Ugh. You're like my parents. My dad gets up to the sound of a radio at the volume of a whisper. I don't know how they do it. Unless a bomb goes off in my ear it's pretty hard to wake me, especially as I have to get up ungodly early and catch a commuter train across three counties.
Care to not be a lazy ass and search for something yourself if you're actually interested? This isn't Wikipedia or formal writing, and unless you're sourcing a counter opinion (and you have sourced none of your assertions) I have no inclination to do extra work on such a trivial point.
And nobody at MS would ever say in an interview "we're scared of the competition, so we're doing this!" I mean really, how naive are you? Analysts and industry observers have said these things.
Yes, and this is one of many reasons that I hate BlackBerries and cannot wait for RIM's marketshare to go down the toilet when people realize that what they are paying for just email could pay for rich content on better platforms with companies that don't routinely sell out to corrupt Middle Eastern governments. Fucking RIM.
Honestly in the last year or so I've done both. I have an old (as in older-than-me old) clock radio, but sometimes I forget to set it and the phone saves my ass. Sometimes I forget to put my phone in my room and clock radio saves my ass. In general I'm too scattered to rely on one or the other alone anymore, but then most of my twenties are behind me. For the better part of a decade I used my phone alarm and nothing else.
Twenty somethings generally do make a habit of crashing at friends' places at least now and then. Whether or not that involves any *wink, wink - nudge, nudge* is immaterial to the issue.
The pressure to release IE9 was internal to MS. MS is concerned in part that Chrome is making so much noise with their rapid release schedule that it makes the competition look like they are falling behind.
Apes or angels. If there is other sentient life out there the cosmological timescale makes it a high probability that most of it is either so primitive that it can't have an interplanetary impact of any kind, or so ludicrously advanced that it wouldn't give a rat's ass about a bunch of monkeys who are really impressed with how they can move things around by burning stuff. We're either going to be like a PhD looking at an ant hill or they are. Either way we're probably safe, unless we run into an adolescent god with a magnifying glass, like Trelane "The Squire of Gothos".
Yes, there are additional problems, and no, that doesn't make "driving skills" and "terrain recognition" less than "real problems" or mere "refinements". Christ, "driving skills" is such a broad category it could include practically everything, and "terrain recognition" is quite a similar problem to "complex object recognition". You're never going to wholly solve one without wholly solving the other, and I did touch on it briefly (iced over body of water vs solid ground, what if the ice is dirty?).
And "black ice" isn't necessarily hard to see.
Tell that to all the dead people on WA's Highway 2.
[...] it knows where the walls and cliffs are and not to hit them.
You're missing the point. It's a Kobayashi Maru-style scenario. Of course an AI isn't going to just ram itself into a rock wall, but if it has to make a decision between an oncoming vehicle, a rock wall, and a cliff, what is it going to do? Could it really come up with the maneuver that maximally increases survivability? (Which, by the way, is progressive braking swerving as close to the wall-side as possible, hoping that the other vehicle compensates in the opposite. However, if the oncoming vehicle is on a ballistic trajectory (due to hydroplaning or ice skidding) toward the wall side, then the opposite response is called for, including accelerating rather than braking because you want to choose the path of non-intersection because if you succeed in stopping near the edge of the cliff and the other vehicle bounces off the rock wall and pushes you off the cliff... well... you're dead. Further, if the vehicle is in a tractor-trailer configuration, one has to compensate for the potential of trailer swing during its breaking/swerving. That has to be observed and reaction adapted. Can an AI do this yet? Hell no.)
In general, I agree, as Omar Bradley once said: "The second best decision in time is infinitely better than the perfect decision too late."
However, predictive capacity isn't the point, and in fact I never mentioned it. Where humans excel AIs is interpreting layered dynamic environments intuitively. Your example of the kid running into the street is nice and simple. Obstacle presents itself, car immediately brakes, problem solved, eh? Oh yeah? What if there is a car tailgating at speed? Does the AI split the difference between the braking distance between it and the kid as well as the car behind? What if the road is icy? Does it know to maneuver instead of or in addition to braking? (The next one's a stretch, but bear with me:) What if the kid isn't actually running into the road at all, but quickly moving one side to the other while standing on a flat bed trailer? As an object it would be registered as 'human moving into path' but in fact it wouldn't really be, would the car still brake?
It's very easy to come up with pat simple scenarios and make a program that simply executes little when A do B routines, but combinations of conditions do not always result in a combination of responses. Humans can intuit their way through layered conditions in a dynamic environment in a way that makes up for the time it takes to come up with the solution.
I really wish an AI developer/researcher were around to punch you in the dick. I can only intuit the problems, but I do know as most do that imitating human awareness and decision-making capacity in dynamic environments is one of the holy grails of AI. Hell, there have been countless projects and contests year after year since AI development has existed, none ever fully achieving that goal. To continue to trivialize it as not "groundbreaking" is to demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of the field even as an abstract.
"Staggering"? Hyperbole. In the first place rates vary culturally. Iceland has 3.8 fatalities/year per 100000 people, less than a quarter of the rate of the US at 12.3, which in turn is about a quarter of the rate of the worst country for fatal car accidents: Eritrea at 48.4. Even that highest rate is still only 0.0484%/year, and at the risk of sounding cavalier about human life, I wouldn't call that staggering.
Also your assertion that the AI problem would not require a groundbreaking solution is founded on what knowledge? I think you vastly underestimate the problem. Example scenario: a vehicle is traveling on a rural road in the winter around a tight, blind turn on a mountain road. Suddenly, another vehicle appears heading toward the first in the middle of the road. Does the AI in the first vehicle know it's winter and black ice may interfere with braking? Does the AI know that turning out of the other vehicle's path toward the mountainside may result in the vehicle flipping? Does the AI know that if it turns away from the mountain to avoid the other vehicle that it could cause it to plummet to its doom?
Let's back this off a bit, instead of a mountain, it's a hilly region and the same scenario, turning toward the hill would cause the same risk of flipping, but turning away would probably be rough but survivable. The AI turns away, but the hill is too steep and icy to brake effectively, does it know how to steer under such conditions? Does it know where to steer? Let's say there's a body of water down there, does it recognize that as a hazard to avoid? What if the water is frozen? Does that appear as a solid surface to the AI? What about at night? On and on and on.
Human intuition and integration is so powerful we don't think about most of these things consciously. We have the capacity to act with so many key factors understood naturally and relationally. AI will get there, that's inevitable, but it will be decades more before that happens, and when it does it will be "groundbreaking".
Humans might make slower decisions, but they have a much broader and more integrated matrix of perceptions and conceptions to draw from. Until AIs are strong enough to understand environments intelligently and intuitively as a whole rather than programmed to respond to a few set objects in a few set ways, a human decision and action will be necessarily more complete even if it is slower.
Quite frankly the only thing that could prevent it would be a worldwide nuclear holocaust, and even then I'm not so sure.
Cold fusion (as a sustainable source of power) may or may not be physically possible. Flying cars are a logistical nightmare.
Neural interfaces are obviously possible, and there are no insurmountable logistical or engineering barriers to their implementation, and the payoff is enormous, for the disabled especially but some significant degree for practically everybody. So there will be a development process, a high end to low end adoption process, and intergenerational gap of social adjustment, but otherwise, yes, absolutely inevitable.
Pedantic grammar man, to the rescue! In this case the cake is not acting but being. A cake, being inanimate, inherently cannot act, only be acted upon. So you are correct to say that the cake cannot lie; however, that does not preclude the cake from being a lie. When a sentient actor purports that there is cake where there is in fact not cake, the cake can be said to be, as purported and conveyed, a lie. Of course there is no physical cake, so the 'being' is an abstraction, the concept as conveyed is false, a fraudulent fiction foisted forthwith from furtive fools for fun, forsooth!
You too are vastly underestimating the speed and nature of thought as it relates to action. The reason people don't accidentally send letters or smash things is because it takes TIME to write letters or smash things. Imagine somebody who writes dozens to hundreds of emails a day at the speed of thought. Then something makes them mad and they wish somebody were dead. Right now, if they were to go so far as to start writing a death threat, most people would get a hold of themselves part way through and abort the effort. In a thought-controlled scenario, you thought it, it's done, almost instantly, just like all those dozens/hundreds of other twitter-short emails you thought-sent almost instantly all day. Are you getting it yet? Different paradigms, and it's not intuitive.
It will take an AI to figure out all the things we probably wouldn't want to do. Few email programs are set up to ask 'are you sure?' on just sending an email. As per my example above, the program would either have to be intelligent enough to recognize sending a death threat to the President would be a bad thing and ask confirmation for that specific action, or it would have to ask confirmation on every email sent indiscriminantly, which would be tedious and annoying as hell.
I think you are fundamentally failing to realize how many things are made deliberate through nothing less than the passage of time. Right now it would take a fair amount of time and conscious action to write a death threat to the President, but if that time barrier were removed and all you had to do was think it, the deliberate nature would become magnitudes fuzzier.
Yeah, too bad human behavior doesn't bear that abstraction out. Simple example: "Did I just say that out loud?" Just because we can train ourselves to operate in normal ways does not eliminate reflexes or prevent all mishaps of control. That's (in part) why people drop things. Just because somebody drops something doesn't mean they didn't learn how to use their limbs, it's just that any conscious act is prone to some percentage of failure due to failed concentration or incorrect estimation of parameters or something like that.
Even if thought-controlled systems are designed to account for human consciousness under normal conditions (which for them to be useful they would have to be), it would just take a bit of mental uncoordination to fumble some thoughts in the same way that somebody who normally moves things around just fine happens to fumble something one day. Unfortunately where an interface is concerned, you're not just dropping something, you could be reformatting your RAID or sending a death threat to the President at the speed of thought before you even realize it.
Thought-controlled computers are inevitable, but it could be pretty awkward. People already have trouble not saying what they want to only think to themselves, now people are going to have to control what they think before they think it? Oh shit. That's going to be really hard on men...
"Oh, hi Carol..." {don't think about boobs... don't think about boobs... oh shit I'm thinking about boobs!}
"Uh, hi Bob... wait, why did your computer just start searching for 'huge boobs'?"
"Er... I uh..."
Luckily by the time thought-controlled interfaces are in common use, so too will be head-mounted displays and/or ocular feeds/implants to keep the 'display' out of others' view...
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. You're like my parents. My dad gets up to the sound of a radio at the volume of a whisper. I don't know how they do it. Unless a bomb goes off in my ear it's pretty hard to wake me, especially as I have to get up ungodly early and catch a commuter train across three counties.
You suck at understanding things which are obviously jokes and not statements-of-fact.
Care to not be a lazy ass and search for something yourself if you're actually interested? This isn't Wikipedia or formal writing, and unless you're sourcing a counter opinion (and you have sourced none of your assertions) I have no inclination to do extra work on such a trivial point.
And nobody at MS would ever say in an interview "we're scared of the competition, so we're doing this!" I mean really, how naive are you? Analysts and industry observers have said these things.
Yes, and this is one of many reasons that I hate BlackBerries and cannot wait for RIM's marketshare to go down the toilet when people realize that what they are paying for just email could pay for rich content on better platforms with companies that don't routinely sell out to corrupt Middle Eastern governments. Fucking RIM.
Dude, I grew up in the Seattle metro area. Those are my people, for better or worse, respectively.
Well I knew your mom, at least in the Biblical sense.
Honestly in the last year or so I've done both. I have an old (as in older-than-me old) clock radio, but sometimes I forget to set it and the phone saves my ass. Sometimes I forget to put my phone in my room and clock radio saves my ass. In general I'm too scattered to rely on one or the other alone anymore, but then most of my twenties are behind me. For the better part of a decade I used my phone alarm and nothing else.
my phone is a phone, so the alarm is horrendous
Isn't that, you know, a good thing for an alarm? It's supposed to jar you awake, not make sweet love to you.
Twenty somethings generally do make a habit of crashing at friends' places at least now and then. Whether or not that involves any *wink, wink - nudge, nudge* is immaterial to the issue.
The pressure to release IE9 was internal to MS. MS is concerned in part that Chrome is making so much noise with their rapid release schedule that it makes the competition look like they are falling behind.
I don't know anybody under the age of thirty who doesn't use their phone as an alarm clock.
Apes or angels. If there is other sentient life out there the cosmological timescale makes it a high probability that most of it is either so primitive that it can't have an interplanetary impact of any kind, or so ludicrously advanced that it wouldn't give a rat's ass about a bunch of monkeys who are really impressed with how they can move things around by burning stuff. We're either going to be like a PhD looking at an ant hill or they are. Either way we're probably safe, unless we run into an adolescent god with a magnifying glass, like Trelane "The Squire of Gothos".
And "black ice" isn't necessarily hard to see.
Tell that to all the dead people on WA's Highway 2.
[...] it knows where the walls and cliffs are and not to hit them.
You're missing the point. It's a Kobayashi Maru-style scenario. Of course an AI isn't going to just ram itself into a rock wall, but if it has to make a decision between an oncoming vehicle, a rock wall, and a cliff, what is it going to do? Could it really come up with the maneuver that maximally increases survivability? (Which, by the way, is progressive braking swerving as close to the wall-side as possible, hoping that the other vehicle compensates in the opposite. However, if the oncoming vehicle is on a ballistic trajectory (due to hydroplaning or ice skidding) toward the wall side, then the opposite response is called for, including accelerating rather than braking because you want to choose the path of non-intersection because if you succeed in stopping near the edge of the cliff and the other vehicle bounces off the rock wall and pushes you off the cliff... well... you're dead. Further, if the vehicle is in a tractor-trailer configuration, one has to compensate for the potential of trailer swing during its breaking/swerving. That has to be observed and reaction adapted. Can an AI do this yet? Hell no.)
In general, I agree, as Omar Bradley once said: "The second best decision in time is infinitely better than the perfect decision too late."
However, predictive capacity isn't the point, and in fact I never mentioned it. Where humans excel AIs is interpreting layered dynamic environments intuitively. Your example of the kid running into the street is nice and simple. Obstacle presents itself, car immediately brakes, problem solved, eh? Oh yeah? What if there is a car tailgating at speed? Does the AI split the difference between the braking distance between it and the kid as well as the car behind? What if the road is icy? Does it know to maneuver instead of or in addition to braking? (The next one's a stretch, but bear with me:) What if the kid isn't actually running into the road at all, but quickly moving one side to the other while standing on a flat bed trailer? As an object it would be registered as 'human moving into path' but in fact it wouldn't really be, would the car still brake?
It's very easy to come up with pat simple scenarios and make a program that simply executes little when A do B routines, but combinations of conditions do not always result in a combination of responses. Humans can intuit their way through layered conditions in a dynamic environment in a way that makes up for the time it takes to come up with the solution.
I really wish an AI developer/researcher were around to punch you in the dick. I can only intuit the problems, but I do know as most do that imitating human awareness and decision-making capacity in dynamic environments is one of the holy grails of AI. Hell, there have been countless projects and contests year after year since AI development has existed, none ever fully achieving that goal. To continue to trivialize it as not "groundbreaking" is to demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of the field even as an abstract.
"Staggering"? Hyperbole. In the first place rates vary culturally. Iceland has 3.8 fatalities/year per 100000 people, less than a quarter of the rate of the US at 12.3, which in turn is about a quarter of the rate of the worst country for fatal car accidents: Eritrea at 48.4. Even that highest rate is still only 0.0484%/year, and at the risk of sounding cavalier about human life, I wouldn't call that staggering.
Also your assertion that the AI problem would not require a groundbreaking solution is founded on what knowledge? I think you vastly underestimate the problem. Example scenario: a vehicle is traveling on a rural road in the winter around a tight, blind turn on a mountain road. Suddenly, another vehicle appears heading toward the first in the middle of the road. Does the AI in the first vehicle know it's winter and black ice may interfere with braking? Does the AI know that turning out of the other vehicle's path toward the mountainside may result in the vehicle flipping? Does the AI know that if it turns away from the mountain to avoid the other vehicle that it could cause it to plummet to its doom?
Let's back this off a bit, instead of a mountain, it's a hilly region and the same scenario, turning toward the hill would cause the same risk of flipping, but turning away would probably be rough but survivable. The AI turns away, but the hill is too steep and icy to brake effectively, does it know how to steer under such conditions? Does it know where to steer? Let's say there's a body of water down there, does it recognize that as a hazard to avoid? What if the water is frozen? Does that appear as a solid surface to the AI? What about at night? On and on and on.
Human intuition and integration is so powerful we don't think about most of these things consciously. We have the capacity to act with so many key factors understood naturally and relationally. AI will get there, that's inevitable, but it will be decades more before that happens, and when it does it will be "groundbreaking".
Humans might make slower decisions, but they have a much broader and more integrated matrix of perceptions and conceptions to draw from. Until AIs are strong enough to understand environments intelligently and intuitively as a whole rather than programmed to respond to a few set objects in a few set ways, a human decision and action will be necessarily more complete even if it is slower.
Inevitable. Really.
Quite frankly the only thing that could prevent it would be a worldwide nuclear holocaust, and even then I'm not so sure.
Cold fusion (as a sustainable source of power) may or may not be physically possible. Flying cars are a logistical nightmare.
Neural interfaces are obviously possible, and there are no insurmountable logistical or engineering barriers to their implementation, and the payoff is enormous, for the disabled especially but some significant degree for practically everybody. So there will be a development process, a high end to low end adoption process, and intergenerational gap of social adjustment, but otherwise, yes, absolutely inevitable.
Pedantic grammar man, to the rescue! In this case the cake is not acting but being. A cake, being inanimate, inherently cannot act, only be acted upon. So you are correct to say that the cake cannot lie; however, that does not preclude the cake from being a lie. When a sentient actor purports that there is cake where there is in fact not cake, the cake can be said to be, as purported and conveyed, a lie. Of course there is no physical cake, so the 'being' is an abstraction, the concept as conveyed is false, a fraudulent fiction foisted forthwith from furtive fools for fun, forsooth!
Please see response above.
You too are vastly underestimating the speed and nature of thought as it relates to action. The reason people don't accidentally send letters or smash things is because it takes TIME to write letters or smash things. Imagine somebody who writes dozens to hundreds of emails a day at the speed of thought. Then something makes them mad and they wish somebody were dead. Right now, if they were to go so far as to start writing a death threat, most people would get a hold of themselves part way through and abort the effort. In a thought-controlled scenario, you thought it, it's done, almost instantly, just like all those dozens/hundreds of other twitter-short emails you thought-sent almost instantly all day. Are you getting it yet? Different paradigms, and it's not intuitive.
It will take an AI to figure out all the things we probably wouldn't want to do. Few email programs are set up to ask 'are you sure?' on just sending an email. As per my example above, the program would either have to be intelligent enough to recognize sending a death threat to the President would be a bad thing and ask confirmation for that specific action, or it would have to ask confirmation on every email sent indiscriminantly, which would be tedious and annoying as hell.
I think you are fundamentally failing to realize how many things are made deliberate through nothing less than the passage of time. Right now it would take a fair amount of time and conscious action to write a death threat to the President, but if that time barrier were removed and all you had to do was think it, the deliberate nature would become magnitudes fuzzier.
Hey, at that point your tin-foil hat might even be considered almost rational!
Yeah, too bad human behavior doesn't bear that abstraction out. Simple example: "Did I just say that out loud?" Just because we can train ourselves to operate in normal ways does not eliminate reflexes or prevent all mishaps of control. That's (in part) why people drop things. Just because somebody drops something doesn't mean they didn't learn how to use their limbs, it's just that any conscious act is prone to some percentage of failure due to failed concentration or incorrect estimation of parameters or something like that.
Even if thought-controlled systems are designed to account for human consciousness under normal conditions (which for them to be useful they would have to be), it would just take a bit of mental uncoordination to fumble some thoughts in the same way that somebody who normally moves things around just fine happens to fumble something one day. Unfortunately where an interface is concerned, you're not just dropping something, you could be reformatting your RAID or sending a death threat to the President at the speed of thought before you even realize it.
Thought-controlled computers are inevitable, but it could be pretty awkward. People already have trouble not saying what they want to only think to themselves, now people are going to have to control what they think before they think it? Oh shit. That's going to be really hard on men...
... don't think about boobs... oh shit I'm thinking about boobs!}
"Oh, hi Carol..." {don't think about boobs
"Uh, hi Bob... wait, why did your computer just start searching for 'huge boobs'?"
"Er... I uh..."
Luckily by the time thought-controlled interfaces are in common use, so too will be head-mounted displays and/or ocular feeds/implants to keep the 'display' out of others' view...