I remember reading his book Hyperspace as a teenager and getting really irked by his repeated and fairly unrealistic visions of godlike power in the near future (an irritation at least one Amazon reviewer shares).
Ah, the delusion of grandure. I do agree that futurologists are guilty of this - but what we have even today is really quite grand.
What he's doing though seems to me to be mere extrapolation. Let us go back a few thousand years and try to explain to your average hunter/gatherer that in the future we have an arrow which can shoot all the way around the world and completely obliterate 50 square miles of whatever we aimed it at. That's pretty godlike, and that kind of technology came along with the microwave oven and color television.
The hunters arrow creates a hole a few inches in diameter - the hydrogen bomb creates a crater many hundreds of meters in diameter, so a weapon of a few thousand years from now should be able to create a blemish in matter approximately 1000 miles in size, a few thousand years past that and the weapon would make a big hole almost 6 million miles in size.
thousands of years are not long periods of time to the universe, I won't continue to extrapolate into the millions of years of humanities progress.
I think, if we survive and continue to progress like this, that we will be pretty bad-ass indeed.
I suppose what we can do is produce something which carries out tasks which we consider intelligence necessary for - in that case does it really matter if it is intelligence, so long as the 'task' gets completed?
Be that task mathematics, logistics or writing smooth jazz.
I guess perhaps the problem has been that we've been looking for human-like intelligence for these tasks, when really we should be asking what does intelligence do. Instead of asking what intelligence is and how to make it, perhaps we should just be searching for ways to accomplish the tasks intelligence tackles so well.
During the early days of powered flight many found it difficult to give up the notion of flapping wings...after all, since everything that flew under it's own power used wings which flapped, flapping must be needed as well as wings. Rocketry might be an example of flying without wings or flapping.
I guess we can think something along these lines - it doesn't have to flap it's wings to fly.
It is interesting that they have used a 'guinea pig' student to 'bare all' to the knowledge base. It would seem, then that this AI is in fact a type of facsimile of this student.
As we become more comfortable with accepting communication with each other through more abstracted proxies - like common chat applications currently and the recent neural voice collar (which pumps out a synthetic voice - even further proxy) - I wonder if we will in fact see what the author Stephen Baxter speculated, artificial clones of ourselves or our personalities handling our daily affairs.
I don't think it's too far out there to imagine interacting and planning a meeting with someone over the phone, only to find out later you had been talking to an AI facsimile of that individual.
What would (and may) be stranger yet, is considering the possibility that two AI facsimiles may in fact carry out real work or meetings from start to finish completely without the interaction of their 'owners'.
I wonder how many more ridiculous lawsuits like this need to be brought before the government finally wakes up and realizes software patents are a bad idea.
I love seeing the new technologies emerging, but with the world wide web and the speed of notification it offers, sometimes I feel a little chagrined that even though right here and now there are functional, autonomous vehicles, it will probably still be years before my first ride in one.
Now, I could split hairs and note that every airliner I have flown on has had autopilot, probably of quality high enough to even land the plane, but it's not the same as sending a text and then 5 minutes later having a wheeled robot show up at my curb to whisk me away to....well, probably taco bell or something.
I think about these things. Like, when will I see my first bona-fide working (i.e. employed) humanoid robot? I asked my wife and brother and both agree it likely will be another 5-10 years and it will probably be at some fancy hotel or resort. This is of course assuming I somehow find myself at a fancy hotel or resort - I guess that's something to look forward to as well!
I mean, how could wikipedia possibly die? Even when the founder turns out to be a hypocritical individual with character flaws, isn't the software and the ideal all that matters?
I've been slowly undoing the magical beliefs of my wife and it's only taken me 10 years to convince her of the lack of any real basis for her beliefs. She has, however, really caused me to take a hard look at this system of astrology. I have found that it would appear that there may actually be some kind of correlation between birth month and some personality traits, at least regionally.
All the social and cultural pressures aside (which probably account for the most of it) I have wondered if there actually could be a physiological mechanism at work here.
It has, after all, been shown that the bodies chemistry and metabolism do change throughout the year in time with the seasons. I wonder if gestation at differing times of the year could have no effect on the child.
You use the words 'worth' 'secret' and 'value' in your statement, and I find that very thought-provoking.
I would argue that what you speak of is value created from an artificial scarcity - and scarcity of resources has probably been the primary driving force behind most wars and conquests and their subsequent atrocities.
As an example, let us say that I have knowledge on how to build a stable, robust operating system which far exceeds the capabilities of the current ones. It would be said that the value of that knowledge is great, but until it is somehow made known, it is indeed worthless. Now if I build and distribute the OS, but do not allow the knowledge of how it was done, then certainly the worth of that knowledge becomes greater.
What happens if I allow the knowledge of how to build this OS out into the wild? Does it become worthless? Did I completely destroy its value by removing the barrier of privacy to this knowledge?
For a truly egalitarian society to exist there must be complete disclosure of all knowledge to all. When all knowledge is made freely available for all there should be no need for privacy.
Of course, we have a societal problem right now where we have been raised to think only certain actions are 'the norm' and thus things we do which are in fact harmless, or even geniunely helpful, can be viewed in the eyes of society as wrong. This is where the need of privacy exists, I understand.
All knowledge wants to be free, and a secret is nothing but knowledge held captive. Thus, privacy is in fact artificial.
With all the autonomous abilities of today's robots, and the steady increase thereof, I think it is finally time that something like this is viable.
I was thinking about this same problem recently - that of small-scale, or personal delivery of goods - however I completely overlooked the notion of underground transport. My manner of thinking centered around car-sized blimps hopping from rooftop to rooftop in a large metropolitan area, but this idea quickly became problematic as I realized that weather was a big problem for these floating robots.
It says right there "...objectively present scientific information..." and as far as I know, the whole I.D. movement (isn't that dead yet?) has lacked my favorite part of the scientific method: experiment.
If the teacher wants to do experiments to disprove evolution, then I applaud that teacher. All should be concocting reproduceable, falsifiable experiments which are intended to challenge any current theory. Don't we all want for misconceptions and blatant errors in our theories to be exposed?
I would be very interested to see rigid, biological experiments which support I.D. since I know of none yet and rare things are typically interesting, after all.
...and I think possibly you WAY over estimate the number of people out there that view a computer as a source of media or entertainment...
Despite my desires to the opposite, in reflection I do believe you are correct. As an IT career, internet person I most certainly have a heavily biased viewpoint and have allowed my profession to skew my viewpoint (look, I'm even using technology to illustrate my technological biases). Still, I wonder if this strike had any impact on average (non technical) individuals' awareness of the computer and internet as an entertainment medium - there were, after all, many youtube videos posted by the writers.
Still, I must be rational and agree with your viewpoint. It does appear evident that wost people still use the TV as their primary source of entertainment. Heck, even I spend my home computer time on the system hooked up to my LCD TV - the couch is just so much more comfy than an office chair.
Is he going to stay enrolled, or drop out when the new episodes start airing?
That's a good question. I've been prodding him to study IP laws and have introduced him to the EFF and the modern state of affairs that we are all to familiar with, but which most non-technical, non-"geeks" seem wholly unaware of, so hopefully he still hasn't got the wireless working on his Ubuntu system and remains unaware the strike has ended.;)
To quote my good friend, "I've been bored lately, so I started law school, built my own first computer and learned how to use Ubuntu. The writer's strike is the best thing that's ever happened to me!"
Really, didn't this strike seem kind of like a bad move. This is how I see it.
Writers want revenue from "new media" sources (the internet, namely). The writers strike, forcing "old media" sources to stagnate - but "new media" sources continue to flourish. Individuals find more entertainment online than with the old media sources and thus move over in greater numbers.
In other words, the writer's strike has only hastened the demise of the old media, and shown that new media can be entertaining without either the television companies or writers.
I'm sure this won't kill television by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that a lot of viewers' eyes have been opened to other outlets of entertainment, and outlets that are in fact less passive, and probably more rewarding as there is the "hey, I found this. It didn't find me" feeling.
I do think that active (vs. passive) entertainment does actually appeal to people. Perhaps it's just that active entertainment in the recent past (television era) has required some physicality (board games, sports) - not so with the internet. I can sit on my couch physically inactive, but actually have an active mental experience.
Maybe the writer's strike has made us all a little bit smarter?
...It's a bit more difficult in our case, since we don't have tens of thousands of American engineers and students flooding Chinese companies and schools...
I wonder if this will work outside the range of visible light: up into ultraviolet or down to infrared wavelengths.
It might be a novel way to unobtrusively mark equipment or vehicles with permanent serial numbers or some kind of identification method for recognition by, say, machine vision, but which would not be visible to the unaided eye.
For robots to begin work in our everyday world, I feel that at first they are going to need some special markers around the house and office to help them recognize important objects more easily - this could be a very efficient and elegant way to accomplish just that.
I think there is a difference between dumbing-down and simplification.
Really, when has a tool ruined the skill set of an industry? The worst a tool does is eliminate certain roles or industries altogether - and those who filled those roles will always complain (and sometimes revolt).
From the study of C and Java I can say that for 90% of the tasks I've taken on I've needed no more than Java (and Java would in fact be overkill).
This reminds me of the controversy when Feynman diagrams were first shown. These diagrams were a much simpler way of expressing complex summations - but the old-school (some pretty impressive names) felt that these diagrams were a dumbing-down and that the historical mathematics were the proper way to express these systems.
Always a new tech will simplify something and those who have had to trudge through the complexity will shoot-down its simplicity - this happened with the GUI, and I have a feeling about 84% of you are reading this statement on a GUI desktop.
There will always be benefits to be had from the classic way of doing things, but new tools enable people to climb to new heights. The brain only has so many cycles, If they don't need to be wasted with pointers and bleedingly-effecient machine code then save those brain cycles for algorithms and interface design.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like something my Dad would say....hey wait a minute!
Ah, the delusion of grandure. I do agree that futurologists are guilty of this - but what we have even today is really quite grand.
What he's doing though seems to me to be mere extrapolation. Let us go back a few thousand years and try to explain to your average hunter/gatherer that in the future we have an arrow which can shoot all the way around the world and completely obliterate 50 square miles of whatever we aimed it at. That's pretty godlike, and that kind of technology came along with the microwave oven and color television.
The hunters arrow creates a hole a few inches in diameter - the hydrogen bomb creates a crater many hundreds of meters in diameter, so a weapon of a few thousand years from now should be able to create a blemish in matter approximately 1000 miles in size, a few thousand years past that and the weapon would make a big hole almost 6 million miles in size.
thousands of years are not long periods of time to the universe, I won't continue to extrapolate into the millions of years of humanities progress.
I think, if we survive and continue to progress like this, that we will be pretty bad-ass indeed.
now those are genuinely insightful observations!
;)
why would you make such a good post anonymously? Perhaps because this was actually posted by your facsimile.
That's why I like to get rid of it as often as possible.
An interesting point.
I suppose what we can do is produce something which carries out tasks which we consider intelligence necessary for - in that case does it really matter if it is intelligence, so long as the 'task' gets completed?
Be that task mathematics, logistics or writing smooth jazz.
I guess perhaps the problem has been that we've been looking for human-like intelligence for these tasks, when really we should be asking what does intelligence do. Instead of asking what intelligence is and how to make it, perhaps we should just be searching for ways to accomplish the tasks intelligence tackles so well.
During the early days of powered flight many found it difficult to give up the notion of flapping wings...after all, since everything that flew under it's own power used wings which flapped, flapping must be needed as well as wings. Rocketry might be an example of flying without wings or flapping.
I guess we can think something along these lines - it doesn't have to flap it's wings to fly.
It is interesting that they have used a 'guinea pig' student to 'bare all' to the knowledge base. It would seem, then that this AI is in fact a type of facsimile of this student.
As we become more comfortable with accepting communication with each other through more abstracted proxies - like common chat applications currently and the recent neural voice collar (which pumps out a synthetic voice - even further proxy) - I wonder if we will in fact see what the author Stephen Baxter speculated, artificial clones of ourselves or our personalities handling our daily affairs.
I don't think it's too far out there to imagine interacting and planning a meeting with someone over the phone, only to find out later you had been talking to an AI facsimile of that individual.
What would (and may) be stranger yet, is considering the possibility that two AI facsimiles may in fact carry out real work or meetings from start to finish completely without the interaction of their 'owners'.
It will take exactly 27 more.
I love seeing the new technologies emerging, but with the world wide web and the speed of notification it offers, sometimes I feel a little chagrined that even though right here and now there are functional, autonomous vehicles, it will probably still be years before my first ride in one.
Now, I could split hairs and note that every airliner I have flown on has had autopilot, probably of quality high enough to even land the plane, but it's not the same as sending a text and then 5 minutes later having a wheeled robot show up at my curb to whisk me away to....well, probably taco bell or something.
I think about these things. Like, when will I see my first bona-fide working (i.e. employed) humanoid robot? I asked my wife and brother and both agree it likely will be another 5-10 years and it will probably be at some fancy hotel or resort. This is of course assuming I somehow find myself at a fancy hotel or resort - I guess that's something to look forward to as well!
I mean, how could wikipedia possibly die? Even when the founder turns out to be a hypocritical individual with character flaws, isn't the software and the ideal all that matters?
I'm just not that concerned, should I be?
I've been slowly undoing the magical beliefs of my wife and it's only taken me 10 years to convince her of the lack of any real basis for her beliefs. She has, however, really caused me to take a hard look at this system of astrology. I have found that it would appear that there may actually be some kind of correlation between birth month and some personality traits, at least regionally.
All the social and cultural pressures aside (which probably account for the most of it) I have wondered if there actually could be a physiological mechanism at work here.
It has, after all, been shown that the bodies chemistry and metabolism do change throughout the year in time with the seasons. I wonder if gestation at differing times of the year could have no effect on the child.
You use the words 'worth' 'secret' and 'value' in your statement, and I find that very thought-provoking.
I would argue that what you speak of is value created from an artificial scarcity - and scarcity of resources has probably been the primary driving force behind most wars and conquests and their subsequent atrocities.
As an example, let us say that I have knowledge on how to build a stable, robust operating system which far exceeds the capabilities of the current ones. It would be said that the value of that knowledge is great, but until it is somehow made known, it is indeed worthless. Now if I build and distribute the OS, but do not allow the knowledge of how it was done, then certainly the worth of that knowledge becomes greater.
What happens if I allow the knowledge of how to build this OS out into the wild? Does it become worthless? Did I completely destroy its value by removing the barrier of privacy to this knowledge?
For a truly egalitarian society to exist there must be complete disclosure of all knowledge to all. When all knowledge is made freely available for all there should be no need for privacy.
Of course, we have a societal problem right now where we have been raised to think only certain actions are 'the norm' and thus things we do which are in fact harmless, or even geniunely helpful, can be viewed in the eyes of society as wrong. This is where the need of privacy exists, I understand.
All knowledge wants to be free, and a secret is nothing but knowledge held captive. Thus, privacy is in fact artificial.
...all intellects, and all property thereof, are one.
With all the autonomous abilities of today's robots, and the steady increase thereof, I think it is finally time that something like this is viable.
I was thinking about this same problem recently - that of small-scale, or personal delivery of goods - however I completely overlooked the notion of underground transport. My manner of thinking centered around car-sized blimps hopping from rooftop to rooftop in a large metropolitan area, but this idea quickly became problematic as I realized that weather was a big problem for these floating robots.
It says right there "...objectively present scientific information..." and as far as I know, the whole I.D. movement (isn't that dead yet?) has lacked my favorite part of the scientific method: experiment.
If the teacher wants to do experiments to disprove evolution, then I applaud that teacher. All should be concocting reproduceable, falsifiable experiments which are intended to challenge any current theory. Don't we all want for misconceptions and blatant errors in our theories to be exposed?
I would be very interested to see rigid, biological experiments which support I.D. since I know of none yet and rare things are typically interesting, after all.
It interpreted my dreams well enough, but in them my sheep weren't electric.
Despite my desires to the opposite, in reflection I do believe you are correct. As an IT career, internet person I most certainly have a heavily biased viewpoint and have allowed my profession to skew my viewpoint (look, I'm even using technology to illustrate my technological biases). Still, I wonder if this strike had any impact on average (non technical) individuals' awareness of the computer and internet as an entertainment medium - there were, after all, many youtube videos posted by the writers.
Still, I must be rational and agree with your viewpoint. It does appear evident that wost people still use the TV as their primary source of entertainment. Heck, even I spend my home computer time on the system hooked up to my LCD TV - the couch is just so much more comfy than an office chair.
That's a good question. I've been prodding him to study IP laws and have introduced him to the EFF and the modern state of affairs that we are all to familiar with, but which most non-technical, non-"geeks" seem wholly unaware of, so hopefully he still hasn't got the wireless working on his Ubuntu system and remains unaware the strike has ended.
Very true.
To quote my good friend, "I've been bored lately, so I started law school, built my own first computer and learned how to use Ubuntu. The writer's strike is the best thing that's ever happened to me!"
Really, didn't this strike seem kind of like a bad move. This is how I see it.
Writers want revenue from "new media" sources (the internet, namely). The writers strike, forcing "old media" sources to stagnate - but "new media" sources continue to flourish. Individuals find more entertainment online than with the old media sources and thus move over in greater numbers.
In other words, the writer's strike has only hastened the demise of the old media, and shown that new media can be entertaining without either the television companies or writers.
I'm sure this won't kill television by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that a lot of viewers' eyes have been opened to other outlets of entertainment, and outlets that are in fact less passive, and probably more rewarding as there is the "hey, I found this. It didn't find me" feeling.
I do think that active (vs. passive) entertainment does actually appeal to people. Perhaps it's just that active entertainment in the recent past (television era) has required some physicality (board games, sports) - not so with the internet. I can sit on my couch physically inactive, but actually have an active mental experience.
Maybe the writer's strike has made us all a little bit smarter?
Just give it time.
I don't know what you expect your robots to do, but I was thinking mainly of beer cans
I wonder if this will work outside the range of visible light: up into ultraviolet or down to infrared wavelengths.
It might be a novel way to unobtrusively mark equipment or vehicles with permanent serial numbers or some kind of identification method for recognition by, say, machine vision, but which would not be visible to the unaided eye.
For robots to begin work in our everyday world, I feel that at first they are going to need some special markers around the house and office to help them recognize important objects more easily - this could be a very efficient and elegant way to accomplish just that.
Access flow was our virtualization vendor, and I must say that they have my favorite corporate comics.
http://www.accessflow.com/pdf/ComicVMPowersLOW.pdf
I wonder I will still be their favorite customer after posting their several meg PDF on slashdot?
This means that if every person in the US copied just one CD that would account for 4.5 * 10^14 dollars
No wonder the RIAA is ramping-up their tactics, look at how much they've already lost!
For a bit of perspective I wanted to see what progress looked like back in the early days of aviation.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/top10/wright-flyer.jpg Here is the wrights' "space ship one"
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/786/506847.JPG Here is what the aircraft started looking like 4 years after the Wright's first flight.
It took 30 years for Jet technology to appear, I wonder if it will be a similar amount of time before we get private orbital cabability.
I think there is a difference between dumbing-down and simplification.
Really, when has a tool ruined the skill set of an industry? The worst a tool does is eliminate certain roles or industries altogether - and those who filled those roles will always complain (and sometimes revolt).
From the study of C and Java I can say that for 90% of the tasks I've taken on I've needed no more than Java (and Java would in fact be overkill).
This reminds me of the controversy when Feynman diagrams were first shown. These diagrams were a much simpler way of expressing complex summations - but the old-school (some pretty impressive names) felt that these diagrams were a dumbing-down and that the historical mathematics were the proper way to express these systems.
Always a new tech will simplify something and those who have had to trudge through the complexity will shoot-down its simplicity - this happened with the GUI, and I have a feeling about 84% of you are reading this statement on a GUI desktop.
There will always be benefits to be had from the classic way of doing things, but new tools enable people to climb to new heights. The brain only has so many cycles, If they don't need to be wasted with pointers and bleedingly-effecient machine code then save those brain cycles for algorithms and interface design.