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Bill Gates: AI Is The 'Holy Grail' (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At the Code Conference on Wednesday, Bill Gates balanced his fears of artificial intelligence with praise. He talked about two of the challenges AI will pose: a loss of existing jobs, and making sure humans remain in control of super-intelligent machines. Gates, as well as many other experts in the field, predict there will be an excess of labor resources as robots and AI systems take over. He plans to talk with others about ideas to combat the threat of AI controlling humans, specifically noting work being done at Stanford. Even with such threats, Gates called AI the "holy grail" as he envisions a future "with machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence." Gates said, "We've made more progress in the last five years than at any time in history. [...] The dream is finally arriving. This is what it was all leading up to."
Nobody will need more.
Loss of jobs is the big one. An AI is not only not capable of killing humans, but would have nothing to gain from killing the people who maintain it. On the other hand, poor and unemployed people with nothing to lose will tear our society apart if that part grows large enough (as has been demonstrated numerous times throughout history) and I fear nobody seems to be taking this situation seriously. We need to find an alternative way to structure our society, and quickly, if we want AI that does all our work for us.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Currency is an abstraction of labor, we use it to manage the effort put into things during trade - it's a lot more convenient than carrying around four cows and a goat. So, robots come along and take all the jobs? Well, no more scarcity of labor. And the systems of currency and capitalism we have grown so far get upended. They won't go out the window but they will see massive restructurings. If labor is not scarce, want a house? Go pick one down the street where the machines built fifty of them. Free. Because there was no scarce labor involved. Capitalism? Well, in a post scarcity economy the invisible hand that makes it go remains to be seen how that adapts. In the short term however, say ten to thirty years, a transition system where perhaps everyone gets a guaranteed minimum income until our society fully adapts to machines could help to minimize social upheaval over the machines taking all the jobs.
Shh.
"AI is the holy grail" - Bill Gates, 2016
"Two years from now, spam will be solved" - Bill Gates, 2004
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
Given the outcome of Gates' previous predictions, I think it's safe to presume that AI is and will never be the holy grail.
"Bill Gates"
"Expert in the field"
malicious snickering... :)
Our mission is to create him
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Well, I think he's right. And he's actually one of those people with enough experience to say this, since programming doesn't require pesky interaction with the real world like, say, automated cars do, humans obviously suck at programming big time, and Gates is one of those people who have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades. So your argument actually supports him. Maybe that's the whole reason why he's so optimistic about making people redundant in the first place!
Ezekiel 23:20
Free, clean energy is. AI means the oligarchs get to remove more jobs from the masses, thus increasing suppression of dissent (until forced into revolution); but limitless energy means the world's population can all live far better lives regardless of where they're located. Water can be purified allowing food to be grown where it's cost prohibitive now, migration will slow down when the third world can live like the so-called first.
Everybody in IT knows that the creation of versatile electronic "minions" is our holy grail.
But a lot of us are just skeptical about all the projected implied timetables the dreamers, optimists and researchers throw around.
Don't forget we were also closer 20 years ago than 25 years ago.
Bridgekeeper: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
King Arthur: What do you mean? An African or European swallow?
Spoiler: This is from the bridge scene of Monty Python's Holy Grail !
And some day, we'll just be interesting fauna for sentient machines to keep around. Frankly, the way we're going, I'm not sure I object.
We're not even able to see the signs of automation. The some who do want basic income and the rest is only able to scoff at the paradigm change but has no alternatives... I would even say they aren't convinced at all that we're going to run into a massive problem.
Well, I think he's right. And he's actually one of those people with enough experience to say this, since programming doesn't require pesky interaction with the real world like, say, automated cars do, humans obviously suck at programming big time, and Gates is one of those people who have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades. So your argument actually supports him. Maybe that's the whole reason why he's so optimistic about making people redundant in the first place!
One thing Linux and OpenBSD prove - take the importance of money out of the equation and suddenly system quality goes way up.
Loss of jobs to automation has certainly been a big concern. Workers were very worried when the gin mill started being used - it was a direct threat to their jobs, which paid 32 cents per day (a decent wage in 1812, when half that could rent an apartment with a bedroom seperate from the kitchen).
Marginally. Give full control of software development to advanced AI and witness how the people saying that current software is bloated are proven right. You shouldn't need ten million lines of code to make up the usual software for a simple personal computer.
Ezekiel 23:20
Isn't the real problem also automation and robotics in a capitalistic free market? Once this hits a critical point where almost no humans are required all the power will have moved to the sub 1% of humans forever. How well would a revolt work when all militaries are fully automated? How successful would halting human labor production be when it's fully automated? Even the repair and innovation can be automated. This is unprecedented in all of history. The end game for free market capitalism sure looks like it won't work out well for the 99.999% of humans left out of control for the first time ever. If it takes 50 years or 500, we are headed for that scenario as a very real destination.
The Holy Grail, according to Arthurian legend, bestows upon it's finder eternal youth, happiness, and an infinite abundance of food. It is a symbol of an ideal that every man seeks but can never attain. As such, it's a rather good metaphor for Artificial Intelligence research.
Premise: I disagree with the fact that AI dev would produce "beings" that "think" like us. At a side, I agree with the fact that AI dev would produce "beings" that will do and learn tasks that could (at some point) make human beings redundant.
"He (mr Gates) talked about two of the challenges AI will pose: a loss of existing jobs, and making sure humans remain in control of super-intelligent machines."
That sentence is just preposterous for me: I think that in the last 200000 years of human evolution we can say that the most intelligent being has prevailed, flawlessly. Then he reportedly says...
"He plans to talk with others about ideas to combat the threat of AI controlling humans, specifically noting work being done at Stanford."
Now, how is it possible to "control" and prevail over such theoretical superior being? By creating a retarted but safer version? and who or what may stops other human beings to just avoid such safety/ethical measures.. last time we learnt something cool like that it was when we found out that we could split the atom and harvest energy from it... and that went all cool and ethical and under control.. easy peasy
Kasparov said, near the end of the XXth century, a computer will never beat humans...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Well, I think he's right. And he's actually one of those people with enough experience to say this, since programming doesn't require pesky interaction with the real world like, say, automated cars do, humans obviously suck at programming big time, and Gates is one of those people who have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades. So your argument actually supports him. Maybe that's the whole reason why he's so optimistic about making people redundant in the first place!
I think Bill Gates is a prick and his opinion on anything doesn't mean shit. It's okay with him if AI's take over peoples jobs, he doesn't have to worry about feeding his family when he can't get a job because AI's/robots are doing all the jobs you can get.
Be seeing you...
"[...] more capable than human intelligence [...]"
I just can't understand all this nonsense some high profile people are talking about regarding AI these days. We're so far away from "real" AI today, that it's not even funny. While there has been great progress in machine learning in the last 2-3 decades - recent results pushing results more to the spotlight -, what we have are certain specific tasks where we have good results for (pattern/object/image recognition, games, etc.) but we have no intelligence in any sense of the word. Every working architecture that we have today is targeted and extensively trained for a single, very specific task (e.g., playing go, recognizing scenes and objects, recognizing specific patterns in signals and mimicking them - robotic arms, Google's music composer, etc.), incapable of doing anything else. E.g., an architecture built and trained for classifying and recognizing certain images and objects can't do anything with audio signals, radar signals, a go playing "AI" can't play chess, etc. No generalization, no transfer of gained experience for application to other tasks, and no real high level understanding and reasoning about anything. And let's not even start about chatbots.
I could go on with this, but my point is, talking about AI being more than humans, taking over, etc. is still very much sci-fi territory.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I think Bill Gates is a prick and his opinion on anything doesn't mean shit.
Both of these could be right, and still neither of it would prove him wrong.
he doesn't have to worry about feeding his family when he can't get a job because AI's/robots are doing all the jobs you can get.
Wut?
Ezekiel 23:20
That's ok the AI will feed you and your family. To the protein bank.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No the difference is now there are people sociopathic enough to think they have almost reached it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The game programs aren't "strong AI" though, they are "specialized problem solving machines".
I would go so far as saying all the things that we call AI today are simply "specialized problem solving machines." We will have AI when we have a generalized problem-solving machine. That is - when we have a machine for which you can put in any problem and get a reasonable answer - that is the "AI" that people think of.
That said - we don't really need the generalized problem-solver to change the world. Once we have enough sufficiently-capable specialized problem-solving machines, the results are probably about the same anyway.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence
Most of what the human race needs in order to progress is a lack of greed, diligence, honesty, compliance with the laws, less ill-founded beliefs and a willingness to reign in the "entitlement" attitude.
You don't need super intelligent machines (or people) to pick up litter, assemble cars, staff call centres, deliver stuff, report the news, teach children or grow crops. At the risk of falling into the the world will only need half a dozen computers trap, the opportunities for any thing or person with super-intelligence seem rather limited.So although many of these jobs can be automated - driverless cars being the NEXT BIG THING, they don't need to be intelligent to function. They just need to be safe, able to deal with people, reliable and cheap. It seems to me that it's the cheapness that will push up unemployment, not artificial intelligence.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
humans remain in control of super-intelligent machines
So we should keep them as slaves? I don't think that would work out too well. How are humans even supposed to remain "in control" of a super-intelligence? Those things would play us like violins.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
After that we would start making them work on all the meta-problems like "what's the best way to use all these specialized problem solving machines?"
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Well, I think he's right. And he's actually one of those people with enough experience to say this, since programming doesn't require pesky interaction with the real world like, say, automated cars do, humans obviously suck at programming big time, and Gates is one of those people who ... suck[s] big time at programming over multiple decades.
First, FTFY. Bill Gates' technical experience is primarily in writing really really crappy software that failed. Name a single thing he actually wrote or led that was remotely successful. MS Basic? MS bought GWU basic to replace it.
His experience in being a cunning and unethical asshole only interested in himself? Well, you got me there.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
This raises an interesting question: would such an AI be given the power to implement "the best way", or would it just be a suggestion that some people have to carry out? Would these AIs 'just know' they have come up with the best way, or would they have to perform experiments? Would the AIs have to come up with some kind of economic system to allocate limited physical resources among all the tasks they are trying to accomplish?
We currently have lots of "best ways" to do things, like don't over drink, overeat, over-smoke, under-exercise, don't spend more than you make; people don't heed that advice. Would the AIs have enough 'free will' to know the best course of action but not take it?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
First, FTFY. Bill Gates' technical experience is primarily in writing really really crappy software that failed.
Of course. He's one of the people I was talking about. But even commercially successful software can be (and overwhelmingly seems to be) a technical failure. For commercial success, it only has to be slightly less of a failure than its competition. That doesn't define the boundaries of technical possibility.
Ezekiel 23:20
Because he provided us all with such reliable and well-engineered technology... er, gotten rich through monopolistic and otherwise ethically questionable business practices, and ruthlessly exploiting the network effect of a for him happy accident that left him with a huge installed base.
What happens if the AI is intelligent enough to start ruthlessly exterminating anyone associated with Windows?
Give full control of software development to advanced AI and witness how the people saying that current software is bloated are proven right.
I'd lean more towards code being designed and written in such a way that the human brain would soon have no ability to understand even the simplest routines.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-br...
I found the above-linked essay pretty interesting, because he points out what should probably be obvious in hindsight, but easily gets lots in all the "noise" about A.I.
Basically, he argues that the human brain doesn't really "process" or "store" information anything like a computer. We used those flawed analogies all the time when describing how someone's brain works -- but they're no more accurate than the popular medical theory in the past that everything was fluid-based. The truth is -- a computer is a great tool for storing a bunch of data for selective retrieval, and you can use that to an extent to fake intelligence (a la Apple's "Siri", Microsoft's "Cortana", or other such agents). But it's nothing more than an illusion crafted by the software developer. Investing more time, effort and money into such projects is likely to result only in creating more believable "pretend intelligence" as the data-pool it pulls responses from increases in size and scope. You're still no further towards a goal of making a computer that's "self aware" or can think for itself.
I was thinking more like fuel for a chemical battery...
I'd venture to say that AI is the opposite end of the spectrum of complexity from web design. Given that, AI development will be the exclusive purview of elite companies that develop it in the same way that nobody makes their own chips and very few people make their own computers from scratch but a whole lot of people with minimal computer knowledge do at least basic web development. You might buy an AI engine from Microsoft but you'll never really know how it works to the point of being able to roll your own. You might say that open-source will handle that but how many people really understand the inner workings of Linux?
From what I've seen, there is no higher authority than "rich white guy".
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
I told heem we halready ghot one!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I am totally unconcerned with "making sure humans [emph mine] remain in control of super-intelligent machines." It's not that I think it's unimportant; it's just that I think it's trivial. The real issue is which humans.
AI is going to create super-powerful humans (or groups of humans, i.e. corporations and governments). You are probably not one of them. Nearly no one is, but someone (him? them? that board? that law enforcement division?) will be.
This isn't merely a fear, either: it's a contemporary diagnosis. We already see that a supermajority of people give control of their computers to other entities. "My computer must answer to me," isn't anyone's priority or requirement, except for "OSS zealots." And that's a problem: it means that our new gods' place is already nearly assured.
We don't need to remain in control; we need to regain control.
Look at your fucking phone, Blu-ray player, etc and tell me it isn't already (in 2016) running exactly the kind of software that metaphorically tells its users "I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't do that." It's not because it has gone off to left field with amazing inhuman inferences. It's because its master's desires and your desires conflict. This is a human-vs-human conflict, and most humans are losing because they have allowed their opponents to infiltrate their lives.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why are we taking predictions from a guy who didn't think the Web was a thing until it was obviously a thing?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Lets just hope dream docent turn out to be nightmare. No human can remain control of super intelligent machine. Its impossible.
I think Bill Gates is a prick and his opinion on anything doesn't mean shit. It's okay with him if AI's take over peoples jobs, he doesn't have to worry about feeding his family when he can't get a job because AI's/robots are doing all the jobs you can get.
Bill will only have no worries if the AIs decide that money has value.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Marvin Minsky called from beyond the grave and wants his holy grail back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky
Exactly right. If you read Bill Gates book (the first edition) he got everything wrong. He didn't even mention the Internet. He isn't a big thinker.
Give full control of software development to advanced AI and witness how the people saying that current software is bloated are proven right.
I'd lean more towards code being designed and written in such a way that the human brain would soon have no ability to understand even the simplest routines.
All the more reason to mandate that every child learn how to code, right? Because it will be so useful when they grow up.
Some-fucking-how.
The Second Amendment does not apply to AI's.
Yet.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Thanks for posting that, it got me thinking. Reading your post, it seems there are two seperated but related problems that may come up. Before addressing those, it might be worthwhile to address this:
> Also, to shift jobs wasn't such a big deal in the sense that one didn't need an entirely different and technology based skill set
Certainly the finishers, who did the tops of stockings, considered that a special skill, if we restrict the discussion to actual Luddites. The new jobs, for machine operators and engineers, were certainly technology driven. Nineteenth century technology, but technology indeed, technology that was new. Outside of the actual Luddites, the glassblowers, silversmiths, etc were clearly skilled tradesmen. They lobbied for laws enforcing the continuation of the apprentice system they were accustomed to (because years of apprenticeship were needed to develop the skills). Machines have been replacing skilled workers for hundreds of years.
One issue that comes up is related to increased productivity generally, the other to low-skill workers specifically.
If machines are doing all the work, what will people do? In 1812, when the Luddites were around, they typically worked 10 hours per day, 6 days per week, starting at age 12-14. Now, we go to work 8 hours per day (and actually work 5), five days per week, starting around age 20. So we work fewer hours, on fewer days, for fewer years. That doesn't seem to have been too damaging. We've also simply spent a ton more. We went from scrunging to afford food to happily waiting for the new ipad to be released so we can buy it. Even since the 1950s, median home size has doubled. That seems to be okay, more or less.
About low-skilled workers. As you said:
> Most people don't go to uni, what do they do with low skill
> sets when low skill set jobs are being done by machine?
In 1812, 55% of British and 70% of Americans could read. Now it's about 99% in both countries. Few went to high school back then, now most have, and anybody who wants to go to college can. So the statement you made about university is exactly what they said about high school 200 years ago. We may well see that in 100 years most people will have post-secondary education. It seems to have worked well in the past for people to get whatever education is needed for them to do jobs that can't be done by machine.
We are NO closer. It may not even be possible. Holy fuck. We don't even know what intelligence IS. What you see now are a handful of clever algorithms that the media have labeled AI but are not intelligent in the least.
This is the most dangerous misconception being have about the potential dangers AI poses to our society. We see movies with examples "strong AI" enslaving and warring with humanity and believe that is the existential threat. It is of course one potential threat, but because it is so unlikely in the near future it should not be in the forefront of peoples' minds.
Strong AI putting 100% of people out of work is not a likely problem in the next 50 years. But more sophisticated weak AI such natural language processing, computer vision, and autonomous robotics with the potential of putting 20-80% of humans out of work is a significant possibility. Not guaranteed by any means, but perhaps more likely than not in the next 50 years.
Humans have been able to stay ahead of the curve because the basic human abilities of pattern recognition mad even low skilled labor very useful after each labor disruption. But a new reality where one human workers assisted by numerous weak AI systems can do the work of 10 people today will make it very hard for our society to adapt. It won't be like the industrial revolution where we had 100 years to adapt, or the first computer revolution where we had 30-40 years to adapt. This will happen over 10-20 years, and each individual industry could see disruption occur on an inflection point that lasts perhaps only a few years.
We will have to change to a society which accepts that large percentages of workers at any given time will need to be retrained for new work at any time. College grads could find their projected profession not exist any more and need to go right back to school. 50 year olds will find themselves back at square one when their industry dies. This has already happened to many and we have done little to help them. But once it is happening to almost anyone it can no longer be ignored.
This is the real problem. It is not an unsolvable problem though, as long as we accept it exists.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
...or else you consider me and everyone else today who considered posting the EXACT same sentiments to this story.
This guy commenting on any tech advance annoys me as he was one of the main players in holding back computing technologies, either by squeezing better solutions out of the market, strangling new tech in the cradle, or just making darn sure such new tech would be Windows-only (remember he personally approved sabotaging ACPI for Linux)
Never, ever forget his role in computing history - villain, not visionary.
Today, we already produce enough food to feed the entire world a few times over. Why don't we? Simple: we can do this without needing every person to work. One producer can provide for the needs of 100 consumers. If productivity and needs were already 1-to-1, there would be no unemployment problem.
So, machines have already eliminated the majority of jobs in the world. The lion's share of humanity lives in abject poverty today.
You are afraid of not being able to feed you family due to A.I. But you are very late to this conversation. You are already one of the rare few who has yet to lose his job due to automation. You just fixate on this particular form of automation because it is the one that impacts you, but you don't seem to give a hoot about how all the machines that you benefit from are already putting most of the world out of work.
We have already solved the problem of production. We have a severe problem of distribution. A.I. is just a refinement on the problem of production, but it is the first technology that may also give us a solution to the problem of distribution. And you fear it because you think that this particular level of refinement of the production problem is the bad one (because it might put you, specifically out of work).
Gates said, "We've made more progress in the last five years than at any time in history."
Yes, but that's true of nearly ANY scientific field of study or development.
There are almost certainly exceptions, but we've learned more about atomic structure or battery technology or river ecology in the last 5 years than at any time in history. This is normal scientific progress and advancement.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
100% correct. We are no closer to AI now than we were 40 years ago. Chess or Go playing is not AI. Neither is Siri.
The history of AI is full of speculations about when it will have its final breakthrough and there is a long list of projects said to finally provide it. Cyc is maybe the most famous one. "With Cyc", people said, "AI will finally come around".
It's just that this has been going on for 30 years. We've been waiting for the big AI breakthrough for longer than for the year of Linux on the desktop.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
and Gates is one of those people who have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades.
Including himself. Also, he was CEO for a long time, if he saw people suck, why didn't he stop them instead of shipping the shit they produced?
No, he's just a B-celebrity now, making statements to stay in the press. His tech predictions are famously wrong pretty much all the time. I think he'd lose a competition against a random headline generator.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's not a holy grail. This is a holy grail.
True machine code vs fake machine code? What do you think the assembler and compiler do. Write fairy tales?
..don't panic
All the posts so far are making an assumption I just don't see. AI doesn't have emotions. No urges, no desires. You tell a machine that you're going to unplug it, it will tell you it won't be able to complete its assigned task, but it won't CARE. Humans provide the essential motivation of "Why?" Even if we can make an AI that scores a perfect 1000 on an IQ test, it won't have motivation. That's the real difference between true self-aware consciousness and amazing, super fast data crunching. They will need us to provide a reason to exist because they have no will, especially a will to live, on their own. Claiming otherwise is just anthropomorphising.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
As in, "shove in enough engineering and AI specific domain knowledge into it, and have it help us design the next generation of AI." After that, all subsequent AIs will design themselves.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Nothing to worry about, they will need humans for pets. It's a great deal, ask your dog.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A while ago I followed TheGrid web development AI project to keep tabs on how this bot is going to try to eat the industry. Now you can barely even load its home page because it makes so many repos https://github.com/grid-bot . see also https://thegrid.io/ "How The Grid Will Automate Web Design Without Killing The Designer" .. this list seems to work, it churns constantly: https://github.com/the-domains
--hongpong.com
They are already beating us at chess and go
Chess yes, Go no. Pocket Fritz beats a human watt-for-watt. AlphaGo does not.
Well, I think he's right. And he's actually one of those people with enough experience to say this, since programming doesn't require pesky interaction with the real world like, say, automated cars do, humans obviously suck at programming big time, and Gates is one of those people who have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades. So your argument actually supports him. Maybe that's the whole reason why he's so optimistic about making people redundant in the first place!
I think Bill Gates is a prick and his opinion on anything doesn't mean shit. It's okay with him if AI's take over peoples jobs, he doesn't have to worry about feeding his family when he can't get a job because AI's/robots are doing all the jobs you can get.
It's going to happen eventually whether we like it or not. The question is what skills will mankind maintain that computers can't do?
So if AI becomes more capable than human intelligence doesn't that mean it could potentially think of ways to undermine the human race that we never thought of? We've all seen Terminator and the Matrix.
That is one possibility, but not a necessity - you could require the AI system to produce a software system that satisfies the specification while minimizing total program complexity. Just like you could, for example, require a heuristic computer algebra system explicitly to look for either the shortest, or the most comprehensible solution to a mathematical problem, not just any solution (in terms of the form of the result). If would appear that this is best achieved by factoring things out of code, which incidentally happens to be a good practice that is often violated (someone either doesn't wish to learn how to use some functionality so he reimplements it, or people are simply unaware that some functionality exists elsewhere in the code base, so you get a few dozen independently implemented sorts on the source code level in a large program, or you simply use two or more different libraries that implement some identical prerequisite functionality on their own because it's not guaranteed it will be present in the execution environment).
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, I'll grant you the author of that essay probably uses "storing information" far more literally than he should. The brain obviously remembers/stores SOME things, or else we'd be completely non-functional. If I place my car keys on the dresser, I'm able to make a "mental note" that I'm putting them there, so I can go back later in the day and retrieve them.
I think the point was, we don't (except maybe the individuals who seem to really have "photographic memory") store complete sets of information about what we observe. When you scan an image into a computer, it stores a copy of the whole thing, pixel for pixel. It might use compression to help save space, but a replica of the original image is saved someplace and that's what the computer works from in image editors or any type of software analyzing the image to match it for criteria.
The interesting thing with the human brain is, everyone seems to have different amounts of data they store when they observe things. (EG. Sure, you can recall scenes from a movie once you've watched it. But I guarantee if 50 people watch the same movie for the first time, you'll get a wide range of results if you ask each of them to recall some of those scenes.) There are probably all sorts of factors in play as to why each individual considers certain details worth remembering and others safe to discard. That, alone, means we've got to figure out the mechanics of how all of that works before we can properly simulate it in A.I. (Simply electing to use a specific "lossy" storage algorithm for data collection isn't going to mimic what really goes on in the human mind.)
http://www.newser.com/story/18...