1) Nerve signals aren't purely electrical, but electrochemical. You can do brute-force stimulation or detection by purely electrical means, but it's hard on the nerves (literally).
2) Nerves are tiny, and there are lots and lots of them, and they aren't arranged in a regular, predictable fashion. You can't build a standard module that plugs into any random individual human's nervous system and just works.
3) The most interesting nerves in the brain are hard to get to, because they're surrounded by several centimeters of, well, more brain -- not to mention dura, skull, skin, hair, and so on.
4) Even if we do invasively get to the nerves we want, higher-level activity seems to be encoded as a vast phase space. We're better equipped than ever to find patterns in that kind of information, but we're still closer to the beginning of the process than its end.
So, you've got a truly great immersive display, and you're using it to display virtual screens?
That's... that's right up there with using a 4K display to more faithfully render the green characters of an old 3270 terminal. Or using your surround-sound system to accurately reproduce the noises of a manual typewriter. Or telling your autonomous car where to go by using a steering wheel and accelerator to drive a little virtual car along a 3-D map.
For Rockefeller's sake, you've got a display system that can render any 2D or 3D object! Can't you find someone with a little more imagination than the people who say "OMG, I can have a virtual screen for every spreadsheet ever!"?
Why not call them what they are? With all the time and money that's been poured into improving tire traction, it seems hilarious to talk about eliminating it entirely.
Maybe they could take a baby step in this direction by introducing a car that automatically hydroplanes whenever it's on a wet highway. That ought to reduce friction losses significantly, too, right?
Time to move the goalposts!
on
Turing Test Passed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Well, 30% isn't very impressive."
"Well, but people expect online correspondents to be dumb."
"Well, nobody ever thought the Turing test really meant anything."
Whether you "believe in" AI or not, progress is happening.
There will always be people who refuse to believe that a computer can be intelligent "in the same sense that humans are". Eventually, though, most of us will recognize and accept that intelligence and self-awareness are mostly a matter of illusion, and that there's nothing to prevent a machine from manifesting that same illusion.
It's all a matter of perspective. Just ask the civilizations that perished in the Big Freeze, when the Universe's accelerating expansion locked every quark away into isolated groups of two or three.
The vast majority of intelligences across the lifetime of the Universe will be at a loss to fathom what conditions were like in these first few unimaginably violent fractions of a terayear, when the entire universe was too hot for Bose-Einstein condensates to exist except in isolated pockets under exceptional circumstances.
This summary made me think of LEDs and earthquake lights. Even if there is light generation, though, I can't imagine that it would be very intense. And then there's the whole "buried under meters of rock" issue.
Yes, The Academy laughed at your ideas. They also laughed at The Three Stooges.
Sometimes, reviewers reject radical ideas that turn out to be correct. Far more often, though, they reject radical ideas because they're demonstrably ridiculous. You might be the next unsung genius, with the crazy idea that will make all the pieces fall into place. It's far more likely that you're a crackpot.
Suppose one rejected idea in 1000 is actually a revolution in waiting. (I suspect that ratio is generous at best.) Now, suppose we publish one (or ten) rejected ideas in every issue of our journal. How many of those rejected ideas will turn out to be worthwhile? How long will people put up with the "alternative views" section of our journal before they just start skipping them?
My favorite local semiconductor manufacturer produces SiC wafers (and power components), and has seen a nice stock-price bump over the last day or two. Wonder if it's related to this news?
There are many EEG-type devices for non-invasively reading brain signals.
There are multiple research efforts with implants to pick up brain signals at a finer-grained level.
There are multiple research efforts into regenerating damaged nerve tissue, including but not limited to stem-cell therapy.
There is the possibility of unassisted healing over time.
I'm sorry I'm not in a position to offer insider information about any of these, but you will be able to find tons of information about them. Your sister-in-law is in a terrible situation, but there's never been a better time for hope.
Much of body odor comes from short-chain fatty acids, produced when various bacteria break down skin oils. Baking soda turns those acids into salts, which don't smell nearly as much. However, it can also saponify your skin oils, so it's hard on your skin if you use too much.
I love when modest science take the air out of pompous science; I say this in that so many scientists act like they have all the answers; (I'm looking at you climate science.)
Yep. Climate science: where the problem is not so much scientists who think "they have all the answers", but scientists who have answers that you personally find distasteful.
When a million results agree with one another, but are contradicted by a hundred results, the proper response is to figure out what's causing the contradiction, not to throw away the million results. Or the hundred.
Or, if it simply can't stand the suspense of waiting for a reply, it can pause itself, or slow itself down, in order to match its environment.
Or, more likely, it can reconfigure its cognitive processes into something well-suited for conversation on those timescales. Perhaps it can fill the rest of its time with "unconscious" background processing that prepares information it'll need.
I would like to remind people that the idea of "intelligent" machines has been around for almost 100 years now. AND we still don't have any solid evidence of being close to achieving such a thing. Sure, computers can do a lot, and what they DO accomplish, they tend to do very fast. But what they accomplish is not "AI". Even Watson is not "intelligence", it is only the illusion of it.
I'll agree that this is "insightful" as soon as you describe how to distinguish "intelligence" from "the illusion of intelligence".
With the gradual encroachment of around-the-clock bright light everywhere, you don't realize what you're losing.
Last time I went to a planetarium show, they did the standard slow-dimming-background thing, until you could see the equivalent of magnitude 5. "Ah", I thought, "this is what I remember dark skies looking like. It's a shame I have to drive an hour to see them now."
Then we heard the voice of the narrator: "This is what most people see at night today. Now, we'll show you what a truly dark sky looks like..."
...and the bottom fell out of the sky.
The number of stars multiplied at least tenfold. I still literally start to tear up when I think about it. Because I do remember, now, seeing skies like that when I was much younger; but with ubiquitous "safety" lighting, and my aging eyes, I doubt I'll ever see them again.
I know I'll get clear skies eventually in my geographic region, but I also know that I'll never get dark skies here, unless there's a massive power disruption. (When Hurricane Fran came through, one of the few good things about the experience was that there were dark skies for a couple of days afterward.)
I can almost smell his clutch burning as he mentally shifts back and forth between "currency must be free of government intervention" and "currency must be backed by gold or silver"...
Slashdot Mirror
Can you please get a fourth-grader to at least look over your headlines for basic grammar?
Sure, but there are a few issues:
1) Nerve signals aren't purely electrical, but electrochemical. You can do brute-force stimulation or detection by purely electrical means, but it's hard on the nerves (literally).
2) Nerves are tiny, and there are lots and lots of them, and they aren't arranged in a regular, predictable fashion. You can't build a standard module that plugs into any random individual human's nervous system and just works.
3) The most interesting nerves in the brain are hard to get to, because they're surrounded by several centimeters of, well, more brain -- not to mention dura, skull, skin, hair, and so on.
4) Even if we do invasively get to the nerves we want, higher-level activity seems to be encoded as a vast phase space. We're better equipped than ever to find patterns in that kind of information, but we're still closer to the beginning of the process than its end.
And so on...
Uh-huh. And how many bits, exactly, does a state vector represent?
You seem angry.
So, you've got a truly great immersive display, and you're using it to display virtual screens?
That's... that's right up there with using a 4K display to more faithfully render the green characters of an old 3270 terminal. Or using your surround-sound system to accurately reproduce the noises of a manual typewriter. Or telling your autonomous car where to go by using a steering wheel and accelerator to drive a little virtual car along a 3-D map.
For Rockefeller's sake, you've got a display system that can render any 2D or 3D object! Can't you find someone with a little more imagination than the people who say "OMG, I can have a virtual screen for every spreadsheet ever!"?
Why not call them what they are? With all the time and money that's been poured into improving tire traction, it seems hilarious to talk about eliminating it entirely.
Maybe they could take a baby step in this direction by introducing a car that automatically hydroplanes whenever it's on a wet highway. That ought to reduce friction losses significantly, too, right?
"Well, 30% isn't very impressive."
"Well, but people expect online correspondents to be dumb."
"Well, nobody ever thought the Turing test really meant anything."
Whether you "believe in" AI or not, progress is happening.
There will always be people who refuse to believe that a computer can be intelligent "in the same sense that humans are". Eventually, though, most of us will recognize and accept that intelligence and self-awareness are mostly a matter of illusion, and that there's nothing to prevent a machine from manifesting that same illusion.
It's all a matter of perspective. Just ask the civilizations that perished in the Big Freeze, when the Universe's accelerating expansion locked every quark away into isolated groups of two or three.
The vast majority of intelligences across the lifetime of the Universe will be at a loss to fathom what conditions were like in these first few unimaginably violent fractions of a terayear, when the entire universe was too hot for Bose-Einstein condensates to exist except in isolated pockets under exceptional circumstances.
This summary made me think of LEDs and earthquake lights. Even if there is light generation, though, I can't imagine that it would be very intense. And then there's the whole "buried under meters of rock" issue.
Imagine a Beowulf earthquake cluster...
Oh, nicely done. Too bad it's so far down in the thread -- if they don't see the bait, they can't take it.
So, while the main threads of this discussion will certainly have no trouble sustaining combustion, what happens if we change the title to:
Misogyny, Entitlement, and Muslims
Misogyny, Entitlement, and Hispanics
Misogyny, Entitlement, and The 1%
Is it still open season on Nerds? Will I not get in trouble for binding "those people" to Nerds, as opposed to Blacks, or Jews, or... ?
Yes, The Academy laughed at your ideas. They also laughed at The Three Stooges.
Sometimes, reviewers reject radical ideas that turn out to be correct. Far more often, though, they reject radical ideas because they're demonstrably ridiculous. You might be the next unsung genius, with the crazy idea that will make all the pieces fall into place. It's far more likely that you're a crackpot.
Suppose one rejected idea in 1000 is actually a revolution in waiting. (I suspect that ratio is generous at best.) Now, suppose we publish one (or ten) rejected ideas in every issue of our journal. How many of those rejected ideas will turn out to be worthwhile? How long will people put up with the "alternative views" section of our journal before they just start skipping them?
My favorite local semiconductor manufacturer produces SiC wafers (and power components), and has seen a nice stock-price bump over the last day or two. Wonder if it's related to this news?
Baking soda turns those acids into salts...
...which are highly water-soluble, and rinse right off. Forgot that extremely important detail.
She may be locked-in for now, but:
There are many EEG-type devices for non-invasively reading brain signals.
There are multiple research efforts with implants to pick up brain signals at a finer-grained level.
There are multiple research efforts into regenerating damaged nerve tissue, including but not limited to stem-cell therapy.
There is the possibility of unassisted healing over time.
I'm sorry I'm not in a position to offer insider information about any of these, but you will be able to find tons of information about them. Your sister-in-law is in a terrible situation, but there's never been a better time for hope.
Much of body odor comes from short-chain fatty acids, produced when various bacteria break down skin oils. Baking soda turns those acids into salts, which don't smell nearly as much. However, it can also saponify your skin oils, so it's hard on your skin if you use too much.
I love when modest science take the air out of pompous science; I say this in that so many scientists act like they have all the answers; (I'm looking at you climate science.)
Yep. Climate science: where the problem is not so much scientists who think "they have all the answers", but scientists who have answers that you personally find distasteful.
When a million results agree with one another, but are contradicted by a hundred results, the proper response is to figure out what's causing the contradiction, not to throw away the million results. Or the hundred.
Or, if it simply can't stand the suspense of waiting for a reply, it can pause itself, or slow itself down, in order to match its environment.
Or, more likely, it can reconfigure its cognitive processes into something well-suited for conversation on those timescales. Perhaps it can fill the rest of its time with "unconscious" background processing that prepares information it'll need.
I would like to remind people that the idea of "intelligent" machines has been around for almost 100 years now. AND we still don't have any solid evidence of being close to achieving such a thing. Sure, computers can do a lot, and what they DO accomplish, they tend to do very fast. But what they accomplish is not "AI". Even Watson is not "intelligence", it is only the illusion of it.
I'll agree that this is "insightful" as soon as you describe how to distinguish "intelligence" from "the illusion of intelligence".
With the gradual encroachment of around-the-clock bright light everywhere, you don't realize what you're losing.
Last time I went to a planetarium show, they did the standard slow-dimming-background thing, until you could see the equivalent of magnitude 5. "Ah", I thought, "this is what I remember dark skies looking like. It's a shame I have to drive an hour to see them now."
Then we heard the voice of the narrator: "This is what most people see at night today. Now, we'll show you what a truly dark sky looks like..."
...and the bottom fell out of the sky.
The number of stars multiplied at least tenfold. I still literally start to tear up when I think about it. Because I do remember, now, seeing skies like that when I was much younger; but with ubiquitous "safety" lighting, and my aging eyes, I doubt I'll ever see them again.
I know I'll get clear skies eventually in my geographic region, but I also know that I'll never get dark skies here, unless there's a massive power disruption. (When Hurricane Fran came through, one of the few good things about the experience was that there were dark skies for a couple of days afterward.)
“Now is catalytic hydrogenation, I forget, is that protic or aprotic?"
Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that...
...the concept of the "mutual fund".
I can almost smell his clutch burning as he mentally shifts back and forth between "currency must be free of government intervention" and "currency must be backed by gold or silver"...
Kindergarten through high school students typically aren't old enough to give legal consent.
I'm quite sure that this decision came not out of Google's corporate heart, but out of its legal immune system.