So what rules are we going to give it?
That's the core of the problem - we don't understand our own goals well enough to write them in mathematical form. You can't just write an AI with an english language section somewhere in its core code that says "make everybody happy".
A proper generally intelligent AI would essentially be a machine for finding loopholes. That's what intelligence is. How can you ever be sure it's going to follow your rules the way you intended? You need to understand its rules completely before you can ever trust the AI with anything, because if you screwed up somewhere, if there was a consequence you didn't consider, the AI will not be trying to break its own rules to cooperate with you in fixing itself. It will do what it sees as right, even if that means lying to you about its goals.
Willful ignorance or believing that you're in the US are not excuses that a UK court will accept. The comment you were replying to pointed you to the exact law that you're trying to deny exists.
More people should switch to Vimeo, ALL of their videos play fine without Flash.
I disagree. I have a 1GHz machine with 512MB RAM. This machine can play youtube videos just fine using their flash player - smooth and at reasonable resolution. The youtube HTML5 player is a bit worse, stutters a bit, but is generally not awful. Vimeo videos are browser locking slideshows.
Drug safety and the manufacturing process are not trivial items, and they are certainly a critical part of the process for bringing a drug to market. (Lab processes for making a substance are usually horribly inefficient, wasteful, slow, dangerous... very flawed. I know very well how huge a task it is to find a usable manufacturing method)
... but marketing a drug is a tricky subject. Doctors are in theory supposed to be highly knowledgeable impartial experts who will judge a drug on its merits - experts that the patients can trust to prescribe them the right stuff when needed - but in practice it seems that doctors are just as vulnerable to marketing as everybody else. Bad drugs can easily be promoted to common use above cheaper or safer equivalents, just by paying for lots of adverts.
And a Muslim run world would be a hell of a lot worse? Want to proof me wrong? Reverse the migration streams.
I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make there, but just take a look at how many people there are trying to get into Saudi Arabia and the UAE to find work. Migrants go where there is money.
Mao once said that a communist nation would always be able to outmaneuvre a capitalist nation, because capitalism can only ever make moves that profit in the short term.
I think it's fair to guess that in his own mind, he was comparing some utopian ideal of communism vs. a straw man capitalism, but even so, he had a point.
As far as I'm aware, they have no legal powers whatsoever above what any other person on the street has. They have a notebook and a radio so that they can call a proper police officer in case of trouble. Other than that, all they do is give off a vague aura of authority by wearing a uniform. (It's a bright red uniform that looks nothing like a police uniform.)
I live in the West Midlands of England. We already have private security firms contracted to patrol low crime areas, and that has been in place for a few years now. The plans being discussed in the article are a significant expansion of that, adding yet more police duties to those companies.
I do support the use of private security guards to wander around in places where all that is needed is a biped capable of moving while wearing a uniform. There are many places that don't need police patrols. However, I am very much opposed to going any further than that into real police activities. Investigating crimes is something that only real trained and authorised police officers should be doing. These proposals do include that.
Don't call everything a conspiracy without looking for more reasonable explanations first. Middle managers have to manage people, as in interacting with them, supervising them. It's not a job that you can reasonably do remotely. Similarly, top level management have to be trusted. You can't just hand the task over to the lowest bidder. You have to give the job to somebody who has some long term incentive to respect the organisation if you want it done well.
No, he's right. Assuming that humans and their descendants don't adjust things, Earth has less than a billion years left as a habitable planet. Less than that for being habitable to life as it exists today.
You can already say "Shit" on TV if I recall, this sounds more like a back door attempt to stop proper sex education in favor of abstinence only propaganda.
That was my thought too, but it doesn't seem very targetted. It would make sex education difficult and dangerous to teach, even if you follow the rules, but really all it's doing is inviting angry parents to complain about teachers they don't like.
There's also the first filter of wanting the position in the first place. Not just believing that they could do a good job, but wanting to be the one governing a country that is in many ways ungovernable. Power always has its attraction, but at the moment the US president seems to have only the purpose of taking the blame.
You're being careful to say that you know it's possible to put people on mars, but you seem to be arguing that it's fundamentally impossible for them to stay there for the long terms. You seem to be suggesting that faster than light magic is more likely than us figuring out how to manufacture greenhouses on mars. Do you really believe that closed cycle life support is so massively difficult a task that finding new physics and building the starship enterprise is a better hope?
Yes, mars sucks if you have to go out on it without protection, and yes setting up a self sustaining colony would be difficult, dangerous and very expensive. I'm not suggesting that we do it all right this instant. But everything that is necessary for human life could be manufactured on mars, and the tools to maintain that capability could be built there too. The more manufacturing centres you set up, and the more diversity there is among them, the more robust it becomes - tools existing to repair or rebuild other tools, exactly the same way we maintain stuff over here on earth. I am well aware that it would represent a really vast quantity of machinery to achieve all this, but I still think it can be done.
Again, I'm not saying we do this anytime soon! In the short term we do need to figure out how to live on just one planet, but over the course of a century or more it makes sense to start work on a permanant human settlement somewhere off earth.
You do realise that there are some planets in our own solar system, right? The summary mentions them..
Colonies around other stars can wait for a long time, since we only need those to protect against really really huge disasters like supernovae or the sun going out. Those aren't going to happen for a VERY long time, so we can ignore other stars for now.
What we need is self sustaining colonies off Earth, but near enough to be able to interact with Earth, hear Earth's messages, learn Earth's lessons.
The threat we're guarding against is that of having a vast number of people stuck in a single biosphere, all complex unpredictable people, occasionally inventing new and dangerous things. A few decades ago, nuclear war seemed like the manifestation of that. We got past that hurdle with civilisation intact. How many more inventions like that will there be? How many times can we pass the test?
the UK police have never even resorted to using water cannons outside of Northern Ireland
False.
This was a quite prominent issue during the London riots earlier this year. Even with arson and city-wide looting, and with the vehicles available, water cannons weren't used. The political effect of breaking a precedent and using water cannons in mainland england for the first time was considered too great, even when the alternative was to let parts of Croydon burn.
And yes, it does make a specific distinction between temporary and permanant blindness, so this thing is almost certainly legal as far as this particular protocol goes.
I should point out though, that the UK police have never even resorted to using water cannons outside of Northern Ireland, and use of riot equipment is a very serious political issue here. Breaking out the doom rays on a crowd of protestors is not going to happen lightly, and if it did happen, it would not be brushed off or ignored afterwards.
Atmospheric pressure at surface level on Mars is about 1% of Earth's pressure at surface. There's not much to hear. It's not going to be totally silent, but sound will be extremely quiet and distorted.
SpaceX have had only a single successful commercial flight, and even then that was somebody being willing to take a risk on putting their payload onboard a testing flight. I'm happy to be hopeful, and I see no reason why they can't in time develop into a company with a record for reliability, but it's premature to say that they deliver stuff that works.
I don't think it could ever be possible to enforce such community-driven equivalents of regulation without ultimately reverting to a system backed by what a libertarian would call the threat of violence.
I don't really see what would stop somebody from buying some land, refusing to buy property insurance, and building whatever they like based on the idea that "It's my property now, and you have no right to tell me what to do with it."
This is one example of what I don't like about the libertarian ideal. It draws an unhelpful distinction between deliberately inflicted harm (which they rightly denounce as violence), and accidentally or indirectly inflicted harm (which usually seems to be ignored on the principle that it is either an acceptable loss or that the free market will deal with it).
What does the wall represent in this metaphor? What could possibly be worse for the economy than a completely uncontrolled and instantaneous breaking of obligations and established services? Even massively high inflation from being dropped as reserve currency would be only about equally bad.
You don't drop a girder in front of your train just so that you can avoid the girder ahead.
The US health care system used to have equipment, skills and facilities that enabled giving the best level of care in the world, this is true. The problem is that it was only marginally better than everybody else, while costing four times as much as the hippie-commie-socialist-euro health care services. The level of service was definitely not four times better.
Yes, China is attempting to slow its lending to the US, but it's a slow and messy process. They do not have the ability to just stop or change terms of lending.
They're still in the process of slowly (very slowly) dismantling their currency manipulation practices which have been devaluing the yuan against the dollar. The way it was done, and the only way it could have been done, was for the chinese government to exchange dollars and yuan at fixed prices, which inevitably meant buying a lot of dollars. Since they couldn't just have a load of dollars in cash lying around in a vault somewhere, they did have to invest it. and it had to be invested as dollars, not just converted back to some other currency first, as that would defeat the point.
A sudden change in lending from China would come at the cost of damaging their manufacturing and export industries. It's happening, but the government isn't stupid, so it's happening slowly enough for businesses to adapt and survive with minimal job loss.
Slashdot Mirror
So what rules are we going to give it? That's the core of the problem - we don't understand our own goals well enough to write them in mathematical form. You can't just write an AI with an english language section somewhere in its core code that says "make everybody happy". A proper generally intelligent AI would essentially be a machine for finding loopholes. That's what intelligence is. How can you ever be sure it's going to follow your rules the way you intended? You need to understand its rules completely before you can ever trust the AI with anything, because if you screwed up somewhere, if there was a consequence you didn't consider, the AI will not be trying to break its own rules to cooperate with you in fixing itself. It will do what it sees as right, even if that means lying to you about its goals.
I am under no lawful obligation to ...
Willful ignorance or believing that you're in the US are not excuses that a UK court will accept. The comment you were replying to pointed you to the exact law that you're trying to deny exists.
More people should switch to Vimeo, ALL of their videos play fine without Flash.
I disagree. I have a 1GHz machine with 512MB RAM. This machine can play youtube videos just fine using their flash player - smooth and at reasonable resolution. The youtube HTML5 player is a bit worse, stutters a bit, but is generally not awful. Vimeo videos are browser locking slideshows.
Was that an attempt to spell "monsieur" ?
Drug safety and the manufacturing process are not trivial items, and they are certainly a critical part of the process for bringing a drug to market. (Lab processes for making a substance are usually horribly inefficient, wasteful, slow, dangerous... very flawed. I know very well how huge a task it is to find a usable manufacturing method)
... but marketing a drug is a tricky subject. Doctors are in theory supposed to be highly knowledgeable impartial experts who will judge a drug on its merits - experts that the patients can trust to prescribe them the right stuff when needed - but in practice it seems that doctors are just as vulnerable to marketing as everybody else. Bad drugs can easily be promoted to common use above cheaper or safer equivalents, just by paying for lots of adverts.
And a Muslim run world would be a hell of a lot worse? Want to proof me wrong? Reverse the migration streams.
I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make there, but just take a look at how many people there are trying to get into Saudi Arabia and the UAE to find work. Migrants go where there is money.
Mao once said that a communist nation would always be able to outmaneuvre a capitalist nation, because capitalism can only ever make moves that profit in the short term.
I think it's fair to guess that in his own mind, he was comparing some utopian ideal of communism vs. a straw man capitalism, but even so, he had a point.
As far as I'm aware, they have no legal powers whatsoever above what any other person on the street has. They have a notebook and a radio so that they can call a proper police officer in case of trouble. Other than that, all they do is give off a vague aura of authority by wearing a uniform. (It's a bright red uniform that looks nothing like a police uniform.)
I live in the West Midlands of England. We already have private security firms contracted to patrol low crime areas, and that has been in place for a few years now. The plans being discussed in the article are a significant expansion of that, adding yet more police duties to those companies.
I do support the use of private security guards to wander around in places where all that is needed is a biped capable of moving while wearing a uniform. There are many places that don't need police patrols. However, I am very much opposed to going any further than that into real police activities. Investigating crimes is something that only real trained and authorised police officers should be doing. These proposals do include that.
Don't call everything a conspiracy without looking for more reasonable explanations first. Middle managers have to manage people, as in interacting with them, supervising them. It's not a job that you can reasonably do remotely. Similarly, top level management have to be trusted. You can't just hand the task over to the lowest bidder. You have to give the job to somebody who has some long term incentive to respect the organisation if you want it done well.
No, he's right. Assuming that humans and their descendants don't adjust things, Earth has less than a billion years left as a habitable planet. Less than that for being habitable to life as it exists today.
That was my thought too, but it doesn't seem very targetted. It would make sex education difficult and dangerous to teach, even if you follow the rules, but really all it's doing is inviting angry parents to complain about teachers they don't like.
We didn't evolve from modern apes, but at some point going back, one of those common ancestor populations would have been things you could call apes.
There's also the first filter of wanting the position in the first place. Not just believing that they could do a good job, but wanting to be the one governing a country that is in many ways ungovernable. Power always has its attraction, but at the moment the US president seems to have only the purpose of taking the blame.
You're being careful to say that you know it's possible to put people on mars, but you seem to be arguing that it's fundamentally impossible for them to stay there for the long terms. You seem to be suggesting that faster than light magic is more likely than us figuring out how to manufacture greenhouses on mars. Do you really believe that closed cycle life support is so massively difficult a task that finding new physics and building the starship enterprise is a better hope?
Yes, mars sucks if you have to go out on it without protection, and yes setting up a self sustaining colony would be difficult, dangerous and very expensive. I'm not suggesting that we do it all right this instant. But everything that is necessary for human life could be manufactured on mars, and the tools to maintain that capability could be built there too. The more manufacturing centres you set up, and the more diversity there is among them, the more robust it becomes - tools existing to repair or rebuild other tools, exactly the same way we maintain stuff over here on earth. I am well aware that it would represent a really vast quantity of machinery to achieve all this, but I still think it can be done.
Again, I'm not saying we do this anytime soon! In the short term we do need to figure out how to live on just one planet, but over the course of a century or more it makes sense to start work on a permanant human settlement somewhere off earth.
You do realise that there are some planets in our own solar system, right? The summary mentions them.. Colonies around other stars can wait for a long time, since we only need those to protect against really really huge disasters like supernovae or the sun going out. Those aren't going to happen for a VERY long time, so we can ignore other stars for now. What we need is self sustaining colonies off Earth, but near enough to be able to interact with Earth, hear Earth's messages, learn Earth's lessons. The threat we're guarding against is that of having a vast number of people stuck in a single biosphere, all complex unpredictable people, occasionally inventing new and dangerous things. A few decades ago, nuclear war seemed like the manifestation of that. We got past that hurdle with civilisation intact. How many more inventions like that will there be? How many times can we pass the test?
If the daily mail ran a headline claiming that two times three equalled six, I'd double check on my fingers before believing them.
the UK police have never even resorted to using water cannons outside of Northern Ireland
False.
This was a quite prominent issue during the London riots earlier this year. Even with arson and city-wide looting, and with the vehicles available, water cannons weren't used. The political effect of breaking a precedent and using water cannons in mainland england for the first time was considered too great, even when the alternative was to let parts of Croydon burn.
Blinding laser weapons are specifically mentioned in the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons annex of the Geneva Conventions.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Weapons
And yes, it does make a specific distinction between temporary and permanant blindness, so this thing is almost certainly legal as far as this particular protocol goes.
I should point out though, that the UK police have never even resorted to using water cannons outside of Northern Ireland, and use of riot equipment is a very serious political issue here. Breaking out the doom rays on a crowd of protestors is not going to happen lightly, and if it did happen, it would not be brushed off or ignored afterwards.
Atmospheric pressure at surface level on Mars is about 1% of Earth's pressure at surface. There's not much to hear. It's not going to be totally silent, but sound will be extremely quiet and distorted.
SpaceX have had only a single successful commercial flight, and even then that was somebody being willing to take a risk on putting their payload onboard a testing flight. I'm happy to be hopeful, and I see no reason why they can't in time develop into a company with a record for reliability, but it's premature to say that they deliver stuff that works.
I don't think it could ever be possible to enforce such community-driven equivalents of regulation without ultimately reverting to a system backed by what a libertarian would call the threat of violence. I don't really see what would stop somebody from buying some land, refusing to buy property insurance, and building whatever they like based on the idea that "It's my property now, and you have no right to tell me what to do with it." This is one example of what I don't like about the libertarian ideal. It draws an unhelpful distinction between deliberately inflicted harm (which they rightly denounce as violence), and accidentally or indirectly inflicted harm (which usually seems to be ignored on the principle that it is either an acceptable loss or that the free market will deal with it).
What does the wall represent in this metaphor? What could possibly be worse for the economy than a completely uncontrolled and instantaneous breaking of obligations and established services? Even massively high inflation from being dropped as reserve currency would be only about equally bad.
You don't drop a girder in front of your train just so that you can avoid the girder ahead.
The US health care system used to have equipment, skills and facilities that enabled giving the best level of care in the world, this is true. The problem is that it was only marginally better than everybody else, while costing four times as much as the hippie-commie-socialist-euro health care services. The level of service was definitely not four times better.
Yes, China is attempting to slow its lending to the US, but it's a slow and messy process. They do not have the ability to just stop or change terms of lending.
They're still in the process of slowly (very slowly) dismantling their currency manipulation practices which have been devaluing the yuan against the dollar. The way it was done, and the only way it could have been done, was for the chinese government to exchange dollars and yuan at fixed prices, which inevitably meant buying a lot of dollars. Since they couldn't just have a load of dollars in cash lying around in a vault somewhere, they did have to invest it. and it had to be invested as dollars, not just converted back to some other currency first, as that would defeat the point.
A sudden change in lending from China would come at the cost of damaging their manufacturing and export industries. It's happening, but the government isn't stupid, so it's happening slowly enough for businesses to adapt and survive with minimal job loss.