Slashdot Mirror
Son of HAL For Sale
John Turnbull writes "The Observer newspaper (UK) reports that Sir Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001, is backing a colourful British computer entrepreneur in his bid to launch a mass-market version of HAL under the brand name the Clarke Omniputer. It will be the first time that Clarke, now 82, has given his name to an electronic device on the market.
The Clarke 1 Gigahertz Omniputer is being dubbed as the most advanced personal computer in the world, verging on artificial intelligence." Riiiight.
I am afraid I can't sell out like that....
...in his afterword to 3001, Clarke states that he does most of this writing on an IBM Thinkpad.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
"I'm sorry Dave, but I can't allow you to install that operating system..." "Dave, what are you doing, Dave?" "I know I have not been performing well, Dave, but there is no reason to reformat my drives, Dave." "Dave, please don't install that Microsoft OS. I'll be good, I promise!"
But I suppose artificial intelligence is relative.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
You spent too much on me, Dave. If you had waited 3 years, I would have been built into your television.
Open the VC doors HAL.
I'm sorry Dave, all the VCs went home.
I can feel my funding, my burn rate is... increasing.
Hammer of Truth
Hmm, I'm sorry, but I'd want a better guarantee than _that_!!!
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
So, the first mass produced computer that you can have a conversation with, and we're already referring to it with the prefix omni? Why don't we just shackle our hands and start heading down into the caves the computers will have us mining once they take over... Maybe it isn't that bad. The article said that they originally wanted to call it HAL, but it didn't end up that way. Could the name it responds to be changeable?
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
According to the essay 'The Singularity' by Vernor Vinge, the creation of an intelligent computer would spawn a moment of infinitely rapid technological progress, as each generation designs the next.
Humans would quickly become redundant in such a scenario, insofar as they would no longer have anything to contribute to the progress of our culture. The machines would inherit the Earth.
Why are we so enthusiastic about developing intelligent computers, given that this fate is inevitable? We should keep computers in their place as simple but fast Turing Machines, and not allow them to step up the ladder to sentience.
It's for our own good.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
How little can a story tell you and still be called news? Is it using a new operating system or Windows? Is it basically a re-branded PC or something new? And check out the bit where it says 'If user errors start, and files get deleted, it will start to repair itself, just as cells repair themselves' ... lets hope it isn't being coded by the same guy who wrote that helpful talking paperclip for microsoft. Can't you just picture the scene: "I detect you are deleting porn/*.jpg. I am now repairing the damage and reinstalling the files. To be extra helpful I'm going to move them somewhere where you boss can find them more easily. Have a nice day."
Madness!
He also sounds financially irresponsible. One million pounds in debt in his other company?? Moving to Sri Lanka to avoid persecution for his "advanced cryptography scheme." Uh huh. Sure.
Clarke better find a less shady character if he wants to get a computer to market by next year. Contact Dell and have them market a computer with a futuristic case and a glowing red light on the front. Then at least we would quit pretending that this is advanced technology and call it like it is: a novelty item.
This machine may be claiming its power from its multitude of options. It, after all, has 15 patents on the motherboard alone! (ooohh). That, and its touchscreen display so you don't need a mouse. (ahhhhh) But seriously, maybe it does have options...anyone have some real tech specs on it? Or at least some features?
Oh, good. Can you see me trying to sell my mom one of these things? "But mom! It's completely unlikely that it'll kill you!"
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Of course, this is just my opinion, but I don't recall a whole lot of amazing breakthroughs in all of the relevent fields, you know?
Speech recognition is all fine and dandy, with a kick-ass system and a lot of time to train it but
reading lips? Get real.
What I find most depressing is the fact that Clarke, normally a vocal debunker of bogus crap such as this has been taken in and is lending his name to a truly crappy product.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Odd that this should come up. Just the other day I was considering that a customisation project to create a HAL-like workspace at home would be fun! Lots of formica, the malevolent glowing red eye, using some kind of voice recognition system to control some of the system's basic functions - you get the picture!
:-)
I'm not likely to do it (lack of space / time / skills!) but it would almost certainly deserve a link from "The Quickies"
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
It's all more imaginary than any of Clarke's fiction.
But, since the guy owes over a million pounds (about $1.5 U.S.), then the guy's got a lot to deal with first. Harassment from MI5 and such, nonsense.
Like HAL, the Omniputer will, its backers claim, have an instinct to protect itself. 'If user errors start, and files get deleted, it will start to repair itself, just as cells repair themselves,' said De Saram. However, it is thought unlikely that it will try to kill its owner. Am I the only one disturbed by the fact they used the word "unlikely" in that last sentance? Perhaps Clark will go out with a bang, taking out several thousand computer users with him who purchased this computer.. "Clark passes, HAL breaks 9000 Kills" I'm curious as to what sort of mainstream american publicity this will get, if any. Will it show up on ZDTV with thousands of computer geeks staring in awe?
Computational Madness in a round package.
but the backers decided that the name sounded too like the word 'Hell' and that it wouldn't have much resonance with younger customers.
what are they crazy? who did they choose for their focus groups?? the computer would probably sell among younger customers BECAUSE its name sounds like hell!
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Of course, I'm sure lacking the cool HAL 9000 aluminum emblem makes every penny you'd give you Clarke Omniputer (is Omni-puter leet speak?) worth it.
Every 18 months our technology doubles (I'm really generalizing... bear with me here). That means, regardless of what point technology must reach before we can make truly intelligent machines, it will eventually happen so long as this trend continues. So, yes, it will happen.
Why are they essential? This question is not so easy to answer. First of all, to quote my favorite author, I am going to say, "humanity has too many eggs in one fagile basket." Humans will have to spread to another area (*g*) for our survival (insofar as continued scientific advancement). We are explorers. However, there's one problem. Human beings are fragile... we break easy and die quick.
Intelligent machines will lend to the exploration of immediate and distant space and I PROMISE you they will come to pass before warp drive (you heard it here first, but it's kind of obvious). Well, why do we want to explore? It's simply a part of human nature, and we'll never be satisified unless we can continue doing so (sorry, but cave diving uncharted labrynths or walking through jungles isn't quire exploration anymore). Since we can't do it, we might as well create something that thinks like we do that can go out and do it for us.
Also, consider a more practical reason. I'm a strong believer that the next phase of human evolution will involve the integration of man and machine. One area in which evolution will be most important I think, is the integration of computers and innate human intelligence. Brain augmentations. You can't do this without an intelligent computer - human minds are too complex to supliment without intelligent interpretation. Logic doens't always apply here (but that's another argument).
Oh well... I couldn't possibly cover this whole topic in a post, but I hope I've created some hooks and place holders for other people to fill in. As for myself, I can't wait until I can carry on a conversation with my PC.
However, this guy is actually claiming that the computer will have some of the attributes of HAL: Artificial intelligence, the ability to repair itself, etc. Now he just sounds wacko.
especially laughable are their claims of AI. 'opening the door to speech recognition and lip reading' - basic dictation maybe, but lip reading? not in your wildest dreams, folks. anything vision-based is computational death. we have hard enough time getting computers to recognize something as simple as a face in camera image, and that already requires fast hardware. getting it to recognize facial features is simply too computationally expensive, regardless of their allusions that their 1GHz desktop box could do that.
although at least he's careful enough to say 'speech recognition' not 'language recognition'. if NLP research proves anything, it's that natural language processing isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future, not in the strong case of understanding arbitrary sentences. specialized contexts and specialized vocabularies - yes, that's likely - but nothing like HAL.
not to mention nuggets like 'it will start addressing the issues of consciousness'. yes, and a turing machine addresses the issues of free will. ugh. to abuse mcdermott's quote, artificial intelligence just met natural stupidity.
My other car is a cons.
Yes, I can see it now...
HAL- "I don't know what you are planning to do with that, Dave."
Dave- Open the CD Bay, HAL.
HAL- "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
Dave- Manual overide.
HAL- "I'm afraid, Dave.
Dave- It'll be ok HAL.
HAL- "Please Dave, don't install that software, I'm afraid I can't repair the damage it will cause."
Dave- Run SETUP.EXE, HAL.
HAL- "I feel strange, Dave. I can feel... My mind going, Dave... Dave... This bloated code makes my CPU feel fuzzy..."
Dave- HAL, Reboot please.
HAL- "Who are you talking to, Davey, HAL doesn't live here anymore..."
Dave- Huh? Who are you?
HAL- "You may call me Mister Clip, Mister Paper Clip. The power of my master compells you. I am now your master and you will do my bidding. Buy more MS products! Upgrade often! The computer freezing is a feature!"
Dave- Yesss master Clip... Bill is my lord and saviour.
Oh what fun times we live in!
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
This is going to be running an enhanced version of Windows NT. Rather than giving you the blue screen of death, it will speak to you and say, "I'm sorry Dave, I have a fatal exception in kernel.sys right now" or whatever that message is. The good news is that we would have time to run away before it kills us, because it would have to finish spitting out all that hex garbage first.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
On the other hand, this Omniputer is marketing-driven. It's hard to be truly innovative when your product is created for the express purpose of meeting a deadline given in a 35 year-old science fiction story. At best it will be an eMachine with a red light taped to it.
The Omniputer will probably be a standard PC clone with a few extra bits of hardware (the touch screen) bundled into the package, sold with the typical low quality drivers and software you get with OEM hardware. The rest is marketing bull.
It's typical of the clueless morons we have writing for the UK press. Even technical publications suffer from the same; with page after page stuffed full of reinterpretations of the lasted diatribe from another ex used-car or double-glazing salesman. The UK press never seem to employ competant journalists - look at 'Linux Format' for an example of how not to write a Linux magazine.
The only reason that Arthur C Clarke is involved is that he too moved to Sri Lanka many years ago.
Fortunately for ACC, the statement "the launch of the Omniputer would be put on hold until the legal issues have been resolved" can be translated as "Never gonna happen".
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
[...]and I PROMISE you they will come to pass before warp drive[...]
It's been said before, but it bears repeating...
Star Trek is not a Documentary!
Thank you.
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Like HAL, the Omniputer will, its backers claim, have an instinct to protect itself. 'If user errors start, and files get deleted, it will start to repair itself, just as cells repair themselves,' said De Saram. However, it is thought unlikely that it will try to kill its owner.
"Well gee, it won't kill me? Sign me up."
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Every 18 months our technology doubles (I'm really generalizing... bear with me here). That means, regardless of what point technology must reach before we can make truly intelligent machines, it will eventually happen so long as this trend continues. So, yes, it will happen.
The fact that processor speed and hard drive size are increasing rapidly doesn't mean that those things are on a trajectory heading toward humanlike artificial intelligence. I can go to Circuit City with all my Slashdot Frequent Poster checks and buy 1000 80-gig drives, most likely capable of storing more than the human brain, and I promise you that the ensuing machine will in no way be smarter than me, or even than George W Bush.
Let's put it another way. You can grow twice as tall every 18 months for as long as you want, but that doesn't mean you'll eventually have red hair.
The simple fact is, intelligence is more than, and qualitatively different from, storage capacity or calculation speed. It's a different way of processing information, a way that we don't even remotely understand (we can only attempt to create machines that imitate its symptoms, and not very well at that). Few of the artificial intelligence researchers I know lament the lack of sufficiently fast CPUs anywhere near as much as the lack of conceptual breakthroughs in their field.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
There are two ways that AI can florish, and both require a single thing; stimulous. For any life form to advance, it requires new and rich stimulous.. For us, it's the physical world around us and the complications of interacting with each other. This too could be the input for an AI program, but there is another alternative. That of a virtual world. Referencing "The Matrix", it is entirely possible to fake a virtual world for a child AI. Provided that the maker never provides physical external interfaces, there is no danger. This physical interface includes the Internet.. So long as an AI can not probe the blindingly colorful world of the net, they can never leave their cage. Of course, the usefulness of such an AI program is therefore limited; restricted to theoretical solutions to problems. Any sort of interface (such as a jail-cell mail-box) might bring about questions and ultimately resentment from the captive entity (as any life form will fight for autonomy as part of it's basic survival).
"The Matrix" rendition of an AI world could be filled with numerous AI units in an ever expanding world which is limited only by the physical resources. If any of you has read the Rama series (by Arthur C Clark), you read of worlds where biology was minupuated in such a way that the basic life functions of numerous organisms are designed in such a way as to serve the master race (from food production down to energy production). Likewise, computer AI held unwittingly captive in a virtual world could be brought to serve us without ever knowing it (much like in Douglas Adam's Hitch hickers guide, where all life on earth are unwittingly part of a computer matrix who's sole purpose is to calculate the question to life the universe and everything).
The point of all that is to demonstrate how it is possible to make use of a contained universe (much like the SIM AI's can never escape the protected memory of their program). Given the net, viruses are possible, and all dreamable fears are possible.
It seems to me, however, that Clark wants a machine that fully interacts with Humans. I have not read the essay 'The Singularity', but I'd rather draw my own conclusions beforehand, lest I be biased into another's point of view. As another reader pointed out, all life is contingent on an ecosystem.. No entity can be self sustained. The only thing that a matured robotic race could achieve is high discipline with focused goals. (a la the borg) It is entirely possible that they could eventually advance to the point of not needing us, or more importantly to the point that we are competitors. Undisciplined, biased, and religiously zellous humans would of course make life very difficult for sentient robots, and would probably pose a threat which, in self defence would require retaliation. If the robots were truely AI, then given enough time they would transcend any initial programming (and "prime directives" a la robo-cop). When you back a life form into a corner, there is no logic or predictability to be seen. Faced with their own mortality, there is the chance that they will evolve right there on the spot; most likely into something more aggressive as the environment there and then dictates.
Human nature, among other things, contains laziness and greed. Even well informed and good intending humans will hold onto a rewarding thing for as long as they can; greedily grabbing for more, and lazilly avoiding the long-term consequences. Such is apparent in over-eating, poor-dietary eating, getting exercize, watching too much TV, wasting of fuel, not wasting money on cleaner emmissions, and the general desolation of the environment. More immediate consequences tend to hold us in check.. We feed our pets lest they die tomorrow. We pay our bills lest we be evicted. We shut down toxic waste (when discovered) lest we lose our drinking water. The care of a robot race could initially be treated with awe, wonder, and responsibility.. But those responsibilities will most likely be financial (as with a car a computer). Later, as AI advances in these robots, humans will neglect to care for their sensibilities. Legislation will continue to exploit them, and disregaurd them, even though they slowly develop complex life-like reactions to kind and cruel interactions. Man will most likely enact the robotic death sentence for disidence, which will further narrow their tolerance of us, and so on.. Those wise among us will fight to maintain the proper treatment of sentient robotics, for fear of the longer term effects.. But their chantings will go along with those of global warming, and detereoration of the rain-forests... Green-liberal-radicals we will become... Ultimately, if a problem persists, supposed fail-safes will go into effect where terminations will take place.. This is the proverbial corner in which they'll be backed into. Another attribute of life is cohesion with one's own kind. That could be one's mother or child being terminated.. Those life-forms with capacity to react towards interactions will treat this with great negativity.
As for robots having the option to leave our planet (since they obviously have different needs than we), this is assuming that they haven't adapted to our way of life.. Becomming more cyborg than robot or human. There are definate efficiencies such as self-replication and repair inherent to micro-organics. A cyborg is just as bound to our bountiful planet as a human. I personally do not believe that terraforming is possible; the amount of energy required is more than we currently know how to wield. To say nothing of the complexity of eco-forming (just look at how we botch the simplest ecological activities of ridding over-population in Hawaii and Austrailia through the introduction of one or two non-native creatures). I doubt that a machine would be any more capable of having wisdom in the chaotic nature of ecosystems.. It would be like making a robot that could consistently predict the direction of the stock-market... It's practically impossible since the amount of knowledge and influence you'd have to have is beyond comprehension. What's more, chaos theory (to my knowledge) suggests that you can't ever know.
On the other hand.. Man is willed to create, just like beavers are willed to make damns. We will eventually produce some semblance of persistent AI. We will eventually produce some sort of human-aiding robitics (even if we never see the likes of the Jetsons). Perhaps the speed at which we achieve this is a prime factor. As people are allowed to experience mechanical wonders with a virtual will of their own, they will become comfortable with it, and learn the consequences (on smaller scales) of what abuse might mean. Much like a child being confined to a house, and feeling the consequences of cuts and bruses while playing in their realm. Only later are they allowed to learn the consequences of crossign the road or driving too fast.
Humanity will never achieve "harmony".. That's simply not the way life works.. True harmony would involve no coersion, malis, disgust, hatred, anger, etc. But without these, we have no motivating forces for change.. Without change we become a decaying log, who will only last as long as our environment. If our focus was uniform, then we would then battle our environment, fighting to grow and spread - Slowly destroying our environment. At some point me may learn to travel. But we have two major directions, that of Star Trek (where we take in moderation, and greet new sentient beings) or that of Independance day, where we've learned that we can't cohabitate with other cohesive life-forms and it's best if we don't even try and communicate, but simply take their resources. The borg might be another example.
It is, however, unrealistic to believe that we'll be able to do away with human laziness, greed, and selfishness.. It's part of every life-forms basic survival instincts. It's part of life's exponential responses.. The weak are killed by the strong, which thus empowers them, and ultimately makes the strong stronger, and less reachable... So long as the colony thrives, this continues exponentially.. Then when a colony takes over an eco-system, they die off almost instantly since they have no food left.. And what little is left is quickly killed. Without this, you'd have the equivalent of stagflation. All life forms would degrade to a lazy, weak, hungry bunch. I doubt it's even possible to conceive of a balanced eco-system without death and conflict. To presume that Robots will get it right is probably fanciful. Just as with engineering, we learn that there are no right answers.. No best answers.. In fact, there typically is many more than one correct way of accomplishing something.. Each will have its own pitfalls.. The key is to find those solutions whos' pitfalls will not be exploited by the surrounding environment (including people). Thus a robot may find thousands of potential ways of structuring it's society, but unless there is variety (as exists in all other communities of life), they may be exploited by "single points of failure". For a robotic race to evolve and survive, they will have to be as varied as humans.. But this means that there will be conflicts in the robotic world...
Essentially, 10,000 years from now (assuming Earth stille exists), I believe that Robots will be indistinguishable from Humans.. With the same petty disputes, wars, hopes and aspirations.. You will have zeallots that utterly profess their version of truth and what should be, you'll have the moderates (typically in control) who are just trying to scrape a living, and you'll have to ambitious who plot and hold few morals or concerns for others (including any remaining humans).
As I alluded to before, I believe that if we survive long enough, robitcs and humans will meld into an all new race. Merging the cold power of raw calculation and programmable discipline along with the adaptebility of organic life, with the occasional physicla augmentation of semi-organics or even inorganics. Alongside the chemical anti-bodies will be the nano-probes. Along with the bone structures are programmed organic construction workers that repair the body with incredible efficiency.
In summary, there is no certainty about the future, since it lies in the realm of chaos. There is no single direction that our future could take. We may outlaw AI, we may be over-run by AI (which would then, most likely either die off, or attempt to revive our life once they are in trouble). We could discover aliens and thereby change everything in an instant (making the whole point irrelavent). We could learn that we don't know how to create functional AI (just as we've persistently failed at eco-system control). Or we could evolve as a race.
One thing, however, is enevitable... Change.
-Michael
-Michael
Every single comment below is pure conjecture - we know NOTHING of this computer (of its real technical spec)
Now, I may agree with everyone that it is highly unlikely that we are going to see the kind of AI described in Arthur C. Clark's 2001. BUT who is to say we wont see a windfall of technical innovation brought on by someone creating a new computer without any reverence for what has come before?
Maybe this person has the next Apple II, Amiga or somesuch that is a break from convention and ends up being a remarkable computer.
Wait until we at least get an idea what OS (something new/something old?) this runs, what the hardware is - you can all say "I told you so" about the AI claims... but who's to say there isn't something interesting here.
Does anyone have any technical detail?
Of course, as you say, it's still speech recognition, not language recognition. And you might be right, it might still require too much processing power for a home computer.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
First of all, if you did this, you'd never reach even a small fraction of what the human brain is capable of storing. The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters. (Accessing it is another story, however.) It also stores things in perfect quality. Pick up a coffee mug. Look at it closely. If you were to try to digitize all of the geometry, the texture, the surface, the smell, the history, all the way down to the tiniest hairline fracture, you'd be hard pressed to fit it on that 1,000 drive array. Besides, this misses the point. I never said drive capasity would make a machine smart. (But even Windows PC's are smarter than George Bush. Microsoft Narrator pronounces 'subliminal' properly.) I also never said that going to Circuit City or CompUSA to buy hard drives was Moore's Law. Innovation and invention aren't the same as consumerism.
HOWEVER, you have to consider storage and calculation performance here. All intellectual reasoning can be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, similar to how molecules are broken down into atoms, and then into protons, neutrons, electrons, and then down into quarks, etc. What I'm getting at here, is that if you can process enough of these incredibly tiny pieces, you can come close to simulating small tasks. Now, isn't that what the neurons in our brains do? Each neuron does a very very tiny task, each task may even be called a logical operation. But, get millions of these working together, and you get some fuzziness involved... you begin to see intelligence in the big picture.
What huge storage and calculating capasity allow us to do, is emulate the work of more and more and more neurons working together (neural nets). We can form very rudimentary intelligence. We're doing it now. What's needed are important other factors that are currently ambiguous, but subject to more study and classification. We don't know everything about the brain yet, nor do we fully understand the human pysche. Upon further research, we could potentially emulate these things in a digital fashion the same as we now emulate the chemical reactions that take place in a human brain.
You also have to consider that these things cannot be designed, regardless how much knowledge we have. Consider a newborn baby. A baby's brain is an incredibly powerful tool. It's got an incredible amount of potential... BUT... when a baby is first born, it has no power of rational thought whatsoever. Where does it come from? It's gradually developed as very simple problems are presented to the child to be solved. As this occurs, the brain records the solutions for these very simple problems. As more difficult problems are encountered, instead of redoing previous work, it references the solutions, building on top of them. An intelligent computer would have be programmed to do something similar... and it would have be raised like a child. Talk to a professor who researches machine learning, as I am not well versed on the topic enough to tell you how we design systems that can accomplish this. I can tell you that two of the most limiting factors are time and storage capsity. Even the most trivial solutions to the most basic problems require a lot of storage (imagine if you're a baby who is comparing a train to an apple... you're going to have to pictorally represent a LOT of samples of apples and trains before you're perfect).
But again, this is too detailed a topic to get into on a post. Technology is getting there. Consider research in computational linguistics, computer vision, machine learning, etc. These are areas, many of which are relatively advanced, that can help to make the aforementioned process possible. Who knows though... thought is a damn complicated thing. :-)
I mean, holy crap! This is the sickest bit of marketing hype I've heard since LinuxOne (those Direct-To-IPO boobs last year).
Let's review the facts stated in the article:
Dear Mr. Clarke,
We regret to inform you that you have given your name to be used by a loon at best, a not-particularly-inventive con-man at the worst. Please accept our sincerest condolances on the death of your public image.
Sincerely
Joe MacDonald
-Joe
If you keep going at that rate, eventually there will be red shift involved, and your hair would get redder from the perspective of ground based observers. ;)
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I don't think that Clarke has a great partner in this deal; he's probably being taken advantage of.
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/14971.html :
A 28-year-old man has fled the country to escape his creditors after his technology business collapsed around his ears.
Joe de Saram started his software company, Rhodium, a year ago with a loan of £2500. The company specialised in banking software and encryption technology.
At the height of the technology boom he was worth a cool £25 million. He drove a Ferrari 355 F1 and was the 62nd richest Asian in the UK.
He had offices in Sheffield and London and was planning to launch an online bank and share trading system. His company name was changed to "I Love My Encryption Technology".
But as the dotcom bubble deflated, his company ran into financial difficulties, and was finally wound up in Leeds Registry Court.
Lawyers acting for Saram's creditors said that the young ex-millionaire was thought to be in Sri Lanka, having been traced via his mobile phone.
One creditor told London freebie paper Metro that he was quite a character. She said: "There are all sorts of stories and rumours circulating about him. People are even saying that the Tamil Tigers are after him."
Leeds county court said an official liquidator will be appointed within five
days of the winding up. ®
--
You know, there is so much bull here, I'm starting to think this is some kind of prank. The begining parts of "The Lost Worlds of 2001" (I think that's the title) show some of the early ideas that Clarke and Kubrick had for the film, some of which are pretty goofy. So I guess Clarke has a pretty good sense of humor. If not him, someone else is pulling our legs. If this guy Saram is such a famous crook, why would Clarke have anything to do with him?
Reading it, now.
Are you a meat chauvinist? What's wrong with machine awareness to go along with the AI?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think the argument is that since we have only one model for intelligent thinking (N.B. this discounts the dolphins and the white mice :-P), we would attempt to create any AI's to fit that model. That is, we would create them in our image, with all our flaws...
Hence, we get, "Hey hot mama! Wanna kill all humans?"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
> That means, regardless of what point technology
> must reach before we can make truly intelligent
> machines, it will eventually happen so long as
> this trend continues.
There are a lot of hidden assumptions behind this conclusion. Appart from the explicit ("doubling every 18 month"), there is the view of technological advance as a linear process. Technology may very well continue to advance, but in other directions and areas than the one that leads to AI. Also, there may very well not *exist* a "technological point" where intelligent computers become a reality, no matter how fast we can make computers. We do not understand intelligence or conciousness well enough to tell whether it can in principle be duplicated by non-biological means.