1) Someone will always comment on their continued use and the superiority of an essentially obsolete Nokia handset, whether it is an older feature phone or an N900.
2) A pissing match will take place between otherwise zealous technology advocates as to how little they pay for mobile service, often coupled with how little value they find in mobile data or contemporary smartphones.
The parent posters' theories may be crackpot or science fiction, but it does seem that in absolute terms our knowledge of cosmology, while well grounded in theory, seems awfully speculative especially given our level of understanding of basic forces like gravity, let alone find concrete, experimentally verifiable theories for the beginning/end of the Universe.
I would argue that the size and timescales are also so vast relative to both our individual existence and existence as a species that we might not be able to ever really know with any certainty, nor would the answers matter.
It's like being in 4th grade and trying to develop meaningful theories on when and where you will retire in your late 60s. Not only do you not know enough facts to answer the question substantively, it's so far away that knowing or not knowing isn't really relevant and much of it hinges on unrelated consequences of events that we don't know and haven't experienced yet.
The only problem with an electric auxillary motor is that it would take a ton of power and I'm not sure the battery size/weight to get any meaningful runtime out of it would be at all practical.
One thing that I have seen that seems 'new' and might make an electric motor work are variable-speed diesel DC generators. They feed some kind of DC-DC converter/charge controller to provide a fixed DC voltage that can charge batteries or feed an inverter and could probably supply DC to the motor, too, although I haven't seen the converters for 48vdc.
Supposedly they're extremely efficient as they have the electrical generation built into the flywheel, so there's no mechanical losses from a belt or shaft driven generator. Because the charge controller is setup to convert a wide range of DC voltage to a fixed voltage, the engine can be run at varying speeds depending on electrical need, rather than requiring a fixed RPM required to generate AC power. Battery charging can happen at low speeds for improved fuel efficiency. I think they also enable the use of very small diesel engines, saving space.
At least this way you could have one IC engine that does both generation and could act as a power source for a motor. With enough battery, docking and exiting marinas could be done on battery alone. And you'd only need one IC engine for electrical power and auxillary propulsion.
As a person who spends a significant amount of their time planning my fantasy boat, it looks like in terms of equipment selection, 12v and 24v seem to be kings with much less choice once you get to 48vdc.
Now this is mostly for recreational boats up to about 50'. The larger vessels seem to be more inclined to support 24v because they have the space for larger battery arrays and more flexibility to support 12v runs for the many accessories that only run on 12v.
The more run of the mill boats seem to be exclusively 12v because they have less space for battery arrays, their engines are default setup for 12v alternators.
But even when you get into larger trawler-type cruisers, they may have 24v or even 48v arrays, but that mostly seems to be because almost every appliance they have is 115vac and they're just looking for power efficiency when they're not running off the generator anyway.
Every iPhone I buy has been used *hard* for two years by two busy professionals working as consultants, and then used continuously as a home telephone (we kept our landline number and ported it to a cell number because it was actually cheaper than the monthly taxfest that is a landline) and then used pretty hard by a 10 year old boy after that.
I may buy a new iPhone every year, but every one of those iPhones gets used for four years and by then it's not even a question of battery that's an issue, but of software and processor obsolescence for any kind of a serious tasks, and I don't think that's really all that different for Android users, either. The only hardware issue I've ever had was a volume up button on a 4S that crapped out six months in, and it was swapped out in store for a replacement phone in 10 minutes.
I really don't understand guys like you that are so angry about people who do buy a phone every year. Admittedly the biggest "feature" add on year on year is mostly CPU/RAM, although the screen size bump with the iPhone 6 Plus has been the main thing this year. It's a fucking tax writeoff for us and even if we bought 2-3 phones individually we'd be looking at upgrades every 18 months or so anyway, so one every 12-14 months doesn't seem outrageous.
I sometimes think the hostility is because you're too broke, too cheap or just flat-out jealous.
I'll be slightly less abrasive than above, but my experience with the "non replaceable" battery in every iPhone since 3GS is that battery failure has been a non-issue.
I buy a new iPhone every year, pass my old one to my wife, and her now "old" phone becomes our house phone, and the "old" house phone becomes an iPod for my son on trips.
So by the time it gets to iPod status it has been used as a daily phone with frequent charging (me), abusive charging (my wife lets hers get down to 10-20% constantly and doesn't charge in the car, etc), sitting in a charging dock, on, for a solid year as the house phone and then getting used intermittently by my son. It still seems to hold a reasonable charge -- he uses it constantly during a 3 hour plane ride and then more still after we get off the plane without any complaints of short battery life.
I don't really see the "non replaceable" battery as an issue. Even when I had a replaceable battery phone, I only just swapped batteries at home. The few times I decided to haul a battery around with me, I use it so infrequently that it was half discharged by the time I needed it.
If you suck down so much battery during normal use and can't charge off a computer or socket, any of the LiO USB chargers would be fine or even one of the battery cases.
I don't think Apple wants to be in the car manufacturing business with a car of their own anymore than they want to be in the PC and smartphone manufacturing business. With consumer electronics, though, you only have to be in the design business (and only partially, since they buy a lot of technology from someone else -- AFAIK, they don't design display panels, radio chipsets, flash memory, RAM, etc).
With cars, though, there's not really a contract manufacturer who does the assembly, you have to do that yourself although you can buy a lot of parts from OEMs like Bosch and others.
I think Apple sees a way to become a marquis branded supplier to other car makers. Building an "Apple Car" is a design exercise, a way to see how what they do can be applied to electric cars and I'm sure it has a lot to do with dashboard electronics and "user interface" as much as it does with anything else. There may also be less sexy opportunities in terms of what they know about battery management.
From what I've read the lack of respect for negative results ties into both the leadership for study funding and to the less informed people from outside the scientific community who often approve the funding.
The person in charge of a larger scientific entity may have even more invested in the "right" conclusion in terms of their leadership potential and may not want to fund or advance studies which could threaten their larger position on the issue.
And people from outside the scientific community may see negative outcomes wrongly as "failed" science -- why look, you couldn't even prove your theory. As you point out, this is wrong, but I think these people look at it kind of like a failed business venture. If Joe Scientist's theory is disproven, he must be an incompetent idiot and we should disown him because clearly he's going down the wrong path.
Do SAN vendors intentionally mix production runs of drives when they ship them?
I would kind of expect them to, and it might explain why I've never seen a group of drives bought at the same time (installed in a server or SAN) fail as a group.
Although I would kind of expect some logistical challenges if I was a SAN vendor trying to keep inventories of multiple production runs in stock for populating new SANs, especially when some single unit devices can ship with as many as 24 drives. Keeping a half-dozen unique batches on site for populating systems, sure, but 24? I would think some SANs would have to go out with drives from the same production run and the logistics just get more complicated with mismatched supply/demand/production curves.
I think there's two other interrelated things that contribute to this.
"Big Science" these days, especially in healthcare, often involves long-term, expensive studies which take years to perform. People who commit to this mode of science make both a commitment to the field, but often to the hypothesis being tested.
To get the study funded requires basically betting your career on the validity or at least the likelihood of the validity of the hypothesis.
So, if I've bought into the hypothesis that dietary cholesterol influences serum cholesterol and it takes 10 years to design, fund and implement the study involved in it when the results turn out negative, what of my career? I've invested a good chunk of it basically being wrong.
And I think a fair amount of the people involved in these big theories aren't just scientifically interested in them, they are invested in them in terms of scientific reputation since they kind of have to be to get them funded. They often become advocates for the theory before it's proven, and if it isn't sustained by the study there's the risk of looking foolish because you were wrong.
So between personal reputations and career commitment and the size of the science involved, people have a lot of personal stake in seeing their hypothesis validated.
I think it's more the Peter Principle -- people get promoted for success in their current position and stop getting promoted once they become ineffective.
I think the last "kick upstairs" is done for employees who are too ineffective but too loyal/valuable to have working elsewhere.
I see this at two clients with POS systems. They don't handle any cash or credit card transactions, everything is billed to internal accounts, but they still want to use some of the terminals for productivity software because the POS systems are underutilized as POS systems, they lack the space for additional productivity PCs and don't want to spend money on them anyway.
I opposed it on principle in terms of providing advice, but as a matter of practicality since they're not handling real money or credit card information the risk is a lot less.
In the late 1970s in junior high we would ride the bus and get off at random stops and write down pay phone numbers. Then when we got home we would call the numbers and do all sorts of gags.
The one that inexplicably worked well was telling people that had won money from a radio station. Why they believed that an 8th grader sounded like a disk jockey is still beyond me.
It's almost kind of sad that kids of today can't get that experience. There's very few pay phones left and I bet none of them accept incoming calls. It was also pretty safe from a get in trouble perspective. Call logging and tracing would have been a huge endeavor and we never called any one pay phone more than a few times or suggested anything violent or even all that ribald.
They don't pay it off now by printing money because other people keep buying the debt.
The dollar represents 2/3rds of the world's reserve currency. The rest of the reserve currencies combined aren't enough to replace it.
Hyperinflation probably isn't always a guarnateed outcome, I would wager political pressure not to manipulate monetary and fiscal policy that much is a bigger reason.
One other interesting takeaway for me was the range of what it might mean to be be a superintelligence. The author being interviewed said there are kind of various dimensions to superintelligence, such as speed of processing, complexity of processing, size of "memory" or available database of info, concurrency (ability to process independent events simultaneously).
Not all superintelligences may have all of these qualitative dimensions maxmized, either, which can be part of the problem of failing to recognize when one has been created because we may fail to see its potential because it doesn't seem omniscient.
I think it's also interesting how we kind of default to science fiction ideas of like Terminator or other "machines run amok" scenerios where the outcome is physical violence against humans.
Some of the outcomes could be more subtle and some of the biases could be inbuilt by humans and not the part of some kind of warped machine volition or intuition.
One of the everyday examples might be the advanced software designed to bank finances, linking program trading, risk and portfolio analysis, markets, etc. The amount of information big banks have to process on a daily basis is massive and while humans make important decisions, they rely heavily on machine analytics and suggested actions (and modeled outcomes) to make those decisions.
The system may make money, but is it only biased in terms of firm profit or could it have other, unintended capital effects? Is it possible that while each big bank may have their own unique system but because all these systems have a lot of shared data (prices, market activity, known holdings by others, common risk models, etc) that they could have an influential or feedback loop among them that might actually drive markets? Could this unintentional "network" of like systems be something like a superintelligence?
One question I sometimes ask myself -- what if wealth inequality wasn't a conspiracy of some kind (by the rich, the politicians, a combination, etc) but instead was something of a "defect" in the higher order of financial system intelligence? Or maybe not even a defect, but a kind of designed-in bias in the system's base instructions (ie, make the bank profitable, for exampel) that resulted in financial outcomes which tend to make the rich richer? What if the natural outcome of markets was greater wealth equality but because they are heavily influenced by a primitive machine intelligence we get inequality? How could we know this isn't true?
I think these are the more interesting challenges of machine superintelligence because they grow out of the things we rely on current (and limited) machine intelligence to do for us now. Will we even recognize when these systems get it wrong and how will we know?
Because US debt is denominated in US dollars, we could pay it off tomorrow with a spreadsheet entry at the Federal Reserve which created $16.39 trillion by fiat. There may even be some non-inflationary gimmick that could be employed to pay off existing debt via normal government revenue and only sell treasuries to the Fed who would never sell them.
And because the dollar is the dominant world reserve currency (around 65%), Congress could just vote to nullify a huge portion of that debt tomorrow. There's no short or even medium term replacement for dollars as a trading currency, so not only would it suck nations holding that debt the world would have to keep using the dollar or go broke.
The latter is the existential threat to the Chinese economy. With the stroke of a pen, the Chinese could see 1.2 trillion just wiped off their balance sheet.
When you control both the printing of your money and issue debt in the same money, anything is possible.
I listened to a podcast (Econtalk, which is about as sober as podcasts get) that interviewed an AI "worrier" and he acknowledges that our current technology can't produce a superintelligence now. But he does make a couple of interesting points which I think make for reasonable discussion even if it isn't the "ZOMG, PANIC" kind of talk you imply.
One, discussing machine superintelligence before it actually develops is almost necessary because once it DOES exist it may be difficult to control. By definition, superintelligence will be smarter than we are and capable of manipulating at a level of complexity we can't grasp, making it hard to control.
And we've already created single-purpose "intelligences" similar to this, like the old "Internet worm" or some kinds of computer viruses that while they lack general purpose intelligence, have a self-replicating intelligence that can be difficult to contain. Imagine a smart hypervisor designed to manage a computing cluster but with the intelligence to replicate/migrate nodes across cloud computing infrastructure. Couple it with cyber defense technology, encryption, etc but given the single minded purpose of "don't shut down". It's not hard to see at a not-so-far-off level of intelligence that it could self-migrate across cloud platforms, resisting shutdown, possibly even able to hide in private cloud platforms all while being able to escape detection and control.
Which brings up the other point -- we don't know what machine superintelligence will look like. Part of the problem with understanding what superintelligence could be is that we don't know how far we are from creating one because as humans we try to imagine superintelligence in anthropomorphic terms using human epistemologies. It doesn't have to be the anthropomorphic HAL 9000, it could be a hypervisor manager, a securities trading system or some other single-purpose automation system that contains a feedback loop between a series of "dumb" systems coupled with a control plane. We may create it by accident and even if its not perfect, there are some realms where it wouldn't take long running amok to cause large problems, even if the outcome wasn't "judgement day".
Some devices like Nest seem to add more intelligence to things we already use, but some devices just seem to add gadgets without actually making things more intelligent.
Where are my outlets with an integrated, network accessible power meter? Or the smart electrical panel that can have circuit priorities and acceptable power source types assigned to it so that when I run off a Tesla PowerWall I get maximum utility from the power? Or even the main power meter that lets me see my electrical utilization in real time?
So much of the IoT just seems to be about adding new gadgets whose utility seems limited while ignoring the rest of the house which is dumb.
I also wonder if gang affiliation in prison has a lot to do with it. I don't claim to be an expert, but from what I've read it's difficult to survive in a lot of prisons without some kind of gang affiliation. Even if you're not a full-on blood-in member, a lot of time people end up owing favors to whatever gang they were involved in and they're expected to pay those back and most prison gangs easily can reach out beyond the walls and coerce poeple back into criminal behavior.
As in Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. We know that the risk of an asteroid strike, but we don't know about all the potential asteroids that could hit us.
While the overall risk is low, we don't know what could possibly hit us.
Most "lethal injections" imply a drug with some sedative/hypnotic properties that renders you unconscious, not much different than being administered anesthesia where you just "fall asleep" quickly.
Beheading? A very effective beheading (guillotine) sounds like there's at least a chance of some very terrifying moments of consciousness of your head separated from your body.
Worst is one of the Islamic terrorist beheadings where they just kind of saw your head off with a knife, which sounds like a mixture of extreme pain and extreme agony for several minutes.
Given the potential universe of wacky cults, from Scientology to the Heaven's Gate to Aum Shinrikyo to Jim Jones' People's Temple, it might make sense to think about the risks associated with cults.
Especially if you factor in that Heavens Gate attracted a lot of people with IT smarts and Aum Shinrikyo tried to sarin gas the subway. Even if they don't become mass phenomenons there's some risk that bizarre millennial thought coupled with above average intelligence could lead to some bad outcomes.
Why not one of those hobby turbines used as a generator?
This one:
http://www.mhzusa.com/MHZ-JetC......has a gearbox for driving the driveshaft of a boat, but maybe it could be adapted to run a generator. The specs show 8kw of power output and I think this is the smallest one they sell. Some of the others have power output in excess of 10kw.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard a few good lectures on ontology and epistemology and every time I'm struck by the level of assumption and interpretation in what we know.
1) Someone will always comment on their continued use and the superiority of an essentially obsolete Nokia handset, whether it is an older feature phone or an N900.
2) A pissing match will take place between otherwise zealous technology advocates as to how little they pay for mobile service, often coupled with how little value they find in mobile data or contemporary smartphones.
The parent posters' theories may be crackpot or science fiction, but it does seem that in absolute terms our knowledge of cosmology, while well grounded in theory, seems awfully speculative especially given our level of understanding of basic forces like gravity, let alone find concrete, experimentally verifiable theories for the beginning/end of the Universe.
I would argue that the size and timescales are also so vast relative to both our individual existence and existence as a species that we might not be able to ever really know with any certainty, nor would the answers matter.
It's like being in 4th grade and trying to develop meaningful theories on when and where you will retire in your late 60s. Not only do you not know enough facts to answer the question substantively, it's so far away that knowing or not knowing isn't really relevant and much of it hinges on unrelated consequences of events that we don't know and haven't experienced yet.
The only problem with an electric auxillary motor is that it would take a ton of power and I'm not sure the battery size/weight to get any meaningful runtime out of it would be at all practical.
One thing that I have seen that seems 'new' and might make an electric motor work are variable-speed diesel DC generators. They feed some kind of DC-DC converter/charge controller to provide a fixed DC voltage that can charge batteries or feed an inverter and could probably supply DC to the motor, too, although I haven't seen the converters for 48vdc.
Supposedly they're extremely efficient as they have the electrical generation built into the flywheel, so there's no mechanical losses from a belt or shaft driven generator. Because the charge controller is setup to convert a wide range of DC voltage to a fixed voltage, the engine can be run at varying speeds depending on electrical need, rather than requiring a fixed RPM required to generate AC power. Battery charging can happen at low speeds for improved fuel efficiency. I think they also enable the use of very small diesel engines, saving space.
At least this way you could have one IC engine that does both generation and could act as a power source for a motor. With enough battery, docking and exiting marinas could be done on battery alone. And you'd only need one IC engine for electrical power and auxillary propulsion.
As a person who spends a significant amount of their time planning my fantasy boat, it looks like in terms of equipment selection, 12v and 24v seem to be kings with much less choice once you get to 48vdc.
Now this is mostly for recreational boats up to about 50'. The larger vessels seem to be more inclined to support 24v because they have the space for larger battery arrays and more flexibility to support 12v runs for the many accessories that only run on 12v.
The more run of the mill boats seem to be exclusively 12v because they have less space for battery arrays, their engines are default setup for 12v alternators.
But even when you get into larger trawler-type cruisers, they may have 24v or even 48v arrays, but that mostly seems to be because almost every appliance they have is 115vac and they're just looking for power efficiency when they're not running off the generator anyway.
No, I don't see it as in issue for anybody.
Every iPhone I buy has been used *hard* for two years by two busy professionals working as consultants, and then used continuously as a home telephone (we kept our landline number and ported it to a cell number because it was actually cheaper than the monthly taxfest that is a landline) and then used pretty hard by a 10 year old boy after that.
I may buy a new iPhone every year, but every one of those iPhones gets used for four years and by then it's not even a question of battery that's an issue, but of software and processor obsolescence for any kind of a serious tasks, and I don't think that's really all that different for Android users, either. The only hardware issue I've ever had was a volume up button on a 4S that crapped out six months in, and it was swapped out in store for a replacement phone in 10 minutes.
I really don't understand guys like you that are so angry about people who do buy a phone every year. Admittedly the biggest "feature" add on year on year is mostly CPU/RAM, although the screen size bump with the iPhone 6 Plus has been the main thing this year. It's a fucking tax writeoff for us and even if we bought 2-3 phones individually we'd be looking at upgrades every 18 months or so anyway, so one every 12-14 months doesn't seem outrageous.
I sometimes think the hostility is because you're too broke, too cheap or just flat-out jealous.
I'll be slightly less abrasive than above, but my experience with the "non replaceable" battery in every iPhone since 3GS is that battery failure has been a non-issue.
I buy a new iPhone every year, pass my old one to my wife, and her now "old" phone becomes our house phone, and the "old" house phone becomes an iPod for my son on trips.
So by the time it gets to iPod status it has been used as a daily phone with frequent charging (me), abusive charging (my wife lets hers get down to 10-20% constantly and doesn't charge in the car, etc), sitting in a charging dock, on, for a solid year as the house phone and then getting used intermittently by my son. It still seems to hold a reasonable charge -- he uses it constantly during a 3 hour plane ride and then more still after we get off the plane without any complaints of short battery life.
I don't really see the "non replaceable" battery as an issue. Even when I had a replaceable battery phone, I only just swapped batteries at home. The few times I decided to haul a battery around with me, I use it so infrequently that it was half discharged by the time I needed it.
If you suck down so much battery during normal use and can't charge off a computer or socket, any of the LiO USB chargers would be fine or even one of the battery cases.
I don't think Apple wants to be in the car manufacturing business with a car of their own anymore than they want to be in the PC and smartphone manufacturing business. With consumer electronics, though, you only have to be in the design business (and only partially, since they buy a lot of technology from someone else -- AFAIK, they don't design display panels, radio chipsets, flash memory, RAM, etc).
With cars, though, there's not really a contract manufacturer who does the assembly, you have to do that yourself although you can buy a lot of parts from OEMs like Bosch and others.
I think Apple sees a way to become a marquis branded supplier to other car makers. Building an "Apple Car" is a design exercise, a way to see how what they do can be applied to electric cars and I'm sure it has a lot to do with dashboard electronics and "user interface" as much as it does with anything else. There may also be less sexy opportunities in terms of what they know about battery management.
From what I've read the lack of respect for negative results ties into both the leadership for study funding and to the less informed people from outside the scientific community who often approve the funding.
The person in charge of a larger scientific entity may have even more invested in the "right" conclusion in terms of their leadership potential and may not want to fund or advance studies which could threaten their larger position on the issue.
And people from outside the scientific community may see negative outcomes wrongly as "failed" science -- why look, you couldn't even prove your theory. As you point out, this is wrong, but I think these people look at it kind of like a failed business venture. If Joe Scientist's theory is disproven, he must be an incompetent idiot and we should disown him because clearly he's going down the wrong path.
Do SAN vendors intentionally mix production runs of drives when they ship them?
I would kind of expect them to, and it might explain why I've never seen a group of drives bought at the same time (installed in a server or SAN) fail as a group.
Although I would kind of expect some logistical challenges if I was a SAN vendor trying to keep inventories of multiple production runs in stock for populating new SANs, especially when some single unit devices can ship with as many as 24 drives. Keeping a half-dozen unique batches on site for populating systems, sure, but 24? I would think some SANs would have to go out with drives from the same production run and the logistics just get more complicated with mismatched supply/demand/production curves.
I think there's two other interrelated things that contribute to this.
"Big Science" these days, especially in healthcare, often involves long-term, expensive studies which take years to perform. People who commit to this mode of science make both a commitment to the field, but often to the hypothesis being tested.
To get the study funded requires basically betting your career on the validity or at least the likelihood of the validity of the hypothesis.
So, if I've bought into the hypothesis that dietary cholesterol influences serum cholesterol and it takes 10 years to design, fund and implement the study involved in it when the results turn out negative, what of my career? I've invested a good chunk of it basically being wrong.
And I think a fair amount of the people involved in these big theories aren't just scientifically interested in them, they are invested in them in terms of scientific reputation since they kind of have to be to get them funded. They often become advocates for the theory before it's proven, and if it isn't sustained by the study there's the risk of looking foolish because you were wrong.
So between personal reputations and career commitment and the size of the science involved, people have a lot of personal stake in seeing their hypothesis validated.
I think it's more the Peter Principle -- people get promoted for success in their current position and stop getting promoted once they become ineffective.
I think the last "kick upstairs" is done for employees who are too ineffective but too loyal/valuable to have working elsewhere.
I see this at two clients with POS systems. They don't handle any cash or credit card transactions, everything is billed to internal accounts, but they still want to use some of the terminals for productivity software because the POS systems are underutilized as POS systems, they lack the space for additional productivity PCs and don't want to spend money on them anyway.
I opposed it on principle in terms of providing advice, but as a matter of practicality since they're not handling real money or credit card information the risk is a lot less.
A nominal promotion in terms of title, but actually reduced responsibilities in terms of work.
In the late 1970s in junior high we would ride the bus and get off at random stops and write down pay phone numbers. Then when we got home we would call the numbers and do all sorts of gags.
The one that inexplicably worked well was telling people that had won money from a radio station. Why they believed that an 8th grader sounded like a disk jockey is still beyond me.
It's almost kind of sad that kids of today can't get that experience. There's very few pay phones left and I bet none of them accept incoming calls. It was also pretty safe from a get in trouble perspective. Call logging and tracing would have been a huge endeavor and we never called any one pay phone more than a few times or suggested anything violent or even all that ribald.
They don't pay it off now by printing money because other people keep buying the debt.
The dollar represents 2/3rds of the world's reserve currency. The rest of the reserve currencies combined aren't enough to replace it.
Hyperinflation probably isn't always a guarnateed outcome, I would wager political pressure not to manipulate monetary and fiscal policy that much is a bigger reason.
One other interesting takeaway for me was the range of what it might mean to be be a superintelligence. The author being interviewed said there are kind of various dimensions to superintelligence, such as speed of processing, complexity of processing, size of "memory" or available database of info, concurrency (ability to process independent events simultaneously).
Not all superintelligences may have all of these qualitative dimensions maxmized, either, which can be part of the problem of failing to recognize when one has been created because we may fail to see its potential because it doesn't seem omniscient.
I think it's also interesting how we kind of default to science fiction ideas of like Terminator or other "machines run amok" scenerios where the outcome is physical violence against humans.
Some of the outcomes could be more subtle and some of the biases could be inbuilt by humans and not the part of some kind of warped machine volition or intuition.
One of the everyday examples might be the advanced software designed to bank finances, linking program trading, risk and portfolio analysis, markets, etc. The amount of information big banks have to process on a daily basis is massive and while humans make important decisions, they rely heavily on machine analytics and suggested actions (and modeled outcomes) to make those decisions.
The system may make money, but is it only biased in terms of firm profit or could it have other, unintended capital effects? Is it possible that while each big bank may have their own unique system but because all these systems have a lot of shared data (prices, market activity, known holdings by others, common risk models, etc) that they could have an influential or feedback loop among them that might actually drive markets? Could this unintentional "network" of like systems be something like a superintelligence?
One question I sometimes ask myself -- what if wealth inequality wasn't a conspiracy of some kind (by the rich, the politicians, a combination, etc) but instead was something of a "defect" in the higher order of financial system intelligence? Or maybe not even a defect, but a kind of designed-in bias in the system's base instructions (ie, make the bank profitable, for exampel) that resulted in financial outcomes which tend to make the rich richer? What if the natural outcome of markets was greater wealth equality but because they are heavily influenced by a primitive machine intelligence we get inequality? How could we know this isn't true?
I think these are the more interesting challenges of machine superintelligence because they grow out of the things we rely on current (and limited) machine intelligence to do for us now. Will we even recognize when these systems get it wrong and how will we know?
Because US debt is denominated in US dollars, we could pay it off tomorrow with a spreadsheet entry at the Federal Reserve which created $16.39 trillion by fiat. There may even be some non-inflationary gimmick that could be employed to pay off existing debt via normal government revenue and only sell treasuries to the Fed who would never sell them.
And because the dollar is the dominant world reserve currency (around 65%), Congress could just vote to nullify a huge portion of that debt tomorrow. There's no short or even medium term replacement for dollars as a trading currency, so not only would it suck nations holding that debt the world would have to keep using the dollar or go broke.
The latter is the existential threat to the Chinese economy. With the stroke of a pen, the Chinese could see 1.2 trillion just wiped off their balance sheet.
When you control both the printing of your money and issue debt in the same money, anything is possible.
I listened to a podcast (Econtalk, which is about as sober as podcasts get) that interviewed an AI "worrier" and he acknowledges that our current technology can't produce a superintelligence now. But he does make a couple of interesting points which I think make for reasonable discussion even if it isn't the "ZOMG, PANIC" kind of talk you imply.
One, discussing machine superintelligence before it actually develops is almost necessary because once it DOES exist it may be difficult to control. By definition, superintelligence will be smarter than we are and capable of manipulating at a level of complexity we can't grasp, making it hard to control.
And we've already created single-purpose "intelligences" similar to this, like the old "Internet worm" or some kinds of computer viruses that while they lack general purpose intelligence, have a self-replicating intelligence that can be difficult to contain. Imagine a smart hypervisor designed to manage a computing cluster but with the intelligence to replicate/migrate nodes across cloud computing infrastructure. Couple it with cyber defense technology, encryption, etc but given the single minded purpose of "don't shut down". It's not hard to see at a not-so-far-off level of intelligence that it could self-migrate across cloud platforms, resisting shutdown, possibly even able to hide in private cloud platforms all while being able to escape detection and control.
Which brings up the other point -- we don't know what machine superintelligence will look like. Part of the problem with understanding what superintelligence could be is that we don't know how far we are from creating one because as humans we try to imagine superintelligence in anthropomorphic terms using human epistemologies. It doesn't have to be the anthropomorphic HAL 9000, it could be a hypervisor manager, a securities trading system or some other single-purpose automation system that contains a feedback loop between a series of "dumb" systems coupled with a control plane. We may create it by accident and even if its not perfect, there are some realms where it wouldn't take long running amok to cause large problems, even if the outcome wasn't "judgement day".
Some devices like Nest seem to add more intelligence to things we already use, but some devices just seem to add gadgets without actually making things more intelligent.
Where are my outlets with an integrated, network accessible power meter? Or the smart electrical panel that can have circuit priorities and acceptable power source types assigned to it so that when I run off a Tesla PowerWall I get maximum utility from the power? Or even the main power meter that lets me see my electrical utilization in real time?
So much of the IoT just seems to be about adding new gadgets whose utility seems limited while ignoring the rest of the house which is dumb.
This makes complete sense.
I also wonder if gang affiliation in prison has a lot to do with it. I don't claim to be an expert, but from what I've read it's difficult to survive in a lot of prisons without some kind of gang affiliation. Even if you're not a full-on blood-in member, a lot of time people end up owing favors to whatever gang they were involved in and they're expected to pay those back and most prison gangs easily can reach out beyond the walls and coerce poeple back into criminal behavior.
As in Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. We know that the risk of an asteroid strike, but we don't know about all the potential asteroids that could hit us.
While the overall risk is low, we don't know what could possibly hit us.
Most "lethal injections" imply a drug with some sedative/hypnotic properties that renders you unconscious, not much different than being administered anesthesia where you just "fall asleep" quickly.
Beheading? A very effective beheading (guillotine) sounds like there's at least a chance of some very terrifying moments of consciousness of your head separated from your body.
Worst is one of the Islamic terrorist beheadings where they just kind of saw your head off with a knife, which sounds like a mixture of extreme pain and extreme agony for several minutes.
Given the potential universe of wacky cults, from Scientology to the Heaven's Gate to Aum Shinrikyo to Jim Jones' People's Temple, it might make sense to think about the risks associated with cults.
Especially if you factor in that Heavens Gate attracted a lot of people with IT smarts and Aum Shinrikyo tried to sarin gas the subway. Even if they don't become mass phenomenons there's some risk that bizarre millennial thought coupled with above average intelligence could lead to some bad outcomes.
Why not one of those hobby turbines used as a generator?
This one:
http://www.mhzusa.com/MHZ-JetC... ...has a gearbox for driving the driveshaft of a boat, but maybe it could be adapted to run a generator. The specs show 8kw of power output and I think this is the smallest one they sell. Some of the others have power output in excess of 10kw.