NO. Just no. Stop parroting this false choice. If you lived in a glass house, how secure would you feel? Do you really think giving up all your privacy is security? It is not. I want opaque walls! I don't want every criminal out there looking into my house and seeing everything I do on my computer! Obviously, no one is immune from law breaking. Not the guy on the street, not the government man, not the corporate man. You give up your rights, and you give up your protection. In other words, you give up your security from the world at large. If society as a whole has more rights and more privacy, it also has more security. That means security from all threats, especially including governments and corporations. The most insidious thing is that usually, unlike in this situation, the governments just break the laws by literally breaking the laws (repealing them, passing loopholes, etc.), so that stealing your money, your property, and your privacy is not illegal. Here, the government is just being lazy, and failing to repeal the fourth amendment before blatantly violating it.
Big deal. Intelligence agencies deal in drugs to accomplish their own ends. It's called establishing trust. Look at the team members on the development of this project. They are all anonymous, as far as I can tell. I have no idea who KillYourTV is. Nor do I know who you are. For me personally, a typical citizen, I have no idea where to go or what to do to maintain my privacy. This goes beyond wanting to look up medical conditions without my ISP and government looking over my shoulder. I don't know who to trust. I think I can trust Snowden, Drake et. al., but when it comes to Phil Zimmerman, the maker of PGP, or Bruce Schneier, I wonder just a little bit more. They are public figures, and I have good confidence in them, but only like 95%. How many people and programs can I trust before my odds of misplacing my trust approach 1? How about all the developers of the major operating systems? That's literally thousands of tons of people. Can I trust that ALL the developers of Windows, Linux, Android and OSX are not paid by the NSA? I think not. I am feeling sick over this. Not for me, but for all the republics of the free world. I'll probably get most of my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. I probably already have. But my daughters might not. If the government makes sure it can get to all criminals, it also makes sure it can get to all dissenters. Even ones that blow the whistle on systemic problems, like Snowden. What government wants all its systemic problems exposed? Every democratic republic should, in theory, want all its systemic problems exposed, but in practice?
The meaning of the word "God" is a bit different, as it goes to a more basic problem of how we understand the universe. Consensus is a bit harder here. If you ask me, I think the difference between science and religion is pretty easy to understand.
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In science, causality rests in the external world. The universe has properties and charactaristics. I can perceive those properties. My observations will shape my beliefs about the universe. This approach is standardized in the scientific method.
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In religion, causality rests in the internal world. My beliefs about the world will inform my actions and my perceptions. I will do things, say things, and ultimately perceive things based on my beliefs, that will change the external world. If I believe in Buddha, Mohammed, or Jesus strongly enough, and follow their teachings, I may arrive in a paradise. If I want to perceive God and his miracles, I must first believe in God and his miracles, generally.
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Of course, if you poll 20 people about science and religion, you won't get my answer, but probably 20-30 different answers (some answers will contain multiple answers). Ask 20 people what God is, exactly. Who knows what crazy answers you get. The GP said something about a "god like being". What exactly is the GP thinking? A separate ghost like entity with separate thoughts from people and animals? When I think of God, I think of "being", rather than "a being". All that is. The first line of the Gospel of John, where God is so all-encompassing, that even separating a single word from God's existance was not possible. So the grunting sounds we make in English to signify being, or even the word "being" will never really identify god or elucidate what he is. The only thing you can do to understand God is to simply exist.
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It is really no wonder people get confused when there is so little consensus. Science and religion both inform us what we should do here on earth. Should we try to stop global warming, or just let God handle it? Are we in the end-times anyway? Is the Rapture approaching? Are we just a few years from the Singularity in AI? It is really no wonder people fight over this stuff, when no one can agree, even on what the words themselves mean.
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What we need to get out of this situation is an iron fisted world dictator appointed by God to make everyone believe the same thing, and create consensus. Yeah, that will work! Let's try that!
I saw that about limited speeds. I don't think most people assume the speeds will stay limited to 25 MPH, any more than the top speed of driven cars stayed limited to the speeds of the first models in the 1900s. And the range is just in the prototype. Of *course* the market demand will push that limit up. There is no inherent limit that precludes speeds faster than 25 or ranges greater than 100 miles. Get this system ready to bolt on a Tesla, and now the range is 400 miles and the speed is a bit greater than 25. That's what I was commenting about-- when the driverless cars reach the mass market.
Driverless cars open up huge possibilities. Think of long distance trips, where the drive is eight hours. With a driverless car, this eight hours could be spent overnight, so you go to sleep in your car in Plainfield, CT, and wake up in Jamestown, NY. (OK, maybe you need to wake up once to refuel). You didn't lose any time getting there! Right now, you can't get a plane or public transportation from one destination to the other without a lot of logistical connections. Flying might be a six or seven hour ordeal, and driving around eight. Also, I would have killed for this car at certain times in my life where my commute was upwards of 40 minutes of white knuckle driving each way. I could actually work on my way to work. If the car could also be passengerless, even more possibilities open up. What about taking the kids to school. Busses aren't always available, especially for private schools. Putting my oldest in a driverless car could save me over an hour each day. What about sharing the car or renting it out? A driverless car could make me money while I am at work. There could be an Uber or Lyft like app that would allow me to put the car to work, recouping my costs. And doesn't this make remote shopping more possible? Where I pick out my stuff online, and send my car to get it? Someone at the store just rings it up and puts it in my car? Picking up folks at the airport? Just send my car...
I'm not talking about escalating, or crossing the line. I am talking about what happens when a citizen makes a comment they are well within their rights to make. On one occasion, in my personal experience, a friend told a cop to "protect and serve" when the cop was walking away after a particularly obnoxious encounter. The cop turned, walked up to my friend, grabbed his shirt, and violently shook him, yelling at him at length for being a smart ass. I positioned myself behind the cop, worried that the situation might get worse. Fortunately, for everyone involved, the illegal violent shaking was all that occured. So, you keep putting it like the citizen is going to be the one that crosses the line and escalates. I believe from this and other experiences, as well as stories recounted to me, that it is typically the overly agressive police officer who intially crosses the line from verbal abuse to physical agression.
That is exactly what the protests are all about. The "law" is an unwilling participant in the fight. Prosecutors, unwilling to alienate the police they rely on to do their jobs, refuse to indict officers who broke the law and police policy on video, resulting in a man's death. So the system is corrupt. You can't fight them on the street. You can't fight them with the law. Your congressperson only listens to donors (e.g. the police union). Really? Is it all so neat and tidy for you? Police cameras, which continuously stream video to a remote server operated and protected by citizen watchdog groups, should be mandatory. For a start. And who will fight to make that happen? You? Were you volunteering? Let me know...
"reply verbally in kind" is not escalation. The citizen is well within their rights to say, "Well you don't need to be a complete asshole about it. Just shut up and give me the ticket." After all, the police started with the unnecessary verbal abuse. To respond "in kind" is not escalation. But of course, everyone knows where that conversation is going. The abusive police, insisting on their god given right to be an abusive dickhead, will escalate to prove to the citizen that they must, as you suggest, "shut up and comply" like a good subservient citizen, not one with rights. You say it is a "dumb" thing to do, but some people have a lot of self respect, and won't be wrongly abused. They would rather get into a physical altercation to defend their honor than to be bowed by a policeman breaking the law (which is what most likely will happen in my scenario). I am not one of those people, but I personally know people like that. And I worry about them whenever there is a police situation, despite them doing nothing wrong.
That is why unarmed people who try to get into a wrestling match with cops get shot, because the cops are very afraid of losing control of their own gun.
People who are compliant tend not to get shot. People who react violently are far more likely to get shot. So if you actually care about people getting shot you should care about violence against police.
No, it goes both ways. Police who are overly aggressive and verbally abusive tend to provoke ordinary citizens with a sense of dignity and self respect. When citizens reply verbally in kind to unfair and abusive treatment from the police, the unfair, abusive police escalate and turn the situation violent where the situation should not be violent. This is one of the reasons police cameras work. The police tend to self-monitor and self-censor their overly agressive and abusive behaviors before a confrontation begins to escalate. So a cop is much less likely to start a traffic stop interaction with an angry comment like "What kind of fucking moron drives forty eight in a residential area?" if they know it is going to be on camera for their boss to see.
Not all cops, of course. I have been pulled over by many polite and respectful police officers. And of course, police typically have to deal with drunken belligerents more than church choir members. But someone who is drunk should still be treated with respect, not verbally abused, even while they are being arrested and jailed.
The Supreme Court does not interpret the constitution to be either completely restrictive of the Federal Government only to those powers and authorities granted to it by the Constitiution, nor is it completely free to do whatever it wants so long as it is not prohibited by the Constitution. An example is a federal bank. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say the Feds can have a bank, or create the Federal Reserve (try to find authority for this in the Constitution). Early on in the republic, there was a big fight over this. Eventually the Supreme Court decided that anything that was necessary and proper to effect the powers granted to the feds by the Constitution was allowed. So, a federal bank was allowed, because that was considered necessary and proper for collecting taxes, and spending the revenues collected. Many of the States Rights folks specifically raised the ninth and tenth amendment arguements, but they did not win with the Supremes. But not just anything is allowed. My guess is that if the Feds decided to open Federal Liquor Stores or have a Federal Lottery that would get struck down in the courts for being unnecessary and/or improper to effect some federal power. States can do these things, but the Feds probably can't. So, the real situation is not so black and white as either post tries to make it.
I agree that science that divides on the basis of race should probably be considered tainted by default. The Supreme Court adopted this approach for laws that discriminated on the basis of race. Such laws were not precluded, but subject to strict scrutiny. But there are a lot of scientists out there that are more concerned with the issues within their profession and field of inquiry that with issues of race. You would expect some science that impinges on this area to be valid. If it leads to better medical treatment, that's a win for science. If it leads to individuals taking a molehill of truth to justify a mountain of racism, remember to blame the biased individuals, not the scientist.
"expect to be judged by fellow scientists as a baby torturer, although not as harshly and uniformly as if you merely design an experiment associated with racist beliefs."
I said that wrong. Clearly torturing babies is more likely to be judged more harshly than having racist beliefs. I need to review my stuff before I post, not after.
Putting words in someone's mouth, and rearranging the meaning by truncating all nuance, after they plainly stated their position, is generally considered rude and provocative. You should have expected a commensurate response. I interpreted what i kan reed wrote as meaning that anyone is free to pursue these lines of study, but they cannot avoid judgments of their fellow scientists and the broader community when they are pursuing goals strongly associated with prejudice, not science. No one should expect to avoid these judgments, any more that people should expect the world to be free from racism. There is racism in the world, and torture, war and murder. If you devise an experiment which involves torturing human babies, expect to be judged by fellow scientists as a baby torturer, although not as harshly and uniformly as if you merely design an experiment associated with racist beliefs. You might learn something from your baby torture experiments, but you are still a baby torturer.
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Meta-monkey posted a typically racist view that the people that left Africa were superior for some speculative reason (greater curiosity and resourcefulness). It is just so odd that meta-monkey suggested a hypothesis with a stated conclusion that Africans are inferior. "The genes for curiosity and intelligence are therefore more likely to be passed on the farther they are from the place of origin." Why didn't meta-monkey suggest a study that the most dominant and superior genes tend to control a geographical area, and inferior genes are pushed to the edges, and therefore, we would expect to see that the populations pushed from Africa are genetically inferior? Here is my judgment: the study suggested by meta-monkey is motivated by a blatant racial bias not disinterested scientific curiosity. Anyone is free to pursue that line of inquiry, and make their own judgments, but they are not free to choose what my judgment or the judgments of their other peers will be. So i kan reed's answer was not merely "yes".
Try Rome around 100-75 B.C. It fits better with the current political climate of corruption, and the erosion of public virtue. The democratic republic was/is dying in all but name. Rome was no banana republic, and the U.S. is not much like one either.
I believe I do understand your argument. And I do agree that it is not clear where intelligence, consciousness, and free will come from. I think it is even difficult to say exactly what these things are. My point was that it doesn't matter where these things come from, or if artificial intelligence is anything like real intelligence. When we made flying machines, we copied the shape of the bird's wing. Early on, we abandoned the idea of making the wings flap like birds, or that the wings must have bones, muscles, blood, nerves, skin and feathers. The wings on a 787 are nothing like real birds wings. They don't feel anything, as far as anyone can tell. But they fly. They fly faster, higher, and with greater power than any bird wing. Sure, birds can land on a tree branch without breaking it, and a 787 trying the same thing would take the whole tree down and explode. But jets have done things that outclass birds by orders of magnitude, despite not being much at all like their original feathered prototype.
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And so it is with AI. It does not matter that AI is nothing like a thinking person, conscious, or even truly intelligent, the way we mean it. Computers beat humans at competitions that are supposed to showcase human intelligence: chess and Jeopardy. Only smart people win these games! No monkey or parrot could challenge an average human at these games. Yet now, computers have beaten our best. You can disparage the way the computers won all you want. They still won. Just like a 787 flies higher and faster than any bird. Year by year, computers are picking up skills formerly posessed by only humans.
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Did you agree that computers are right now like idiot savants? Can you see a day when they pick up so many skills, that they will seem mainly like savants, and only occasionally like mindless idiots? And do you see why people like Hawking are worried, when Watson has a higher score than Jennings at the end of the game?
I don't know about all that. Before you can assert that physics completely fails to explain a number of properties that human beings have, don't you have to define those properties first? Without proper definitions, how can you make yes/no determinations? I am, of course, assuming you don't have comprehensive definitions of these things, only because the definitions would be of great interest to many people, including me. I don't deny that intelligence, consciousness and free will exist, but I also can't confirm they exist. I don't know how to define them in a way that would let me test whether they exist or not. Even defining existence is a bit tricky. You wouldn't expect me to take your word for it, that you are conscious, and therefore, consciousness exists?
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I think AI is more like flying, and less like hyperlightspeed travel. Before humans could fly, we saw birds fly. We thought it might be possible for people to fly, but we didn't really understand all the principles involved. For centuries, people said that man was not meant to fly. In hindsight, they were wrong.
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Before people could create artificial intelligence, they could see real world examples of intelligence: not only the human intelligence, but to varying degrees, many other animal intelligences. We have something to copy. We copied the shape of the bird's wing. We can copy what the human brain does. We have already had some success making artificial intelligence. Yes, it is very artificial, and not real intelligence like human intelligence. But that is the whole point. To make *artificial* intelligence. In some ways, it is already artifically better than human intelligence. To decide which humans are most intelligent, we can have them take Intelligence Quotient tests. Or we might challenge them to a game of chess. Now, computers can compete with humans at chess and on written tests; surely you have heard that Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, and Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess. AI is like an idiot savant, with islands of extreme intelligence separated by oceans of profound stupidity. The question really is when does AI put all these islands of intelligence together and surpass humans in *all* ways.
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As to hyperlightspeed travel, to date, we have no known examples. We have nothing to copy. It seems unlikely that we will ever go faster than light, especially since we have a set of predictive, well tested and useful equations that suggest we cannot. And if it was possible, wouldn't robots from the future already have invented it? Wouldn't they have already used it to travel back in time and invent it before the humans, so they can kill us all? Since I am not dead, and AI seems plausible, hyperlightspeed travel seems especially implausible.
I have heard the director of the LHC say in an interview that quantized spacetime is a naive idea because it immediately conflicts with special relativity. I like your analogy, because it is with analogies that people get by in understanding physics. Yet, the analogy always introduces the danger of leading us astray where the analogy departs from its parallel with the analogized subject. Trying to understand space and time is difficult in the non-Newtonian world. It is almost better not to try to understand it visually, but only conceptually and mathematically.
I don't think it is all that far off, although I am relying on a perspective of history rather than expertise in the field of AI. The problem is war. We do desparate, almost unimaginable things in war. Trench warfare in WWI, or nuclear bombs in WWII are examples. The US now uses unmanned planes to kill people across the globe, so that we don't endanger the lives of our countrymen. If there is a serious, existential conflict between a couple of the industrial giants in this age, AI, like every other technology, will be pressed into service. Any country failing to use it will lose. AI can advance in leaps if people's lives are on the line. WWII was a terrible war, but the technological progress it engendered was staggering. Jets, nuclear energy, radar, etc. etc. If you know your enemy is going to release sentient robots to kill you, you will damn sure be working on something you hope will be better. Just imagine the pressure if a modern Nazi party was working on sentient robots.
We would make sentient robots programmed to kill other robots and our human enemies. Of course, they would also be deployed in factories to make better generations of robots. How does this not happen?
If you weren't so nice, I'd think you were trolling with the statement "None of which relates to anything in physics." Physics is the study of the natural or material world. The "study" part always involves consciousness. The way we think definitely influences our theories about the natural world. Nowhere is that more apparent in discussions of time and space. Any conversation about the big bang or black holes always runs smack into what are literally imponderables. It really is impossible to think of a time before there was time. Yet that is always the question that arises- what happened before the big bang? If you tell a person that even thinking of a time before the big bang misses the point, it will never satisfy. Somthing similar happens when you try to think of anything but continuous space-time. If you try to think of quantized space time, you will invariably try to put the quantized space-time into something- a space and time for the quantized space-time to exsist in. You will ask what is between the quanta of space-time. I personally believe those limitations in our consciousness are what limits further physical discovery. Our consciousness exists in space-time, and can never fully step outside itself, or observe itself. That limitation is related to time, in that an observation requires some passage of time. The consiousness doing the observing is inherently not the consciousness observed. If you assume that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, this problem relates to a fundamental limit of observation. If a measurement of position and momentum is made using physical objects which have a physical position and momentum, then you must eliminate the uncertainty of the momentum and position of your measurement apparatus first before making the measurement. So you must do a measurement on your meausrement apparatus, using another measurement apparatus... Since energy and momentum are quantized, this probem of infinite regress is limited to a particular value, the value of the quanta, as expressed in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You should note that momentum is a function of space and time, and position is a function of space and time. Whether we think of the momentum as quantized, or the spacetime as quantized, is a matter of our human understanding and its limitations. Being aware of our limitations does not make them all go away, but it might just lead to a reduced set of limitations.
Theories do matter, and consiousness is our primary tool for fashioning theories. Captain Obvious out.
The professor says that clocks keep time, but they don't know what time is. I found this particular choice really ironic. First, I keep pretty good time. If you ask me what time it is, any time of the day, I can tell you within 10 minutes or so, regardless of the last time I looked at the clock. I regularly wake up a minute or two before my alarm. When I don't use an alarm, I can tell the time within a few minutes when I open my eyes. On the other hand, I think that most humans don't understand what time is. Seriously. What is time? I bet my answer is different from every one who replies here, and that we would get several different answers if we get more than two.
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!
Your comments remind me of Agent K's remark about a person being smart, but people being dumb, panicky animals. You are reasoning about the "government" as though it were a person, when you begin "The government is well aware...". Actually, the government *has* essentially defined "bad guys" as anyone it kills.
"Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
This method for counting civilian casualties was probably not Obama's idea to begin with, but he has adopted it. So now, as Davester666 said, "gov't defines anybody they kill as "the bad guy". You can quibble about women and children, but the point largely remains. Davester666 was referencing a govenment definition, not what any individual (including Mr. Obama) actually thinks. There is a difference. Treating the government as though it were just a very big individual leads to serious miscalculations. The government does not behave like a person.
It seems like there should be a signed release required. The bigger issue is how to deal with this power imbalance. The police collect video everywhere they go. If they don't make it available to the public, then only they have access. The potential to game this system is obvious. Police "lose" video, or withhold it unless someone gets a judge to order the release. Using this and video monitoring of the public more generally, they are perhaps given too much information and power not available to the public.
On the other hand, making all the public surveillance information to the public seems like it would be a danger to privacy, and put too much information in the hands of stalkers, kidnappers, and other criminals. There would be a public backlash when something bad happens.
It seems like we need a new organization to collect information and safeguard it. An organization that is not directly under the command of the executive branches or legislative branches. Access could be granted through either an existing court system or a dedicated court system. This seems like too important an issue to just keep reacting to without a strategy.
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NO. Just no. Stop parroting this false choice. If you lived in a glass house, how secure would you feel? Do you really think giving up all your privacy is security? It is not. I want opaque walls! I don't want every criminal out there looking into my house and seeing everything I do on my computer! Obviously, no one is immune from law breaking. Not the guy on the street, not the government man, not the corporate man. You give up your rights, and you give up your protection. In other words, you give up your security from the world at large. If society as a whole has more rights and more privacy, it also has more security. That means security from all threats, especially including governments and corporations. The most insidious thing is that usually, unlike in this situation, the governments just break the laws by literally breaking the laws (repealing them, passing loopholes, etc.), so that stealing your money, your property, and your privacy is not illegal. Here, the government is just being lazy, and failing to repeal the fourth amendment before blatantly violating it.
Big deal. Intelligence agencies deal in drugs to accomplish their own ends. It's called establishing trust. Look at the team members on the development of this project. They are all anonymous, as far as I can tell. I have no idea who KillYourTV is. Nor do I know who you are. For me personally, a typical citizen, I have no idea where to go or what to do to maintain my privacy. This goes beyond wanting to look up medical conditions without my ISP and government looking over my shoulder. I don't know who to trust. I think I can trust Snowden, Drake et. al., but when it comes to Phil Zimmerman, the maker of PGP, or Bruce Schneier, I wonder just a little bit more. They are public figures, and I have good confidence in them, but only like 95%. How many people and programs can I trust before my odds of misplacing my trust approach 1? How about all the developers of the major operating systems? That's literally thousands of tons of people. Can I trust that ALL the developers of Windows, Linux, Android and OSX are not paid by the NSA? I think not. I am feeling sick over this. Not for me, but for all the republics of the free world. I'll probably get most of my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. I probably already have. But my daughters might not. If the government makes sure it can get to all criminals, it also makes sure it can get to all dissenters. Even ones that blow the whistle on systemic problems, like Snowden. What government wants all its systemic problems exposed? Every democratic republic should, in theory, want all its systemic problems exposed, but in practice?
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In science, causality rests in the external world. The universe has properties and charactaristics. I can perceive those properties. My observations will shape my beliefs about the universe. This approach is standardized in the scientific method.
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In religion, causality rests in the internal world. My beliefs about the world will inform my actions and my perceptions. I will do things, say things, and ultimately perceive things based on my beliefs, that will change the external world. If I believe in Buddha, Mohammed, or Jesus strongly enough, and follow their teachings, I may arrive in a paradise. If I want to perceive God and his miracles, I must first believe in God and his miracles, generally.
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Of course, if you poll 20 people about science and religion, you won't get my answer, but probably 20-30 different answers (some answers will contain multiple answers). Ask 20 people what God is, exactly. Who knows what crazy answers you get. The GP said something about a "god like being". What exactly is the GP thinking? A separate ghost like entity with separate thoughts from people and animals? When I think of God, I think of "being", rather than "a being". All that is. The first line of the Gospel of John, where God is so all-encompassing, that even separating a single word from God's existance was not possible. So the grunting sounds we make in English to signify being, or even the word "being" will never really identify god or elucidate what he is. The only thing you can do to understand God is to simply exist.
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It is really no wonder people get confused when there is so little consensus. Science and religion both inform us what we should do here on earth. Should we try to stop global warming, or just let God handle it? Are we in the end-times anyway? Is the Rapture approaching? Are we just a few years from the Singularity in AI? It is really no wonder people fight over this stuff, when no one can agree, even on what the words themselves mean.
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What we need to get out of this situation is an iron fisted world dictator appointed by God to make everyone believe the same thing, and create consensus. Yeah, that will work! Let's try that!
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I saw that about limited speeds. I don't think most people assume the speeds will stay limited to 25 MPH, any more than the top speed of driven cars stayed limited to the speeds of the first models in the 1900s. And the range is just in the prototype. Of *course* the market demand will push that limit up. There is no inherent limit that precludes speeds faster than 25 or ranges greater than 100 miles. Get this system ready to bolt on a Tesla, and now the range is 400 miles and the speed is a bit greater than 25. That's what I was commenting about-- when the driverless cars reach the mass market.
Driverless cars open up huge possibilities. Think of long distance trips, where the drive is eight hours. With a driverless car, this eight hours could be spent overnight, so you go to sleep in your car in Plainfield, CT, and wake up in Jamestown, NY. (OK, maybe you need to wake up once to refuel). You didn't lose any time getting there! Right now, you can't get a plane or public transportation from one destination to the other without a lot of logistical connections. Flying might be a six or seven hour ordeal, and driving around eight. Also, I would have killed for this car at certain times in my life where my commute was upwards of 40 minutes of white knuckle driving each way. I could actually work on my way to work. If the car could also be passengerless, even more possibilities open up. What about taking the kids to school. Busses aren't always available, especially for private schools. Putting my oldest in a driverless car could save me over an hour each day. What about sharing the car or renting it out? A driverless car could make me money while I am at work. There could be an Uber or Lyft like app that would allow me to put the car to work, recouping my costs. And doesn't this make remote shopping more possible? Where I pick out my stuff online, and send my car to get it? Someone at the store just rings it up and puts it in my car? Picking up folks at the airport? Just send my car...
Oh, and file a report? Please. You could get arrested for trying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm not talking about escalating, or crossing the line. I am talking about what happens when a citizen makes a comment they are well within their rights to make. On one occasion, in my personal experience, a friend told a cop to "protect and serve" when the cop was walking away after a particularly obnoxious encounter. The cop turned, walked up to my friend, grabbed his shirt, and violently shook him, yelling at him at length for being a smart ass. I positioned myself behind the cop, worried that the situation might get worse. Fortunately, for everyone involved, the illegal violent shaking was all that occured. So, you keep putting it like the citizen is going to be the one that crosses the line and escalates. I believe from this and other experiences, as well as stories recounted to me, that it is typically the overly agressive police officer who intially crosses the line from verbal abuse to physical agression.
That is exactly what the protests are all about. The "law" is an unwilling participant in the fight. Prosecutors, unwilling to alienate the police they rely on to do their jobs, refuse to indict officers who broke the law and police policy on video, resulting in a man's death. So the system is corrupt. You can't fight them on the street. You can't fight them with the law. Your congressperson only listens to donors (e.g. the police union). Really? Is it all so neat and tidy for you? Police cameras, which continuously stream video to a remote server operated and protected by citizen watchdog groups, should be mandatory. For a start. And who will fight to make that happen? You? Were you volunteering? Let me know...
"reply verbally in kind" is not escalation. The citizen is well within their rights to say, "Well you don't need to be a complete asshole about it. Just shut up and give me the ticket." After all, the police started with the unnecessary verbal abuse. To respond "in kind" is not escalation. But of course, everyone knows where that conversation is going. The abusive police, insisting on their god given right to be an abusive dickhead, will escalate to prove to the citizen that they must, as you suggest, "shut up and comply" like a good subservient citizen, not one with rights. You say it is a "dumb" thing to do, but some people have a lot of self respect, and won't be wrongly abused. They would rather get into a physical altercation to defend their honor than to be bowed by a policeman breaking the law (which is what most likely will happen in my scenario). I am not one of those people, but I personally know people like that. And I worry about them whenever there is a police situation, despite them doing nothing wrong.
No, it goes both ways. Police who are overly aggressive and verbally abusive tend to provoke ordinary citizens with a sense of dignity and self respect. When citizens reply verbally in kind to unfair and abusive treatment from the police, the unfair, abusive police escalate and turn the situation violent where the situation should not be violent. This is one of the reasons police cameras work. The police tend to self-monitor and self-censor their overly agressive and abusive behaviors before a confrontation begins to escalate. So a cop is much less likely to start a traffic stop interaction with an angry comment like "What kind of fucking moron drives forty eight in a residential area?" if they know it is going to be on camera for their boss to see.
Not all cops, of course. I have been pulled over by many polite and respectful police officers. And of course, police typically have to deal with drunken belligerents more than church choir members. But someone who is drunk should still be treated with respect, not verbally abused, even while they are being arrested and jailed.
The Supreme Court does not interpret the constitution to be either completely restrictive of the Federal Government only to those powers and authorities granted to it by the Constitiution, nor is it completely free to do whatever it wants so long as it is not prohibited by the Constitution. An example is a federal bank. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say the Feds can have a bank, or create the Federal Reserve (try to find authority for this in the Constitution). Early on in the republic, there was a big fight over this. Eventually the Supreme Court decided that anything that was necessary and proper to effect the powers granted to the feds by the Constitution was allowed. So, a federal bank was allowed, because that was considered necessary and proper for collecting taxes, and spending the revenues collected. Many of the States Rights folks specifically raised the ninth and tenth amendment arguements, but they did not win with the Supremes. But not just anything is allowed. My guess is that if the Feds decided to open Federal Liquor Stores or have a Federal Lottery that would get struck down in the courts for being unnecessary and/or improper to effect some federal power. States can do these things, but the Feds probably can't. So, the real situation is not so black and white as either post tries to make it.
I agree that science that divides on the basis of race should probably be considered tainted by default. The Supreme Court adopted this approach for laws that discriminated on the basis of race. Such laws were not precluded, but subject to strict scrutiny. But there are a lot of scientists out there that are more concerned with the issues within their profession and field of inquiry that with issues of race. You would expect some science that impinges on this area to be valid. If it leads to better medical treatment, that's a win for science. If it leads to individuals taking a molehill of truth to justify a mountain of racism, remember to blame the biased individuals, not the scientist.
I said that wrong. Clearly torturing babies is more likely to be judged more harshly than having racist beliefs. I need to review my stuff before I post, not after.
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Meta-monkey posted a typically racist view that the people that left Africa were superior for some speculative reason (greater curiosity and resourcefulness). It is just so odd that meta-monkey suggested a hypothesis with a stated conclusion that Africans are inferior. "The genes for curiosity and intelligence are therefore more likely to be passed on the farther they are from the place of origin." Why didn't meta-monkey suggest a study that the most dominant and superior genes tend to control a geographical area, and inferior genes are pushed to the edges, and therefore, we would expect to see that the populations pushed from Africa are genetically inferior? Here is my judgment: the study suggested by meta-monkey is motivated by a blatant racial bias not disinterested scientific curiosity. Anyone is free to pursue that line of inquiry, and make their own judgments, but they are not free to choose what my judgment or the judgments of their other peers will be. So i kan reed's answer was not merely "yes".
Try Rome around 100-75 B.C. It fits better with the current political climate of corruption, and the erosion of public virtue. The democratic republic was/is dying in all but name. Rome was no banana republic, and the U.S. is not much like one either.
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And so it is with AI. It does not matter that AI is nothing like a thinking person, conscious, or even truly intelligent, the way we mean it. Computers beat humans at competitions that are supposed to showcase human intelligence: chess and Jeopardy. Only smart people win these games! No monkey or parrot could challenge an average human at these games. Yet now, computers have beaten our best. You can disparage the way the computers won all you want. They still won. Just like a 787 flies higher and faster than any bird. Year by year, computers are picking up skills formerly posessed by only humans.
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Did you agree that computers are right now like idiot savants? Can you see a day when they pick up so many skills, that they will seem mainly like savants, and only occasionally like mindless idiots? And do you see why people like Hawking are worried, when Watson has a higher score than Jennings at the end of the game?
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I think AI is more like flying, and less like hyperlightspeed travel. Before humans could fly, we saw birds fly. We thought it might be possible for people to fly, but we didn't really understand all the principles involved. For centuries, people said that man was not meant to fly. In hindsight, they were wrong.
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Before people could create artificial intelligence, they could see real world examples of intelligence: not only the human intelligence, but to varying degrees, many other animal intelligences. We have something to copy. We copied the shape of the bird's wing. We can copy what the human brain does. We have already had some success making artificial intelligence. Yes, it is very artificial, and not real intelligence like human intelligence. But that is the whole point. To make *artificial* intelligence. In some ways, it is already artifically better than human intelligence. To decide which humans are most intelligent, we can have them take Intelligence Quotient tests. Or we might challenge them to a game of chess. Now, computers can compete with humans at chess and on written tests; surely you have heard that Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, and Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess. AI is like an idiot savant, with islands of extreme intelligence separated by oceans of profound stupidity. The question really is when does AI put all these islands of intelligence together and surpass humans in *all* ways.
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As to hyperlightspeed travel, to date, we have no known examples. We have nothing to copy. It seems unlikely that we will ever go faster than light, especially since we have a set of predictive, well tested and useful equations that suggest we cannot. And if it was possible, wouldn't robots from the future already have invented it? Wouldn't they have already used it to travel back in time and invent it before the humans, so they can kill us all? Since I am not dead, and AI seems plausible, hyperlightspeed travel seems especially implausible.
I have heard the director of the LHC say in an interview that quantized spacetime is a naive idea because it immediately conflicts with special relativity. I like your analogy, because it is with analogies that people get by in understanding physics. Yet, the analogy always introduces the danger of leading us astray where the analogy departs from its parallel with the analogized subject. Trying to understand space and time is difficult in the non-Newtonian world. It is almost better not to try to understand it visually, but only conceptually and mathematically.
RTFA, moron. The expert in AI is his armchair. His armchair is doing all the talking.
We would make sentient robots programmed to kill other robots and our human enemies. Of course, they would also be deployed in factories to make better generations of robots. How does this not happen?
Theories do matter, and consiousness is our primary tool for fashioning theories. Captain Obvious out.
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!
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_...
This method for counting civilian casualties was probably not Obama's idea to begin with, but he has adopted it. So now, as Davester666 said, "gov't defines anybody they kill as "the bad guy". You can quibble about women and children, but the point largely remains. Davester666 was referencing a govenment definition, not what any individual (including Mr. Obama) actually thinks. There is a difference. Treating the government as though it were just a very big individual leads to serious miscalculations. The government does not behave like a person.
y u no use u?
On the other hand, making all the public surveillance information to the public seems like it would be a danger to privacy, and put too much information in the hands of stalkers, kidnappers, and other criminals. There would be a public backlash when something bad happens.
It seems like we need a new organization to collect information and safeguard it. An organization that is not directly under the command of the executive branches or legislative branches. Access could be granted through either an existing court system or a dedicated court system. This seems like too important an issue to just keep reacting to without a strategy.