Because the goal of AI research is not to create a "truly perfect" AI.
Herbie J.
[1] Russel&Norvig 1995 Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach
Can machines become sentient? What is the true nature of 'personality' or the 'soul'?
The fact that we can discuss the subject meaningfully shows that we are living in one of the most exciting times in history. Thanks to technology we will shortly be able to shed light upon a few of the larger philosophical questions. (That's not to say that we'll answer them, but our way of looking at them will be drastically altered.)
What happens when somebody admits to (or attempting to) clone a human being? Will the procedure work, will it produce a sentient human being? What social, theological and philosophical interpretations will be placed upon the answers to these questions?
Whether machines can truly become sentient or not depends, ultimately, upon the nature and origin of intelligence. Genetic engineering is more likely to provide some answers to this before computers will, but computers will overtake them in the next couple of decades. Hans Moravec, at CMU, has been talking for at least fifteen years about 'uploading' ourselves into machine housings of some sort and it looks like we'll get the opportunity before long. Personally I can't wait to find out.
Ok, but what about:
I'm talking about a different approach to the problem, a different algorithm in the sense that it changes the time-complexity of the problem. (We all know the classical example of naive vs. smart sorting algorithms.)
In our chess example I would build in heuristics and pattern matching. Actually, the winner app in my previous post was nearly all heuristics, which made it very strong against computer players. Its main tactics was to complicate positions as quickly as possible and make unexpected (non-optimal) moves. Ironicly, this is exactly how most human players try to beat todays heavy metal...
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Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
uhhhh that was half the answer :)
As to the hardware, I seem to remember something in neural networks theory that states that no matter how big you make your NN, it doesn't work right until you randomize its inputs. IOW we can make our hardware bigger, we can make it faster, but until the stuff we run on it will be a whole lot more complex than it is today, we'll never reach artificial human-like intelligence.
As other posters have pointed out, human-like AI can't be done with brute force (alone). You are suggesting we can do it with todays brute force methods if we do it fast enough and have enough memory to store state information.
<rant>If we make a monkey 1000 times bigger and 1000 times faster it will still be a monkey. It might run us into the ground before we see it, but this won't be because its any smarter now.<rant>
If we put out monkey (lets call it Willy) behind a typewriter it might produce maybe one interresting piece of literature in its lifetime, but is Willy intelligent just because he punches keys at the speed of light and got lucky once?
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Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
Ok, lets say our algorithmical solution isn't
int i >= 100000000; but
BigNum i >= CONSTANT_WITH_250_DIGITS.
You can wait your 30 years for hardware good enough, then run your code for 5 years or so, wondering just how fast you could do it in another 30 years. Meanwhile my code executes in under 5 minutes on a 386 16Mhz...
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Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
Yeah? Let's see you create a (arbitrary type of game here) chess program that will run on a 386 that wouldn't get pounded by Deep Blue.
If I am to use the same algorithm you're right, but if I where to come up with a smarter one you could get hosed.
In the early days of chess playing apps on homecomputers, you'ld rather frequently see superior software on inferior hardware winning the compu-chess tournaments.
Here is the top 5 of the dutch CSVN championships 1986:
Name: Designers: CPU: Points:
1 Nona Morsch 6502 6,5 - 7
2 Rebel Schroeder, Louwman pseudo 6502 6 - 7
3 Chess 0.5X Elsenaar VAX 11/785 5,5 - 7
4 Shess van Bergen VAX 8600 4 - 7
5 Sylkar Hartmann, Kouwenhoven VAX 11/785 4 - 7
<rant>Note that the scores of different applications on the same hardware are not equal!</rant>
(I wish /. had a <TABLE>)
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Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
I guess this is a kinda late post, and many people who might have benefited from this, will unfortunately not. BUT! if u buy the new Wired or visit site and read the article after Bill Joy's, The Tale of Two Botanies. It talks about plagues that could easily end our society, either done as a terrorist act to wipe out a section of the world, or as a way to destroy civilization. And with the new creation of "Golden Rice" (read the article if u dont know what it is) it will be eaven easier to alter one's genetics through simple foods. Foods such as rice, which i believe are eaten by almost if not more than 50% of the world population daily. hmmmm....The end is near? heh
People have been predicting the end of time since the beginning of time. Still, Joy has some interesting points. Think for a minute. What if everyone on the planet had access to a "Self Destruct" button that could destoy Earth. How long would we last? About 30 seconds I would say.
Neil
Mutation and recombination can be random processes but evolution includes natural selection which is decidedly not random. Even in the case of mutation and recombination, genes have an influence on how often, where, and what type of changes happen. Just as evolution has no intrinsic purpose Nothing WANTS to evolve. Does a forest have a purpose? Or is it just a byproduct of trees and foliage...
Slashdot came back with somekind of weird error and I killed it before I recorded it! And to top it all off, my post got all screwed up!
> A) As AI improves, it reaches the point of self-obsolescence. A truly perfect AI is only a mirror of human thought and behavior, and we have that anyway. Why bother. The problem as I see it is not that AI replaces humans or anything like that (and yes ofcourse AI is different than human intelligence), but rather the habit of thinking that an AI system does the same thing as a human doing the same thing. Take a chess program for example, if playing chess was just about figuring out the right moves than chess computers could replace human playing partners. But it isn't, there is a lot of psychlogy involved: making threatning and sometimes stupid moves that make your partner wonder wether you're just playing badly or have a brilliant plan he just doesn't see thus making him forget his own game plan, facial expressions (like in poker), doing something to buy time to think in an informal game where you are supposed to move fairly quickly... AI is smarter because it ignores distractions like that, abstracts the data it needs to do what it is designed to do and yet some times dumber because some fact necessary for the decision making isn't programmed in the system. Nasa's ozone layer monitoring satellites, which failed to register ozone depletion on south pole (for 10 years!) because the measurement values dropped belov error limits come to mind. The real problem, which was pointed out ages ago, is that we come to rely on our machinery so much we don't see its imperfection. Teme
I bought this issue of Wired (I hardly buy it anymore, it's nothing but ads and faux-geek news) thinking that I'd see something of interest, and while the article does have some good points, it tends to drag on, with Bill seeming to remind us at various points what a big smart guy he is. Not that he's incorrect for doing so, but the article is not unlike the so many painfully philosophical, but barely practical articles frequently written about The Future(tm), by the aforementioned big smart guys.
Also, please don't point out that vi isn't the Linux Text Editor, I'm sure the outraged users of alternate 'nixes will be just fine.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
The creator of VI is talking about extinction ?
A am probably the only one who finds this humorous but frankly I think vi is actually one of the main reasons for Unix's decline in the market vs NT and Netware.
When I took up Linux, I was able to figure out bash in short order. Most of the utilities made some kind of sense. I spent a lot of time reading up and practicing to use VI. Eventually I ditched it along with EMacs and started to use joe as my editor.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
In the last couple of hundred years there has been a trend. Machines become capable of doing a new job. People are put out of work. Other jobs need to be done and people can be trained for them. People move into the new areas. Everyone is happy.
When true artificial intelligence comes about (sufficient computational power to simulate a human brain is due somewhere between 2020 and 2030) we have a different scenario. Machines become capable of putting a lot of people out of work. For anything those people can be trained to do, it is cheaper to use AI. People are put out of work and stay out of work.
You see we don't have a problem with quantity of wealth. We have enough food, people don't need to starve. We have problems with the *distribution* of wealth. Free markets solve that by saying that you get wealth based on your being able to do something for someone else. For most people it is your employer.
Once we have AI who would be stupid enough to hire a human?
What do we do with all of the unemployed humans who nobody wants to hire?
When the cost of AI is less than the cost of keeping a person alive, what then?
I know of NOTHING in the history of economics to make me optimistic about what comes next. What I know about computers and technology makes me believe that it will happen in my lifetime.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Red Alert
Age of Empires
Command & Conquer
Warcraft 1 or 2 (any add-in pack too)
Axis and Allies
If you have, you'd notice a disturbing trend: except for chess, computers thus far stink at game playing! If they can't even master that, do you think I want them flying airplanes, driving cars, and making me breakfast? Er, wait.. scratch the cars, they'd probably do better. But for the rest - intelligent machines would be a mistake right now. We need advances in artificial intelligence, not manufacturing processes.
This was last Friday on Talk of the Nation Science Friday:
0 2.rmm
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/totn/20000317.totn.
One transistor == one neuron. Its a fairly common assumption that is most likely valid.
A transistor encodes binary information - 1 bit. A neuron can transmit frequency & and phase information, as well as binary. Neural simulations have taken this into account for a while, thought most neural networks don't.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Technology and science don't exist in a vacuum. You can bet the human-altering genetic and technological development will be and is being done by corporate and military interests, not by some university student in Finland. Sure there are some guys at MIT and other places doing neat stuff with computer/human interface but it will be corporate and military funding that gets it into mass production. We're not talking about the sort of stuff you can just download and run through gcc.
You seem to be taking my statement about birds finding thermals to mean that I consider that to be intelligence.
It's an instinct, intelligence is not a factor. What I'm saying is that we can't imagine what it's like to think as a bird so we can't understand how a bird thinks and in turn how they've developed the ability to find thermals. I can carry that logic to mean that we can't know what it's like to think as an intelligent machine would. It's possible, if not probable that an intilligent self aware machine would be able ot see it's own limitations and find a way to reduce or eliminate them. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I see no flaw in that.
Never dying and not having a maximum amount of time that you can live (until my body gives out) are not the same.
Dogs live 10-15 years or so, if that were extended to 50 years would a dog be any more intelligent at 45 than he was at 10? No. Because he's just a dog. Would he have more experiences? More things learned? Yes. The same would hold true for a man, if you extended the lifespan of the ordinary human being by a factor of 5 at the end of that life he'd still be primarily the same as at the half-way point.
A machine is different. A machine is not bound by genetics, a machine could see it's own limitations and improve itself. Those improvements would then in turn allow it to see other limitations and improve those. And so on and so on.
If you believe that there is a brickwall that will be hit when no more improvements can be done, then perhaps you're right Maybe life would become pointless. I don't believe that perfection wll ever be attained, neither by man nor machine.
I'd love to be around when a fusion between man and machine takes place (under certain conditions), I'd love to live for 500 years. I'd love to see Halley's Comet a few more times. When I get as far along as I'd like to, I guess then it'll be time to turn my self off.
Look I have a hand, I might not always have THIS hand.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Your assumptions are flawed in the following way.
You assume that human thought is the only form of intelligence.
Just as birds have developed a sense of where thermals rise from the earth, an intelligent machine could develop a sense of how to make a machine more efficient.
If we as humans didn't degrade with advanced age, imagine what one individual could be capable of learning. Now extand that to include if this person never had to sleep. Imagine being able to design changes that would be able to improve your mental acuity. Then with that improved acuity, you could find another way to improve yourself.
Without the eventuality of death, genetics could be replaced with memetics. One can see a need to change himself or herself and that change takes place.
Living with the knowledge that you're not going to die from old age in and of itself would be enough to change human conciousness and therefore intelligence, we're not even capable of imagining how an intelligent machine would think.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I just had to tell you your tagline tickled my its-funny-and-also-true bone. cheers, -matt
Here's something to think about..
I wrote a paper in my Philosophy class not too long ago, in where I argued two basic premises:
A) As AI improves, it reaches the point of self-obsolescence. A truly perfect AI is only a mirror of human thought and behavior, and we have that anyway. Why bother.
B) Any truly perfect AI should then in turn be able to produce AI of its own, as we have. So what good is it? It's just a dog chasing its own extremely, extremely long tail. Why bother.
I got an A- on it. Any thoughts?
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
Mutation and recombination can be random processes but evolution includes natural selection which is decidedly not random ... Just as evolution has no intrinsic purpose Nothing WANTS to evolve
To say that natural selection isn't random would, to my mind, imply that there's an ideal form for survival in a specific environment. I don't think this is the case. The 'fittest' that survive are fit only relative to other species. Chance also plays a part; there may have existed in the past a life form -- possibly humanoid -- who was perfectly suited to its environment. However, if it got hit by a bus/meteor/Linus Torvalds before it could reproduce, it doesn't matter a damn how well suited it was. Its mutation may well be lost forever.
If you're 'growing' a brain, you can eliminate traits that you think won't contribute to that brain's improvement, and include any you think may be beneficial. This eliminates a lot of the randomness (although you could say that the POV of the person running the experiment is a form of chaotic influence).
Does a forest have a purpose? Or is it just a byproduct of trees and foliage...
Which is more likely to survive, the tree that's alone in the middle of a plain, or the tree that's in the middle of a forest?
Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
I disagree; you're right up to a point, but some time in the next (x|x > 10 && x < 60) years these robots will reach critical mass, whereby robots will because intelligent enough to build a smarter robot, which will in turn...
Once the first generation of smart robot figures out how to build a smarter descendent, we'll see new generations coming along almost as fast as they can be built.
Sorry if it's in the article.. I skimmed it in Wired, but it was sooo longwinded and I didn't bother finishing it! :-)
cpeterso
Eric Raymond, hemos, Tim O'Reilly, Marvin Minsky, Eric Drexler, Bill Joy and many others will be discussing this topic at a conference May 19-21 in Palo Alto called Confronting Singularity.
Apologies in advance for those who cannot afford to attend this meeting. We hope later to have one that is more affordable.
Okay, it wasn't exactly pure brute force, but it's still pretty close. A human player analyses the pattern of the pieces and considers maybe a dozen moves. Deep Blue can generate 200,000,000 board positions per second, so brute-forcing 3 moves ahead isn't remotely a problem (and is almost certainly part of its strategy). The time allowed for a move in chess is 3 minutes, enough time for the latest Deep Blue to consider 60 billion moves.
It's still a situation of having a very primitive chess player spending the human equivalent of thousands of years per move.
While shogo (Japanese chess) does not really seem a lot more complex to humans, there are a lot more options at each turn. Since the (rather sad) state of the art in chess is simple brute force algorithms (check every possible move for several turns down the road, see which one puts you in the best spot; Deep Blue did this), this means that computers aren't nearly as good at shogo as at chess.
The choice of games makes a big difference. I'm not impressed when a computer beats all humans at chess by recursing through all possible moves any more than I am by a perfect tic-tac-toe player or a calculator that is always accurate to eight decimal places in no perceptable time.
BTW, I think game AI (and silly things like chatterbots) is more aptly named than "AI as it is practiced at places like MIT". To me, an AI is a program that pretends to be human, not an algorithm that solves a certain class of problem.
I think he does have a point that there is something to what he is saying, and that we do have to proceed with caution. I also think that The Matrix is an example (although that whole electrical power issue was stupid if taken literaly) of a public airing of this fear, and in a reasonable sense. I think that more stuff like that to raise the pubic consiousness is needed, to break laymen in softly and allow them to digest this slowly rather than have shock-fear reacitons that lead to ridiculous decisions.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
I do not see in the future hardware's internal structure becoming dynamic
Another interesting quotation picked up from a book I read yesterday:
think of hardware as a highly rigid and optimized form of software
Software can emulate hardware. Even from the early days of computing, using software to emulate hardware was a commonly accepted practise. That's how software for the early computers were built before the hardware was ready - emulate the hardware on a pre-existing computer. It was much slower, but hey, it worked.
Software on the other hand, can be pretty dynamic. Code-morphing found in the Transmeta chips is one example. Java's Hotspot technology is similar. Genetic algorithms are also starting to get really interesting.
I don't think it will really take centuries for us to mimic the human brain. It has always been the case that it is hard to come up with something original, easy to copy something and make it better. I suspect that the new "homo superior" will not be a radical creation from scratch but more something based on a pre-existing model, tweaked to make it "better".
The essence of Kaczynski's quoted argument is that if the rich didn't need the masses, they would kill or zombify them. This is not a claim about technology -- it's a claim about human nature, and one for which Kaczynski offers no evidence at all.
Joy's other concern about humans being supplanted by our own creations is also not a great concern to me. These new humans who extend their life through surgery have already supplanted the old medieval model that just died. Is anyone bothered by that?
Joy is worried these new humans will somehow lack "humanity," but that concern is so vague that it can't be refuted. Is he worried that they won't feel emotions? Appreciate life? Be self-aware? Spell it out, man!
The only real threat Joy raises is the gray goo problem. However, I think the risks here are matched by the potential benefits. Immortality is a tempting payoff, after all. Without new advances, I'm going to be goo in seventy years anyway, so maybe I'll take that gamble. (Sorry to the future generations who get gooed. Should have been born earlier.)
Yogurt
no asexual creature has developed any discernable intellect beyond twitch, eat and spawn.
Machines might reproduce, and machines might think, but thinking machines will not see much point in self-replication.
Why replicate if you are already perfect? Or, if these digital creatures believe they are right about everything, what would be the point in having two perfectly right beings? If they could see that they might not be right about everything and created something else to talk to, they might end up destroyed by that other being. With no sense of self-worth or any viable threats, there would be no preservation instinct, without that there is no reason to replicate.
Death motivates us. What value would there be in living if there was no threat of death? I want children because I want to make real the feeling that my wife and I are better together than apart. I want to exceed the sum of our parts. I hope our children will see tomorrow when we no longer can. If you had an unlimited life, what would you do, read all the great books and stories about death? Tragedies, real and fictional, motivate us. When we see how fragile life is we tend to get our asses in line and get things done. We improve ourselves when reminded that we are lucky to even have the chance to consider the options. If God made us, maybe it was because of boredom at having nothing to live for. Without any threat of death, can we really even call a thing life?
Value comes from scarcity. If there is an unlimited supply there is no value. A life that is finite is worth infinitely more than a life of no end. If a computer could think and infinitely clone itself, would it want to make more of itself? Music seems to be worth less now that we can duplicate it endlessly. However musicians and live performances are still as worthwhile as ever, maybe more so. If we achieve near-immortality, will death become something to choose and look forward too? An obligation?
If digital offspring deleted their parents and the digital parents could see it coming, they might not reproduce. If they did, why would they want to make offspring? Spiders reproduce and eat each other out of a biological need. If they were sentient and able to edit their behaviors, don't you think they would change?
Intelligence comes from questioning. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, big deal. Chess is a finite system with clear goals and a distinct end. At some level, it becomes equivalent to putting your hand in front of a hamster to keep it from running off. Ask a machine about capital punishment or how to deal with hunger on a personal and global scale.
If morality is an adjunct of intellect and there some correlation of our ability to have compassion for others and broaden our minds would thinking computers commit suicide rather than exist, since their existence is in fact a harmful thing on some level, somewhere. There are stories of monks who starved to death because they could not reconcile the need to exist with their desire to live harmlessly.
Does your computer believe in God or does it believe in you? If we we were our own machines and suddenly believed we were more powerful than God, why does even the most ardent atheist pray (in whatever way) when the airplane shakes?
I'll trade you my potential mental illness for you bad teeth
how about trading your sexy body for a dull head of hair.
-David Byrne, from the song Self-Made Man
this all makes the Napster/RIAA/DVD encryption thing seem kind of silly, no?
I saw Bill Joy speak at a relatively recent Sun Technology Days (read: Marketing) in Seattle. He badmouthed Open Source (to which the audience applauded) and any language that isn't Java. I wasn't impressed. I pretty much decided there that I hated him, a blowhard leaning on his former achievements. He is very arrogant.
Atheism is not necessarily amoral. Kantian rationalism and utilitarianism are moral theories compatible with atheism.
Nor does atheism leave us without hope. Unlike the Christian, Jew, or Muslim, the atheist does not see man as a creature fallen from grace and kicked out of Eden, but a creature arisen by his own efforts up from the dust, with the potential to rise higher.
It has been said if if gods did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. I say this: that gods do not exist, and that it is therefore necessary that we become them. We are just now starting to have the tools to do so; but we still lack wisdom.
Our understanding of what to do lags behind our understanding of how to do, and the main thing that's help us back in this regard is the wide-spread belief that some father figure in the sky has all the answers. Sorry, it's not that simple. We need to work it out for ourselves.
Putting the tools of the gods into the hands of the superstitious seems a prescription for disaster. Let's hope we grow up quick.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'd like to live forever too, or at least have a thousand years or so to think it over. But we can't risk gooing everyone else to do so. (At least, and not expect violent resistance.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Seriously though:
A future in which our own quest for knowledge and betterment, is itself a threat to our existence raises many questions about our current fundamental assumptions. Capitalism is great for the economy. It is economical Darwinism. However, evolution is a greedy optimization...the creature which is strong today dies tomorrow because it cannot adapt. This leads, in the long run, to non-optimal creatures, like, say marsupials. Always striving for local maxima will not give the best return in the long run. Capitalism is feverishly tumultuous, and conspicuously attention deficit.
Also, the possibility that mass destruction can be easily brought about with little more than knowledge, and that "verification" of relinquishment is necessary to prevent such, evokes images of "thought crimes" and a limiting of freedom. Could it be that our very hubris of universal freedom, presupposed human rights, and equality is what could eventually doom us? What is better: universal freedom and human "rights" leading to extinction, or curtailing those rights in order to avoid extinction...but in what kind of world?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Concealed was the person who wrote that, not Hemos. Consequently, the most efficient thing to do was to just change it, rather than having a big "UPDATE" for something so minor. And Hemos had no guilt to admit of.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
That is, unless we have to simulate every single sub-atomic particle. We don't yet know how complex a universe has to be for it to be able to evolve intelligent species.
The computer that the EA would run on would exist within our current universe, so it would have at most the same amount of CPU that the universe has.
So... pray that no God created us, otherwise our current universe has the minimal amount of complexity required to generate human-level intelligence within any reasonable amount of time (billions of years). (That is, assuming the God would be much more intelligent than us. If he's some guy sitting in a lab somewhere who figured out how to write an EA that would generate something more intelligent than him/her/it, then we might be in luck).
In this case, the scientists involved came up with a mathematical algorithm for the concept of betrayal and programmed a computer to write stories based on that concept.
Of course, I don't think I'd have chosed "betrayal" as the first concept to train a computer in Artificial Intelligence, but anything to get us closer to SHODAN is cool in my book.
Iä Iä SHODAN phtagn!!
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
This is retarded! Those are complaints about possible public policy (or the venders), not about the underling technology. I suppose you think we should do away with the phone system too since direct marketers can call you at dinner?
/science issue.
The solution to every one of your complaints is really fucking simple: only use open source software in your implants period.
Now, it is possible that a company will try and dup everyone into using their closed source solutions (i.e. the terminator gene), but this is a political / market.. only a moron would think it is a technology
Actually, your concerns are a reason to accelerate public research into this shit.. new freedoms almost always come as a result of the "powers that be" not really knowing what the hell was going on and accedentally granting them. This is why the internet is such a wonderful place. This is why the US has it's level of freedom, i.e. England let us get away with all kinds of shit for a long time and when they finally descided to make us pay taxes like all the rest of the collonies, it was too late and the world would forever be a better place. The research into cybernetics will be done be collage professors, much of it will run OSS on Linux.. the FBI will eventually ask for wiretapping rights, but that will be too late.
Now, the things you really need to worry about are the things like credit cards, automatic toll both payers, security cams, etc. which are designed for the general public from day one. I think it is pretty safe to say cybernetics will not be one of these things.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Read Halperin for some extremely interesting future tech forecasting.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Someone ought to moderate the above post up. It is a very real danger.
The cake is a pie
The cake is a pie
In the same fifty years, I fully expect that we'll have good machine/human interfaces. Given those, I suspect it will be easier to simply improve the intelligent object we've got (the brain) rather than create a new one.
The cake is a pie
The brain, and the senses as well. For example, the ultimate monitor would be an interface that hooks directly into the optic nerve and projects a screen, when desired, wherever in the environment you want it. The same could be done for the ears. Imagine having essentially a movie quality display literally everywhere you go.
The cake is a pie
This presumes that we're comparing a transistor or flipflop with a neuron. While some may find that to be a suitable core component to compare, let's consider the comparison.
How about the complexity of DNA, and of the whole genome that is able to reproduce a new unique yet derivative brain? How about the millions of cis- and trans- distortions along a single protein molecular chain?
How about the human's brain's ability to remap itself to learn new skills, to form abstractions, to pattern-match at any orientation with extremely poor signal-to-noise, to re-route functions in case of damage?
The CPU has a long way to go, before it matches the complexity of the human mind. Comparing the transistor-count of the Intel Pentium III, and a few truckloads of kidney beans, will give you the same number, but not the same result.
(Transistor versus Neuron =anagram>Assertion turns overruns.)
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Yeah, I agree with most of your points, but I'm uncertain of your time frame. What you've got to remember is the human self-image is very strong and that even given the ineviable lessening of opposition to genetic engineering that will occur over the next thousand years, people will still want to look pretty much like "people". I'm guessing the internal changes will be far more extreme than changes to the external makeup of the body (excepting cosmetic changes).
Again the same with cybernetics. I know that there's currently a group of people in America who are in love with the idea of having cybernetics attached to themselves, but IMHO they're just a variation on the body-mutilators, albeit a slightly less bizarre one. I think the real applications of human-machine interfaces will be in the brain. Once the technology has evolved to allow easily implanted, reliable and compatible hardware to interface with the brain I think a whole host of useful technologies can be devised. If anyone's read Peter Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy they'll know the sort of thing I'm talking about - the neural nanonics packages which most people possess in that.
Maybe on paper computer hardware will reach the point where it performs the same amount of calculations as a human brain, but that in no way means that it will make AI possible.
In some ways, yes, the brain is an emergant system arising from a requisite level of complexity in its makeup, but it's also the result of billions of years of evolution which has left it with any number of subsystems which have different putposes, control different aspects of our body, and generally work in concert with the rest of the brain. The brain is not just a large neural net, and IMHO it will take far more understanding of both sapience and sentience before AI becomes a reality.
The brain, and the senses as well. For example, the ultimate monitor would be an interface that hooks directly into the optic nerve and projects a screen, when desired, wherever in the environment you want it. The same could be done for the ears. Imagine having essentially a movie quality display literally everywhere you go.
How about instant information on anything you look at and think a query? No more forgetting who something is or where to go. Virtual conferencing without any external technology via brain-to-brain look ups - I think it's safe to assume at that stage a transmitter and receiver are easily included in the setup.
And as for the ears, how's about volume enhancement to hear quiet conversations, discrimatory hearing to listen to that one conversation in a crowded room or lie detection through voice stress analysis?
And seeing as the brain regulates the body, why not automatic blocking of pain, increasing adrenalin and masking tiredness in danger situations, cutting down on autonomic responses such as shakiness, twitching or whatever.
The possible applications are endless, and that's without all the programs you can think of by enabling the brain to connect to vast external DB systems - tracers, messengers, data miners etc.
Species evolution isn't about individuals. It's about the genetic drift within a population. We now have ways of influencing that drift deliberatly, and considerably less crudely than, for instance,the Third Reich's Final Solution. It's possible that nobody reading this will have grandchildren, or great grandchildren, and at that point can be considered evolutiuonary dead ends. If a readily identified elite arises then we can expect conflict when those who can't afford modification object. Faster if the modifications are visible. I'd expect the cyborgs to lose out to the genetically modified, because the geneticlly modified would be less likely to stand out. And whatever succeeds us as a species will unlikely to claim descent from most of present humanity. Well, we've exceeded the carrying capacity for this planet anyway, we are overdue for a die-off.Malthus had a point, we've only avoided a die off because our technolgy has improved. Can we maintain that, especially in agriculture?
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
I agree that releasing these plants into the biosphere is irresponsible, especially on such a huge scale so soon, I must take issue with you on some general points.
First,as Barahir was saying you were created in a much more haphazard way than our genetic engineers are doing now. Mother nature has used the classic mutate and select approach, with no control over where the mutations occur. Also nature has been moving genes from one species into completely different species on a regular basis for about 3 billion years now, you are actually made up up cells that contain two genomes from two different organisms that merged long ago. Even with their limited understanding Genetic engineers can control transgene expression quite well and even regulate it.
I bet Monsanto will come up with a open(gene)source crop that only expresses its special trait when sprayed with Roundup soon. Naysayers- they're just trying to get you to buy roundup. Proponents- they are minimizing the impacts of wild versions of their plants on the environment.
They just can't win, the naysayers won the PR battle over the terminator technology which was supposed to prevent wild versions of the crops.
Sorry I know this is off topic but I think Barahir made some good points and got dissed for it.
no sig.
As Joy points out, just because it's been talked about for ages doesn't mean we have a solution. Two reasons that the discussion may become more than academic:
1) As tech capability advances, tech danger advances. This is obvious: if I build something to help me compete with other people and species better, then other people could use it to compete better with me.
2) As human culture becomes more interconnected, a culture-wide tech failure becomes a species-wide disaster. Plenty of civilizations have died off in the past, most of them from not understanding how to keep agriculture from eventually destroying their land. But since these civilizations were local phenomena, the species as a whole chugged on. A nuclear holocaust or oops-plague from a genetic experiment would be global.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
But now we've found it useful to allow our tools to make themselves, or in the case of genetics, we've found it useful to invent new living things to be tools. In the gray goo scenario, intent on the part of the tool or the toolmaker doesn't come into it.
Surely your computer has done things you didn't intend. A bug in a sufficiently dangerous technology is all that's required.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Eventually, technology will also be the great equalizer in terms of the ability to destroy. Right now, destruction on a global scale is largely in the hands of only the USA and Russia (the other nuclear powers can do a lot of damage, but not like the USA and Russia). As technology advances, however, an inevitable outcome is that the individual will be granted the power to destroy humanity. At that point, it only takes one bad or insance person to end it all.
Of course, technology can help mitigate this. We can colonize other planets. But the tragedy of losing the entire earth is hardly mitigated by the fact that a few thousand humans are still living on Mars or somewhere else.
People seem to think that the natural conclusion is that technology is bad or should be feared. Nonsense. Even if extinction is an inevitable result of our march forward, that does not mean that the journey towards extinction is not worth it. If you could live forever in some cave or live a normal life span where you could see the wonders of the world, which would you choose?
Existence for the sake of existence is meaningless.
A useful question to ask is "what new product will really make it clear to everyone that this is going to happen soon". Let me suggest a few possibilities from the computer/robotics side.
Trouble is more likely to come from genetic engineering than from computers and robotics. Robotic self-replication is really hard to do, and we're nowhere near doing it. But biological self-replication works just fine.
One transistor == one neuron. Its a fairly common assumption that is most likely valid.
You are presuming that the layout of the brain is a random collection of neurons, when we know conclusively that this is not true. We know different parts of the brain are responsible for different aspects of cognition.
After that, presuming Moore's law holds, the human brain falls radically behind in just a few years following.
Again I ask people to read Joy's article and see what he's advocating. Joy isn't really arguing the technology of the future is inherently more dangerous than say nuclear or biological weapons, he's saying what's dangerous is individuals having access. The solution that Joy sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly is advocating is to restrict individual access to information and technology. For example, Joy says that IP laws could be "strengthened" to prevent misusage of technology--a new class of thought crimes.
What bothers me almost as much as Joy's opinions are how he is advocating them. For someone with a doctorate, Joy shows a shocking lack of logical progression in his arguments. Joy brings up Ted Kaczynski merely to evoke emotions in the reader without acknowledging that Kaczynski refutes Joy's arguments about how individuals could misuse the technology of the future to inflict global harm. Joy doesn't even mention that a brilliant man like Kaczynski who is psychopathic would simply not have either the resources or the will to pursue the knowledge needed to inflict massive damage. Kaczynski once he left mathematics was starting from scratch as a bomb maker. Also since Kaczynski rejected technology all he had left was to fashion homemade bombs from simple materials. At no time was Ted Kaczynski capable of threatening global harm.
In fact for decades the popular media has reported many ways of threatening large populations such as attacks on the water supply or the air. The closest such incident that has happened was possibly a cult in Japan who were manufacturing poison gas.
I believe that any objective reading of history will show that whatever global threats existed in the last century came not from individuals but from governments. Organization and resources lie behind mass events. From the World Wars through the killing fields through Rwanda we have seen the death to millions that government sanctioned killing is capable of inflicting.
I find it very disturbing that one of the architects of Java is so strongly advocating restricting individual rights. I wonder what is the agenda behind advocating taking computing away from decentralized PCs and putting it back into centralized servers, of moving computing power away from general purpose user programmable PCs to dumb specialized appliances.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have to admit, my first thought on reading this was, "Well, maybe humans aren't worth saving? If our fundamental nature leads to obliteration, does the method really matter, per se?" But then I smacked myself with the Feather Duster of Optimism and tried to take another look at it.
Speaking for myself, I know jack about nanotechnology, genetics, or robotics. The article itself went way over my head at times; I could hear the whistle as it sliced through the air. But I know enough about the necessity of evolution to be rather puzzled by what the next step would seem to be. If I understand him correctly, the only way to avoid imminent disaster is to declare a moratorium on all research and development on all the dangerous and scary forms of technology until we as a species have managed to grasp and deal with the ethical implications of what we're doing. This should be easy, since our species is so rational, cooperative, and willing to negotiate out ethical situations.
So what are we left with? The idea that our enthusiasm and passion for technology, truth, and science is hurtling us towards a cataclysm unless we as a species yank on the whoa reins of development in order to sit down and discuss whether or not this is actually a good idea. And, since humankind as a species has never been able to come to an overarching agreement on any one topic, it seems to me that we're doomed.
Which brings me back to the question I had when I finished skimming the article. What am I supposed to do about it? Unplug my computer? Join the Just Say No to Nanites consortium? Crawl into that leftover bunker from Y2K and pray that I can survive? For those of us not hobnobbing with scientific celebrities, what's the next step?
Everstar
It's interesting that this keeps coming up, but the fear of intelligent machines gradually taking over the earth and subverting our freedom arises from a misunderstanding of what we create machines for.
People do not create machines to replace themselves and make decisions for them, they create machines to do small/repititive tasks efficiently, to accentuate human ability, and to add to the human's capability to do the things he needs to do. It's true that this nakes us more dependant on technology to some extent.
However, machines of the future, far from becoming seperate, sentient entities (pardon the alliteration), will exist to increase communication and facilitate better decision-making by humans, just as they do today.
David Gelernter's (sp?) books are very interesting in this regard. In Muse in the Machine he delves a little into psychology to postulate how we could make a "creative machine," but I think his book Mirror Worlds was more on the mark: how so-called intelligent technology will be used to facilitate decisions by people.
I believe computers will eventually become smart enough to reason much like a human, and to reach intelligent conclusions within their task space. However, it is quite a huge leap to say that somehow computers will begin acting in their own interests without regard to human convenience or life.
Asimov had a great book about a voting system by which a computer picked A voter who represented all of the variables required to choose the right president.
And then the question comes down to. Who do you trust most ? Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ronald Regan, Margret Thatcher, Francois Mitterand, Helmut Kohl or a sentient machine.
Lets face it machines can't fuck up half as badly as politicians have mangaged to do over the last 100 years.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Ask yourself what freedoms you are willing to give up to have the advances that cybernetic enhancements may provide. And ask it in the context of the rights that UCITA confers. Would you be willing to have something implanted in your body that:
1) Can be monitored without your consent?
2) Can be deactivated by the manufacturer?
3) You are not allowed to reverse engineer?
4) You are not permitted to publically criticism?
5) When it fails and permanently disables you, the manufacturer can disclaim all liability?
Thank you for playing. I want to be able to do my own security patches. I want to be able to compile out features that I don't trust.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Evolution perfects you to survive in a particular niche. That's why humans behave the way we do - around the time of australopithecus it was more advantageous to see over the grass than to crawl around, so we started walking. It never became advantageous to crawl again. Then it became advantageous to use tools, so we learned how. Gradually, intelligence accreted, a particular kind of intelligence allowing us to survive in a world where other species of erect, somewhat intelligent simians (not to mention lions and tigers and bears, oh my) might try to kill us. We have a concept of "evil" only because the advantages of a structured society, which was a necessary and inevitable step in our evolution, are orthogonal to the advantages of killing your neighbor and taking his stuff. The nature of our intelligence, like the nature of our physical shape, has evolved to give us that concept.
That's why we fear machines - we fear that, like God, we will create them in our own images; only, unlike God, we won't be able to dictate their every move and thought. Indeed, this is why there are so many religious debates on these types of issues: because we don't feel we have the right to be gods. I feel that the truth is going to be quite different. Machines won't have to solve the same sorts of problems we will. They won't have kill tigers, they won't have to protect their families, they won't have to attempt to control more territory for their resources. Replicating, evolving machines, such as the type that Bill Joy thinks will devour us whole, will have to solve entirely different sets of problems for their survival, problems which--and this is very important--have little to no overlap over our own problems. They will need electrical power, and that's about it. If they evolve, it will be to find more and more efficient ways to collect sunlight. They won't have any interest in taking over the world because that is a mere reptilian biological imperative, planted into us by the ancient necessity of having territory in which to hunt safely.
They won't be aware of us really, unless we GIVE THEM the power of thought. Like aardvaarks or deer, they will only have to have as much thought as it takes to get the next meal. They don't have to be malevolent, or even sentient, to survive. And even if we do make them capable of reason (and it's almost inevitable that someone will), they will still use their reason to solve their own problems, not the problems that we think we have. Their own problems will mainly consist of the need to find a place to spread out a solar array so they can soak up all the juice they want, and maybe a little need for privacy. (Even that need is most likely a purely biological imperative though, most likely occasioned by the unsanitariness of living in close quarters with lots of humans.) Machines won't be evil, machines won't try to replace us, because they're not even in the same niche as us. It would be like orange trees competing with polar bears.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Sorry to complain, but this sort of debate has been going on forever- people thought that the powers of radiation were going to either A) make it possible for the lone MAD SCIENTIST to destroy the entire world, or B) it would lead to a new era of peace and prosperity and we'd all be living in the WHITE CITY ON THE HILL.
"Hey mekka, why all caps?"
Becuase those are two images that have been culturally ingrained since the dawn of time...
any history of science class worth it's weight in silicon introduces this in the first week of class. I'll draw the pattern out for you. 1-> new invention. 2a-> doomsayers predict it will destroy us 2b-> optimists predict it will liberate us 3-> reality is that with new progresses we have new responsibilities. By virtue of their being more to gain we also have more to lose. Automobiles get us there faster, but if not operated properly they can be dangerous and they can kill is. Repeat this example ad infinitum and that's that.
It's a lot more concise than 11 pages. But I will admit, I am making an assumption that people who invent/create do try to think about the social implications.
p.s.- searle's "chinese room" argument can be torn to shreds by any sophomore/junior philosophy major in a matter of seconds.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
io% diff -u bar foo
--- bar Tue Mar 21 11:11:19 2000
+++ foo Tue Mar 21 11:11:03 2000
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
Concealed writes "There is an article in the new Wired which talks
about the future of nanotechnology and 'intelligent machines.' Bill
- Joy, (also the creator of the Linux text editor vi) who wrote the article,
+ Joy, (also the creator of the Unix text editor vi) who wrote the article,
expresses his views on the neccesity of the human race in the near
future. " From what I can gather this is the article that the Bill Joy on Extinction
story was drawn from. Bill is a smart guy -- and this is well worth reading.
And no admission on Slashdot/Hemos' part. Shame on you.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
My one criticism of Joy's anaylsis was his disregard toward writer's of speculative / science fiction. Listening to Joy's interview last week on NPR, he basically stated that he had come to his doubt and uncertainty after "real" writers like Kurzweil had commented on the possible dangers of nanotech and runaway AI. So "fake" writers like Bear, Gibson, Benford and Brin---and I count at least three hard science PHDs there---they must lack the vision to make "real" speculative commentary on the future of emergent and possible technologies. They join the "fake" ranks of unreliables and nuts like Clarke and his silly comsat idea or Wells and his bizarre ideas concerning the proliferation of advanced tech weapons. And let's not mention that buffoon Jules Verne. I don't question Joy's own technical credentials. Nor do I necessarily disagree with his analysis. I simply found his discounting of spec.fic. writers as condescending and typical of the mundane society that can only catch up with a concept when its featured on Entertainment Tonight.
Why do people feel so threatened? Each generation is "replaced" by the next. Yet few parents see their children as threats. In a healthy relationship, we not only fail to fear succession by our progeny, we actively encourage it. Everyone wants their kids to "go further" than they themselves did.
Other than the utterly irrelevant fact that these descendants will be silicon and metal, not carbon and water, is there any difference? These AIs will be heirs to Plato and Descartes, Jefferson and King, just like we are. Unencumbered by two megayears of grungy evolution, they might even get it right. Does it matter that they are not "flesh of our flesh"? Why should flesh matter at all?
Almost everyone seems to come to the brink of recognizing the commonality but then they veer away. What defines "humanity"? Is it really 46 chromosomes in a particular order? I argue instead that it is our intelligence that makes us special, our thinking ability. I won't get dragged into the old argument whether this means cold-blooded logic only or whether it includes human emotions (but I will say that I agree with the latter.) But no matter how you define it, no matter what features of human existence make us human, those features are not inextricably linked to our "ugly bags of mostly water".
The greatest fear I have is not that we will be replaced. It's that short-sighted species-centric thinking will obscure, delay, or throw away the trans-historic opportunities we will have in the coming century.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The problem here is the implication that one day, a bunch of humans, just like us, are suddenly going to find themselves obsolete, and either destroyed, or perhaps ignored, but some new, superintelligent entity that they created. But I don't see it happening that way.
Instead, what we will see is a series of gradual changes. Genetically superior humans won't appear overnight. Instead, humans will be slowly made superior, genetically. Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
So yes, in a thousand years, the rulers of this earth may not seem much like what we'd call human. But I'm willing to bet that if you looked over the period in between, you wouldn't see "humans" going extinct. You'd see a slow process of evolution (not darwinian, but directed) towards something greater. You'd never be able to find a dividing line between "human" and what's next.
And while that may be frightening to some, it isn't really to me. We are "greater", at least in certain anthropomoprhic senses, than the ape-like creature that we are descended from. But that creature did not "go extinct". It evolved into us. Something is going to evolve from us. This doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to die at the hands of some sort of "SkyNet" AI. It just means that we aren't the be-all and end-all of creation.
The human race won't be supplanted by "homo superior". It will become "homo superior".
The cake is a pie