No, an even sillier fallacy, committed by people who vaguely remember reading about Searle's chinese room thought experiment in Phil 101, is exactly the one you made. Nobody has thought of a good reason why a perfect functional duplicate of your brain wouldn't have the same thought-content as your brain. Of course, if it's made of different stuff, it will need different anesthetics - and you can't get it drunk with ethyl alcohol either. But that's your argument for why it's not intelligent? I hate to break it to you, but your brain is processing signals. That's all it does. I assume you're conscious, but if so, it's because of the signal-processing in your brain.
OK, the Mir space station was probably much roomier than any likely Mars spaceship, but it's worth noting that people stayed up there for a year at a time, and there were no fistfights, gropings, or any other such silliness. I'm sure the Russian space agency has reams of psychological data from Mir.
The value I see in this is that if you repeat such experiments many times, you can start testing theories about the interaction of certain personality types, and also test theories about choosing optimal group sizes, gender mix, degree of contact with Earth (less might actually be better). Also, I know that Mir cosmonauts frequently got pissed off because they were given too much work. Experiments like this could establish an appropriate threshold for "minimum necessary slack time".
OK, I take it back - maybe there is a lot to be learned from experiments like this. As a bonus they're absurdly cheap (as a fraction of the total Mars mission cost) and if repeated often enough, they really might help (in unexpected ways) with planning a mission which is least likely to fail.
(Though it's worth adding that if the actual Mars astronauts got into bloody fistfights and sexually harassed the hot Canadian crewmate, Americans might actually tune in and learn more astronomy sort of by accident. Hmm, maybe Rupert Murdoch should fund the mission and give FOX/Sky broadcast rights to what would surely be the most watched reality show in all of history!)
Huh? They'd bring a few pounds of Plutonium 238, or they'd be is a spaceship with solar panels, or their exercise equipment would have generators. Note the inclusive "or" - most likely, all of the above would be true.
I see it differently, and I think the test subject do too: If you're the first crew to Mars, you know every second that what you're doing is fucking important, and that you have a special privilege and responsibility, and that the whole world is watching you. I think it's pretty likely that under such circumstances the dude wouldn't have tried to fondle the hot Canadian chick. You'd keep a lid on it.
Contrast that to an experiment where you basically have five people in railroad car undergoing isolation torture with dubious scientific value. Then you realize "you know, if I have nice bloody fistfight with Sergey, they'll cancel this stupid experiment, let me go home, and the jerk might even lose a tooth like he deserves to. All signs point to yes."
So in summary, I'm saying that a real crew on its way to the actual planet Mars has many more reasons to be on their best behavior.
Right, which is why the best thing to do with all the CO2 in the atmosphere is to make it into some sort of a solid carbonate. "Clean coal" dreamers claim that just injecting CO2 under the crust will make this happen on Earth - I suspect it's more complicated, but when we're already fantasizing about teraforming, the question of sequestering CO2 somehow is probably not the decisive one. Also, re. the earlier comment about the albedo: you could achieve the same effect cheaper by putting a huge solar-powered space station into the liberation point between Venus and the sun. Then you can spread out sails to block as much sun as you need until Venus gets just the perfect amount. This would be even better than Earth, because by manipulating the shade, you could control the illumination of various regions to ensure optimal weather year round.
I agree! We could sell it to China or some private company who will pay for the deorbiting and has an actual plan of what could be done there. Maybe they could grow silicon crystals? Who knows? But now that we burned so much fuel lifting all that stuff, it's a shame to just let it all fall down.
The outcry won't be from me. Yeah, I want Hubble to stay up as long as possible. The ISS? I sort of don't care. I don't feel like I've really learned anything from the hundred billion dollars we spent on it. (We already knew that our shuttles suck and occasionally explode.) It's a shame we put all that money into it, and put tons of noxious crap into the atmosphere from all the solid rocket fuel... but, fuck it. It's been a distraction from day 1 and the sooner it goes down, the sooner we can start doing something valuable in space.
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.
Bullshit. All of those project significantly advanced human knowledge (or are about to - if we learn as little from the LHC as we did from the ISS, it will be called the most miserable failure in all of science).
Face it, the ISS was a make-work project for NASA. It was not a tool designed to teach us something we wanted to know. When it crashes to Earth, science will barely notice.
Yeah, you're right, but that will have its own oddities, like the one in the parent post but on a larger scale. But real-time routing will require cameras pretty much everywhere where cars drive, and... yuck. But then again, I'm sure a place like Tokyo will get satnav that's wired in to the municipal traffic data, and could get information about which lights will turn red when. Actually, a cooperation between navigation devices and urban stop lights could potentially speed up traffic a whole lot. For example, if the city computers know that I and ten other cars near me are all going to the local interstate on-ramp, they would herd us together and make sure we get green lights all the way through - keeping us from clogging the streets and wasting gas idling, braking and accelerating. I guess that would be the first step in the system which would eventually autopilot cars through cities - and yeah, that wouldn't be so bad.
I wonder how many more stories like this we'll see once sat-nav becomes something that almost everyone uses. For now, most people who have it don't have it on for most of their trips, but many people who "grow up with it" eventually will. This means that the magic voice will have incredible power in shaping urban traffic patterns. Some roads will be jammed while others will be empty, and all because of sat-nav. I wonder if cities will start adapting to sat-nav by widening the streets that (say) Gramin likes to recommend.
I can imagine a scene in a future movie where some old coot gives the protagonist a ride without nav-sat through the city - taking shortcuts, avoiding lights, dodging jams, and revealing hitherto unseen, decaying, abandoned-looking streets. The protagonist gets to his destination in half the normal time, but still thinks the old man is nutty for his luddite refusal to do things the easy way.
Exactly - these would be satellite phones that would have free, unrestricted internet service for anyone who operates one. They could saturate Iran with them. Sure, it would cost some money, but much less than a war! It would be an incredible PR stunt, because it would just be access to information - not like radios hard-tuned to our propaganda channel. I seriously hope that the government are working OLPC-like rugged smart phone prototypes for just this purpose. A billion's worth of these will likely play a much bigger role in future outcomes of wars than will a billion's worth of some new fighter jet. Plus, the potential civilian spinoffs from a huge project of this sort are likely to be significant.
Of course we won't do it, because if we encourage too much amateur muckraking, it will probably bite us in the ass, because it will encourage people to expose all the fucked up shit that our government does.
I also wondered this! For one thing, it would make Stallman's head explode, but we might as well get the sad and inevitable event behind us and all use the best compiler we can get for all Linux projects.
Obama's economists decided that they need to spend their way out of this recession, and even though Orion would not pass muster by my bang-for-buck standards, it's not the worst way to spend money if spending money is what you're trying to do.
Of course we could do better: We could dream big like JFK and (for the first time since the 60's) try something truly ambitious and expensive. As Americans, it's time we finally accomplish something! Ever since we lost the Vietnam war, we've been complete pussies about big projects. (It doesn't help that when we do try we fail miserably, like when we try to impose Western democracy to Iraq) As far as I can tell, the largest public project recently was the Big Dig in Boston. We can't even rebuild Ground Zero. We act like a country who lost faith in ourselves, in a time when it's very important that the rest of the world has faith in us (and our currency). We lucked into the internet - yes, that was cool, but it wasn't something we deliberately set out to do as a public communication tool.
I think that Obama should just ask to dust off the Titan V blueprints and build factory to produce them on a massive scale. Then use those to lift into space something really cool, like a 100m mirror for a telescope, solar collectors that beam power back to Earth, etc.
That linked article was amazing, not least because it was already ten years old. With the computation gains we have made since 1999, it's a crime that this sort of AI has not made it into commercial games.
I hope not! There isn't a single Civ game which can challenge a human being without cheating. And it's for Civ-type games that I think the sort of AI regimentation described in the article could potentially do the most good. I'm really glad that we're reaching times where significant resources are being devoted to fundamentally improving game AI. Maybe in Civ 5, I can have an interesting struggle with an AI opponent who doesn't cheat. Right now we are miles from this, though.
I agree that this is very interesting, but the sheer asymmetry of the setup (players begin with four ships versus 20,000+ for the AI) means that we don't really have a chance to compare the AI to human intelligence. The concepts seem sound, but they need to be implemented in combination with an economic model which will allow symmetric human v. AI showdowns. Something like this would be very cool, for example, in the next iteration of the Civilization series.
To his credit, the author acknowledges these limitations and admits that the concepts need to be taken farther. With this I agree, and I hope they do!
I'm puzzled by this myself, but I'm a bit of an outsider and definitely not a developer. Could it be that GTK+ is more streamlined and performs better? If not then I really can't fathom why this GTK+ vs. QT rivalry is being depicted as a battle of near-equals. They're not close!
The only strange thing about your argument is that your "brand-taxed" iPod was also made in China. They can do QA in China as well as anywhere, but it will cost you a premium.
Wow, thank you for that informative reply! I didn't realize the thing about the two chips with two different operating systems. So is there no open-source competitor for an OS like Nucleus? Since you say that it is deeply regulated, I assume not.
I was looking at a Chinese iphone knockoff, thinking that the hardware seems decent, but I wouldn't trust the knockoff operating system. With Android, though, the cheap knockoff can legally have the very same operating system, since they don't have to pay license fees. This means that if Samsung or whoever come up with a neato handset that makes them lots of money, three months later a Chinese factory will be making identical-looking knockoffs with the same Google-made software. This might even be legal! If I were a handset manufacturer, I'd be very scared of the openness of Android, but as a consumer, I would seriously take a second look at those Chinese knockoffs that will soon come our way.
And I recommend that you first listen to this talk to regain your perspective and maybe your sanity. (Talk in OGG format)
The speaker is Bruce Sterling, and the title is The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. I think this might be the single greatest talk I've ever heard about anything, not just the question of singularities.
The talk was by the brilliant cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling - Title: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. The OGG version is here. Make sure you have an hour and are wearing a diaper, because you might pee yourself.
What's so evil about their powering their industry with a carbon-free energy? I think this is awesome! I only wish that the electricity were going to people rather than to digging up more fossil fuels. Yuck!
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No, an even sillier fallacy, committed by people who vaguely remember reading about Searle's chinese room thought experiment in Phil 101, is exactly the one you made. Nobody has thought of a good reason why a perfect functional duplicate of your brain wouldn't have the same thought-content as your brain. Of course, if it's made of different stuff, it will need different anesthetics - and you can't get it drunk with ethyl alcohol either. But that's your argument for why it's not intelligent? I hate to break it to you, but your brain is processing signals. That's all it does. I assume you're conscious, but if so, it's because of the signal-processing in your brain.
OK, that's an awesome post.
The value I see in this is that if you repeat such experiments many times, you can start testing theories about the interaction of certain personality types, and also test theories about choosing optimal group sizes, gender mix, degree of contact with Earth (less might actually be better). Also, I know that Mir cosmonauts frequently got pissed off because they were given too much work. Experiments like this could establish an appropriate threshold for "minimum necessary slack time".
OK, I take it back - maybe there is a lot to be learned from experiments like this. As a bonus they're absurdly cheap (as a fraction of the total Mars mission cost) and if repeated often enough, they really might help (in unexpected ways) with planning a mission which is least likely to fail.
(Though it's worth adding that if the actual Mars astronauts got into bloody fistfights and sexually harassed the hot Canadian crewmate, Americans might actually tune in and learn more astronomy sort of by accident. Hmm, maybe Rupert Murdoch should fund the mission and give FOX/Sky broadcast rights to what would surely be the most watched reality show in all of history!)
Huh? They'd bring a few pounds of Plutonium 238, or they'd be is a spaceship with solar panels, or their exercise equipment would have generators. Note the inclusive "or" - most likely, all of the above would be true.
I see it differently, and I think the test subject do too: If you're the first crew to Mars, you know every second that what you're doing is fucking important, and that you have a special privilege and responsibility, and that the whole world is watching you. I think it's pretty likely that under such circumstances the dude wouldn't have tried to fondle the hot Canadian chick. You'd keep a lid on it.
Contrast that to an experiment where you basically have five people in railroad car undergoing isolation torture with dubious scientific value. Then you realize "you know, if I have nice bloody fistfight with Sergey, they'll cancel this stupid experiment, let me go home, and the jerk might even lose a tooth like he deserves to. All signs point to yes."
So in summary, I'm saying that a real crew on its way to the actual planet Mars has many more reasons to be on their best behavior.
Maybe it's because the rebels in Star Wars are fighting in wars that are worth fighting. When we have one, I'll do my part to help.
Right, which is why the best thing to do with all the CO2 in the atmosphere is to make it into some sort of a solid carbonate. "Clean coal" dreamers claim that just injecting CO2 under the crust will make this happen on Earth - I suspect it's more complicated, but when we're already fantasizing about teraforming, the question of sequestering CO2 somehow is probably not the decisive one. Also, re. the earlier comment about the albedo: you could achieve the same effect cheaper by putting a huge solar-powered space station into the liberation point between Venus and the sun. Then you can spread out sails to block as much sun as you need until Venus gets just the perfect amount. This would be even better than Earth, because by manipulating the shade, you could control the illumination of various regions to ensure optimal weather year round.
I agree! We could sell it to China or some private company who will pay for the deorbiting and has an actual plan of what could be done there. Maybe they could grow silicon crystals? Who knows? But now that we burned so much fuel lifting all that stuff, it's a shame to just let it all fall down.
The outcry won't be from me. Yeah, I want Hubble to stay up as long as possible. The ISS? I sort of don't care. I don't feel like I've really learned anything from the hundred billion dollars we spent on it. (We already knew that our shuttles suck and occasionally explode.) It's a shame we put all that money into it, and put tons of noxious crap into the atmosphere from all the solid rocket fuel... but, fuck it. It's been a distraction from day 1 and the sooner it goes down, the sooner we can start doing something valuable in space.
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.
Bullshit. All of those project significantly advanced human knowledge (or are about to - if we learn as little from the LHC as we did from the ISS, it will be called the most miserable failure in all of science).
Face it, the ISS was a make-work project for NASA. It was not a tool designed to teach us something we wanted to know. When it crashes to Earth, science will barely notice.
Yeah, you're right, but that will have its own oddities, like the one in the parent post but on a larger scale. But real-time routing will require cameras pretty much everywhere where cars drive, and... yuck. But then again, I'm sure a place like Tokyo will get satnav that's wired in to the municipal traffic data, and could get information about which lights will turn red when. Actually, a cooperation between navigation devices and urban stop lights could potentially speed up traffic a whole lot. For example, if the city computers know that I and ten other cars near me are all going to the local interstate on-ramp, they would herd us together and make sure we get green lights all the way through - keeping us from clogging the streets and wasting gas idling, braking and accelerating. I guess that would be the first step in the system which would eventually autopilot cars through cities - and yeah, that wouldn't be so bad.
I wonder how many more stories like this we'll see once sat-nav becomes something that almost everyone uses. For now, most people who have it don't have it on for most of their trips, but many people who "grow up with it" eventually will. This means that the magic voice will have incredible power in shaping urban traffic patterns. Some roads will be jammed while others will be empty, and all because of sat-nav. I wonder if cities will start adapting to sat-nav by widening the streets that (say) Gramin likes to recommend.
I can imagine a scene in a future movie where some old coot gives the protagonist a ride without nav-sat through the city - taking shortcuts, avoiding lights, dodging jams, and revealing hitherto unseen, decaying, abandoned-looking streets. The protagonist gets to his destination in half the normal time, but still thinks the old man is nutty for his luddite refusal to do things the easy way.
Of course we won't do it, because if we encourage too much amateur muckraking, it will probably bite us in the ass, because it will encourage people to expose all the fucked up shit that our government does.
I also wondered this! For one thing, it would make Stallman's head explode, but we might as well get the sad and inevitable event behind us and all use the best compiler we can get for all Linux projects.
Obama's economists decided that they need to spend their way out of this recession, and even though Orion would not pass muster by my bang-for-buck standards, it's not the worst way to spend money if spending money is what you're trying to do.
Of course we could do better: We could dream big like JFK and (for the first time since the 60's) try something truly ambitious and expensive. As Americans, it's time we finally accomplish something! Ever since we lost the Vietnam war, we've been complete pussies about big projects. (It doesn't help that when we do try we fail miserably, like when we try to impose Western democracy to Iraq) As far as I can tell, the largest public project recently was the Big Dig in Boston. We can't even rebuild Ground Zero. We act like a country who lost faith in ourselves, in a time when it's very important that the rest of the world has faith in us (and our currency). We lucked into the internet - yes, that was cool, but it wasn't something we deliberately set out to do as a public communication tool.
I think that Obama should just ask to dust off the Titan V blueprints and build factory to produce them on a massive scale. Then use those to lift into space something really cool, like a 100m mirror for a telescope, solar collectors that beam power back to Earth, etc.
That linked article was amazing, not least because it was already ten years old. With the computation gains we have made since 1999, it's a crime that this sort of AI has not made it into commercial games.
I hope not! There isn't a single Civ game which can challenge a human being without cheating. And it's for Civ-type games that I think the sort of AI regimentation described in the article could potentially do the most good. I'm really glad that we're reaching times where significant resources are being devoted to fundamentally improving game AI. Maybe in Civ 5, I can have an interesting struggle with an AI opponent who doesn't cheat. Right now we are miles from this, though.
I agree that this is very interesting, but the sheer asymmetry of the setup (players begin with four ships versus 20,000+ for the AI) means that we don't really have a chance to compare the AI to human intelligence. The concepts seem sound, but they need to be implemented in combination with an economic model which will allow symmetric human v. AI showdowns. Something like this would be very cool, for example, in the next iteration of the Civilization series.
To his credit, the author acknowledges these limitations and admits that the concepts need to be taken farther. With this I agree, and I hope they do!
I'm puzzled by this myself, but I'm a bit of an outsider and definitely not a developer. Could it be that GTK+ is more streamlined and performs better? If not then I really can't fathom why this GTK+ vs. QT rivalry is being depicted as a battle of near-equals. They're not close!
The only strange thing about your argument is that your "brand-taxed" iPod was also made in China. They can do QA in China as well as anywhere, but it will cost you a premium.
Wow, thank you for that informative reply! I didn't realize the thing about the two chips with two different operating systems. So is there no open-source competitor for an OS like Nucleus? Since you say that it is deeply regulated, I assume not.
I was looking at a Chinese iphone knockoff, thinking that the hardware seems decent, but I wouldn't trust the knockoff operating system. With Android, though, the cheap knockoff can legally have the very same operating system, since they don't have to pay license fees. This means that if Samsung or whoever come up with a neato handset that makes them lots of money, three months later a Chinese factory will be making identical-looking knockoffs with the same Google-made software. This might even be legal! If I were a handset manufacturer, I'd be very scared of the openness of Android, but as a consumer, I would seriously take a second look at those Chinese knockoffs that will soon come our way.
And I recommend that you first listen to this talk to regain your perspective and maybe your sanity. (Talk in OGG format)
The speaker is Bruce Sterling, and the title is The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. I think this might be the single greatest talk I've ever heard about anything, not just the question of singularities.
The talk was by the brilliant cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling - Title: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. The OGG version is here. Make sure you have an hour and are wearing a diaper, because you might pee yourself.
What's so evil about their powering their industry with a carbon-free energy? I think this is awesome! I only wish that the electricity were going to people rather than to digging up more fossil fuels. Yuck!