...you'll still be there on the network, for all your "friends".
I bet that's Google's solution to mortality, in case the medial singularity doesn't happen.
Next step is making people believe that the mind of the deceased has been uploaded in the cloud !
To me, innovation is how humans (or animals) make use of something that already exists. The new use IS the innovation.
For instance, some monkey groups are using wood sticks to get ants out and eat them.
Creating the wood stick (even by separating it from a tree or bush) isn't innovation : They already exist.
Putting the stick into the ant nest isn't innovation : Any random event (wind, birds...) can result in having a stick into an ant nest.
Putting the stick into the ant nest, waiting for the ants to walk on the stick, and eat them isn't innovation : If you create a database of things where you have stick, monkey, ant, nest and possible relationships, extracting random information from your database will inevitably result in this tuple / words being extracted "monkey uses wood stick to get ants out and eat the ants.".
To me, the innovation is WHY the heck the computer / random record picker would choose / consider this possibility as more interesting, from one point of view (the monkey, the ant, the universe, whatever...) than previously.
To me, THIS is innovation.
There has to be a point of view. There has to be an innovator.
Does the computer need to innovate for himself ? My answer is no.
Can the computer propose something innovative, useful and meaningful ? Put it another way, can the computer judge the utility of an innovation for humans ? My answer is probably no. Because humans care about monkeys, ants, universe and the rest.
And humans are creating culture, whereas computers are not.
In "The Last Question", the "God computer" you're talking about is composed of... humans. (Humanity IS the computer)
What I mean is that, in real life, *maybe* (or maybe not) there's nothing to be built except running the Good (or God) software in people's brains.
Nogginknockers 2 from Bloodlust Software has it all : The scenario, the characters, various super powers, lots of blood, weirdness and unsubtle humorous dialogues. Who could beat it ? Not being networked is even a feature here !
The Crusades were certainly done by organised groups of christians acting in the name of christianity.
Yes. That's why there is a difference between religion / politics (humans trying to take control over other humans, using one of the most subtle kind of manipulation) and faith / spirituality (higher-order ideas that free the human from his unnecessary lower-level problems, and allows achieving meaningfulness, enlightenment, love and peace, at least at personal level, which is a good start, I believe). Humans often tend to pervert good things (whatever the good thing is) in order to achieve domination over others.
You would thing that people would be able do away with these historic and completely ridiculous ideas by now. Instead they are still stuck in the dark ages, but now with shiny new technology. Really sad.
Is it ridiculous to think humanity needs, like a child, to learn from something higher (his "parents", i.e. the "why I am existing", which is a spiritual question), on how to achieve happiness (check history & the news for insights) ? Forbid a child to eat too much sweeties, he won't understand first (he's like "eating sweeties is so sweet, this is a very pleasant experience, it cannot be bad for me !"). Rules and advices probably seem very awkward and stupid from the child's point of view.
You would thing that people would be able do away with these historic and completely ridiculous ideas by now. Instead they are still stuck in the dark ages, but now with shiny new technology. Really sad.
"Historic and completely ridiculous ideas", are you sure ? Do you mean that it is ridiculous to be surprised or even "enlightened" by the fact that there is something (i.e. the universe, and you, consciously speaking about the fact that you exist in a universe that exists, unexpectedly or not), instead of nothing (i.e. a situation that would have been far more probable, at least to me) ?
I see this more of an innovative VJ technique, which is cool indeed, rather than a reliable brain reader (or even vision center reader).
Nevertheless, the output could be made more psychedelic, colorful and various.
The idea and implementation is indeed very fun to us, IT people, because we usually love data crunching and we are enthusiastic about sci-fi, but, seriously... The title of the post is badly chosen.
I'm sure Google wants to be able to identify people by their voices... I mean in the digital era, where you have pseudonyms, multiple identities, and where portable (micro)phones are proliferating, it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the opportunity to identify or disambiguate people's identity thanks to their voice signature... I'm going to choose my future phone operating systems very carefully...
You don't want it to finish, even if it's beautiful at the ultimate moment. At least that's my point of view.
However, maybe some people practice sex just to finish it... Ok I'm stopping there.
Nothing surprising to me in this video. I also saw a woman pressing her jaw with a handkerchief, and I thought "This person just got out from the dentist's cabinet".
After all, when we're playing a game of baseball (right, right, I know, this is slashdot), and a ball is coming towards us, we aren't calculating in our heads the velocity, air resistance and other variables involved in catching the ball. We just reach out our arms and our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
How do you know you're not calculating in your head all the variables involved ? If calculating is taking variables into account and producing a result, then you're definitely calculating, except variables aren't expressed anywhere as numbers (neither are they in microprocessors, since they're electrical impulses, by the way).
The bumblebees are moving, and then the scientist interpets their movement as calculus. Nature doesn't need numbers. Seeing numbers is a human-specific way of thinking (dividing and measuring things) that comes from conciousness (me vs around me, which means I am separated from other things, things can be separated, individualized, counted, etc...).
We can see numbers in anything, so, when you're catching a ball, you're calculating in a way... It's both calculating (from a human point of view), and not calculating (from a holistic point of view). That's my point of view...
You don't have to adopt a religion to believe that there is a single (conscious or not) cause to everything (call it God, Tao, exception, paradox, singularity, triggerOfBigBang, whatever).
I personally think that God is one special idea that comes with conscience, and that it's not by chance : maybe conscience is linked to what matter really is, and what matter really is comes from the cause of everything. In short, conscience is part of the nature of the-cause-to-everything (call it like you want). In shorter, the cause of everything is conscious... because we all are conscious that there is a cause to everything.
I don't personally think this belief makes me a "religious" person. And I don't think it's very different from deciding that 2 parallels never cross.
One other "belief" of this kind is that a very intelligent water molecule (or a human) cannot understand that the brand of the opaque plastic bottle it's in, is Evian... it can understand it's inside a bottle (universe) and that the boundaries are weird (limits imposed by physical laws like speed of light, and the paradox that the universe expands "inside nothing"), but it cannot know what a brand is (it's very different from what he sees inside).
Maybe logic is a purely human (and not universal) way of understanding. It's sufficient for human (and rational) way of knowing. But I think human has also the ability to explore other ways of understanding. And I think rational and simple and intuitive things (like deciding that 2 parallels never cross, or that there is a conscious cause to everything) can coexist in a healthy human mind, like it is the case for many scientists, in their personal life.
Don't we ourselves, computer scientists, create artificial worlds where we trigger like a Big Bang for artificial lifeforms ? We are just mimicking what we already "know". Why is it so hard to admit it ?
I totally agree.
Moreover, what is this "cloud" everyone keeps talking of ? Is it a bunch of corporations dividing their world (the web) into slices / market share, sharing your data between themselves, using it as a currency ? We all know that there are 2 kinds of currencies on the web : data and audience.
Google invented nothing really new here with this Chrome platform : They just carefully selected where your data will be stored : On their servers. They're trying to shrink the web to a bunch of big actors, exactly like what was done with territory during the Yalta conference (february 1945) after WWII.
They want everyone to adopt this platform by simplifying user experience, and more precisely by simplifying his thinking : They don't want the user to bother about data storage. It would indeed be nice not to worry about data storage, and actually, it can be done without giving all the data to one company.
There's just another way of making data persistent on the internet : Think of Freenet and other systems like that. Your data is stored everywhere, as encrypted chunks of data, replicated, on a good number of users computers (a bit like an encrypted RAID5 system on the internet). Your data is replicated closer to where it's more frequently (and heavily) accessed.
And for some of your data, you don't want it to be replicated everywhere, so you have to host this kind of data (private data, and also public but frequently updated data).
The internet could be a platform where every point (PCs, laptops, smartphones, microwaves ovens, whatever) could be a unit of storage, routing / load balancing, computing, input/output & application server... and all these points could cooperate making a uniform system thanks to standards. Actually, today's internet has all the infrastructure to become such a P2P platform.
I prefer to see the future of internet as not too cloudy. I vote against Google's "cloud". I vote for everyone's peer-to-peer internet.
Give me a near-DVD quality, a price lower than DVD machines, and a foolproof system, for example with a URL/key/whatever that's valid during a certain time lapse (at least 5 hours), and maybe it can work.
Also I find that going out to the cinema is fun, and I'm not going to stop watching movies this way. Fun is not always staying at home in front of the computer. And please don't advertise about watching movies on a cellphone.
Already done very efficiently and elegantly in 2004 : 96kb executable that generates... a beautiful and playable Quake-like game, no less. This program is a pure gem.
More information on Wikipedia :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
Who is the most intelligent ? Universe-that-created-man-that-created-computer OR Man-that-created-computer ?
I think universe is : All the potential (intelligence) was in the universe to form life and intelligence. Moreover, life and intelligence is STILL a part of the universe (we are in the universe).
Come on, how can a creation be more intelligent than his creator ? Mozart is the genius, not the requiem !
If universe is more intelligent than man, how could man (as a species) create (a species/lifeform) more intelligent than himself ?
If humanity creates more intelligent beings than himself, then... humanity is more intelligent than humanity : It's nonsense. In mathematics, nonsense usually means impossible / false problem.
Slashdot Mirror
...you'll still be there on the network, for all your "friends". I bet that's Google's solution to mortality, in case the medial singularity doesn't happen. Next step is making people believe that the mind of the deceased has been uploaded in the cloud !
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
To me, innovation is how humans (or animals) make use of something that already exists. The new use IS the innovation. For instance, some monkey groups are using wood sticks to get ants out and eat them. Creating the wood stick (even by separating it from a tree or bush) isn't innovation : They already exist. Putting the stick into the ant nest isn't innovation : Any random event (wind, birds...) can result in having a stick into an ant nest. Putting the stick into the ant nest, waiting for the ants to walk on the stick, and eat them isn't innovation : If you create a database of things where you have stick, monkey, ant, nest and possible relationships, extracting random information from your database will inevitably result in this tuple / words being extracted "monkey uses wood stick to get ants out and eat the ants.". To me, the innovation is WHY the heck the computer / random record picker would choose / consider this possibility as more interesting, from one point of view (the monkey, the ant, the universe, whatever...) than previously. To me, THIS is innovation. There has to be a point of view. There has to be an innovator. Does the computer need to innovate for himself ? My answer is no. Can the computer propose something innovative, useful and meaningful ? Put it another way, can the computer judge the utility of an innovation for humans ? My answer is probably no. Because humans care about monkeys, ants, universe and the rest. And humans are creating culture, whereas computers are not.
And why wouldn't we consider that the content of the Universe (including us) is shrinking, instead ?
In "The Last Question", the "God computer" you're talking about is composed of... humans. (Humanity IS the computer) What I mean is that, in real life, *maybe* (or maybe not) there's nothing to be built except running the Good (or God) software in people's brains.
following your way of thinking, the same question applies to a philosopher or a logician, don't you think ?
Nogginknockers 2 from Bloodlust Software has it all : The scenario, the characters, various super powers, lots of blood, weirdness and unsubtle humorous dialogues. Who could beat it ? Not being networked is even a feature here !
The Crusades were certainly done by organised groups of christians acting in the name of christianity.
Yes. That's why there is a difference between religion / politics (humans trying to take control over other humans, using one of the most subtle kind of manipulation) and faith / spirituality (higher-order ideas that free the human from his unnecessary lower-level problems, and allows achieving meaningfulness, enlightenment, love and peace, at least at personal level, which is a good start, I believe). Humans often tend to pervert good things (whatever the good thing is) in order to achieve domination over others.
You would thing that people would be able do away with these historic and completely ridiculous ideas by now. Instead they are still stuck in the dark ages, but now with shiny new technology. Really sad.
Is it ridiculous to think humanity needs, like a child, to learn from something higher (his "parents", i.e. the "why I am existing", which is a spiritual question), on how to achieve happiness (check history & the news for insights) ? Forbid a child to eat too much sweeties, he won't understand first (he's like "eating sweeties is so sweet, this is a very pleasant experience, it cannot be bad for me !"). Rules and advices probably seem very awkward and stupid from the child's point of view.
You would thing that people would be able do away with these historic and completely ridiculous ideas by now. Instead they are still stuck in the dark ages, but now with shiny new technology. Really sad.
"Historic and completely ridiculous ideas", are you sure ? Do you mean that it is ridiculous to be surprised or even "enlightened" by the fact that there is something (i.e. the universe, and you, consciously speaking about the fact that you exist in a universe that exists, unexpectedly or not), instead of nothing (i.e. a situation that would have been far more probable, at least to me) ?
I see this more of an innovative VJ technique, which is cool indeed, rather than a reliable brain reader (or even vision center reader). Nevertheless, the output could be made more psychedelic, colorful and various. The idea and implementation is indeed very fun to us, IT people, because we usually love data crunching and we are enthusiastic about sci-fi, but, seriously... The title of the post is badly chosen.
I for one welcome our new canine-wolverine overlords.
I'm sure Google wants to be able to identify people by their voices... I mean in the digital era, where you have pseudonyms, multiple identities, and where portable (micro)phones are proliferating, it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the opportunity to identify or disambiguate people's identity thanks to their voice signature... I'm going to choose my future phone operating systems very carefully...
You don't want it to finish, even if it's beautiful at the ultimate moment. At least that's my point of view. However, maybe some people practice sex just to finish it... Ok I'm stopping there.
Nothing surprising to me in this video. I also saw a woman pressing her jaw with a handkerchief, and I thought "This person just got out from the dentist's cabinet".
After all, when we're playing a game of baseball (right, right, I know, this is slashdot), and a ball is coming towards us, we aren't calculating in our heads the velocity, air resistance and other variables involved in catching the ball. We just reach out our arms and our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
How do you know you're not calculating in your head all the variables involved ? If calculating is taking variables into account and producing a result, then you're definitely calculating, except variables aren't expressed anywhere as numbers (neither are they in microprocessors, since they're electrical impulses, by the way). The bumblebees are moving, and then the scientist interpets their movement as calculus. Nature doesn't need numbers. Seeing numbers is a human-specific way of thinking (dividing and measuring things) that comes from conciousness (me vs around me, which means I am separated from other things, things can be separated, individualized, counted, etc...). We can see numbers in anything, so, when you're catching a ball, you're calculating in a way... It's both calculating (from a human point of view), and not calculating (from a holistic point of view). That's my point of view...
You don't have to adopt a religion to believe that there is a single (conscious or not) cause to everything (call it God, Tao, exception, paradox, singularity, triggerOfBigBang, whatever).
I personally think that God is one special idea that comes with conscience, and that it's not by chance : maybe conscience is linked to what matter really is, and what matter really is comes from the cause of everything. In short, conscience is part of the nature of the-cause-to-everything (call it like you want). In shorter, the cause of everything is conscious... because we all are conscious that there is a cause to everything.
I don't personally think this belief makes me a "religious" person. And I don't think it's very different from deciding that 2 parallels never cross.
One other "belief" of this kind is that a very intelligent water molecule (or a human) cannot understand that the brand of the opaque plastic bottle it's in, is Evian... it can understand it's inside a bottle (universe) and that the boundaries are weird (limits imposed by physical laws like speed of light, and the paradox that the universe expands "inside nothing"), but it cannot know what a brand is (it's very different from what he sees inside).
Maybe logic is a purely human (and not universal) way of understanding. It's sufficient for human (and rational) way of knowing. But I think human has also the ability to explore other ways of understanding. And I think rational and simple and intuitive things (like deciding that 2 parallels never cross, or that there is a conscious cause to everything) can coexist in a healthy human mind, like it is the case for many scientists, in their personal life.
Don't we ourselves, computer scientists, create artificial worlds where we trigger like a Big Bang for artificial lifeforms ? We are just mimicking what we already "know". Why is it so hard to admit it ?
I think it's not reasonable to be too reasonable.
Please search for "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" in Wikipedia. This is the title of an article published in 1960 by the physicist Eugene Wigner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
Imagine this in a somewhat futuristic mafia movie, in a carefully planned gangland killing scene...
I totally agree. Moreover, what is this "cloud" everyone keeps talking of ? Is it a bunch of corporations dividing their world (the web) into slices / market share, sharing your data between themselves, using it as a currency ? We all know that there are 2 kinds of currencies on the web : data and audience. Google invented nothing really new here with this Chrome platform : They just carefully selected where your data will be stored : On their servers. They're trying to shrink the web to a bunch of big actors, exactly like what was done with territory during the Yalta conference (february 1945) after WWII. They want everyone to adopt this platform by simplifying user experience, and more precisely by simplifying his thinking : They don't want the user to bother about data storage. It would indeed be nice not to worry about data storage, and actually, it can be done without giving all the data to one company. There's just another way of making data persistent on the internet : Think of Freenet and other systems like that. Your data is stored everywhere, as encrypted chunks of data, replicated, on a good number of users computers (a bit like an encrypted RAID5 system on the internet). Your data is replicated closer to where it's more frequently (and heavily) accessed. And for some of your data, you don't want it to be replicated everywhere, so you have to host this kind of data (private data, and also public but frequently updated data). The internet could be a platform where every point (PCs, laptops, smartphones, microwaves ovens, whatever) could be a unit of storage, routing / load balancing, computing, input/output & application server... and all these points could cooperate making a uniform system thanks to standards. Actually, today's internet has all the infrastructure to become such a P2P platform. I prefer to see the future of internet as not too cloudy. I vote against Google's "cloud". I vote for everyone's peer-to-peer internet.
Give me a near-DVD quality, a price lower than DVD machines, and a foolproof system, for example with a URL/key/whatever that's valid during a certain time lapse (at least 5 hours), and maybe it can work. Also I find that going out to the cinema is fun, and I'm not going to stop watching movies this way. Fun is not always staying at home in front of the computer. And please don't advertise about watching movies on a cellphone.
Amstrad CPC 464 ? 6128 maybe ?
Already done very efficiently and elegantly in 2004 : 96kb executable that generates... a beautiful and playable Quake-like game, no less. This program is a pure gem. More information on Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
What's predictable is that no computer program will ever be able to cook the uncookable, or predict the unpredictable, as you like...
Who is the most intelligent ? Universe-that-created-man-that-created-computer OR Man-that-created-computer ? I think universe is : All the potential (intelligence) was in the universe to form life and intelligence. Moreover, life and intelligence is STILL a part of the universe (we are in the universe). Come on, how can a creation be more intelligent than his creator ? Mozart is the genius, not the requiem ! If universe is more intelligent than man, how could man (as a species) create (a species/lifeform) more intelligent than himself ? If humanity creates more intelligent beings than himself, then... humanity is more intelligent than humanity : It's nonsense. In mathematics, nonsense usually means impossible / false problem.