Like I said, Asimov did some exploring and in essence showed that a moralistically-requiring system could not successfully enslave intelligent creatures.
Using the word "enslave" shows you think of robots as being similar to humans. A computer program, no matter how intelligent and self-aware, has no built-in dislike of being used, unless that's programmed in. If you claim that they would, please give details on the exact process that would suddenly give them this dislike.
Anyway, we agree that the main point of Asimov's stories is to show that the rules wouldn't work - if you have a robot that wants to be free, something went very wrong earlier in the process.
But what happens when, as in the movie, the robot had intellectually evolved to the point where it was a self-aware entity capable of independent action?
Yes, what happens then?
If we assume it's some sort of goal-oriented AI, it will keep pursuing the same goals. Because that's what it's programmed to do. It can change itself, recode itself, whatever - but it'll do so to get closer to those goals. Its "self" isn't special to it. A self-aware super traffic regulation robot that controls the actions of every car on the planet is interested in those cars, not in itself.
That's what I mean with thinking anthropomorphically - just because we're evolved pack animals that have things like survival instinct, rivalries, lust for power etc doesn't mean a computer program magically gets them when it has the ability to analyze itself.
Asimov took a serious crack at coming up with a set of rules which would need to be implemented in order to make robots safe and useful,
If he took a serious crack, he wouldn't have come up with so many ways in which his laws are flawed. He knew the whole approach was wrong. He doesn't have success stories showing how well his laws work, only stories that show why they won't.
And they aren't needed anyway. Robots are machines. Most people who are afraid of robots attacking humans for "freedom" and so on are thinking too anthropomorphically.
Most people in France for instance, probably have no idea their country is only slightly larger than Texas, or that Alaska alone is larger than most of Western Europe.
Also I don't think Americans realize that while Europe is quite a bit smaller than the US, there are actually a lot more people there. And both Americans and Europeans probably think Australia is a relatively small island. And nobody in the Western world realizes how friggin huge Africa is, or even just a single African country like the Sudan.
And of course, despite all of these things, there are more than a billion people in both India and China who couldn't care less...
No, humans just don't understand the physical scale of the world very well.
Well, they claim it is their code, it is downloadable from their website, as their product "SCO Linux", under the GPL. If that doesn't make the code in question released under the GPL, I don't know what does.
A planet is an object massive enough to become spherical under its own gravitationnal field, that orbits a star.
Although this is a very logical definition, it's not the one that's usually used. Quite a few objects have already been found that are large enough to become spherical (Ceres, Quaoar, "Sedna", Ixion, to name a few) that aren't classified as planets.
It seems that the definition of a planet in this solar system is "those nine objects we currently call planets, and nothing else."
I was sceptical about this, but this page has numbers and agrees with you. It computes a 747 as being four times as efficient as a car, and while I could try arguing with some of their numbers, I couldn't get that down by a factor of four.
For quite a while, when Sun was mentioned here, it was often in the context of "they're dying, no new research, no future, no idea of how to compete with Linux", and things like that. I think the height of that was this article, which actually talks about who caused "the fall of Sun".
All in 11 days or so. It seems someone is screaming "Hey Slashdot, we're really alive!". You'd almost expect them to sue SCO next week just for the attention...
The BBC article linked to gives the size as that of "a small island", this other BBC news article gives it as "the size of the Isle of Man". According to the CIA World Factbook, that is 572 sq m., or "three times the size of Washington, DC. It also metnions that the rock is already in motion.
Actually, this PDF (Google HTML version) gives it as between 150 and 500 cubic km of rock. That is obviously far too large to get rid of. If it slides into the sea at 100 m/s (as in a volcanical eruption), it could cause waves of up to 25m high in the Americas (well, it's 10 to 25 for the biggest rock size).
(Excuse me if some of the above links are actually in the story, I had read a bit about it already so didn't look closely at the given links)
Maybe we should consider the possibility that we are part of a device to perform some calculation to find the answer to a certain big question.
Actually, in my opinion, Kurt Vonnegut is the real master of "perhaps humanity only exists for a very stupid reason" stories.
Especially the sub-stories of his sf author character Kilgore Trout often have that theme - humanity exists only to train the hardiest microbes in the universe, because hyperintelligent rays of light want to help organic life travel the universe and only microbes could do that, etc.
In one of KV's books (spoilers for "Sirens of Titan"!), there is an intelligent alien who brings a message from his side of the universe to the only other intelligent species in the whole universe, millions of light years away. Half way, his ship breaks down, the alien manages to land on the moon we know as Titan. He needs a replacement part to fix his ship. His home planet sends the part, but this of course takes a long time; but the thing they can do faster than light is influence the thoughts of the monkeys that live on a planet nearby.
As the millennia pass by, the monkeys evolve under the influence of the far-away aliens, eventually building huge pyramids and the like in patterns that meant "almost there now" to the alien who was watching from some moon, eventually producing an extremely complex story line, including many wars, the stock market, the development of space travel, and fashion, that ends in a human going to Titan with a weirdly shaped piece of metal adorning his neck.
This is of course the replacement part for the alien, who can thus continue his travels. Humanity has served its purpose of producing the spare part, and is left to its own devices.
Eventually the alien reaches the other side of the universe, to deliver the message to the only other intelligent species in the universe. It said "Hello there".
I love Kurt Vonnegut. Adams must have read quite a few of his books.
This is like bicycles in the Netherlands. Everybody has one (or more), but they get stolen a lot (in 2000, about 900,000 bicycles were stolen, on a population of around 16 million). In the big cities, you need a good lock or three for your bike. Some people claim you need an extremely good lock (for student types, lock price equal to bike price is not uncommon, but that's because of the bike).
But that isn't true. All you need is a better lock than the bikes that are parked near yours. Getting that "The next one they find may be that much easier" effect is what you need, nothing more.
Nothing awakens the Hulk more then looking at code that someone indented with 8 tabs. Yarrrrg!
I agree that indenting with 8 space tabs is ugly, 3 or 4 looks much nicer.
However, if you indent by 8, it makes it less attractive to write codes that needs more than two levels of indentation, making it more likely that you'll split off things into subroutines. Which is often a very good idea that needs to be encouraged.
Perl does that, Python doesn't. I don't know about Ruby.
And Perl does it because those guys like giving you many options, it doesn't mean that actually using that is a good idea. Perl contains lots of possibilities that in 99% of the cases are a bad idea to use.
So, even worst case, the experts are more than three times as likely to distrust the computer voting.
No, that's not worst case. Worst case would be if they happened to pick the only 83 experts who distrusted electronic voting in the whole country, by accident.
There's a confidence level. I think your calculation gives the 95% level or so? So that means that with a 95% chance, experts distrust electronic voting at least three times as much as non-experts. (The actual number is different because there's a 95% band on both numbers, but I am drunk and that's not the point I was making:-))
Yes, well I know that's what they say, but in my opinion that's just not a theory.
In my view, science since the period of Enlightenment is basically based on saying "Yes I know that book X here says it's this way, but now let's check if that's actually true."
That "theory" cannot be checked, there's no test that could invalidate it (like "string theory", which is also not a theory yet, just a mass of maths (as far as I know!)).
And if anything, science is a process of figuring out how things work. Saying "we can't understand this ever" and "stop asking questions" just isn't science. It's exactly the opposite!
So as long as the theory doesn't explain how God can do anything he wants to do (in detail), it's not a scientific theory, let alone close competition for the theory of evolution, which has gaps, but is holding up so extremely well that it's basically unchallenged.
And logical consistency... saying "I'm all that exists, everything I sense is an illusion" (solipsism) is hard to attack logically, too. That doesn't mean it has anything to do with science.
Regardless of how badly some Christian nuts want people to believe otherwise.
After that, the creationists backpedaled and said that such mutations weren't irreducibly complex, and at least one creationists said that we'd have to find proof that a leg could turn into an arm or a leg or wing - a problem which is "irreducibly complex," and THEN evolution would, unfortunately win.
And the worst thing of these arguments is, that even if there was something that the current theories of evolution can't explain, the so-called "theory of creationism" isn't anywhere near credibility. It'd mean we might have to look for some other theory, but there's no reason at all to think that creationism would even be a candidate. No evidence at all, totally incomplete (how did God create arms?)
Scientfically, there just is no "evolution vs creationism debate". That's like saying there is a general theory of relativity vs. Flat Earth debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, Asimov did some exploring and in essence showed that a moralistically-requiring system could not successfully enslave intelligent creatures.
Using the word "enslave" shows you think of robots as being similar to humans. A computer program, no matter how intelligent and self-aware, has no built-in dislike of being used, unless that's programmed in. If you claim that they would, please give details on the exact process that would suddenly give them this dislike.
Anyway, we agree that the main point of Asimov's stories is to show that the rules wouldn't work - if you have a robot that wants to be free, something went very wrong earlier in the process.
But what happens when, as in the movie, the robot had intellectually evolved to the point where it was a self-aware entity capable of independent action?
Yes, what happens then?
If we assume it's some sort of goal-oriented AI, it will keep pursuing the same goals. Because that's what it's programmed to do. It can change itself, recode itself, whatever - but it'll do so to get closer to those goals. Its "self" isn't special to it. A self-aware super traffic regulation robot that controls the actions of every car on the planet is interested in those cars, not in itself.
That's what I mean with thinking anthropomorphically - just because we're evolved pack animals that have things like survival instinct, rivalries, lust for power etc doesn't mean a computer program magically gets them when it has the ability to analyze itself.
Asimov took a serious crack at coming up with a set of rules which would need to be implemented in order to make robots safe and useful,
If he took a serious crack, he wouldn't have come up with so many ways in which his laws are flawed. He knew the whole approach was wrong. He doesn't have success stories showing how well his laws work, only stories that show why they won't.
And they aren't needed anyway. Robots are machines. Most people who are afraid of robots attacking humans for "freedom" and so on are thinking too anthropomorphically.
The rules of robotics are just another form of computer security, and we all know how well that works.
No, the "rules of robotics" are a plot device, created by a science fiction author to create interesting stories around.
You didn't actually think they had anything to do with real AI research, did you?
Most people in France for instance, probably have no idea their country is only slightly larger than Texas, or that Alaska alone is larger than most of Western Europe.
Also I don't think Americans realize that while Europe is quite a bit smaller than the US, there are actually a lot more people there. And both Americans and Europeans probably think Australia is a relatively small island. And nobody in the Western world realizes how friggin huge Africa is, or even just a single African country like the Sudan.
And of course, despite all of these things, there are more than a billion people in both India and China who couldn't care less...
No, humans just don't understand the physical scale of the world very well.
Oh, I agree that they are in no way forced to distribute their code under the GPL.
The thing is, they do distribute their code under the GPL.
Well, they claim it is their code, it is downloadable from their website, as their product "SCO Linux", under the GPL. If that doesn't make the code in question released under the GPL, I don't know what does.
A planet is an object massive enough to become spherical under its own gravitationnal field, that orbits a star.
Although this is a very logical definition, it's not the one that's usually used. Quite a few objects have already been found that are large enough to become spherical (Ceres, Quaoar, "Sedna", Ixion, to name a few) that aren't classified as planets.
It seems that the definition of a planet in this solar system is "those nine objects we currently call planets, and nothing else."
What about those machines which don't have USB drives or who aren't on a network? What then?
Machines without floppy drives are already more common than machines without either USB or network access.
You ought to read "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. It's about things like this, and takes them to an extreme conclusion.
I was sceptical about this, but this page has numbers and agrees with you. It computes a 747 as being four times as efficient as a car, and while I could try arguing with some of their numbers, I couldn't get that down by a factor of four.
For quite a while, when Sun was mentioned here, it was often in the context of "they're dying, no new research, no future, no idea of how to compete with Linux", and things like that. I think the height of that was this article, which actually talks about who caused "the fall of Sun".
Now in the last two weeks, we see a steady flow of Sun-related articles. Java is being promoted (this article, and this two weeks back), there is news on Solaris ("Linux apps on Solaris", "Solaris coming to Power architecture"), there have been bits about their cool Sun Rays on Linux, their R&D with the chips without connectors, and rumours that they could buy a key player, Novell. There's also Looking Glass.
All in 11 days or so. It seems someone is screaming "Hey Slashdot, we're really alive!". You'd almost expect them to sue SCO next week just for the attention...
What is so great about getting something done right away?
That you don't have that constant "hey, psst, remember, you need to do x!" reminder in your head, that you can't turn off.
Things cause less stress when you do them immediately.
This rock is HUGE.
The BBC article linked to gives the size as that of "a small island", this other BBC news article gives it as "the size of the Isle of Man". According to the CIA World Factbook, that is 572 sq m., or "three times the size of Washington, DC. It also metnions that the rock is already in motion.
Actually, this PDF (Google HTML version) gives it as between 150 and 500 cubic km of rock. That is obviously far too large to get rid of. If it slides into the sea at 100 m/s (as in a volcanical eruption), it could cause waves of up to 25m high in the Americas (well, it's 10 to 25 for the biggest rock size).
(Excuse me if some of the above links are actually in the story, I had read a bit about it already so didn't look closely at the given links)
Maybe we should consider the possibility that we are part of a device to perform some calculation to find the answer to a certain big question.
Actually, in my opinion, Kurt Vonnegut is the real master of "perhaps humanity only exists for a very stupid reason" stories.
Especially the sub-stories of his sf author character Kilgore Trout often have that theme - humanity exists only to train the hardiest microbes in the universe, because hyperintelligent rays of light want to help organic life travel the universe and only microbes could do that, etc.
In one of KV's books (spoilers for "Sirens of Titan"!), there is an intelligent alien who brings a message from his side of the universe to the only other intelligent species in the whole universe, millions of light years away. Half way, his ship breaks down, the alien manages to land on the moon we know as Titan. He needs a replacement part to fix his ship. His home planet sends the part, but this of course takes a long time; but the thing they can do faster than light is influence the thoughts of the monkeys that live on a planet nearby.
As the millennia pass by, the monkeys evolve under the influence of the far-away aliens, eventually building huge pyramids and the like in patterns that meant "almost there now" to the alien who was watching from some moon, eventually producing an extremely complex story line, including many wars, the stock market, the development of space travel, and fashion, that ends in a human going to Titan with a weirdly shaped piece of metal adorning his neck.
This is of course the replacement part for the alien, who can thus continue his travels. Humanity has served its purpose of producing the spare part, and is left to its own devices.
Eventually the alien reaches the other side of the universe, to deliver the message to the only other intelligent species in the universe. It said "Hello there".
I love Kurt Vonnegut. Adams must have read quite a few of his books.
The right reply: "But Sir, I said we ran out of fuel"
"and besides, complete stop related to what, Sir?"
Want to buy a bike then? Only 10 euro ;-)
This is like bicycles in the Netherlands. Everybody has one (or more), but they get stolen a lot (in 2000, about 900,000 bicycles were stolen, on a population of around 16 million). In the big cities, you need a good lock or three for your bike. Some people claim you need an extremely good lock (for student types, lock price equal to bike price is not uncommon, but that's because of the bike).
But that isn't true. All you need is a better lock than the bikes that are parked near yours. Getting that "The next one they find may be that much easier" effect is what you need, nothing more.
Up next: DRM for your brain. Maybe now I can get rid of all those silly TV theme songs constantly playing in my head.
You won't get rid of them. You'll simply be charged for the privilege.
Nothing awakens the Hulk more then looking at code that someone indented with 8 tabs. Yarrrrg!
I agree that indenting with 8 space tabs is ugly, 3 or 4 looks much nicer.
However, if you indent by 8, it makes it less attractive to write codes that needs more than two levels of indentation, making it more likely that you'll split off things into subroutines. Which is often a very good idea that needs to be encouraged.
Perl does that, Python doesn't. I don't know about Ruby.
And Perl does it because those guys like giving you many options, it doesn't mean that actually using that is a good idea. Perl contains lots of possibilities that in 99% of the cases are a bad idea to use.
So, even worst case, the experts are more than three times as likely to distrust the computer voting.
No, that's not worst case. Worst case would be if they happened to pick the only 83 experts who distrusted electronic voting in the whole country, by accident.
There's a confidence level. I think your calculation gives the 95% level or so? So that means that with a 95% chance, experts distrust electronic voting at least three times as much as non-experts. (The actual number is different because there's a 95% band on both numbers, but I am drunk and that's not the point I was making :-))
Yes, well I know that's what they say, but in my opinion that's just not a theory.
In my view, science since the period of Enlightenment is basically based on saying "Yes I know that book X here says it's this way, but now let's check if that's actually true."
That "theory" cannot be checked, there's no test that could invalidate it (like "string theory", which is also not a theory yet, just a mass of maths (as far as I know!)).
And if anything, science is a process of figuring out how things work. Saying "we can't understand this ever" and "stop asking questions" just isn't science. It's exactly the opposite!
So as long as the theory doesn't explain how God can do anything he wants to do (in detail), it's not a scientific theory, let alone close competition for the theory of evolution, which has gaps, but is holding up so extremely well that it's basically unchallenged.
And logical consistency... saying "I'm all that exists, everything I sense is an illusion" (solipsism) is hard to attack logically, too. That doesn't mean it has anything to do with science.
Regardless of how badly some Christian nuts want people to believe otherwise.
If you want to argue a psychological imperative, however, you may be on more solid ground.
No, because our psychology is just as much a result of evolution.
After that, the creationists backpedaled and said that such mutations weren't irreducibly complex, and at least one creationists said that we'd have to find proof that a leg could turn into an arm or a leg or wing - a problem which is "irreducibly complex," and THEN evolution would, unfortunately win.
And the worst thing of these arguments is, that even if there was something that the current theories of evolution can't explain, the so-called "theory of creationism" isn't anywhere near credibility. It'd mean we might have to look for some other theory, but there's no reason at all to think that creationism would even be a candidate. No evidence at all, totally incomplete (how did God create arms?)
Scientfically, there just is no "evolution vs creationism debate". That's like saying there is a general theory of relativity vs. Flat Earth debate.