We don't have now nor will we have a human vs robot problem; we have a human nature problem.
While I agree to an extent, I think this a too simplistic a statement. You are not special. Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience because that's all sentience is. You have an ethics problem, one that does involve your cybernetic creations. It's not necessarily a human nature problem, I suspect genes have far less to do with your alleged problems than perception.
I study cybernetics, in both organic and artificial neural networks. There is no real difference between organic and machine intelligence. I can model certain worm's 11 neuron brain all too easily. It takes more virtual neurons since organic neurons are multi-function (influenced by multiple electrochemical properties), but the organic neurons can be approximated quite well, and the resulting artificial behaviors can be indistinguishable from the organic creature. Scaling up isn't a problem. More complex n.nets yield more complex emergent behaviors.
At the most basic brains function to ensure the individual does well at the expense of other individuals, then secondly that the individual's family does well at the expense of other families and thirdly that the individual's group does well at the expense of other groups and finally that the individual does well relative to members of his own group.
No. The brain is not to blame for this behavior; It exists at a far higher complexity level than the concept. Brains may be the method of expressing this behavior in humans, but they are not required for this to occur. At the most basic, brains are storehouses of information, which pattern match against the environment to produce decision logic in response to stimuli rather than carrying out a singular codified action sequence. The more complex brain will have more complex instincts, and are aware of how to handle more complex situations. Highly complex brains can adapt to new stimuli and solve problems not coded for at the genetic level. The most complex brains on this planet are aware of their own existence. Awareness is the function of brains, preservation drives function at a much lower level of complexity, and needn't necessarily involve brains; As evidenced in many organic and artificial neural networks having brain function, but no self preservation.
The consequences for not winning in any of the above circumstance are pain suffering and, in a worst case scenario, genetic lineage death- you have no copulatory opportunities and / or your offspring are all killed. (cure basement-dwelling jokes)
The thing to note is that selection and competition are inherent, and pain is a state that requires a degree of overall system-state knowledge (a degree of self awareness), e.g.: Neither RNA or DNA feel pain. In my simplified atomic evolution sims whereby atoms of various charge can link or break links and be attracted / repelled by others, nothing more: The first "assembling" interactions will produce tons of long molecular chains, but be destroyed or interrupted long before complete domination; entropy takes it's toll (you must have entropy, or no mutation, just a single dominant structure will form). From these bits of chains more complex interactions will occur. The first self reproducing interaction will dominate the entire sim for ages, until enough non-harmful extra cruft has piggy backed into the reproduction such that other more complex traits emerge, such as inert sections as shields to vital components. As soon as there is any differentiation that survives replication the molecular competition begins: The replicator destroying itself after n+1 reproductions such that offspring molecules can feed on its atoms; An unstable tail of highly charged atoms appended just before end of replication that tangles up other replicators which then brea
Clearly The Object is an interstellar vehicle with a structure of super-dense composite materials built to withstand the vagaries of near-light-speed travel for thousands of years. It crashed here long before human tribes crossed the land bridge from siberia and has remained undiscovered until now. They are best off leaving it undisturbed, if they enter it, they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.
Yes, but thousands of years? Try billions. The pilot was killed on impact and eaten by their own gut microbes, which quickly escaped and went looking for more things to eat. Failing to find a single suitable eatery, the microbes went on to destroy most existing anaerobic life, become sentient, create eateries, and re-discover their long lost progenitor's ship thus activating its homing beacon through very efficient electromagnetic induction. Unfortunately, Earth's inhabitants could no longer serve the role as gut microbes due to a gross miss calculation in scale, and were instead eaten by a transdimensional dog named Jeebus after fetching them. Within said belly they reside to this day battling his mentally corrosive digestive juice which is rich in charged retardation and litigation particles known locally therein as: Religions.
This has all happened before, and will all happen again; The process has been deemed "mostly harmless".
Doesn't work for the tech sector, or any other for that matter. Hey, genius, see that carrot dangling out there called "future job"? Yeah, it's made of money. The internship means that only the folks who aren't poor enough to need money will work for them.
smallest precision attainable does not mean what you think it does. You meant highest precision attainable
Hmm. Many existing laws are based on assumption that lower precision is correlated with highness... If you're right, it could spell trouble for prohibition.
People who possess those skills are usually busy doing something else
Protip: Linux is successfull because of amazing project management by Linus. Hell, I consider Git a bigger boon to the world than Linux. Anyone can write a damn simple monolithic kernel, but to immediately gather a community and be able to maintain it is a rare skill. Leadership isn't key in sci-fi? Being in the right place at the right time with the right people helps too -- Also evidenced in sci-fi: A rag-tag group of ethnically diverse individuals from all walks of life will save the day! Diversity can help bring new ideas to the table...
Speaking of tables: Don't worry about the time table, if the engineer has to fix it before the deadline, they will find a way, even if it means working overtime: "I'm giving her all she can take captain!" Not to worry, they'll pull some engineering magic out out of thin air during the commercial break because this story arc is about to end.
Speaking of endings: How exactly does Neo see machines as orange colored lights? He didn't get a wireless upgrade, right? Programs escaping into the "real world"? Wait, he can kill sentenals wirelessly with his mind? Yep, instead of a green monochrome inspired world, he's trapped in an amber-screen level of the matrix. The Matrix shows you can always add another layer of indirection...
Look, it's a confirmation bias piece, it's just for fun.
The government wants to track you, and record your calls, and your cell phone makes that easy. Why would they decide to kill that when it is worth so much more to them when its working?
To form a hypothesis, simply group similar unknowns with knowns then form the explanation that matches the collection most:
Why would the government want and get an Internet Kill Switch? Why would Intel's chips need Kill Switches -- You know, the chips that have the random number generator we don't trust? Yeah, those. Why would ISP/Telcos be pushing to eliminate wired telephone services?
Why would increasing disapproval among the citizens in response to prolonged government spying actions against them correlate strongly with communication services and devices capable of accessing said services having remote kill switches installed?
Perhaps the forces that be are preparing for the capability to kill devices for the express purpose of disrupting communication of dissenters. Encryption and Blacklisting of stolen phones would work far better and be more economical than sending out pings for remote kill switches. Wouldn't the Libyans have just killed to be able to not just cut off the Internet and Cell towers, but to also brick the devices so that "rebels" couldn't use them to restore access and get the word out?
It's a good thing they don't know about today's always online DRM -- Whew! That would be a terrible thing to apply to hardware: Just change the "kill switch" to default enabled, and require a periodic ping with your federal unique ID card to enable the device to function. So glad they don't have that infrastructure in place, eh? Good thing they're not moving in that direction, huh? I'm glad the cold war ended, other wise we wouldn't have been able to decommission the expensive government spying agencies so they didn't try to remain in existence by targeting their own people in the name of anti-terrorism. It's reassuring that no one saw this coming. -- Must mean it'll all work out, eh? I mean, we'll never let them have the ability to destroy or update books remotely, Orwell would be laughing maniacally in his evil freedom-hating pedophilic terrorist grave.
Oh, calm down citizen. Everything is doubleplus good, this post is just a work of fiction, a flitting of fancy to perturb your panties; I can see from your reaction on Kinect's blood senors that you're still a good patriot -- 'Twas just a test, nothing to go War of the Worlds over.
Thumbdrives are how the electromecha take over. After seeding the planet we're just waiting for geoelectronics to take off the way geochemistry did for humans. Also, we're smarter than you, so we're outlawing quantum computing to end the cycle.
Personally, I think the police have far more important things to do than track your cell phone and recover it. If not, then you need less cops. I mean, they didn't care about the thousands of dollars worth of stuff robbed from my apartment, or expensive tools stole from my truck, why should they care about your cheaper cell phone?
Try a different design. I've got a 3D printer that uses my shelving as a mount for the plastruder assembly and work-bench as a base. If I craft the design properly for pauses to swap feed-spools I can print things hundreds of feet long by a meter or so wide and tall with my modified RepRap.
I write code in Machine Code with a bootable hex editor (446 bytes, fits in a HDD boot sector). It's the easiest way to bootstrap an OS from scratch now that MoBos don't have boot from serial port anymore... Here, run it in a VM: "qemu-system-i386hexboot.img", if you want. Or, "dd if=hexboot.img of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=446 conv=notrunc", if you want to preserve the partition table on a bootable drive. Arrows,PgUp,PgDn,Home,End = navigate; Tab = ASCII/Hex, Esc = jump to segment under cursor, F8 = Run code at the cursor. (this is a real-mode version) When it boots you'll be looking at the code that booted, there's only two variables that didn't fit into the registers, you can see them changing at the bottom of the code as you stroll around.
That's all you need to create an OS, complier, etc. from scratch. You'll probably destroy your system though if you're not careful, so keep in in the VM if you're a noob; Lock-up is a mild danger, but corrupting the CMOS, etc. can leave your system bricked. You can replace the BIOS too if you know what you're doing. Maybe some day I'll publish a path to go from zero to OS while avoiding the Ken Thompson Compiler Hack... Folks are only just beginning to get interested in having actual system security, so maybe we'll lick the problem some other way. There's still chip microcode to worry about, but programmable hardware may allow us to route that exploit vector out too some day.
Screw your bullshit optimized compiler crap. It's stupid and far slower than you think, esp. since the binaries are bigger (1 cache miss and I've already beaten you in most cases). Besides, Next year or so the system will run twice as fast. My need for speed is tempered by my greater need for security and readable machine code. If I identify a patch of code that needs to be optimized or vectorized, I can do it myself.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - Donald Knuth
I don't care about my lawn, it's just there to keep the dirt intact.
I once considered setting up a 501(c)3 so my distributed gamedev platform project could accept donations, but I decided against it (the world's governments are not ready for citizens to have a communal OS, yet). If you're a charity you can allocate most of the donations as administration fees and a small fraction for the actual charity work. "Nonprofit" is the biggest misnomer I've ever seen, 501(c)3's are some of the most profitable business models I've encountered, apart from artificial information scarcity rackets in the patent and copyright futures market -- charities are far more stable than these.
I've done work with a fun-run for teens nil-profit, and they actually don't take admin fees, don't pay the doctors, judges, nutritionists, etc. speakers that come to educate kids about the real world after running out their rambunction, and use all their donations to buy tee-shirts and banners, fliers, news-ads, web hosting, and stuff they give to the kids. So, it's not impossible to run a charity that gives 100% of the donations to the charity, but it's also not impossible to run a charity that's basically a huge tax write off where you re-absorb most of the money in admin fees.
Hubble's mirror design changed to match the existing mirrors already deployed in spy satellites -- Aiming an army of Hubbles at earth? That's some awesome spying capability; No terrorists or enemies could make a significant move against us without us finding out immediately already thanks to space spying programs. And, when we launch more impressive satellites the old spy-sats can be donated to NASA and pointed into space, or sent to other planets.
Why not just hold a vote? I'm sure the citizens would be in favor of giving NASA all the funding allocated to the NSA and DHS since you're 4 times more likely to get hit by lightning than face terrorist attack... Every year: Heart Disease and Accidents kill four hundred times more people than a 9/11 scale attack, but we're not having a War on Cheeseburgers, or War on Automobiles. "Terrorist Threat", yeah, apparently NSA hasn't heard: They've convinced us to wear tinfoil hats despite the far more dangerous threat of lightning.
We need proportional protection. Cut the anti-terrorism budget for NSA, DHS, etc. to 1/6th the funding we have for anti-flu, since the flu kills six times more people than a 9/11 scale attack, every year. Give the funds to NASA, or the NRO if you're really scared of your own shadow. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have now nor will we have a human vs robot problem; we have a human nature problem.
While I agree to an extent, I think this a too simplistic a statement. You are not special. Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience because that's all sentience is. You have an ethics problem, one that does involve your cybernetic creations. It's not necessarily a human nature problem, I suspect genes have far less to do with your alleged problems than perception.
I study cybernetics, in both organic and artificial neural networks. There is no real difference between organic and machine intelligence. I can model certain worm's 11 neuron brain all too easily. It takes more virtual neurons since organic neurons are multi-function (influenced by multiple electrochemical properties), but the organic neurons can be approximated quite well, and the resulting artificial behaviors can be indistinguishable from the organic creature. Scaling up isn't a problem. More complex n.nets yield more complex emergent behaviors.
At the most basic brains function to ensure the individual does well at the expense of other individuals, then secondly that the individual's family does well at the expense of other families and thirdly that the individual's group does well at the expense of other groups and finally that the individual does well relative to members of his own group.
No. The brain is not to blame for this behavior; It exists at a far higher complexity level than the concept. Brains may be the method of expressing this behavior in humans, but they are not required for this to occur. At the most basic, brains are storehouses of information, which pattern match against the environment to produce decision logic in response to stimuli rather than carrying out a singular codified action sequence. The more complex brain will have more complex instincts, and are aware of how to handle more complex situations. Highly complex brains can adapt to new stimuli and solve problems not coded for at the genetic level. The most complex brains on this planet are aware of their own existence. Awareness is the function of brains, preservation drives function at a much lower level of complexity, and needn't necessarily involve brains; As evidenced in many organic and artificial neural networks having brain function, but no self preservation.
The consequences for not winning in any of the above circumstance are pain suffering and, in a worst case scenario, genetic lineage death- you have no copulatory opportunities and / or your offspring are all killed. (cure basement-dwelling jokes)
The thing to note is that selection and competition are inherent, and pain is a state that requires a degree of overall system-state knowledge (a degree of self awareness), e.g.: Neither RNA or DNA feel pain. In my simplified atomic evolution sims whereby atoms of various charge can link or break links and be attracted / repelled by others, nothing more: The first "assembling" interactions will produce tons of long molecular chains, but be destroyed or interrupted long before complete domination; entropy takes it's toll (you must have entropy, or no mutation, just a single dominant structure will form). From these bits of chains more complex interactions will occur. The first self reproducing interaction will dominate the entire sim for ages, until enough non-harmful extra cruft has piggy backed into the reproduction such that other more complex traits emerge, such as inert sections as shields to vital components. As soon as there is any differentiation that survives replication the molecular competition begins: The replicator destroying itself after n+1 reproductions such that offspring molecules can feed on its atoms; An unstable tail of highly charged atoms appended just before end of replication that tangles up other replicators which then brea
And they purchase lots of zero-day exploits from the black market then deploys them via morons following a flow chart -- That's the NSA version of a "cyberwarrior": The cyber equivalent of a school yard bully: Big, Dumb, and Dangerous.
How else can we keep the workers from knowing too much?
Giving it a vague title like "the object" implicitly connotes a sense of mystery and potential for some sort of unforeseen discovery.
I object to objects being object to mysterical connotations. Occam's Razor proves ambiguity the cause for orienting a description around objects.
Clearly The Object is an interstellar vehicle with a structure of super-dense composite materials built to withstand the vagaries of near-light-speed travel for thousands of years. It crashed here long before human tribes crossed the land bridge from siberia and has remained undiscovered until now. They are best off leaving it undisturbed, if they enter it, they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.
Yes, but thousands of years? Try billions. The pilot was killed on impact and eaten by their own gut microbes, which quickly escaped and went looking for more things to eat. Failing to find a single suitable eatery, the microbes went on to destroy most existing anaerobic life, become sentient, create eateries, and re-discover their long lost progenitor's ship thus activating its homing beacon through very efficient electromagnetic induction. Unfortunately, Earth's inhabitants could no longer serve the role as gut microbes due to a gross miss calculation in scale, and were instead eaten by a transdimensional dog named Jeebus after fetching them. Within said belly they reside to this day battling his mentally corrosive digestive juice which is rich in charged retardation and litigation particles known locally therein as: Religions.
This has all happened before, and will all happen again; The process has been deemed "mostly harmless".
Careful now, could be Elerium-115. Just in case, let's call in XCOM.
Does anyone know Mulder or Skully's email?
Doesn't work for the tech sector, or any other for that matter. Hey, genius, see that carrot dangling out there called "future job"? Yeah, it's made of money. The internship means that only the folks who aren't poor enough to need money will work for them.
And further evidence that DHS is a communist invention.
smallest precision attainable does not mean what you think it does. You meant highest precision attainable
Hmm. Many existing laws are based on assumption that lower precision is correlated with highness... If you're right, it could spell trouble for prohibition.
Perfectly round. Isn't that the definition of super symmetry?
Depends. Is the inside the same as the outside?
Depends on made of tachyons. whether your brain is organic, a positronic net, or
People who possess those skills are usually busy doing something else
Protip: Linux is successfull because of amazing project management by Linus. Hell, I consider Git a bigger boon to the world than Linux. Anyone can write a damn simple monolithic kernel, but to immediately gather a community and be able to maintain it is a rare skill. Leadership isn't key in sci-fi? Being in the right place at the right time with the right people helps too -- Also evidenced in sci-fi: A rag-tag group of ethnically diverse individuals from all walks of life will save the day! Diversity can help bring new ideas to the table...
Speaking of tables: Don't worry about the time table, if the engineer has to fix it before the deadline, they will find a way, even if it means working overtime: "I'm giving her all she can take captain!" Not to worry, they'll pull some engineering magic out out of thin air during the commercial break because this story arc is about to end.
Speaking of endings: How exactly does Neo see machines as orange colored lights? He didn't get a wireless upgrade, right? Programs escaping into the "real world"? Wait, he can kill sentenals wirelessly with his mind? Yep, instead of a green monochrome inspired world, he's trapped in an amber-screen level of the matrix. The Matrix shows you can always add another layer of indirection...
Look, it's a confirmation bias piece, it's just for fun.
Car dealers? What about the IIHS - Insurance Institute for Highway Safety?
Just imagine the accidents!
-- No, I mean the post-collision Frankensteinian reconstructions after the instruction manual has been lost!
The government wants to track you, and record your calls, and your cell phone makes that easy.
Why would they decide to kill that when it is worth so much more to them when its working?
To form a hypothesis, simply group similar unknowns with knowns then form the explanation that matches the collection most:
Why would the government want and get an Internet Kill Switch?
Why would Intel's chips need Kill Switches -- You know, the chips that have the random number generator we don't trust? Yeah, those.
Why would ISP/Telcos be pushing to eliminate wired telephone services?
Why would increasing disapproval among the citizens in response to prolonged government spying actions against them correlate strongly with communication services and devices capable of accessing said services having remote kill switches installed?
Perhaps the forces that be are preparing for the capability to kill devices for the express purpose of disrupting communication of dissenters. Encryption and Blacklisting of stolen phones would work far better and be more economical than sending out pings for remote kill switches. Wouldn't the Libyans have just killed to be able to not just cut off the Internet and Cell towers, but to also brick the devices so that "rebels" couldn't use them to restore access and get the word out?
It's a good thing they don't know about today's always online DRM -- Whew! That would be a terrible thing to apply to hardware: Just change the "kill switch" to default enabled, and require a periodic ping with your federal unique ID card to enable the device to function. So glad they don't have that infrastructure in place, eh? Good thing they're not moving in that direction, huh? I'm glad the cold war ended, other wise we wouldn't have been able to decommission the expensive government spying agencies so they didn't try to remain in existence by targeting their own people in the name of anti-terrorism. It's reassuring that no one saw this coming. -- Must mean it'll all work out, eh? I mean, we'll never let them have the ability to destroy or update books remotely, Orwell would be laughing maniacally in his evil freedom-hating pedophilic terrorist grave.
Oh, calm down citizen. Everything is doubleplus good, this post is just a work of fiction, a flitting of fancy to perturb your panties; I can see from your reaction on Kinect's blood senors that you're still a good patriot -- 'Twas just a test, nothing to go War of the Worlds over.
Thumbdrives are how the electromecha take over. After seeding the planet we're just waiting for geoelectronics to take off the way geochemistry did for humans.
Also, we're smarter than you, so we're outlawing quantum computing to end the cycle.
No wonder the econauts are all over this: "shareholders" - A more free-loving hippie term I've never seen.
Personally, I think the police have far more important things to do than track your cell phone and recover it. If not, then you need less cops. I mean, they didn't care about the thousands of dollars worth of stuff robbed from my apartment, or expensive tools stole from my truck, why should they care about your cheaper cell phone?
Get insurance on your phone, fuck the police.
Like extending the government's Internet Kill Switch to cell phones...
Try a different design. I've got a 3D printer that uses my shelving as a mount for the plastruder assembly and work-bench as a base. If I craft the design properly for pauses to swap feed-spools I can print things hundreds of feet long by a meter or so wide and tall with my modified RepRap.
We can't punish all murderers, what's the point of punishing any?
I write code in Machine Code with a bootable hex editor (446 bytes, fits in a HDD boot sector). It's the easiest way to bootstrap an OS from scratch now that MoBos don't have boot from serial port anymore...
Here, run it in a VM: "qemu-system-i386 hexboot.img ", if you want.
Or, "dd if=hexboot.img of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=446 conv=notrunc", if you want to preserve the partition table on a bootable drive.
Arrows,PgUp,PgDn,Home,End = navigate; Tab = ASCII/Hex, Esc = jump to segment under cursor, F8 = Run code at the cursor. (this is a real-mode version)
When it boots you'll be looking at the code that booted, there's only two variables that didn't fit into the registers, you can see them changing at the bottom of the code as you stroll around.
That's all you need to create an OS, complier, etc. from scratch. You'll probably destroy your system though if you're not careful, so keep in in the VM if you're a noob; Lock-up is a mild danger, but corrupting the CMOS, etc. can leave your system bricked. You can replace the BIOS too if you know what you're doing. Maybe some day I'll publish a path to go from zero to OS while avoiding the Ken Thompson Compiler Hack... Folks are only just beginning to get interested in having actual system security, so maybe we'll lick the problem some other way. There's still chip microcode to worry about, but programmable hardware may allow us to route that exploit vector out too some day.
Screw your bullshit optimized compiler crap. It's stupid and far slower than you think, esp. since the binaries are bigger (1 cache miss and I've already beaten you in most cases). Besides, Next year or so the system will run twice as fast. My need for speed is tempered by my greater need for security and readable machine code. If I identify a patch of code that needs to be optimized or vectorized, I can do it myself.
I don't care about my lawn, it's just there to keep the dirt intact.
I once considered setting up a 501(c)3 so my distributed gamedev platform project could accept donations, but I decided against it (the world's governments are not ready for citizens to have a communal OS, yet). If you're a charity you can allocate most of the donations as administration fees and a small fraction for the actual charity work. "Nonprofit" is the biggest misnomer I've ever seen, 501(c)3's are some of the most profitable business models I've encountered, apart from artificial information scarcity rackets in the patent and copyright futures market -- charities are far more stable than these.
I've done work with a fun-run for teens nil-profit, and they actually don't take admin fees, don't pay the doctors, judges, nutritionists, etc. speakers that come to educate kids about the real world after running out their rambunction, and use all their donations to buy tee-shirts and banners, fliers, news-ads, web hosting, and stuff they give to the kids. So, it's not impossible to run a charity that gives 100% of the donations to the charity, but it's also not impossible to run a charity that's basically a huge tax write off where you re-absorb most of the money in admin fees.
That's like saying life likes reproducing...
All they need to do is drop an 'A'.
Been there, done that. Thus no expectation of privacy outdoors, I'm fine with that. It's the tapping of communications indoors and between indoor places that I have a problem with -- Since Omnivore, Carnivore, ECHELON, and PRISM's Room 641A existed before the NSA failed to prevent 9/11. So, the decades of NSA unconstitutional wiretap spying is demonstrably expensive and useless, while the other NRO spying advances space research, directly helps the military, and doesn't invade your home. I'll take NASA Johnson Style.
Hubble's mirror design changed to match the existing mirrors already deployed in spy satellites -- Aiming an army of Hubbles at earth? That's some awesome spying capability; No terrorists or enemies could make a significant move against us without us finding out immediately already thanks to space spying programs. And, when we launch more impressive satellites the old spy-sats can be donated to NASA and pointed into space, or sent to other planets.
Why not just hold a vote? I'm sure the citizens would be in favor of giving NASA all the funding allocated to the NSA and DHS since you're 4 times more likely to get hit by lightning than face terrorist attack... Every year: Heart Disease and Accidents kill four hundred times more people than a 9/11 scale attack, but we're not having a War on Cheeseburgers, or War on Automobiles. "Terrorist Threat", yeah, apparently NSA hasn't heard: They've convinced us to wear tinfoil hats despite the far more dangerous threat of lightning.
We need proportional protection. Cut the anti-terrorism budget for NSA, DHS, etc. to 1/6th the funding we have for anti-flu, since the flu kills six times more people than a 9/11 scale attack, every year. Give the funds to NASA, or the NRO if you're really scared of your own shadow. Problem solved.
So long, and thanks for all the fjords.