If they were actually asking 10- to 17-year-olds the following: "Have you received one or more requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult?" I'm guessing that one of the survey results they've not reported is that 100% of the kids replied, "Huh?"
This is in the vicinity of what bugs me about Kurzweil. There's some linguistic sleight of mouth going on when he makes these sweeping statements about machines surpassing humans in intelligence. Sometimes I think that all a machine would need to do to match Ray in intelligence is sit around all day drinking its own kool-aid. I know he's really smart and there's a lot to his argument that technology is advancing at an exponential rate and now in a "fast climb" but none of that makes him a qualified diviner of the future.
Your comparison of airplanes to birds shares some similarities with what Ray does. It chooses some particular advantage the machine has and then projects it onto the whole organism. Airplanes surpassed birds? I can think of lots of ways they haven't, not the least of which is they really suck at landing in trees.
...if a few ICANN committee members aren't significantly wealthier than they were before this issue came up.
Does anyone know how the money flows in this "business?" Is there an actual transaction involved in which money is transferred? If so, I wonder who's covering the cost of processing the refund. What these companies do amounts to zero-cost gambling. Why would the banks underwrite the activity for nothing?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.neuroblast.net/general.shtml
If they were actually asking 10- to 17-year-olds the following: "Have you received one or more requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult?" I'm guessing that one of the survey results they've not reported is that 100% of the kids replied, "Huh?"
... but the company's PR seems to run really well on hot air.
This is in the vicinity of what bugs me about Kurzweil. There's some linguistic sleight of mouth going on when he makes these sweeping statements about machines surpassing humans in intelligence. Sometimes I think that all a machine would need to do to match Ray in intelligence is sit around all day drinking its own kool-aid. I know he's really smart and there's a lot to his argument that technology is advancing at an exponential rate and now in a "fast climb" but none of that makes him a qualified diviner of the future.
Your comparison of airplanes to birds shares some similarities with what Ray does. It chooses some particular advantage the machine has and then projects it onto the whole organism. Airplanes surpassed birds? I can think of lots of ways they haven't, not the least of which is they really suck at landing in trees.
...if a few ICANN committee members aren't significantly wealthier than they were before this issue came up. Does anyone know how the money flows in this "business?" Is there an actual transaction involved in which money is transferred? If so, I wonder who's covering the cost of processing the refund. What these companies do amounts to zero-cost gambling. Why would the banks underwrite the activity for nothing?