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Alva Noe: Don't Worry About the Singularity, We Can't Even Copy an Amoeba
An anonymous reader writes "Writer and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley Alva Noe isn't worried that we will soon be under the rule of shiny metal overlords. He says that currently we can't produce "machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba." He writes at NPR: "One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence. This really ought to be obvious. Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything. All the doing was on our side. We played Jeopordy! with Watson. We used 'it' the way we use clocks.""
Of course Watson didn't answer questions in Jeopardy. That's not how Jeopardy is played. The contestant ASKS questions, not answers them.
Artificial intelligence is synthetic intelligence. As a rule of thumb it can solve problems as well as an expert in a subject can. Somewhat better or worse depending on the subject, but generally, it does as well as an expert.
What it isn't it artificial consciousness, as it doesn't have emotions or desires. You would hope a Professor of philosophy could get his head around the difference.
What it does have is intelligence, and it has it in spades.
Ha! Appropriate /. tagline while reading: Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
"Last updated: Aug 14, 2012"
i did some research and the professor has been dead for years, but they never shut off his email account.
i called UCB to trace the submission and they said the email was coming from INSIDE THE SERVER ROOM.
cue twilight zone music
I did philosophy myself as an undergraduate, so I don't want to bash our armchair friend here for doing his best. He is making the classic mistake of making claims about fields he isn't part of. In this case biology, computer science, and cognitive science in general (beyond philosophy).
Regarding the statement "We used 'it' the way we use clocks":
He is mistaking agency for being something that is an end unto itself. This isn't true. Agents commonly use other agents as tools. The mere property of "being used" doesn't dictate whether something is sentient, intelligent, an agent, or whatever. Yeah, we used Watson to play Jeapordy!, but that doesn't mean it isn't smart. Watson is actually way "smarter" than any human in certain ways.
This boils down to what you define as intelligence. In humans, intelligence is a very rough term applied to an enormous pile of features. Processing speed, memory, learning algorithms, response time, and many more features all contribute to what we think of as intelligence. A singularity doesn't need to precisely mirror the way in which a human thinks in order to be a singularity. It just needs to be able to adapt and evolve. I'll be the first to admit we are a long way off from modeling a human consciousness in virtual space. However, existing machine learning and rule based techniques are powerful enough to do some really impressive things (like Watson and Siri). They aren't singularity level, no, but that doesn't make this man's arguments relevant.
Regarding "we can't produce "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba":
The idea that an ameoba displays intelligence in excess of our current ability to simulate is frankly a little ridiculous. Artificial agents are capable of very complex behavior. They can react to abstract constructs which are inferred about their environment. They can anticipate opponents based on statistical probability and thereby win, on average, more often than even *a human being*. An amoeba is closer in behavioral complexity to a simple chemical reaction than it is a contemporary artificial intelligence.
AI uses sensible variable and function names *and* comments its code?
We're doomed.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Wrong. We've produced "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of..." a worm: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Im not worried about AI being smarter than us... Im worried about machines that use the same logic (or ethics) we do...
Such as the Baghdad Airstrike... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
A machine is only as good as the code behind it, and look at the issues with electronic voting machines, ATM's, and chip on credit card's
What exactly is intelligence?
At one level, it is the ability to process input, digest it, and generate useful output. In that sense, we have created intelligent machines long ago.
Bug at another level, the level of "awareness" or "consciousness" we aren't even close.
On one point I agree with the author: machines aren't about to take over the world. People might do awful things with the machines they create, but it is still people who tell the machines what to do.
I find this laughable because it's almost the opposite of the "If we can put a man on the moon, we can solve cancer." fallacy. If we can't copy an amoeba, we won't. LOL. No? I beg to differ. We can't right now, and for a million fundamental reasons that are all being solved in time.
Here's some perspective. I work in cell biology. 3 years ago, genetic expression required measuring the RNAs of at least a small cluster of cells. Two years ago, single cell RNA analysis became available. A year ago we started seeing the ability to split one cell into 4 equal vessicles, each able to be analyzed separately if need be. We also now have the software and processing power to infer huge bioinformatic hypotheses from this intricate data. In three years the ability went from an average, to a single, to a greater sampling number from the single (for statistical accuracy). THIS IS NOT EVEN THE UPCURVE OF SINGULARITY, but it sure feels like it.
Nanomaterials are allowing for crazy new properties on the macro-scale. Biotechnology is becoming cellular an surpassing simple chemistry. Artificial intelligence is now being implemented on neural-like computer architectures which are much more powerful at brain-like activity.
Full Disclosure, I've been a Kurzweilian Singularity Believer for years now and my life is betting on it. But I've had a lot more than confirmation bias going on to keep my confidence very high.
I thought that too, until I watched a couple of episodes of Jeopardy and realized it's just a regular question/answer game show with "[what|who] is" tossed in front of each answer.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I think the singularity is just some technology-wrapped new age bullshit.
The fact that you had to resort to fiction (and cheesy fiction at that) for your reference, instead of an applicable real life analogy, just shows that up.
Putting nuclear bombs on the tips of rockets and programming them to hit other parts of the Earth is also mere tool use. Tools are not inherently safe, and never have been. Autonomous tools are even less inherently safe. The most likely outcome of a failed singularity isn't being ruled by robot overlords, it's being dead.
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
I couldn't find a more recent article, but at the end it mentions that this AI came up with a formula for cellular metabolism. It is my understanding that this formula has been tested to be valid, but no human scientists understands what the formula means yet.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
What is the point of this article? You would think that people have learned better by now than to attempt to make predictions as to where technology will go.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What I'm worried about is letting a computer algorithm decide wether it should kill someone or not.
while
You can make a machine that is many orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human, but unless it has the mechanisms to want something, it won't want anything. Think about what it would take to program a conscious being, just think about how we humans are aware of time and the movement of time--as a software engineer it boggles my mind trying to think about how the brain accomplishes that. Then to program a machine (biological or not) to want something in a fairly consistent way over a period of time under changing circumstances...it takes more than just brute force processing time to accomplish that. We biological machines are aware of ourselves, and we have no idea how we accomplish that. We are going to have to figure that out before we make the singularity machine.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
It's interesting speculation based on the recent history of technological growth. Personally, I think it will be self-limiting somehow but the good professor seems to have completely missed the point.
More than half the time, the "answer" doesn't even make sense as a response to the "question".
Q: Who is "Joe DeSixpack"
A: Born in 19th Century Verona, he died of plague playing beach volleyball in Aruba.
NO!!!
P.S. sorry for my English
The single most serious error in your English is to treat 'believing' as a synonym for 'knowing,' as in the statement "anyone with a belief in God knows already ..." Rather they believe more than "science" (which is, in this context, I guess you mean material factors), is required to become alive.
Before the usual slashdot crowd start shouting "blasphemy, blasphemy, a believer in God inside our atheistic /. temple" i must remind them that this is about a professor of philosophy writing about stuff that we religious people ardifficult ande experts in, so, here we are...
The mere fact that you imagine yourself an expert in what the good professor is writing about, is no shield from complaints about your lack of epistemological rigour. 'God' is being used here as a word by which to avoid inquiring into the more profound problems of our existence.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
We have already moved beyond that. The neuron to ethernet interface is just a little clunky.
Sounds like someone should go study general systems theory... er nobody talks about about general systems theory.
The development of Watson stems from employers' inability to use human intelligence 100% instrumentally -- i.e., people can't be used as clocks. Once Watsons are prevalent, humans will be economically superfluous in nearly every area that requires thought. Our overlords won't even bother to bring out the old line about freeing up humans' time to do "better things."
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Don't worry. It is using a non-standard prototype for `main', and it forgot a few semicolons. It will stop working the next time the compiler is updated. Who knew that some obscure idiosyncrasies of the C programming language would save humanity? :)
It's not about making machines smarter than us, it's about making machines that replace us in the workforce.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly
welcome our new overlords of our new shiny metal overlords.
Meanwhile a week ago nematodes reached the singularity, when folks mapped the roundworms' 300+ synaptic connections into a Lego robot, which proceeded to react to moving toward a wall in similar fashion to biological nematodes.
But apparently is retarded when using brackets, so there is hope yet
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I would argue that AI might be here sooner than we think, it may not behave like what we think intelligence is.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Bright lights, like this loon, are all part of the "man is not ready......." pseudo religious bullshit".
In fact, we will progress to artificial life and artificial intelligence in erratic steps - some large, some small - some hard, some easy.
Easy is logic, easy is memory and lookups, easy is speed - hence Watson as we start to climb the connectedness/co-relatedness/content addressable memory ladder. (Content addressable memory {CAI } is like a roll call in the Army - "Private Smith?" - "here"). A lot of the aspects of intelligence are ramifications of CAI, and other aspects of interconnectedness. Add in the speed and memory depth and more and more aspects of an AI emerge. As time goes, step by step, intelligence will emerge. It might be like an infant that needs to learn as we do, but at a far higher speed - zero to 25 years old in 5 minutes???. Experiential memories - can they be done at high speed, or must that clock take longer?.
The precise timing of these stages elude me, but I believe they will emerge with time.
As to whether or not this AI will be a malevolent killer, or one of altruistic aspect??? It seems to me that this will depend on how is is brought up.
(until an AI can reproduce sexually - no he/she). Can a growing AI be abused - mentally, as in children are abused?? I suspect that with no sexuality that there will be no casus abusus. That is not to say that ways to abuse a growing AI are impossible to find - they will emerge in time.
As these AIs emerge, how smart will they be? and IQ of 25 or one of 25,000,000?? This might bear some relationship with how these AIs treat mankind, as a student at man;s knee, or as something that looks down at man with an IQ of 100 and also sees bees and ants with with a group IQ of 25? and muses - what's the difference and thinks of other things...
From downloading too much porn
As I note in my doom and gloom YouTube, it's a 50-year-old analogy in the quest for AI that artificial flight did not require duplicating a bird. Artificial intelligence may look very different, and in fact in my video, I avoid defining intelligence and merely point out that "a computer that can program itself" is all that is required for the singularity.
is the constants. If your process doubles in the measured quantity in 20 days then you have something that might be worth worrying about (assuming that it won't hit some other limit, so long as that limit isn't you), but if it doubles in 20 years you have some time to consider and prepare. Whenever I see talk about the singularity it seems like the growth people are talking about either has a very short doubling period (which it probably doesn't) or the growth is actually super-exponential (the doubling period itself is chchanging with time).
In either case, innumeracy will be our downfall before the singularity gets us.
just a ghost in the machine.
there is a very important thing to consider.
that the reason computers seem so slow at somethings like ai is because we are already inside a singularity, and that as entities inside the construct have no way to 'meet' the intelligence of our singular mind. to create a true singularity from within a true singularity would be akin to rewriting the whole thing and as the singularity we have no way to overwrite our existence except to die and rejoin it. assuming the developers designed it that way.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...
Computers have been able to "program themselves" since the first Fortran compiler. We just taught computers how to interpret specifications written at higher and higher levels. Let me know what it'd take for a computer to come up with a program's requirements all by itself, and then we'll know what a singularity needs.
"THIS IS NOT EVEN THE UPCURVE OF SINGULARITY"
On an upward exponential curve, *everything* is on the upcurve,
The level of intelligence of amoebas is hard to reach: they have to survive in the real world.
AI has therefore set its standards considerably lower: matching the level of intelligence of Berkeley philosophers and social scientists. Here is an example, indistinguishable from its human counterparts:
http://www.elsewhere.org/journ...
People drive technology and the number of people has been going up exponentially, so techincal prograss is NOT linear.
And the whole point of "singularity" is that once we create an intelligence smarter than us, it will (in theory) in turn create an intelligence smarter and faster than it, and so on. That's not linear progress.
--PM
The "singularity" does not necessarily require artificially intelligent computers vs. pseudo-intelligent computers. It only requires an exponential growth of change in technology, mediated or enabled by some sort of computation. The details are semantics I suppose, the key is the exponential technological feedback cycle. I think you could make the argument that we are already in it, via augmented intelligence. Used Wikipedia or IMdB lately? From your smartphone? Remember when you had to know stuff, instead of efficiently looking it up? I think the professor is right in one sense, but misses the bigger picture, we are already in a technological singularity.
and the CEO of the contractors who build the system get's 50M bonus for doing a good job.
Yes! That's precisely the technology-wrapped new age bullshit we're talking about.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Well, they will if I get to program them. :)
We evolved from single celled organisms, but we are not those now.
Science evolved from ignorance by determining the uselessness of, and then discarding, philosophical nonsense and replacing it with a very specific, non-soft, objective, rule-based behavior called "the scientific method." Which -- unlike the vast majority of philosophy -- produces useful results.
The claims philosophy have to science can be best likened to a leaky condom. We managed to get the scientific method in spite of it. Not because of it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hawking can't lift a finger without external, artificial assistance. Does that make him an idiot?
If I were able to cut your head from your body, but keep it running, so to speak, now that you can't speak to us (no lungs) and we see no interesting activity on your part, would that make you an idiot?
If I drug you so you are fully conscious, but cannot move, are you then an idiot?
Intelligence is not bound to the ability to do anything material. Intelligence is about manipulating information. Induction, association, that sort of thing. Agency with regard to conceptual matters. Consciousness... well, I have ideas about that, but they're just ideas at the moment.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
so glad to see published articles where they say this plainly
'teh singluarity' needs to go to the dustbin of history b/c it's wasting *billions* of research dollars
Thank you Dave Raggett
all of which are, as TFA says, not 'intelligence' at all!
Thank you Dave Raggett
"a computer that can program itself"
is a computer that has been programmed by a human with parameters and a system specifically made by humans for it to take defined variables and combine them in pre-programmed parameters
all pounded out by a dumb monkey
'teh singularity' is a tautology
you can't make a new thing by calling the same thing a different name
Thank you Dave Raggett
[S]o yes, in this case "i treat 'believing' as a synonym for 'knowing,' "
But in the case of, "I believe you are mistaken," you don't? Yes?
In other words 'God' makes this a special privileged belief, not subject to the problematic difference between belief and knowledge which might occupy a rational epistemology. 'God' as the fullstop to inquiry again.
I do not know whether any god "exists" --in fact I don't even understand what kind of existence is being claimed for God --however I do believe you are mistaken to find yourself in possession of definitive knowledge of such putative form of existence, a fortiori the fact that a god, (known as God), enjoys it.
[A]nd no, i don't use 'God' "as a word by which to avoid inquiring into the more profound problems of our existence"... on the contrary
I understand that is how you feel, but you clearly do. Tell me this: Why is there something, rather than nothing.
[From your other post] ... AND for recognizing this "Slashdot mindthink"
Heaven forbid one should use one's mind actually to think! If perchance you meant groupthink, well that's a fine accusation to come from the believer of a folie en masse.
You would never catch me making that claim, but perhaps you prefer to argue about imaginary beings with imaginary interlocutors?
It should suffice to remember that affirmanti non neganti incumbit probatio. That is to say the onus of proof any assertion lies with the party making the assertion. No one should ever be required to prove the non-existence of an object, the existence of which someone asserts but for which evidence of existence is lacking. Moreover, while it is correct to point out (as you have) that lack of evidence is not proof of non-existence, that does not mean it is not evidence of non-existence.
That is the basic logic pertaining to any member of the set of putative objects for which no evidence of their existence exists. In the case of the particular claim "God exists" however, there is an even greater difficulty.
For God, by definition, lacks any material existence (body). No one, neither believer or reasoner, I think, would dispute that God exists in a mental/cultural sense (mind): as a word (for instance as the translation of the 3rd word of the Hebrew scriptures); as a character in that most interesting of texts; as concept; and as a belief in some people's minds. But surely the existence claimed for God, by believers, must be greater than that?
Given we have access (knowledge) only the states of existence of body ('science' as you call it) and mind, what evidence could we even access about this other putative state of existence?! What does 'exist' even mean (to humans) in the statement "God exists"? Thus you face the difficulty in, as I wrote above, both of evidencing a novel state of existence beyond the realm of human apprehension and only then are you in a position even to show that God partakes of it.
Given these --for creatures of mind and body insurmountable --difficulties, God turns out to be an unworkable foundation for knowledge. But if you don't want to think to hard about these problems, 'God' is a good way to stop yourself from doing so.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The "AI" these days is just a collection of IF/THEN statements.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yup! Bush was a pansy, Obama not only made sure all of the telco's were immune from lawsuits, Made sure that we'd still be bombing in Iraq and expanding in Afghanistan - he flipped the finger at forming a coalition and bombed the shit out of Syria!
And as an ice cream topper - he did it all with the approval of the media.
That's freaking awesome. The media spent a shitload of time asking bush if he did cocaine - Obama published a book where he manned up to not only toking weed, but snorting coke - and he told the media to piss off.
Yep, all of the blame is on bush - I can't wait to watch all of the Orambo movies on the big screen..
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Doubly true, we recently stuck a worm's brain in a robot body.
Wowowowow and a worm is way more complicated than an amoeba! Dr. Noe should probably stick to questioning his own existence.
But that we are so far from any kind of AI that worrying about what form it might take is stupid. Yes, there are lots of things that might happen in the far future. Until they are closer, worrying about them is silly. There have been stories from people who are all paranoid about AI and think we need to start making with the rules. No we don't, we are so far away we don't even know how far away we are. We also have no idea what form it'll take. May turn out that self awareness is a uniquely biological trait and we never make computers that are truly strong AI.
Also if you are betting your life (regardless of if this means an actual bet, singular investment of all assets, etc) on something far off, you are a moron. You have no idea when a technology will happen, if it'll even be possible, and if it is if it'll even be marketable. Want a great example? SED, surface-conduction electron-emitter display. Reasonably chance you've never even heard of it. Was a new tech from Canon, basically a flat, large, hig rez take on CRT. Offered extremely high refresh rates (and thus low blur) great contrast ratio, wide viewing angle, etc. Very exciting display technology lots of people looked forward to as an LCD alternative. Wouldn't displace LCD, but would be a better technology for many uses. It was real too, actual working sets were shown at CES in 2006.
What happened? Well as a result of litigation, the financial downturn, and the general market, they decided to pack it in and stop development. They shut down and liquidated that division in 2010, and there's been no further development. So despite it being real and doable, it didn't happen and almost certainly never will happen.
Now compare that to the concept of strong AI, which we have no idea if it even can exist, if it does what form it will take, and if so what technology will be required. Maybe not the best thing to be betting the farm on.
And AI is to biological intelligence what airplanes are to birds.
Here is a link to the 1963 article Artificial Intelligence: Progress and Problems. It refers to the bird analogy as a "trite analogy", which leads me to believe that it predates even this article by many years.
Yeah "it" will be self limiting for the obvious reason - processing takes resources. There is not going to be an exponential explosion in computing without exponential explosion in power efficiency or resource availability. Nothing in my laptop will ever become sentient, the power supply is not sufficient for such a crappy flops/watts design.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Mental masturbation wherein meaningless questions are poorly answered.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
"Asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim."
--Djikstra
Play Command HQ online
"Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything."
A ridiculous analogy. It's like saying the dog that fetches the wood to its master has no intelligence at all. It's the master that "fetched" the wood. AI is not pseudo-intelligence, but intelligence with restrictions. These restrictions and limitations go away day by day, year by year, as we better understand the brain and its workings.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
What she asks of machines they cannot have, as it comes from birth. She's looking at the wrong place. the furthers step isn't Watson, but UHFT.
An amoeba's interaction with its environment comes from the fact that it's a product of that environment. AI are not a product of their environment, they are artificial. What Alva Noe asks of an AI could only be answered by one that appears spontaneously from its environment.
However, the environment we've created in which AI could appear is way too simple to allow such spontaneous creation. For now.
The singularity won't arrive by a human built AI but by the evolution of a spontaneous behavior on an environment created for human purposes. Thus, the pool from which true AI will come isn't Watson, but ultra high frequency trading. Not a created being, but a created environment in which inexplicable behaviors arise.
And we want to assume we know what consciousness is? What intelligence is? These are a bit harder to define than time. We really don't know what time is even though we measure it so very accurately. We have resorted to defining it using the methods by which we measure it. All of this makes it more likely that AI can be developed just fine. AI doesn't have to understand what time or consciousness is, because natural intelligence doesn't understand those things either!
Join the IParty!
If you compare the power usage and performance of a Commodore 64 to today's laptops, I think we've done a pretty good job of exponentially increasing power efficiency. Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds, we just haven't figured out how to steer all this power towards actual intelligence. If mother nature can create human minds that function on a few sandwiches a day, I'm sure we'll be able to surpass that. Of course it can't continue to grow exponentially forever, but it can certainly scale well beyond the combined power of the seven billion human brains on this planet today.
There is a distinct difference between Intelligence and Consciousness.
I have no doubt that the AI we are building will improve dramatically, even to the point where it will far exceed human intelligence. But it is unlikely that the intelligent machines to ever be sentient.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
And he calls himself a professor? I guess he's way off base..
Smarter as us doesn't mean it has to understand what it's talking about (most politicians don't know jack what they are talking about and still they 'make' the rules)..
And let's not forget, with neural networks, AI can advance much faster than a regular person, and also let's not forget, there are way more advanced projects going on in laboratories than IBM's Watson, which haven't been shown to the public.. IBM's Watson is just the tip of the iceberg..
I sometimes wonder how these "professors" got their degree, sometimes I just wonder if those positions come with a box of cereal...
I don't think the technological singularity - if there's such a thing - should be feared. You may, however, want to fear widespread pseudo/artificial/whatever intelligence. Or just call it plain automation. Because it's going to take your job well before there's a technological singularity. And the challenges that need to be overcome to get us there are much easier than copying an amoebe. You don't need to be able to copy an amoebe in order to be able to do just about anything a human does better than a human.
We don't need to be able to copy amoebes for technology to take over the jobs of the drivers of all kinds of vehicles, all logistics personell, most IT personell, most construction workers, most car mechanics, all fast food personell, most military personell. You name it. And we're getting there fast; in fact replacing all these people would not really be so much of a technological challenge; it's now simply a matter of economics.
Prepare for a job in entertainment, (health) care, science or automating the hell out of anything or be without one in a decade. For quite some time, humans may still compete on the job market with general purpose robots, maybe they always will, but those jobs will inevitably be plain dull; computer tells you what to do, you do it, repeat. And there's all the reason to fear that...
0x or or snor perron?!
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
It's interesting speculation based on the recent history of technological growth.
Machines have a history of blowing up or falling apart, but not of becoming evil and maniacal murderers.
we need an AI for spelling bees...
Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds, we just haven't figured out how to steer all this power towards actual intelligence
In terms of number of switches, not really (we're getting close though). In terms of interconnect, you're orders of magnitude off. The big difference between a brain and a microprocessor is the number of interconnects between discrete components. Neurons in a human brain have as many as 7,000 connections to other neurons. The state of the art for hardware neural network simulations have 700. And don't expect that to scale linearly - doubling the number of connections is really hard. Latency goes up dramatically.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But all of it doesn't even matter.
The professor of philosophy is actually wrong. We don't understand what time is any better then clocks do. We are complicated, ad infinitum refined "clocks" for mindless, insentient set of genes who aren't even aware of us. Even the notions "aware" and "sentient" are themselves misleading.
The point is, once we can teach machines how to recreate and simulate our creative process, it wouldn't really matter if machines are really intelligent or just faking it very well. After all, everything we found out from psychological and neurological research leads to conclusion that we are faking it too. Yes it's terrible, scary, and unimaginable ("What? This AC is full of it! I think, therefore I am ... if I take my word that I do actually think, that is") but we can either accept it, or make up fairy tales about Weightless Indestructible Translucent Detachable Inner Human and Father Figure In Somewhere Else Place Behind Invisible Wall Or Infinite Distance. I've also heard some atheist mysticism BS about sentience dwelling under QM rug where, in Schroedinger's cat's box we keep all our last hopes for What We Wish Was True But Facts Are Killing It.
If you ever had someone close who got dementia, you could have had insight into nature of thought yourself. Brain doctors are probably the most disillusioned humans of them all.
Terminator isn't a peer-reviewed scientific paper. In fact, it's often thought that much of its sources were fabricated with special effects and clever camera work.
In fact, it's author James Cameron is not even an established scientist, it has been recently discovered that his oceanographic work on Titanic was published BEFORE he underwent any deep sea exploration, and it's speculated that he only went down there afterwards to further fabricate his already published results. It's also speculated that he never produced unobtainium in his lab before claiming its discovery.
In fact, I'm not even sure if Judgement Day even happened, and whether or not any Cyberdyne Systems products were responsible for it happening.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Indeed. Other BS things called as "singularity".
1) What is at the center of a black hole? Answer: Singularity. Real Answer: No freaking clue
The singularity of a black hole simply means we can't see that far. It is the point from which information cannot escape. It's not some psuedomystic hand-waving nonsense promising unicorns and fulfilled dreams. It's just the name for a region for which there is no way to discover what is inside of it.
The singularity in the context of technological progress uses the black hole as a metaphor. It describes a point at which technology becomes self-propelling in a manner that makes it impossible for us to project what life would be like then, in a similar way to how miniaturisation and Moore's law have given us a present that couldn't have been projected in the 1940s. People then like to project what it could look like as an interesting exercise, and some of them choose to promise unicorns, but that doesn't make the concept of self-propelling technological advance itself inherently wrong.
Clear proof then that the timeline was altered by the events of Terminator 2.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
But all of it doesn't even matter.
The professor of philosophy is actually wrong. We don't understand what time is any better then clocks do. We are complicated, ad infinitum refined "clocks" for mindless, insentient set of genes who aren't even aware of us. Even the notions "aware" and "sentient" are themselves misleading.
No, this is wrong. The professor is right; we do understand time and computers do not. In fact, we are capable of an understanding of time in a way which is impossible to communicate to computers or even any other forms consciousnesses. We understand time because we have an inherent sense of causality built into us, and time is the name we have given to the way we relate causal events. In fact, we are so good with time that we can construct dynamic experiments in our mind, using our own mind as a model and track the state of the modelled mind in time.
Consider the following experiment. A little child watches his mother put a bar of chocolate in the fridge. Little later daddy sneaks in and eats the chocolate. The little boy giggles; why? Because he knows that as far as mommy is concerned the chocolate is still there in the fridge and she will be surprised when she looks for it. How does he know? Because he constructed a simulation in his head of his mommy's mind, fed it a sequence of stimuli and observed its evolution over time. This is a level of manipulation of time (causality) which is completely out of reach of the most powerful computer.
Mod parent up. A worm is way more complicated than an amoeba and it was even on the /. front page a few days ago.
--M
# grep slashdot access.log | grep html | sort | uniq | wc -l 2604
That's not a robot, that's a mecha suit.
This professor doesn't get what artificial intelligence (AI) is. There really is no difference between AI and "real intelligence" the only difference is in size. We only call it AI because it isn't very smart yet. If we could construct a computer that would be at the size of a human brain in terms of neurological connections and had the same capacity we would actually have constructed a self aware computer.
"Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds"
no they aren't. Seriously, watch some of the DARPA robotics challenges. These machines attempt to mimic human tasks. They take something like an hour to do the calculations to move itself up a ladder. And usually fail at that. It takes me roughly 10 seconds to do that same bit of calculation. And I usually don't fail. This isn't related to intelligence either. This is simply figuring out how to move our respective limbs to go up a ladder.
When it comes to actual sentient intelligence, robotics have literally not started. There's all this talk about singularity bullshit. That doesn't come in to play until we've actually demonstrated it at any level. Every construct we have with SVMs, neural networks, etc. None of those demonstrate real AI at any level. How can we have hit a singularity if we've yet to show the most basic form of actual intelligence.
We currently have machines that can tell us if something is blue or something is red based off a statistical analysis. God help you if you ask it why is something blue.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly
Better yet, Skynet, in an attempt to gather all human-recorded data and understand our behaviour, visits 4chan and its circuits fry while they are trying to process and interpret the acquired data.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
As a practicing neuroscientist I couldn't agree more with Dr. Noe. It is obvious to the extreme that computers don't think, and aren't aware of anything. An amoeba is aware of its surroundings because it is alive. When we all figure out what alive actually means, then we will understand more fully why computers can't think, and why they aren't aware of anything.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
This is a level of manipulation of time (causality) which is completely out of reach of the most powerful computer.
Why exactly ? Computers can also run simulations.
You're thinking of the event horizon. The singularity refers to the point where the laws of physics as we currently understand them won't give a meaningful answer i.e. the gravitational field becomes infinite.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm living in a computer simulation being run on a computer. And I'm starting to get the feeling that it's a poorly optimized console port from Ubisoft.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't know if you ever had to change the RAM in an older Dell computer, but one nearly bit my hand off.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well - no, they did not. A single neuron is complicated and poorly understood at present. The network of 300 of those is not understood at all. The lego robot that you referenced is a primitive lookalike thta does not fully reproduce the behaviour of real worm.
And the developers promise a Day One patch and announce DLC.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, it is about consciousness. Neuroscientists can define it, but they can't explain it. Brains apparently are consciousness generators, and we really don't understand how that happens based on brain circuitry, neurochemistry and physiology. Clearly, it has something to do with being "alive", and since computers aren't alive they aren't conscious.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Fail.
Trying to prove a scientific point based on a bad action movie.
What the author was pointing out was that Watson was made by and programmed by people. It didn't care if it won or lost and it didn't understand the questions. It was in fact nothing but a giant filing cabinet with a good indexing system.
It is the difference between memorizing and understanding.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There has been growth in the artificial intelligence field?
Here I thought there had been absolutely no change in the amount of awareness and agency we can imbue a computer program with. Silly me.
I mean, I suppose linear growth with a slope of zero is technically still linear growth, but you wouldnt call it exponential (perhaps your exponent is also zero?)
Flight wasn't invented by developing flapping feathered wings - as many once seem to have envisioned. Flight was understood to be getting from point A to point B without negotiating the terrain. Better ways were found to do this mechanically. AI should no more duplicate human brain thinking than flight should duplicate bird flying.
Besides, if you succeeded in creating a human brain in a computer it would be as disturbed as a human raised in a dark basement. Our thinking requires a lifetime of delicate social interactions and lots of other experience moving about in a human body.
Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds, we just haven't figured out how to steer all this power towards actual intelligence.
You're either severely overestimating today's computing technology or severely underestimating human brain power. Scratch that, you're most likely severely doing both. As of today, computers are only good at reproducing very specific tasks and doing them extremely well (most times). Solving massive computational problems does not equate intelligence!!!!
Intelligence: Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Like countless folks have already said, modern computational technology has barely touched the surface of intelligence. There's no scratch there yet, not even a finger print blemish. You'll struggle to make comparisons with even the dumbest living organism on earth, like for instance the amoeba, against the likes of today's AI. I for one don't expect we'll make any major break-through in AI until we actually figure out how our own damned brains work.
Not to mention the utter lack of anyone knowing how to formulate a self-aware algorithm.
The entire premise that true AI is even possible is highly speculative at best in any case; I think further speculating on when said hypothetical AI will take over or whether we will have the resources to fuel its ravenous power appetite is a little premature.
Im of the opinion that such AIs are not possible, and that if they are we are several hundred years from being close to one. We havent even solved the philosophical questions around determinism, free will, and the "brain in a glass jar" after thousands of years of philosophical study; how on earth are we to begin creating artifical intelligence without having figured out how intelligence in general works?
Brains are also not digital, and theres the minor issue that we still cant really quantify "self" purely in terms of hardware.
But they can't eat the chocolate.
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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple. - Colossus
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Trying to create A.I. with the current methods is like trying to connect billions of transistors on millions of breadboards to create Microsoft Windows.
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It's not enough to emulate the properties of intelligence, you have to emulate the reason for there needing to be intelligence in the first place.
This difference was clear to me when reading up on existing AI and machine learning methods.
AI in it's current form feels more like engineering than an exploration in nature, science and math. Slightly dangerously with my limited knowledge in AI i would describe AI today as an extremely useful and insightful set of tools inspired by nature, but which are not themselves nature. They are just yet another thing that we have learnt to re-implement as a fruit of biology. Actually cellular automata feel more like nature than AI.
Methods such as neural networks are pre-evolved static solutions, the information flowing through them may evolve, but the method which determines their flow does not itself evolve, they are therefore selective and static imitations of the a brain much the same as an animatronic manikin is an imitation of the body at an evolutionary static point in time.
It's conceivable that with enough detailed imitation an intelligent implementation of a whole brain (not even human) could be achieved... but it seems highly unlikely and impractical. However implementing the basis or conditions to give emergent and undirected development in a "synthetic" medium would be nature at work or "life" in my view. Imagine an AI that had the freedom and incentive to create it's own methods dynamically, that kind of creative freedom must be a pretty good fit for true "Artificial Life", so shouldn't it be called "Emergent Intelligence"... The opposite to "Imitated Intelligence".
"Writer and professor of philosophy "
well, I'm sure there will be some solid fact based opinion there. One that won't be applied a tiny area to a wider and different sciences.
Philosophy as a field of study in and of itself is dead. Its 'no better then astrology and rides on the coat tails of it's own history.
As an example. well, this story.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Have you been watching the materials science field? Superoconductors are approaching STP. If you took any computer you have in your hands right now and rewired it with superconductor, you could probably just keep cranking up the overclocking rate with zero consequence. Without resistance there is no heat, and without heat, there is no problem. This is happening very soon. Read up.
The singularity in the context of technological progress uses the black hole as a metaphor. It describes a point at which technology becomes self-propelling in a manner that makes it impossible for us to project what life would be like then, in a similar way to how miniaturisation and Moore's law have given us a present that couldn't have been projected in the 1940s.
I think the singularity is fundamentally different. There are very few things today that couldn't have been (or weren't) projected in the 40's. Sure, there were some things where the particulars were mostly wrong (rather than the internet, it would have been an automated library, or a robot that could give you answers, rather than ubiquitous video phones, we just have normal phones that we carry with us everywhere) but basically everything we have today is just the culmination of technological possibility that was seen long, long ago.
The singularity is supposed to go farther I think - like explaining video games to medieval peasants, or something like that. There isn't even the technological context available to convey the function or significance of new developments, if you go back far enough. The singularity is by definition supposed to be things that we can't even imagine, because the world will be so fundamentally different that it operates on a different set of assumptions.
That said, I'm not convinced that a singularity exists, or that there will be a future that is fundamentally unrecognizable to us today - we've imagined a hell of a lot of stuff, and even something that entirely changes human reality (brains in jars living in virtual interfaces, etc) will still differ from today's technology only by interface and increased sophistication.
You rock. I haven't seen this yet.
People gave you 0 because they don't remember the Simpson's episode you're refrencing, or that she had to pay them.
there is a very important thing to consider.
that the reason computers seem so slow at somethings like ai is because we are already inside a singularity, and that as entities inside the construct have no way to 'meet' the intelligence of our singular mind. to create a true singularity from within a true singularity would be akin to rewriting the whole thing and as the singularity we have no way to overwrite our existence except to die and rejoin it. assuming the developers designed it that way.
I think the first thing you should consider is the whereabouts of your shift key.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds
In which way?
If a computer can make additions, subtractions, multiplications at 0.00001% of the time we're capable of, this doesn't mean they're more powerful. It only means they're more specialized in a very narrow activity. Yes, very narrow, since a human being uses a very tiny fraction of their time performing mathematical calculations.
Humans are way above machines when we're talking about performing various activities one after another without extensive downtimes spent reprogramming themselves.
Here's an example: get up, dance, write a 50-word paragraph about eggs, clap hands, take a shower, hum the national anthem, name 5 random objects presented to you, understand a joke someone's telling you, smell a flower.
The list could go on. Intelligence is not about doing one thing very fast, but about doing many different things well enough. And yes, this includes animal world as well.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If they're told to.
That's the big difference. A human mind starts constructing a simulation by itself, a computer doesn't, nor do I see it doing so in the foreseeable future.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Or, maybe, people are just bored of the Simpsons?
(I bet there was a Simpsons episode about that, but please don't tell me about it).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If mother nature can create human minds that function on a few sandwiches a day, I'm sure we'll be able to surpass that
This sort of feeble handwaving is why most AI advocates come across as drooling idiots.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There is no existing mechanism for an AI that somehow was started on a particular type of computing equipment to suddenly and exponentially start increasing the computing efficiency of that equipment, even if the whole thing is an FPGA. Even if it would be directly linked to each and every machine at TSMC or UMC it cannot magically start shitting out better CPUs and plug them into itself.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Exponential growth is almost always an S curve.
It'd be pretty funny if the top of the AI S curve was lower than where we're at.
Being serious: Also pretty odd -- we have an existence proof for things as smart as us. Whether smarter things than us can exist is an unknown.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
In this universe we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
void main() {
while (true) { if (humans = (detect_humans()) { kill(humans) } if (low_on_fuel_or_ammunition()) { fetch_fuel_or_ammunition() } } } // die, humans
Curious. AI using a high-level language and spacing/indenting to make it more human readable! I don't think so!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The "singularity" does not necessarily require artificially intelligent computers vs. pseudo-intelligent computers. It only requires an exponential growth of change in technology, mediated or enabled by some sort of computation. The details are semantics I suppose, the key is the exponential technological feedback cycle. I think you could make the argument that we are already in it, via augmented intelligence. Used Wikipedia or IMdB lately? From your smartphone? Remember when you had to know stuff, instead of efficiently looking it up? I think the professor is right in one sense, but misses the bigger picture, we are already in a technological singularity.
I think you're the one missing the point. The fact that computers/the internet are making better tools available to human beings says abslutely nothing about whether computers/the internet will eve acquire sentience.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The "singularity" does not necessarily require artificially intelligent computers vs. pseudo-intelligent computers. It only requires an exponential growth of change in technology, mediated or enabled by some sort of computation.
Not even exponential growth (which is a good thing for singularity believers as exponential growth is, of course, impossible).
For a "singularity" you just need the top of the S curve to be way, way over our heads.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Come on, in the real world the CEO of the contractors gets a 50M bonus even if the thing doesn't fucking work at all.
The real version of skynet would probably look something like day 1 of the Obamacare website. John Connor would destroy it by attempting to log in.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If skynet vists 4chan that explains why it's trying to destroy humanity.
And I have to reconsider what side I'm on. (Like hell I do, who wasn't rooting for bad Arnie in Terminator 1 -- he had 6502 assembly language scrolling inside his head, I could emphasise with that.)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Duh, guess I should have read the parent post. What a maroon I am.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Even the notions "aware" and "sentient" are themselves misleading.
You are free to believe that you have no more awareness or sentience than a half brick, but it's simply untrue
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Seriously, watch some of the DARPA robotics challenges. These machines attempt to mimic human tasks. They take something like an hour to do the calculations to move itself up a ladder. And usually fail at that. It takes me roughly 10 seconds to do that same bit of calculation. And I usually don't fail.
If we continue at the current pace of advancement the robot will be faster than you at that task within 10 years.
Hey, give Skynet a break, everyone has to be a teenager once.
Whether smarter things than us can exist is an unknown.
It's highly probable though. We can do a lot of pretty awesome stuff running in basically fixed hardware, and hardware full of bugs at that. Build a brain without cognitive biases and it'll be smarter by that alone. Build an intelligence that can dynamically alter its own source code and hardware to optimize for specific tasks and it'll be even more so. There's probably a limit on how much such optimizations can achieve, but in any case we're hardly there, wherever "there" is.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So apparently Watson didn't play Jeopardy. Apparently it was the programmers who played Jeopardy, using Watson as a tool. Does that prove Watson is not intelligent?
Let's say a fictional Dr. Sorenson, unscrupulous and backed by a powerful and wealthy totalitarian state with no regard for human life, has several dozen children upon which to conduct unrestricted psychological experiments. After years of research and careful conditioning, he has succeeded in programming a child to disregard all concerns except the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to understand complex and tricky queries. This child is completely subservient to Dr. Sorenson's instructions. It grows and learns over the next 20 years, a human tool to the evil Doctor. After that time has passed, the state wants to prove that its children are the best educated in the world, and so taps Dr. Sorenson's research to do so. The child is to travel to America with a team of caretakers, much like Watson, and play Jeopardy. The child is not exercising free will or otherwise acting in any recognizably human manner; it only is acting out years of conditioning and controlled learning. Clearly, it is actually Dr. Sorenson that is playing Jeopardy, using the child as a tool. Does that prove that the child is not intelligent?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
...we will progress to artificial life and artificial intelligence in erratic steps - some large, some small - some hard, some easy....
But why would you assume that this is the case? Why is this kind of "progress"--a completely self-replicating artificial intelligence--inevitable? What evidence points to that?
Human beings don't even have a cure for cancer, billions of people lack clean water. Yet somehow (almost by magic or wishful thinking) we're supposed to assume that the human race will develop this technology in the next 100 years, and certainly in the next 500. What if it takes another 1,000 years?
Except by that point, the oil would have run out, and all the major cities are 30 feet under water. To believe that these technologies (AI, asteroid mining, fusion, nanotech) will see the light of day, you have to believe that we can undertake another Moon Landing when electricity is $10 kw/hr and the government doesn't have the money to repair a 50 year-old bridge.
This Sig does not Exist.
A machine can easily be given free will. Most advanced artificial intelligence actually has free will. Take the Overmind project. The AI can move its Mutalisks any way it wants; it chooses to move them in the most effective way it has learned to do so, because it is designed to want to be effective. Sure, it's never going to deliberately lose the game like a human might. But that's just a matter of its motivations. The Overmind lives in the game world, deriving pleasure solely from defeating its enemies and deriving pain solely from taking casualties. It has never learned any concept of dignity, nor does it derive any pleasure from arranging its buildings artistically. Does that mean it doesn't have free will? Not any more than my own complex network of desires (stimulation, expression, victory) and pains (hunger, thirst, pain, regret, loss, embarrassment) mean that I don't have free will. My choices in service of these abstract and not fully understood motivations are more complex than the Overmind's choices on how to use its Mutalisks most effectively, but that doesn't mean I have free will and the Overmind does not. Maybe we just don't want the Overmind to have free will because it doesn't look like human free will.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Too many, or not enough?
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Imitating free will with a machine deciding which way to move based on programming isn't free will in the sense that animals and people have free will. You have to be alive and conscious to have a "will". When you make a conscious robot, then you can start talking about free will in machines.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
This is a level of manipulation of time (causality) which is completely out of reach of the most powerful computer.
Why exactly ? Computers can also run simulations.
The child not only manipulates time as an abstract concept, but also demonstrates a theory of mind. AFAIK, no simulation has yet achieved a theory of mind.
The singularity is not equal to sentient computers. It's the exponential growth of science and technology that leads to ... who knows what - including cybernetics of some type. Not Terminator type of cybernetics but synthetic parts (hearts) and "cures" for alzheimers and other diseases.
If we've been experiencing exponential growth since 1954 (the birth of transistors) and it's been doubling every 18-24 months then we've now doubled 30 times. One unit of processing power in 1954 is now 1 billion units and will be 1 trillion in 20 years. The capability of best computers in existence today will be trivial in 20 years.
We will have AI tutors / teachers that will radically transform education and many other fields.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Also known as the event horizon.
Assume for a second, that you have a pond. And a new type of algae has been introduced into the pond. Algae grows quickly, so let's assume a doubling time of a day. 24 hours. The concern is that this new algae is gross and smells bad and nobody wants to have a pond full of this disgusting algae. Unfortunately, treating the algae is expensive and nobody wants to treat the entire pond.
The question is: One week before the pond is entirely covered in algae, would enough have appeared that you would even notice? At a "gut instinct" level, we'd guess that perhaps a quarter or a third or at least a tenth of the pond would be covered in algae, but that gut level instinct would be completely wrong. Just 1.56% of the pond would be covered - right about the point where it becomes noticeable at all.
The point is this: information processing capabilities, globally, aren't just growing exponentially: the rate of growth is itself also growing exponentially. Just about exactly at the time where we notice actual, verifiable intelligence of any kind is just about exactly the time where we have to assume it's ubiquity.
Previous discussions talk about the number of cross connects and how far away we are from the mark without commenting that the Internet itself allows for an infinite number of cross connects - my laptop can connect directly to billions of resources immediately with an average 10-25ms delay. Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth. It's why 401ks are so universally underutilized, why credit cards are such big business, and why the concept of the "singularity" seems like such hocus pocus at the gut level.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
*sigh* Someone doesn't understand the Singularity theory. Based on the title i'm guessing it's the professor, but since i can't actually read the article at work it's possible it's the Slashdot editor who conflated lack of AI with lack of Singularity.
The basic premise of the Singularity is that over historic time periods the rate of knowledge acquisition of the human race has increased at a geometric rate.
The reason this has happened is because acquiring knowledge allows us to develop tools that allows us to build upon the pre-existing knowledge to make new discovers that allow better tools, and so on. (Although it's far from a perfect simulation, anyone who's ever played Civilization or any similar strategy game should know that process by heart.)
There are two possible outcomes to this progression, either we hit some rate limiting factor sometime in the "near" future, or the rate of knowledge acquisition over time will approach a mathematical singularity, at which point we will be discovering things so fast that our current minds can not comprehend what will happen. Obviously proponents of the Singularity believe that it is the second possibility that will happen.
However the theory of the Singularity makes no prescriptions about _how_ we will obtain that rate of knowledge. Certainly Artificial Intelligence is one such way. However direct augmentation of our brains is another possibility. Whether that will be via cybernetic implants, biomedical alterations, genetic tinkering, or something else we haven't, and possibly can't, think of is impossible to say at this point.
Up until now of course tools have allowed us to indirectly augment out brains. Writing lets us record information. The internet lets us retrieve information. Now Watson helps us interpret that information. Yes Watson isn't doing anything, Watson is just a tool we use. But tools that help us accomplish things we couldn't before are exactly what moves us along the path towards the Singularity.
As has been pointed out, there was just recently news about replicating a worm's mind in a mechanical body. Yes it's very interesting, but no, it isn't a perfect recreation of an actual brain. But maybe when that paper gets scanned into Watson 2.0 it will make some connection to some other paper on artificial neurons or some such and Watson will let the authors know that they really ought to talk to each other. And boom, we're suddenly creating real artificial minds. Or maybe something else happens. The whole point is we don't know what the next step will be, we're just observing a trend.
If you want to argue against the Singularity you can't just pick a hole in the prospects for AI. You need to explain why the current trend in knowledge acquisition won't continue.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Well, thank you sir, for your compliment AND for recognizing this "Slashdot mindthink" plus the usual illogical claim "if something can't be proven scientifically does not exist" (that my Greek ancestors -good enough scientist/philoshophers of their time- though as nonsence...)
If something cannot be proven scientifically then it is not affecting the world. If something has no effect then why concern yourself about it? God could certainly be proven scientifically, He just needs to heal a few amputees or part the Atlantic ocean. God's insistence on only healing people who's body might heal itself doesn't lend great credence to the 'omnipotence' claim.
When the miracles degrade from 'flooding the entire earth' to 'make something that looks vaguely like my son appear on a slice of toast' it's not surprising that the level of belief has fallen. It's curious that the miracle degradation happened concurrently with human's ability to measure the natural world, it's almost like ignorance of natural processes fueled belief.
Enigma
You people who believe in the singularity very obviously don't know how a computer works. It's simply an electric abacus; look at schematics for an ALU or a logic gate. How many beads do I need to put on my abacus before it becomes self-aware?
The danger is anthropomorphism; it's simply too easy to fool people into believing they see sentience where there is none. Evil people will use this to their evil ends.
Free Martian Whores!
No that's a different thing. The event horizon is a spherical region around the singularity from which light cannot escape. A singularity is a zero-dimensional point in space lying within the horizon. The gravity at the event horizon is not infinite.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Yeah "it" will be self limiting for the obvious reason - processing takes resources.
Even if you manage to find the resources, it will still be self-limiting. The singularity supposes that the first AIs will be designing the next generation of AIs. I think it's far more likely that they'll be trying to come up with new fart jokes, and channel surfing. People who want to design and build AIs are already rare. Why would artificial people designed to be like people be any more likely than people to want to design and build new people?
I am not so sure. Sometimes I even get lens-flare!
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Individual neurons can make quite complex calculations. Their I/O just sucks.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
They cheated. They did nothing of the sort, unfortunately.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Only the Welsh ones.
While I agree with your general concept (I think), this example doesn't demonstrate it because you don't have enough context.
Why would the child giggle when dad eats a bite of chocolate? Simply put - the child wouldn't, assuming this is his first observation of the pattern of behavior. The child would have no reason to giggle, because nothing is inherently funny about it. Dad (and Mom, for that matter) go into the refrigerator to get food all the time. Mom (who most likely does the grocery shopping) puts food in the refrigerator all the time.
The child would giggle if he had observed a pattern of behavior where:
1. Mom puts a "special food item" (like a chocolate bar) in the fridge
2. Dad sneaks a bite of this special item without Mom's awareness
3. Mom later discovers a missing bite of her food.
4. Mom (or Dad) respond with some behavior which the little boy decides is funny
So on subsequent repetitions of this pattern, the boy sees steps 1 & 2, and mentally projects step 4, causing him to giggle.
Alternatively, Dad cues little boy during the initial iteration of step 2 that this is a funny action (perhaps doing it by acting in a silly manner, smiling & laughing more than normal, etc), in which case his laughter has nothing to do with a mental simulation, but is merely reflecting Dad's attitude.
The bottom line is -- humans are REALLY GOOD at pattern recognition, and computers less so (currently). What you call "simulations" I see as simply extrapolations of observed behavior patterns -- and if computers got good at autonomously recognizing human behavior, they'd get good at "simulations" too.
No. Computers run calculations with seeded random inputs which are interpreted as simulations. A computer "simulates" aerodynamics by calculating them. The human mind "becomes" the object, and "feels" the answer in the simulation.
A computer runs 2+2=? simulation. If that's not a simulation, then computers don't run simulations. If that is a simulation, then we disagree on the definition of simulation.
Learn to love Alaska
Build a big computer and drop it into a 'body' it controls. Make it capable of responding in ways which can change its environment based on input from that same environment. Basic feedback loop.
Through outside forces, make sure the environment is always changing, so the computer never hits a point of equilibrium. Can never stop re-calculating and responding.
Now, build a second computer with the same specs. Put it into the same body as the first one, give it the same ability to control the body and respond to the environment. Wire them together somewhat so that they can take input from each other, but each is responding to a slightly different perspective on the environment around them. Never in total agreement.
Think of two mirrors facing each other. Sort of. And then...
Magic!
Self awareness occurs somewhere in the space between those two computers.
Also, note how the human brain is divided into two halves.
Now go and spend the next hour puzzling over that. Have fun!
The event horizon is the "surface" of the black hole. Th singularity is the "center" of the black hole. They are the same, so long as the crust of the earth and the core of the earth are the same.
Learn to love Alaska
weather system aren't digital either yet we can simulate them on a computer. if we can understand the brain (that's the hard part) then we can model it in code ... probably running orders of magnitude faster / more memory / in parallel.
the question is what sort of consciousness would arise from such a thing? i can't even speculate.
'means very little'
unless...you want to actually build the thing
that's the problem with "teh singularity" types...NONE OF THEM ARE CODERS...
all machine behavior is determined by human coders...absolutely nothing you can say changes this fact
YOUR ARGUMENT IS IRRATIONAL
Thank you Dave Raggett
Hah- I had thought the 0-dimensional point was simply 0-dimensional with regard to outside coordinate system physics (ie, interior all timelike paths closed) within its real-space volume. Not sure where I got that idea now, in retrospect. I get the difference now, thanks
Fair enough, with the one caveat, that they may as well be the same, because unlike the crust of the Earth, if you dig down a few feet, history can record that you continued to exist.
By the action of the ratchet of science, gains are made, promulgated and further gains built on those gains. The time between gain is variable, but gains are inevitable, as are forks with some growing faster, some slower and some withering or merging back. That is how radio and TV and all physics grew, and so will AI knowledge grow. The people without clean water choose their corrupt leaders, as we chose clean water. They are free to copy us, but they prefer to spend their money on faction fights and not on sanitation and clean water. We do have cures for cancer. There are many types of cancer. 100 years ago = all fatal. Now we can cure some and slow others. Every year we make gains on curing each of the disparate types of cancer, and hopefully solving the jumping gene viruses that seem to be responsible for many of them.
Oil will not run out. We now grow oil, not fossil oil, vegetable oil. Another 50 years and the Tesla type battery cars will rule all vehicles. Internal combustion engines will pass into history as the CO2 grows and the arctic ice all melts, and solar gets above 50% and most combustion processes will not be used for power or transportation.
The Lithium batteries get better year by year. They are now capable of gasoline range, another 10 years = 2-3 times gasoline range or smaller in size to suit the weight/cost needed to give 300-400 miles per charge.
The government does not have the power of will to eliminate corruption in construction. These unions need curbing.
We also need to make 500 year or 1000 year bridges. The Romans used iron reinforcing that were lead dipped to prevent rust. We can galvanize all steel used in construction. The concrete can also be made to endure. Just add 30% to the cost = 1000 year reinforced concrete. We do not do it now because the politicians are concerned with it lasting until the next election, not with endurance.
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I read your interesting and polite enough answer
I work to a simple rule, be polite to me and I'll be polite to you.
I see you are good in Latin ...
I'm not. I had to learn these legal dicta at Law School.
No, no, no. Quite the opposite! If I were to say (I'm not) "I know you to be paedophile," it is not the person who disagrees with my claim (the neganti) who must "prove me wrong." It is I (as the affirmanti) upon whom the onus of proof is incumbent (incumbit probatio). That principle (as spelled out in the affirmanti dictum) is essential to any rational intercourse. No positive assertion can lie be above it.
Thus the assertion "God exists" (putting to one side what that might mean for a moment) needs to be proven, not the denial, "I don't accept that God exists."
But even without meeting him the conclusion that "God does not exists because... science/proofs/evil/etc" is illogical, and i confess that i get a little angry when (religious) atheist use these claims pretending to be the logical ones in a conversation
It makes me angry too. Precisely because it is not for the non-believer ever to utter the sentence "God does not exist." It is completely foolish to assert the actual non-existence of something when one means simply to deny it's existence. That may seem like a fine point (which is no doubt why so many fall prey to this error), but it's for the believer to show that "God exists," and the not for non-believer even to make any positive ontological claims regarding the proposed diety. And, assuming for the sake of argument God does not exist, what evidence could one possibly have to establish the non-existence of a non-existing thing with the attributes predicated to this God?
In case this difference is not clear, take this example: Life on other planets. It is a completely different thing to state "I don't accept the existence of extra-terrestrial life" (perhaps because there is no evidence of it) from stating "there is no life on other planets" (and imagine the evidence you would need to prove that!!)
Any reasonable atheist must therefore, IMO, be an agnostic (in the orginal sense of the word, ie. the subject matter of gods and supernatural claims is literally unknowable ... being Greek you get that of course). That is the agnostic holds both statements, "God exists," and "God does not exist" as inherently unprovable. An agnostic, in not accepting the statement "God exists" as true, is therefore unavoidably also an atheist.
Best thing for you, a critical thinking person, is to explore God by reading the Bible (start with the New Testament - unfortunatly, even the best English translation is problematic...
With all due respect, as intellectual stimulating as I find the analysis of ancient texts, my reading the Bible, would not involve "exploring God," so much as exploring the cultural and material conditions which gave rise to the various conceptions of gods (as well as other matters of interest that might emerge from the text). Were it my wish to explore God, I should more likely either study quantum physics or protein replication, or listen to Arvo Pärt. ;)
Also despite the fact that ethically I'm extremely close to the position outlined by Jesus (sans the supernatural) and I'm not above quoting him, I find the NT no where near as interesting as the OT. I was, some time ago, an avid student of the earlier Hebrew scriptures. A complex multi-layered text and a fascinating window into the iron-age. I agree, transl
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I'm not exactly a neuroscientist but at this point feel it's pretty safe to say that consciousness is just he sum of electrical impulses though a weighted connection of neurons and it's correlative magnetic field (a bunch of wires with amplifiers and resistors and electricity running thought them); and depending on your philosophy, this may also require that some (or most) of the electrical input be triggered in response to an environment. Given that computers respond to key strokes, they may well be conscious. Either way (brain or computer) no electrical activity = no consciousness. Sentience on the other hand is a bit harder to pinpoint, and there is even scientific rational that children under 5 may not be fully sentient (with respect to adults), or conversely most animals with fur are sentient as sentience is often reduced to be ones ability to experience pain and pleasure based on environmental input, rather than be strictly reactionary to that input.
Nope. A purely empirical observer wouldn't be able to tell you that 'as far as mommy knows, the chocolate is still in the drawer and that is why she is surprised'. The empirical observer would be able to predict that mommy giggles but wouldn't know __why__ she is giggling. The little boy can, because he can model mommy's state of mind. That is the fundamental difference.
It could design the new hardware, which can then be manufactured. At some point the brains would be linked straight to the manufacturing equipment, so the chips could design and produce their successors. So at that point, yes, it could simply shit out better CPUs and plug them into itself. Of course it would have to be set up that way by humans initially, but from that point on...
"Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds"
no they aren't. Seriously, watch (...)
Let's use the same reasoning the other way around.
"Human minds are waaay more powerful than computers"
no they aren't. Seriously, watch a human solve a hard sudoku. These humans attempt to mimic basic computer tasks. They take something like an hour to do the calculations to fill in the symbols. And usually fail at that. It takes a computer roughly a tenth of a millisecond to do that same bit of calculation. And it never fails.
See? Like I said, we just haven't figured out yet how to steer all the power of computers towards actual intelligence. The human brain is good at parallelism (which computers currently still struggle with) but neurons fire at rates up to 200 Hz while computer circuits switch more than ten million times faster. They are already better at playing chess, long considered by many to be an impossible thing as it required "real intelligence" that would never be achieved by computers. They'll be driving cars soon (they already can in a very limited way). That, too, was considered impossible, how could a computer possibly process all that visual data? And whenever we manage to get them to perform some task (like flying an airplane, for example), they do so vastly more accurately than we do.
I'm sure that, once someone starts building chips that were specifically designed to have lots of interconnections structured similar to a human brain (instead of the current topology that still works more or less like a big switchboard), and we scale it up to the same number of nodes, it will immediately outperform our brains by orders of magnitude. And then imagine what kind of architectures that brain could come up with.
Human brains appear so powerful because they take lots of shortcuts and make simplifications that are "close enough for government work". We are very good at discarding irrelevant data and making wild guesses. When asked to do a simple task but do it extremely accurately and repeatedly, we struggle. We are basically cheating all the time. Computers have vastly more power but are wasting most of it by being extremely precise. If we figure out how to let them compress their data in a usable, structured way, I think they probably do have the power to surpass us. The programming just isn't there yet. Also, they would need a lot more parallelism. All it would take, is someone using today's manufacturing techniques to build a chip with lots of interconnects, structured similar to a human brain. Computers switch millions of times faster than neurons (neurons get up to about 200 Hz max), so they'll outperform us pretty much immediately.
Really, look at how today's computers process an image. They look at every single pixel and make calculations on them trying to find basic structures. You try looking at a million numbers, given to you as one long list, and figuring out if it contains a picture of a car. The computer has that power, we just have to channel it in a different way.
Look at the complexity of today's computer chips. We stuff billions of logic gates into a square centimeter of silicon. Would it really be beyond our capabilities to make a copy of the structure of a human brain, but without all the blood and other biological nastiness, and make it orders of magnitude faster? We already pretty much understand how a neuron works, it's just the emergent behaviour of billions of those neurons connected to each other that still evades us. But all we need to do is build it and see what it does. I'm sure we will some day. I have no idea whether or not it will be truly "sentient" since we don't even know what that word means, but outperform us it certainly will.
Right, the 'exponential growth' thing seems to assume that it can just start connecting to other computers and use them and completely ignores the fact that the speed of light is really, really slow. It's pretty slow when you're dealing with the distance from one side of an IC to another. It's annoyingly slow when you're trying to send signals between chips on the same circuit board. Once you get off-site, then it's likely to be the bottleneck.
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Yeah, and these honey badgers are starting to become a real pain in the ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
>> We stuff billions of logic gates into a square centimeter of silicon.
Compared to hundreds of trillions synaptic connections and everything that happens at chemical and molecular level, that is minuscule. Sense of scale.
>>We already pretty much understand how a neuron works,
No we dont. Understanding how 300 neurons of c.elegans worm actually work is beyond our current capability.
>> it's just the emergent behaviour of billions of those neurons connected to each other that still evades us
Bollocks, for all we know connections are just a small part of the puzzle. Chemical and molecular level functions could be the key for actual functioning nervous system, worst case quantum level.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Why would artificial people designed to be like people be any more likely than people to want to design and build new people?
Well, if we paid off making a new AI with a massive, hyper-euphoric, temporary endorphine rush, they might want to do quite a bit of it.
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weather system aren't digital either yet we can simulate them on a computer.
We simulate them poorly, over very very short periods of time. Any forecast beyond 3-5 days is pure guessing, and even up to that point its a crapshoot.
if we can understand the brain
Its not even been shown that we can, aside from the interesting philosophical questions that raises, but OK...
then we can model it in code
Does not follow. Our brains are analog, and it is possible that an analog brain is required to either understand or model said brain. If that is the case, it would be fully possible that we (having analog brains) can understand our own brain, but that it is impossible to represent in a digital form.
An example of this principle is quantum behavior. People understand it (to a limited extent) but it cannot be fully implemented in code; it requires a quantum element.
Its not even been shown that we can
nothing is shown to be possible until we do it, yet we do still manage to do things. huh.
brother in Christ
Since 'Christ' specifically addresses the putative divine nature of the person, perhaps "brother in Jesus" is more accurate. But even that would be to overstate it.
But your "affirmanti" and 'neganti" are "not in the right order" plus your "incumbit probatio" is "out of order"... i, the theist, don't have to prove nothing to you, the atheist, because YOU, the A-theist, is the one making the claim that I, the theist, am... A-theist!
I'm sorry but that is simply wrong, perhaps you don't understand my position. I am making no ontological assertion about God. I am not asserting either "God is" nor am I asserting "God is not." As I said, it makes me angry too when atheists claim "God does not exist," for that statement is an assertion (and thus demands proof).
You are asserting "God is," I'm simply denying it, which is to say, demanding proof. My point about paedophilia was not to insult you, but merely to point out that, should we abandon this fundamental principle of the Western canon (that the onus of proof rests with the one making an assertion rather than the one denying that assertion is true), we should all be subject to accusations of the most heinous crimes and should be constantly required to clear our good name. That will not do!
If you are unable to accept this basal principle of rational discourse, then another Latin dictum must come into play, namely, contra principia negantem non est disputandum.
so you are an "agnostic"... hmmm... o.k.! But you are NOT an A-theist
Atheist: one who denies the existence of gods (but not necessarily asserts their non-existence). Agnostic: one who claims all questions of gods and the supernatural are inherently unknowable. While it is possible to be an atheist without being an agnostic, it is not possible to be an agnostic without being an atheist, since in not accepting "God is" as a true statement (and an agnostic does not accept it as true) one satisfies the criterion of atheism.
Remember that my belief in God is not belief without knowledge of God but belief with knowledge of God - that is, i have pesonally met the guy
Of course you have, he is, as you say, "existant" in your head. I've no doubt of that (though I do not accept your belief in God is itself divine), but you still have not addressed where else he could possibly be.
Well I cannot disagree with you there. I once found someone on /. writing (re capital punishment) "I'm a Christian, so I believe in an eye for an eye," to which I responded, " ... just keeping reading! There's this character who comes in a little later, ... called Jesus, maybe you've heard of him ... who has a slightly different gloss on that." It seems that Bible for them is the OT, then they skip over all that embarrassing left-wing loving your neighbour stuff in the Gospels and directly on to Corinthians ...." But this is a different story (one that begins with Luther's principle "that faith and not works is the source of grace.")
Exploring God through science ...
Assuming for the sake of argument some self-reflective intelligence exists (let's call her Dea) who bears responsibility for the creation of the cosmos: Then science would be the study of the works of Dea Herself. Bible study is inevitably the study of human literature and would therefore add the filter of other self-reflective intelligences obscuring the original intelligence of the creatrix. Study science instead and hear to the voice of the Goddess itself.
And in any case, have you ever studied protein replication?! Our DNA is literally a programming language (containing only 4 symbols
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
We have no ideas re human consciousness/intelligence, so it is off target to say we've got anywhere with artificial intelligence, no matter how well developed our cybernetics is. On the other hand, things don't have to be very intelligent to destroy us. I'm somewhat concerned that when we do construct things which exhibit some sort of consciousness, inevitably our first actions will be to vivisect them and terminate them. This will not look good to later, more advanced versions in retrospect.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Ok. And apply energetic conservation from zero resistance to your laws. Do you know about superconductors?
Well, if we paid off making a new AI with a massive, hyper-euphoric, temporary endorphine rush, they might want to do quite a bit of it.
So in other words, give them an orgasm? Why is nobody volunteering to pay me off that way for my code??
Entropy.
You can't make order from disorder.
You can't do calculations without increasing entropy somewhere else.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'm sorry, but I prefer to define free will as the ability to freely make choices. Not as something that requires such nebulous concepts as consciousness and intentionality (a "will"). You couldn't prove in your whole lifetime that a human being has consciousness or intentionality.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
How is that relevant? Every time DNA is replicated, order is created. So what? The universe is very large. Please demonstrate relevance in these hazy terms you're throwing around.
Yes, yes, i understand you - you don't understand me (and Greek, and Greek Orthodox theology!).
Well I'm glad I've articulated my position more successfully than you. ;) As regards Greek Orthodox theology, how would you know what I understand of it? I've not addressed it. Now it is true that I have rather more understanding of Western theology than Gk Orthodox, but for present purposes I'm assumed nothing more about your theology than that you do not believe God (except as incarnated in the person of Jesus) is corporeal.
[B]ut you choose that theoretical accusation because i am Greek?
No, not at all. I wouldn't especially associate paedophilia with Greeks (the etymology of the term notwithstanding). Nor with homosexuality for that matter. Rather the particular infamy of that charge was meant to dramatise the intolerable situation we should descend into, once we were to abandon the ancient precept pertaining to onus.
To call someone an atheist is an accusations of the most heinous crime.
Only where it is a crime to be so enlightened. I think you might find more people might object to being called a paedophile than an atheist (even among believers).
[I]n the Greek Orthodox theology it's not even posible to be without God since... its not posible!
That may be so in G.O theology, but since we have not yet been able to discover God anywhere outside your head, we are getting a little ahead of ourselves to deem it impossible for anyone else to be without him. More to the point it would be a mistake overly to fall back to the Greek etymology of the term when it has a clear meaning (relating to personal belief) in the language we are speaking. Thus the OED defines the 'atheist' in the first sense to mean "One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God." Nor need we even use the term. I'm not particularly wedded to the word 'atheist' and actually prefer, when challenged as to my religious affiliation, to call myself simply a 'non-believer.'
Goddsess? blasphemy!
Not to the goddess worshiper, it's not! God, Goddess, it's all the same to me. I just wanted to emphasise that we were speaking about some abstract human-like creator, not in particular that god that is in your head. In any case, being Greek orthodox you surely don't harbour the fervent anti-Marianism of the anglophone churches?
Agnostic: the blind and deaf theist! You - curable
Again the OED has 'agnostic' meaning: "A person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of immaterial things, especially of the existence or nature of God." Yes agnostics are blind, but unlike all the other blind people possess at least the humility to admit they do not know that which they cannot know.
As far as a cure, from my perspective, it is not I who needs to be cured. It is you who has fallen from the light of truth into the darkness of fable. Not that I should wish to cure you, mind. If a belief is capable of providing succor to a fellow sufferer in the vale of tears, far be it from me to disabuse them thereof. And in any case, were your beliefs to lead you to behave according to the highest ethical standards demanded by Jesus of his followers, (and I must say, I find it difficult to reconcile an admitted racism with those moral imperatives), I should have no ground to complain.
But now to the crux of the matter ...
So, because of the "contra principia negantem non est disputandum" YOU must accept that YOU are a theist (having God in you) else we cannot have a discusion!
You are exactly correct. Just as you are to me the barbarian who will not recognise the need to provide proof for your assertion that "God exists," so I am the wild man who regards what is for you axiomatic as the very thing to be established. There is then, on both those sides, little prospect of meaningful dialogue.
I hope at least that you may have benefited from practising your English with me.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Every time DNA is replicated, order is created.
No, it isn't.
The net entropy always increases.
Where is the entropy increase caused by the calculations in your wonderful zero energy superconducting computers?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Entropy exists within the materials of the superconductor by way of vibrations that happen above 0K. This is well known. The fact that you say "...your wonderful zero energy superconducting..." implies that you have no knowledge about this field of study whatsoever and think I'm making this up. I have no control over that. I can't force you to learn about something before refuting it ignorantly. I can't make you have a little trust in someone else's arguments such that you might actually make an effort of your own to find out. Superconductors have been studied and produced for over 20 years now and you're welcome to learn whenever you choose. scholar.google.com
Goodbye.