I mean DNA extraction from crime scenes is already routine (for serious crimes). Of course we already also have the techology to sequence DNA and identify the genes. I wonder how long before they can use that information to build a computer model of the donor's expected physical appearance? It can't be that far off.
Then eventually there will be portable devices, routinely carried by police officers, which upon "tasting" a fingerprint or a discarded hair follicle or the like, will be able within a matter of seconds to estimate the suspect's appearance, display a picture and automatically broadcast it to all other officers in the vicinity.
Looks like "Minority Report" didn't even scratch the surface of where we're headed.
Of course we can expect criminals to respond by using "glove" and "hat" technology to foil the detectors and "disguise" technology to evade capture;o)
As a Scot, obviously I don't find the compliment objectionable per se, but there *are* those who would interpret such a remark as racist. In that it perpetuates a racial sterotype which probably isn't justified.
It's no wonder iD decided to delay Doom III, anyway. With the economy in its current condition, and the high cost of suitable top-end video cards ($400+) it's very likely that any launch this year would be met with very poor sales. Better for them to wait until next year when (i) hopefully people will have more money and (ii) video cards with an adequate spec will have come down in price a bit.
I've been using Linux as my primary (and often only) OS for the past ten years.
I don't give a flying f**k what SCO do: I'm not giving up my Linux, and I'm not paying SCO for it either. They can take their "licence" and stick it where the sun don't shine.
And I'll be keeping a large pointy screwdriver near the front door in case some asshole in uniform turns up to try and take it away from me.
I think more people than you may realize will adopt the same attitude when they find that most of their hardware won't work with any BSD kernel.
...like the "interoperability" between my JVC-HM-DR10000 DVHS machine and my Sony KP61PS2 61" rear projection set. Individually, they are awesome pieces of equipment. As for playing together well though, I suppose they do what's expected of them only if your expectations are based on what first-generation VCRs could do - but the interoperability features that are supposed to let the VCR and the TV control each other are so flawed that they just have to be disabled. For example, with them switched on, no matter what input the VCR is recording through, if I change channels on the TV or switch it off then the recording stops and the VCR powers off. The other stupid glitches are just too weird to try and explain. But it all adds up to the fact that a good proportion of the cost of these boxes was wasted because the features they paid for just don't work at all in any usable way.
Well yeah I liked Blake's Seven too (apart from the laughably named "special effects", there we shall not go!) but to say that Babylon 5 didn't expose that amount of character depth is just to show a total ignorance of scope of the latter series.
We saw Londo Mollari morph slowly from a drunken buffoon into a mass murderer and beyond; G'Kar changed from a devious and arrogant diplomat into a deeply humble and spiritual man - and that's just two of the characters. I remember in the third season in particular, where the pivotal point resided for these characters, feeling a deep sense of despair at what was happening. This was a show that would affect your mood for days after seeing it, and not always in a good way.
The characters in Blake's Seven on the other hand were mere sterotypes. Coloured-in sterotypes maybe, in the sense that the writers had granted them more than one personality characteristic each (how generous), but they hardly changed or grew throughout the life of the show, and the story never attained anywhere near the same dramatic impact that Babylon 5 did at its height.
It was only to be expected. Blake's Seven was written and produced by the same people who made Dr Who. Dr. Who, though still a lot of fun, wasn't much more than children's tea-time adventure serial, dramatically speaking, and Blake's Seven wasn't all that different.
> A little belly hanging out over the pants can be sexy.
Yeah, providing that: (i) it's not excessive or out of proportion, and (ii) it isn't hairy.
There are far too many girls walking around London wearing hipster jeans and short tops, exposing great hairy rolls of flab that just make you want to upchuck your lunch. I mean, yes let's not get over-obsessed about body shape; but on the other hand, ladies, if your belly looks like it belongs to a middle aged beer drinking lorry driver, a little modesty wouldn't go amiss.
Hmmm...Mystery Science...Mister Sinus...yeah, it's similar all right. Surprising if they haven't had a "Cease and Desist" yet, on the basis of trademark violation or something.
I don't think I've ever seen so many ways to spell a single word (excercise) in one place before.
But more to the point - what everybody seems to be forgetting is that it is *normal* for male primates in early middle age to start developing a pot belly. It's normal for pre-menopausal females to put on weight too. It has been argued that it attempts to ensure the body will have sufficient resources to survive disease and injury (which become more likely and more devastating as one gets older).
This "gym culture" is a right pain in the ass anyway. I can think of better ways of spending my time that on some damn treadmill. And I'm far from convinced that it increases longevity. To take one recent example which should strike a chord for many of us: Douglas Adams died suddenly during a gym workout. And Jim Fixx - whom many credit with starting the 1970's "jogging" craze - died of a heart attack while, you guessed it, out jogging.
There *are* children who are not old enough or not mature enough yet to be trusted with something as important as, say, their own safety. All children belong to this group until they grow up sufficiently. Looks like you yourself haven't quite got there yet, doesn't it. And they still let you have children?
Check the history. If you Google for Gartner and OSS/Linux etc., you will see that Gartner's reports are ALWAYS pro-Microsoft even when their supporting arguments are very weak indeed. So no surprise there.
By comparison, Bloor Research reports are usually positive about Linux and Open Source in general.
Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and bootlickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.
Making something artificial that is as robust as a living being is much harder
Obviously, or we'd already have done so. Many things are difficult, that were once thought to be impossible but are now commonplace.
the "brains" of the robots we can create are much more fragile than we are. We just give them weatherproof, inflexibile coatings before we turn them off and send them into space. Also keep in mind that these robots are made to do less. This inflexibilty means that less can break. This is true in the biological world as well. To do a more apt comparison would mean comparing much simpler organisms survival to the computers we send into space.
It's hardly relevant to quibble about what is apt or inapt. This isn't an Olympic contest with rules to make things fair between machines and humans. For practical purposes we are only interested in comparing humans vs. competent, intelligent, adaptable machines that do not yet exist, but whose necessary properties are reasonably well understood.
The only thing our robots are more "robust" at than life is being off so that they consume no resources.
Nonsense. We already make electronics packages that can survive the radiation, extreme temperatures, airlessness and zero gravity of space much better than humans can. But you are right about the advantage of power management, of which more in a minute.
This, and the fact that humans are not expendable is the only reason we send robots into space instead of humans.
No not really. For well-defined mission profiles, it is not only cheaper but less risky to send a single-minded, pre-programmed robot to do the job.
In fact, a computer consumes a lot more energy to do what it does than a human does to accomplish what it does (a human accomplishes a good deal more, but to limit it to an area that you already know about, a brain uses a lot less energy than a CPU does).
Misleading and irrelevant. The human brain consumes about 25W. The fastest current Pentium IVs and Athlons consume about three times that in full power mode, but so far every generation of processor has been succeeded by a lower power version, so you can probably expect 25W Pentium IV's before too long. Technology will eventually deliver a computation rate per Watt close to the theoretical limit set by thermodynamics. Good luck in trying to do that with organic human brains! And don't forget that artificial processors can spend any proportion of their lifetime completely switched off or in some kind of sleep mode to conserver power; humans can't do that for more than about 50% of their duty cycle.
This is how it will play out. The timescales are dependent only on how long it takes to develop the necessary technology.
To reach the nearest stars for investigative purposes within a usefully short journey time, say a decade or so, we need a propulsion technology capable of getting us there. The difficulty of this is proportional, roughly speaking, to the mass of the probe's payload and engines. We can therefore make this more feasible if technology can also deliver a means of making the payload less massive. Since we can't shrink humans plus their life support equipment down to a few grams, that translates to making small computers capable of acting independently once out of effective communication range.
Fortunately, the apparent longevity of Moore's Law makes this rather more likely than not. By 2013 (judging by the trends of the last few decades that's six speed-doubling periods plus a year to work on power consumption issues), people will be buying personal computers equipped with 200GHz P4 processors, or the contemporary equivalent. Five years later, terahertz computing should be commonplace. This computation rate is more than enough to simulate an entire human brain directly at the synapse level. You could have a really stupid AI model and the thing would
I think I see your problem. You're taking your hints from science fiction authors rather than the science itself.
*sigh*. I don't have a problem, and you took this out of context. I only mentioned science fiction in the context of what people are capable of imagining versus what actually happens, to illustrate that what you think is plausible now is far short of what might actually appear in a few short decades.
Will respond to the rest later, gotta be somewhere else now.
But the technology we have today was unforeseen by previous generations. Just think about the internet for example. Asimov came closest I think, with his "Multivac" - but even he thought it was much farther off.
So the technology may yet appear in our own lifetimes. Once the right component density is available (only a matter of time, now) it could take just one breakthrough in AI systems design to change everything.
But if you have a principled objection to the possibility of truly strong AI then there is probably nothing I can say to convince you. You may still be denying it when it comes knocking at your door.
As far as fragility is concerned, it is much easier *even in theory* let alone in practice, to make electronic devices that can withstand extremely harsh conditions such as exist in space, than it is to harden humans. It's not even certain, without a prohibitively massive amount of shielding, how long humans could survive the solar and cosmic radiation out beyond the van Allen belt without contracting terminal cancer.
I'm not going to give you an essay here, but it is well understood and widely agreed that we will send intelligent autonomous probes to the nearby stars long before we send humans, because they can be made small (and therefore cheap to power and propel) and we can't; because they can withstand the long journey and extreme conditions and we can't; because they can do without tonnes of food water and air and expensive organic recycling systems, and we can't.
So who's fragile?
It may still turn out that the human body relies, for its continued health and existence, upon the presence of as yet undetected substances and/or symbiotic microorganisms in our own biosphere. Substances and organisms that we therefore don't bring with us when we leave Earth. You have surely noticed that those who return from long stays even in Low Earth Orbit generally don't look too healthy afterwards? It might all be due to the absence of gravity, but then again it might not.
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous, of course.
I mean DNA extraction from crime scenes is already routine (for serious crimes). Of course we already also have the techology to sequence DNA and identify the genes. I wonder how long before they can use that information to build a computer model of the donor's expected physical appearance? It can't be that far off.
;o)
Then eventually there will be portable devices, routinely carried by police officers, which upon "tasting" a fingerprint or a discarded hair follicle or the like, will be able within a matter of seconds to estimate the suspect's appearance, display a picture and automatically broadcast it to all other officers in the vicinity.
Looks like "Minority Report" didn't even scratch the surface of where we're headed.
Of course we can expect criminals to respond by using "glove" and "hat" technology to foil the detectors and "disguise" technology to evade capture
Why, because Scots people are more "canny"?
As a Scot, obviously I don't find the compliment objectionable per se, but there *are* those who would interpret such a remark as racist. In that it perpetuates a racial sterotype which probably isn't justified.
It's no wonder iD decided to delay Doom III, anyway. With the economy in its current condition, and the high cost of suitable top-end video cards ($400+) it's very likely that any launch this year would be met with very poor sales. Better for them to wait until next year when (i) hopefully people will have more money and (ii) video cards with an adequate spec will have come down in price a bit.
You mean like in the UK.
Yeah, two million jobs that are probably already headed for India anyway.
You obviously haven't heard of an Anton Pillers Order.
I was joking about the pointy screwdriver, in case there are any assholes in uniform listening...
I've been using Linux as my primary (and often only) OS for the past ten years.
I don't give a flying f**k what SCO do: I'm not giving up my Linux, and I'm not paying SCO for it either. They can take their "licence" and stick it where the sun don't shine.
And I'll be keeping a large pointy screwdriver near the front door in case some asshole in uniform turns up to try and take it away from me.
I think more people than you may realize will adopt the same attitude when they find that most of their hardware won't work with any BSD kernel.
...like the "interoperability" between my JVC-HM-DR10000 DVHS machine and my Sony KP61PS2 61" rear projection set. Individually, they are awesome pieces of equipment. As for playing together well though, I suppose they do what's expected of them only if your expectations are based on what first-generation VCRs could do - but the interoperability features that are supposed to let the VCR and the TV control each other are so flawed that they just have to be disabled. For example, with them switched on, no matter what input the VCR is recording through, if I change channels on the TV or switch it off then the recording stops and the VCR powers off. The other stupid glitches are just too weird to try and explain. But it all adds up to the fact that a good proportion of the cost of these boxes was wasted because the features they paid for just don't work at all in any usable way.
Well yeah I liked Blake's Seven too (apart from the laughably named "special effects", there we shall not go!) but to say that Babylon 5 didn't expose that amount of character depth is just to show a total ignorance of scope of the latter series.
We saw Londo Mollari morph slowly from a drunken buffoon into a mass murderer and beyond; G'Kar changed from a devious and arrogant diplomat into a deeply humble and spiritual man - and that's just two of the characters. I remember in the third season in particular, where the pivotal point resided for these characters, feeling a deep sense of despair at what was happening. This was a show that would affect your mood for days after seeing it, and not always in a good way.
The characters in Blake's Seven on the other hand were mere sterotypes. Coloured-in sterotypes maybe, in the sense that the writers had granted them more than one personality characteristic each (how generous), but they hardly changed or grew throughout the life of the show, and the story never attained anywhere near the same dramatic impact that Babylon 5 did at its height.
It was only to be expected. Blake's Seven was written and produced by the same people who made Dr Who. Dr. Who, though still a lot of fun, wasn't much more than children's tea-time adventure serial, dramatically speaking, and Blake's Seven wasn't all that different.
Alan! What the blazes are you doing surfing slashdot? Get back to work!
> A little belly hanging out over the pants can be sexy.
Yeah, providing that: (i) it's not excessive or out of proportion, and (ii) it isn't hairy.
There are far too many girls walking around London wearing hipster jeans and short tops, exposing great hairy rolls of flab that just make you want to upchuck your lunch. I mean, yes let's not get over-obsessed about body shape; but on the other hand, ladies, if your belly looks like it belongs to a middle aged beer drinking lorry driver, a little modesty wouldn't go amiss.
Hmmm...Mystery Science...Mister Sinus...yeah, it's similar all right. Surprising if they haven't had a "Cease and Desist" yet, on the basis of trademark violation or something.
Dammit. It's "exercise". EXERCISE. Isn't it?
I don't think I've ever seen so many ways to spell a single word (excercise) in one place before.
But more to the point - what everybody seems to be forgetting is that it is *normal* for male primates in early middle age to start developing a pot belly. It's normal for pre-menopausal females to put on weight too. It has been argued that it attempts to ensure the body will have sufficient resources to survive disease and injury (which become more likely and more devastating as one gets older).
This "gym culture" is a right pain in the ass anyway. I can think of better ways of spending my time that on some damn treadmill. And I'm far from convinced that it increases longevity. To take one recent example which should strike a chord for many of us: Douglas Adams died suddenly during a gym workout. And Jim Fixx - whom many credit with starting the 1970's "jogging" craze - died of a heart attack while, you guessed it, out jogging.
What's that bad smell? Oh no, the Microsoft employees are visiting Slashdot again.
There *are* children who are not old enough or not mature enough yet to be trusted with something as important as, say, their own safety. All children belong to this group until they grow up sufficiently. Looks like you yourself haven't quite got there yet, doesn't it. And they still let you have children?
I think 10 years is a bit of a stretch, unless they manage to kill off open source through political or legislative means.
Check the history. If you Google for Gartner and OSS/Linux etc., you will see that Gartner's reports are ALWAYS pro-Microsoft even when their supporting arguments are very weak indeed. So no surprise there.
By comparison, Bloor Research reports are usually positive about Linux and Open Source in general.
Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and bootlickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.
-- Journal of the Whills
Obviously, or we'd already have done so. Many things are difficult, that were once thought to be impossible but are now commonplace.
It's hardly relevant to quibble about what is apt or inapt. This isn't an Olympic contest with rules to make things fair between machines and humans. For practical purposes we are only interested in comparing humans vs. competent, intelligent, adaptable machines that do not yet exist, but whose necessary properties are reasonably well understood.
Nonsense. We already make electronics packages that can survive the radiation, extreme temperatures, airlessness and zero gravity of space much better than humans can. But you are right about the advantage of power management, of which more in a minute.
No not really. For well-defined mission profiles, it is not only cheaper but less risky to send a single-minded, pre-programmed robot to do the job.
Misleading and irrelevant. The human brain consumes about 25W. The fastest current Pentium IVs and Athlons consume about three times that in full power mode, but so far every generation of processor has been succeeded by a lower power version, so you can probably expect 25W Pentium IV's before too long. Technology will eventually deliver a computation rate per Watt close to the theoretical limit set by thermodynamics. Good luck in trying to do that with organic human brains! And don't forget that artificial processors can spend any proportion of their lifetime completely switched off or in some kind of sleep mode to conserver power; humans can't do that for more than about 50% of their duty cycle.
This is how it will play out. The timescales are dependent only on how long it takes to develop the necessary technology.
To reach the nearest stars for investigative purposes within a usefully short journey time, say a decade or so, we need a propulsion technology capable of getting us there. The difficulty of this is proportional, roughly speaking, to the mass of the probe's payload and engines. We can therefore make this more feasible if technology can also deliver a means of making the payload less massive. Since we can't shrink humans plus their life support equipment down to a few grams, that translates to making small computers capable of acting independently once out of effective communication range.
Fortunately, the apparent longevity of Moore's Law makes this rather more likely than not. By 2013 (judging by the trends of the last few decades that's six speed-doubling periods plus a year to work on power consumption issues), people will be buying personal computers equipped with 200GHz P4 processors, or the contemporary equivalent. Five years later, terahertz computing should be commonplace. This computation rate is more than enough to simulate an entire human brain directly at the synapse level. You could have a really stupid AI model and the thing would
Will respond to the rest later, gotta be somewhere else now.
Well that's how things are today, all right.
But the technology we have today was unforeseen by previous generations. Just think about the internet for example. Asimov came closest I think, with his "Multivac" - but even he thought it was much farther off.
So the technology may yet appear in our own lifetimes. Once the right component density is available (only a matter of time, now) it could take just one breakthrough in AI systems design to change everything.
But if you have a principled objection to the possibility of truly strong AI then there is probably nothing I can say to convince you. You may still be denying it when it comes knocking at your door.
As far as fragility is concerned, it is much easier *even in theory* let alone in practice, to make electronic devices that can withstand extremely harsh conditions such as exist in space, than it is to harden humans. It's not even certain, without a prohibitively massive amount of shielding, how long humans could survive the solar and cosmic radiation out beyond the van Allen belt without contracting terminal cancer.
I'm not going to give you an essay here, but it is well understood and widely agreed that we will send intelligent autonomous probes to the nearby stars long before we send humans, because they can be made small (and therefore cheap to power and propel) and we can't; because they can withstand the long journey and extreme conditions and we can't; because they can do without tonnes of food water and air and expensive organic recycling systems, and we can't.
So who's fragile?
It may still turn out that the human body relies, for its continued health and existence, upon the presence of as yet undetected substances and/or symbiotic microorganisms in our own biosphere. Substances and organisms that we therefore don't bring with us when we leave Earth. You have surely noticed that those who return from long stays even in Low Earth Orbit generally don't look too healthy afterwards? It might all be due to the absence of gravity, but then again it might not.