If you were to build a robot which acted in a manner indistinguishable from a fox, then - as many have argued in many places - there is a good case for looking at it from an ethical PoV as if it were a fox. The ultimate AI achievement of building an AI indistinguishable from a human would result in regarding the AI from an ethical PoV as if it were human.
This reminds me of a part of the book 'The Tin Men', where a researcher is building ethical robots and putting them on rafts in a swimming pool with other robots, to see if they will throw the other off to save themselves.
Worms may feel pain - even plants might - but they can't reason about that well enough to truly suffer. Therefore, feeding them to birds is not a moral issue. It's like when people say "meat is murder!" and imagine that simply redefining "killing humans" as "killing animals" makes any kind of difference to the argument. Meat is _slaughter_ not murder, unless you are a cannibal.
Have you ever seen Power Wheels in action? They run at 5mph, a more expensive model might approach 10mph. An adult can outrun these things. Not that it's necessary given that it's a slow moving target. Battery life on these things is maybe 30-60 minutes. They're really only good for getting across fairly flat terrain. And from the video I've seen it looks like it operated via a cable, not wireless.
A more serious problem should be apparent from the video. There is a guy standing next to the toy truck, feeding it the ammo belt...
These "circuits" are just solutions of custom-designed DNA, and each "gate" takes small single-strands of DNA as input, and produce them as output, whether as a "wire" to another gate, or as the final output to be measured to check if the circuit is working. Now imagine putting that in a cell. (Oh, and this is why formal methods matter -- if someone's going to be putting code in your body, it's not enough to debug it, you want that shit proven correct.)
I can imagine putting this in a cell. I just can't imagine why - or how.
The problem with most bottom-up molecular design like this is trying to replicate in miniature the macro-level machines we make. Biological design is necessarily messy; it has to work under a huge range of noisy conditions, and with components of varying quality. It's not like the well-ordered, quiet, dry environment that you find in a computer.
For example : what would happen if the DNA computer starts to get transcribed? Or broken down by anti-viral defences? Or just clogs up the normal processes, like the cytoskeleton, or cellular repair? Further, how would the output of the computation be transmitted to the outside world? Perhaps by interfacing with ion channels in the membrane, or triggering synthesis of coloured chemicals?
So that's the how : as for the why - I could see that it would be any easy way to grow biological cell-based processors. Then if you could link them up, you get massive parallel computing. Again, though, there is the problem of coordination across membranes and control of cell division and cell spatial patterning.
It's been mentioned before, but if slashdot handled unicode properly, then I would have read the micrometers in your comment, and not just 'm'. Ampersand mu doesn't work...
?
To be fair, the GP was claiming that money is a reasonable measure of someone's success in the world of business. I would agree that _personal_ wealth may be a little misleading as an indicator of how good someone is a their job - some people give to charity (as Gates is now doing), and some hoard their money. Happiness is not really the issue, here, is it?
Also, I don't agree that no-one could spend billions in their lifetime, even on material goods. So long as those goods include islands, spaceships, and island-bases for launching spaceships from. If you expand the idea of 'material goods' to include football teams and players - like Abramovich does - then the billions can get spent quite quickly.
Obviously spending money like this is obscene, but it IS possible.
To be fair, there are cases where quantum effects have surprising macro-level effects. Superfluidity of liquid Helium, and Hawking radiation are good examples. Not that I disagree with you in principle (the fallacy being the presupposition of consciousness as being anything other than a low-entropy state that requires constant energy input to maintain itself), but it is perfectly reasonable to think it's possible that quantum chemistry could cause unexpected physiological phenomena (olfaction is one known example of this).
Well sure, there are tons of biological examples of quantum chemistry triggering larger effects. Light absorbed by the eye can involve a single photon, which triggers a conformation change in retinal, which alters the conformation of the protein that binds it, which in turn effects a phosphorylation cascade leading to membrane depolarization, which leads - through some neurotransmitters and such - to events in the brain.
I'm sure I've mis-remembered many of the details, but you get the point?:)
Anyway, this is quite different from consciousness requiring quantum-level stuff for it to work all the time. Where are the evolutionary intermediates for this process? Did the brain suddenly discover quantum mechanics when it reached a certain level of complexity? It seems improbable
Agreed. Penrose is getting long in the tooth, and his last few theories to be debunked are evident of this. He's seeing things that aren't there. However, in a sense, he's right, but there's no magic or new physics behind it. After all, everything in this universe is, to some degree, emergent from quantum phenomena--everything in our macroscopic world, from dogs and cats, your car, your house, the tax man, and your brain is nothing more than the result of quantum amplitude flows and configuration states on the microscopic scale. But I don't think higher-level cognition will be directly explainable through quantum mechanics.
I agree... in general. However, there is a difference between homogenous macro-scale objects (rocks, for example) and highly heterogenous ones (organisms). Even from a non-quantum perspective, living systems are set up to amplify effects at the smallest scale up to the largest. For example a single mutation - a molecular level event - can occasionally lead to disease states that affect the whole body. Since living systems rely on molecular-sized machinery, they do exploit quantum effects (light, tunnelling of energy barriers, etc)
Really, though, the idea that consciousness is not just potentially sensitive to quantum phenomena (because brains are living tissue) but also totally explained by quantum mechanics is too much. Of course the hierarchy of 'levels' of description of an organism (quantum, molecular, cellular, tissue, organ..) are not separate one from the other; of course there is leakage of cause between them. The idea that the highest level should be reliant completely on the lowest is just foolishness
In fact, it sounds like the ideal sequel:
'Dr Jones, you probably heard we've located a previously unknown ancient settlement using satellite technology. However, what you probably haven't heard is that this settlement displays a very unusual feature that has completely flummoxed our scientists...'
This is basically the plot of Aliens vs Predators. Space telescope finds a pyramid under the ice of Antartica. It's radiating heat because a reactor inside has started up to warm an Alien queen.
Although you could argue that is all just the plot of "At The Mountains of Madness" by that terrible racist Lovecraft. Alien city at the polar region, age-old battles between horrors from beyond the stars, and so forth.
Just the tip of the fudberg:
- States 2MB for each Java thread created (WTF... Where did they pull this number? Isn't the default stack size for each thread 512KB?)
Only as long as the fuel supply isn't used up. When it gets low on fuel, it starts to grow in size. It will grow enough to destroy earth.
Even worse, some of these irresponsible fuel dumping sites are so large that they can grow large enough to blow off their outer layers. These explosions are bad enough, of course, but sufficiently large piles can even collapse in to form black holes.
We must ban this dangerous 'solar' or 'stellar' devices!
Then again, from a moral perspective, I continue to wonder if we need to make it work here, before we start fucking up the rest of the galaxy.
Hmm. Unfortunately, the more I learn about the scale of the Universe - or even the Milky Way - the less confident I am about human stellar travel in the near future. Or the remote future.
Actually, I hadn't realised the range of sizes of stars. Including the one that would take "1,200 years to travel round in a plane". This is still massively smaller than the distance to the Oort cloud, itself a fraction (1/40th?) of the distance to the nearest star. Really, our everyday experience is confined to the thin slice of scale between (say) mm and tens/hundreds/thousands of Km. If the subatomic world is the 'lower' - very empty - third of the total, and the cosmic is the upper third, then we directly experience only about the middle third of the middle third...
So, you'd like someone to write a natural language shell where you can describe what you'd like to happen, possibly badly, and the shell would magically know what you mean and do the right thing?
COMPUTER : ENHANCE!
Also, applescript is where people should go for "move file 'myfile.txt' to directory 'somedirectory'". Ok, so not exactly that syntax, but still.
If I want to display an image, I can open it in my GUI. If it's actually a common enough operation, I'll write a quick script so I can make it pop up by typing something: showimage blah.png
Indeed; furthermore, on a mac you just need open blah.png and it will open in preview. Or open -a/Applications/MyViewer.app blah.png for some custom viewer.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were to build a robot which acted in a manner indistinguishable from a fox, then - as many have argued in many places - there is a good case for looking at it from an ethical PoV as if it were a fox. The ultimate AI achievement of building an AI indistinguishable from a human would result in regarding the AI from an ethical PoV as if it were human.
This reminds me of a part of the book 'The Tin Men', where a researcher is building ethical robots and putting them on rafts in a swimming pool with other robots, to see if they will throw the other off to save themselves.
Worms may feel pain - even plants might - but they can't reason about that well enough to truly suffer. Therefore, feeding them to birds is not a moral issue. It's like when people say "meat is murder!" and imagine that simply redefining "killing humans" as "killing animals" makes any kind of difference to the argument. Meat is _slaughter_ not murder, unless you are a cannibal.
Maybe I give people too much credit...
So long as that credit is not in Bitcoin, it's probably okay.
What type of MORON keeps a balance of $500,000 in BTC?
What type of MORON keeps a balance of more than $0 in BTC?
What type of GENIUS keeps a balance of LESS than $0 in BTC?
Have you ever seen Power Wheels in action? They run at 5mph, a more expensive model might approach 10mph. An adult can outrun these things. Not that it's necessary given that it's a slow moving target. Battery life on these things is maybe 30-60 minutes. They're really only good for getting across fairly flat terrain. And from the video I've seen it looks like it operated via a cable, not wireless.
A more serious problem should be apparent from the video. There is a guy standing next to the toy truck, feeding it the ammo belt...
Google tells me it is some sort of governmental meeting about the internet.
http://www.eg8forum.com/en/
Could the summary not have expended a sentence about this?
These "circuits" are just solutions of custom-designed DNA, and each "gate" takes small single-strands of DNA as input, and produce them as output, whether as a "wire" to another gate, or as the final output to be measured to check if the circuit is working. Now imagine putting that in a cell. (Oh, and this is why formal methods matter -- if someone's going to be putting code in your body, it's not enough to debug it, you want that shit proven correct.)
I can imagine putting this in a cell. I just can't imagine why - or how.
The problem with most bottom-up molecular design like this is trying to replicate in miniature the macro-level machines we make. Biological design is necessarily messy; it has to work under a huge range of noisy conditions, and with components of varying quality. It's not like the well-ordered, quiet, dry environment that you find in a computer.
For example : what would happen if the DNA computer starts to get transcribed? Or broken down by anti-viral defences? Or just clogs up the normal processes, like the cytoskeleton, or cellular repair? Further, how would the output of the computation be transmitted to the outside world? Perhaps by interfacing with ion channels in the membrane, or triggering synthesis of coloured chemicals?
So that's the how : as for the why - I could see that it would be any easy way to grow biological cell-based processors. Then if you could link them up, you get massive parallel computing. Again, though, there is the problem of coordination across membranes and control of cell division and cell spatial patterning.
Toughly worded, you say? Goodbye Anonymous!
Not _just_ toughly worded. Toughly worded by someone called "General Rapporteur Lord Jopling" - what even IS that title? From this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapporteur
I learn that there are even "shadow rapporteurs" - sounds like a bureaucratic assassin...
Dinosaur propaganda!
More seriously : a) we are not dinosaurs and b) the sun is hotter now than it was then.
It's been mentioned before, but if slashdot handled unicode properly, then I would have read the micrometers in your comment, and not just 'm'. Ampersand mu doesn't work... ?
I got to pick them out...the pimp supplied them.
Hopefully the details of said T&A were stored in some kind of database - or were there so many you had to use a data whorehouse?
To be fair, the GP was claiming that money is a reasonable measure of someone's success in the world of business. I would agree that _personal_ wealth may be a little misleading as an indicator of how good someone is a their job - some people give to charity (as Gates is now doing), and some hoard their money. Happiness is not really the issue, here, is it?
Also, I don't agree that no-one could spend billions in their lifetime, even on material goods. So long as those goods include islands, spaceships, and island-bases for launching spaceships from. If you expand the idea of 'material goods' to include football teams and players - like Abramovich does - then the billions can get spent quite quickly.
Obviously spending money like this is obscene, but it IS possible.
To be fair, there are cases where quantum effects have surprising macro-level effects. Superfluidity of liquid Helium, and Hawking radiation are good examples. Not that I disagree with you in principle (the fallacy being the presupposition of consciousness as being anything other than a low-entropy state that requires constant energy input to maintain itself), but it is perfectly reasonable to think it's possible that quantum chemistry could cause unexpected physiological phenomena (olfaction is one known example of this).
Well sure, there are tons of biological examples of quantum chemistry triggering larger effects. Light absorbed by the eye can involve a single photon, which triggers a conformation change in retinal, which alters the conformation of the protein that binds it, which in turn effects a phosphorylation cascade leading to membrane depolarization, which leads - through some neurotransmitters and such - to events in the brain.
I'm sure I've mis-remembered many of the details, but you get the point? :)
Anyway, this is quite different from consciousness requiring quantum-level stuff for it to work all the time. Where are the evolutionary intermediates for this process? Did the brain suddenly discover quantum mechanics when it reached a certain level of complexity? It seems improbable
Agreed. Penrose is getting long in the tooth, and his last few theories to be debunked are evident of this. He's seeing things that aren't there. However, in a sense, he's right, but there's no magic or new physics behind it. After all, everything in this universe is, to some degree, emergent from quantum phenomena--everything in our macroscopic world, from dogs and cats, your car, your house, the tax man, and your brain is nothing more than the result of quantum amplitude flows and configuration states on the microscopic scale. But I don't think higher-level cognition will be directly explainable through quantum mechanics.
I agree ... in general. However, there is a difference between homogenous macro-scale objects (rocks, for example) and highly heterogenous ones (organisms). Even from a non-quantum perspective, living systems are set up to amplify effects at the smallest scale up to the largest. For example a single mutation - a molecular level event - can occasionally lead to disease states that affect the whole body. Since living systems rely on molecular-sized machinery, they do exploit quantum effects (light, tunnelling of energy barriers, etc)
Really, though, the idea that consciousness is not just potentially sensitive to quantum phenomena (because brains are living tissue) but also totally explained by quantum mechanics is too much. Of course the hierarchy of 'levels' of description of an organism (quantum, molecular, cellular, tissue, organ..) are not separate one from the other; of course there is leakage of cause between them. The idea that the highest level should be reliant completely on the lowest is just foolishness
Now we have such a clear winner on the choice of distro, perhaps we can discuss which would be the best editor on the cluster?
Sounds good - and finish up with a reasoned, polite exchange of views on which programming languages to use on the new cluster?
It's a weak pun : archaeologist/history...
In fact, it sounds like the ideal sequel: 'Dr Jones, you probably heard we've located a previously unknown ancient settlement using satellite technology. However, what you probably haven't heard is that this settlement displays a very unusual feature that has completely flummoxed our scientists...'
This is basically the plot of Aliens vs Predators. Space telescope finds a pyramid under the ice of Antartica. It's radiating heat because a reactor inside has started up to warm an Alien queen.
Although you could argue that is all just the plot of "At The Mountains of Madness" by that terrible racist Lovecraft. Alien city at the polar region, age-old battles between horrors from beyond the stars, and so forth.
Und zis is how ve say gutbye in Germany, Dr Jones!
Just the tip of the fudberg: - States 2MB for each Java thread created (WTF... Where did they pull this number? Isn't the default stack size for each thread 512KB?)
Default is 512k, yes. But there are some extra details: 'Java stack size myths'
Only as long as the fuel supply isn't used up. When it gets low on fuel, it starts to grow in size. It will grow enough to destroy earth.
Even worse, some of these irresponsible fuel dumping sites are so large that they can grow large enough to blow off their outer layers. These explosions are bad enough, of course, but sufficiently large piles can even collapse in to form black holes.
We must ban this dangerous 'solar' or 'stellar' devices!
What's the danger of solar power tower?
The can, on occasion, turn into Eye of Sauron towers, and fry nearby hobbits.
This is my favorite feature of the area.
Interesting... Panning a bit east on that map (to the other side of Mesa Rd) there's a lot of large (500ft+) craters... Is that a nuclear test site?
Uhhhh...no. Those are just ... gophers. Gopher sinkholes. I mean sinkholes. From water erosion and stuff.
They do look interesting, but I really have no way of knowing if they are a natural or manmade phenomenon.
Well, google tells me it might be Mark Twain :
Quote page
Then again, from a moral perspective, I continue to wonder if we need to make it work here, before we start fucking up the rest of the galaxy.
Hmm. Unfortunately, the more I learn about the scale of the Universe - or even the Milky Way - the less confident I am about human stellar travel in the near future. Or the remote future.
There are lots of resources about this but here's one : http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347
Actually, I hadn't realised the range of sizes of stars. Including the one that would take "1,200 years to travel round in a plane". This is still massively smaller than the distance to the Oort cloud, itself a fraction (1/40th?) of the distance to the nearest star. Really, our everyday experience is confined to the thin slice of scale between (say) mm and tens/hundreds/thousands of Km. If the subatomic world is the 'lower' - very empty - third of the total, and the cosmic is the upper third, then we directly experience only about the middle third of the middle third...
So, you'd like someone to write a natural language shell where you can describe what you'd like to happen, possibly badly, and the shell would magically know what you mean and do the right thing?
COMPUTER : ENHANCE!
Also, applescript is where people should go for "move file 'myfile.txt' to directory 'somedirectory'". Ok, so not exactly that syntax, but still.
If I want to display an image, I can open it in my GUI. If it's actually a common enough operation, I'll write a quick script so I can make it pop up by typing something: showimage blah.png
Indeed; furthermore, on a mac you just need open blah.png and it will open in preview. Or open -a /Applications/MyViewer.app blah.png for some custom viewer.