then why should you be forced to buy coverage for things you don't want
Because one day you will want them and show up in the emergency room demanding them
, and in many cases will never need?
Yes, i know, you are indestructible and will never get cancer. If you are lucky, then you turn 40 and you realize that is just a load of crap and you will need them. If you are unlucky, you get run hit by a bus tomorrow and you realize, again, that you actually do need them.
There were 26,000 allied casualties in Iwo Jima alone and 50,000 in Okinawa. 20x Iwo Jima or 10x Okinawa for the invasion of the main island of Honshu sounds, if anything, conservative.
Another guideline: in the battle of Berlin the allies suffered 260,000 casualties which too make 500,000 purple hearts seem like a rather low ball estimate.
Personal obsession with Kurzweil? I have nothing against him personally. I dislike the entire hot air approach of the field.
You think discussing the color of astronaut uniforms is thinking big, whereas quite to the contrary it is actually weak thinking in topics so far out the correctness of which can't even be evaluated.
This tends to attract snake oil peddlers in larger than average numbers since they know they can't be found out.
You are indeed correct, and not much useful have come out of these "number of angels on the head of a pin" discussions.
The fact that is a well established, thousands-of-years long waste of time does not make it any more worthwhile than say, nose picking.
Sorry, let me correct that, nose picking is way more productive than philosophy.
Go back and read Aristotle, then read Archimedes. Compare then the validity of their conclusions 2K years after. There is a fundamental reason for that.
Clowns such as Kurzweil like to focus on soft "far in the future" concepts because that way their incompetence cannot be evaluated. However they quickly lose people's attention so they are forced to come up with random dates in order to media whore themselves back into the limelight. The strong Ai record there (not just Kurzweil) is absolutely dismal, so people quickly catch up to them. However as another famous snake oil peddler observed "there is a sucker born every minute".
Contrary to what you say the dates make all the difference. If something is around the corner then it should be pursued aggressively. If on the other hand is 50 or 60 years into the future, discussing it is a wast of time.
What we are doing discussing ideas so far into the future is like to people in 1910 arguing about the color of uniforms astronauts should wear when they land on the moon.
Turns out that by the time we got to the moon the ideal color was metallic white. In 100 years it might be mirror like space age (pardon the pun) cellophane and 100 years from now a force field.
Women outnumber men in undergraduate enrollments in most of the developed world, but they are much less likely than men to major in mathematics or science or to choose a profession in these fields in developed countries. This outcome often is attributed to the effects of negative sex-based stereotypes in the USA.
In many other countries women are generally assumed to be better in all academic subjects in elementary school.
Ontologies don't simulate the brain in any common sense of the word simulate.
I agree. In fact if you read back *I* never gave ontologies as an example of brain simulation.
If you don't see the difference between "simulations"
I do see the difference. I'm saying something quite a bit more subtle than that. Let's say we do emulate the brain using transistors and fail to achieve strong AI. Then you could come back and say "that wasn't a real emulation for it to be a real emulation you actually need to perform the exact same chemical processes as the brain with a computer". What I'm saying is that all of those are simulations, is just that the level of resolution is finer.
Are you alleging that Cryo-TEM lacks the resolution,
No, just saying that it will take quite a bit of time before we can apply techniques such as those to the entire brain. This is not unlike sequencing the human genome, for which we had the basic tools long ago, and still took ten years of concentrated effort as well as biochemical and algorithmic breakthroughs to finally complete the task.
Back to the subject: high level simulation failed, Kurzweil the suggests to try lower level simulations which is only more difficult (but not without reason) and and then gives himself an absurdly short time span and declares it a certainty that it will happen by 2029. This makes him an outright crackpot.
Power generation is not an industrial use of water.
Industrial water use includes water used for such purposes as fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, or transporting a product; incorporating water into a product; or for sanitation needs within the manufacturing facility. Some industries that use large amounts of water produce such commodities as food, paper, chemicals, refined petroleum, or primary metals. ---USGS (United States Geological Survey)
Explain to me how crafting a database of "facts" has anything to do with simulating the effect of the known laws of physics on a large collection of elementary particles.
You don't get it. I must presume you are young otherwise you would know what I'm taking about. AI has been trying, unsuccessfully, to simulate the brain almost since its inception. They first started with simulations at a higher level and since they failed miserably they are now moving to a lower level simulation, which makes things even harder. Does this make them more cautious about predictions? of course not. "The singularity is coming".
Can you suggest a single reason why a brute-force simulation of the human brain (which we have not yet tried, because we don't yet have the capability to do so) might fail to produce a working virtual human brain?
There are so many reasons why this is unlikely to fail. For starters we have no clue what are the prebuilt wiring structures that facilitate cognitive process and furthermore we are nowhere close to learning them.
Yet we have clowns like Kurzwell saying that this around the corner and young impressionable people buying all that hot air wholesale. No reason to feel bad about it, though, strong-AI has been peddling hot air for over 60 years and always finding naive customers in every generation.
You haven't been able to suggest a single one, so far. It's clear that you haven't thought this through, but you're very much convinced that it can't work. Why is that?
Here is an alternate explanation: I've been thinking about these issues for so long that it is obvious to me that a project such as this will positively fail in the short to medium term, i.e. well past the predicted singularity event. This is so obvious that it didn't occur to me that one needed to list the reasons why we are so far from simulating the frog brain much less the human brain.
To give you an idea, I'd give you even chances that by 2029 we can simulate the fruit fly brain. We now know how some structures are formed there, there are plenty of study subjects and the built-in coding is easy to understand. I've met with people at Max Planck Institute working on this and their work looks promising.
The Human brain? no chance at all that we'll be there by 2029.
So many I don't even know where to begin. Neural networks? cyc? expert systems? natural language processing? you name it. They were all iteration over the same idea: try to make a computer that works like a human.
They have one thing in common: they all failed miserably.
Why would it? AI has been trying to simulate the human brain since day one and so far that has proven the singular most unproductive avenue of attack of all those they've tried. Just because Kurzwell says it again does not make it any less incorrect and fruitless.
It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world.
[citation needed]
Seriously, last time I checked the literature (and I did check the literature rather than blow air out of my ass) immigration had a rather small role in that. It was the opening of borders and trade agreements to goods that caused the collapsed of unskilled labor wages.
This is part of a campaign trying to whitewash industrial consumption of water. Most water used in agriculture/cattle feed is not consumed in any sense of the word. It evaporates back into the atmosphere. In contrast industrial processes often break down the molecules and whatever H2O is left is usually highly polluted and thus truly consumed.
For example at the Autostadt museum they were claiming that a banana "consumes" 100L of water, while neglecting to mention that all of this water is rain that would have fallen down regardless in the first place and that most of it evaporates right back into the tropical growing lands where bananas are grown.
Yes but he is still waiting for the Erlang compiler to finish to verify if it works in large size projects. Should complete within the next year or so.
The logical third point would be, there are those who think Kurzweil is a genius and is spot on about the future.
Actually that one is out. He's made many predictions in the past and often been wrong. There is no way you can logically conclude that this is a valid third option: no sane person can believe that he is some type of wizard than can foretell the future since he's been wrong so often (though admittedly not always).
That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human.
Since so far they learn much slower than humans do that is a rather safe assumption, say for the next 20 years or so. I.e. way past the made up singularity by Kurzweil.
He belongs in the grand tradition of exaggerated AI claims that attract media attention. Heck there is an entire lab founded around this concept with a name to boot MIT Media lab.
while those who see things progressing more rapidly are shown as crazy lunatics.
Easy, we have 60 years of AI people saying "the machines are coming, the machines are coming, TOMORROW, or in 10 years by the latest" and they have yet to show up.
In the long run they will be right, in the short term there is no evidence that the singularity is around the corner. Heck, google translate is stuck at 95% correctness rate for about the last five years. If we cannot solve that one, what basis there is for Kurzweil alarmist scenario?
Actually several legal systems disallow loopholes. That is, when the intent of the law is clear and any normal person could see that the loophole was a missing case in what was meant to be an exhaustive list, then the loophole doesn't apply.
On the other hand one can have a "to the letter" legal system which results in bills 5,000 pages long that still can be abused by anyone employing a sufficiently resourceful lawyer. This seems to be the preferred choice in the USA and several other countries but it doesn't have to be that way.
Slashdot Mirror
then why should you be forced to buy coverage for things you don't want
Because one day you will want them and show up in the emergency room demanding them
, and in many cases will never need?
Yes, i know, you are indestructible and will never get cancer. If you are lucky, then you turn 40 and you realize that is just a load of crap and you will need them. If you are unlucky, you get run hit by a bus tomorrow and you realize, again, that you actually do need them.
This was at a time when a laptop for a hundred bucks was thought to be impossible.....
... and it was impossible. The project has never shipped anything below $200.
and then along came smart phones and tablets.
...which are not laptops and most of which still cost more than $100 (at least the ones you would actually like to own).
The OLPC was made obsolete by these devices.
Right, blame those mean commercial manufacturers for making your flawed-premise hype-driven project a failure.
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.
-1 Flamebait
Still parading your ignorance, eh?
There were 26,000 allied casualties in Iwo Jima alone and 50,000 in Okinawa. 20x Iwo Jima or 10x Okinawa for the invasion of the main island of Honshu sounds, if anything, conservative.
Another guideline: in the battle of Berlin the allies suffered 260,000 casualties which too make 500,000 purple hearts seem like a rather low ball estimate.
Personal obsession with Kurzweil? I have nothing against him personally. I dislike the entire hot air approach of the field.
You think discussing the color of astronaut uniforms is thinking big, whereas quite to the contrary it is actually weak thinking in topics so far out the correctness of which can't even be evaluated.
This tends to attract snake oil peddlers in larger than average numbers since they know they can't be found out.
You are indeed correct, and not much useful have come out of these "number of angels on the head of a pin" discussions.
The fact that is a well established, thousands-of-years long waste of time does not make it any more worthwhile than say, nose picking.
Sorry, let me correct that, nose picking is way more productive than philosophy.
Go back and read Aristotle, then read Archimedes. Compare then the validity of their conclusions 2K years after. There is a fundamental reason for that.
Clowns such as Kurzweil like to focus on soft "far in the future" concepts because that way their incompetence cannot be evaluated. However they quickly lose people's attention so they are forced to come up with random dates in order to media whore themselves back into the limelight. The strong Ai record there (not just Kurzweil) is absolutely dismal, so people quickly catch up to them. However as another famous snake oil peddler observed "there is a sucker born every minute".
Contrary to what you say the dates make all the difference. If something is around the corner then it should be pursued aggressively. If on the other hand is 50 or 60 years into the future, discussing it is a wast of time.
What we are doing discussing ideas so far into the future is like to people in 1910 arguing about the color of uniforms astronauts should wear when they land on the moon.
Turns out that by the time we got to the moon the ideal color was metallic white. In 100 years it might be mirror like space age (pardon the pun) cellophane and 100 years from now a force field.
Here's the abstract, with suitable fixes in bold:
Women outnumber men in undergraduate enrollments in most of the developed world, but they are much less likely than men to major in mathematics or science or to choose a profession in these fields in developed countries. This outcome often is attributed to the effects of negative sex-based stereotypes in the USA.
In many other countries women are generally assumed to be better in all academic subjects in elementary school.
Ontologies don't simulate the brain in any common sense of the word simulate.
I agree. In fact if you read back *I* never gave ontologies as an example of brain simulation.
If you don't see the difference between "simulations"
I do see the difference. I'm saying something quite a bit more subtle than that. Let's say we do emulate the brain using transistors and fail to achieve strong AI. Then you could come back and say "that wasn't a real emulation for it to be a real emulation you actually need to perform the exact same chemical processes as the brain with a computer". What I'm saying is that all of those are simulations, is just that the level of resolution is finer.
Are you alleging that Cryo-TEM lacks the resolution,
No, just saying that it will take quite a bit of time before we can apply techniques such as those to the entire brain. This is not unlike sequencing the human genome, for which we had the basic tools long ago, and still took ten years of concentrated effort as well as biochemical and algorithmic breakthroughs to finally complete the task.
Back to the subject: high level simulation failed, Kurzweil the suggests to try lower level simulations which is only more difficult (but not without reason) and and then gives himself an absurdly short time span and declares it a certainty that it will happen by 2029. This makes him an outright crackpot.
Not to mention University of Warwick, University of Wales, University of Worcested and University of Warsaw all of which use UW to various degrees.
Power generation is not an industrial use of water.
Industrial water use includes water used for such purposes as fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, or transporting a product; incorporating water into a product; or for sanitation needs within the manufacturing facility. Some industries that use large amounts of water produce such commodities as food, paper, chemicals, refined petroleum, or primary metals. ---USGS (United States Geological Survey)
Explain to me how crafting a database of "facts" has anything to do with simulating the effect of the known laws of physics on a large collection of elementary particles.
You don't get it. I must presume you are young otherwise you would know what I'm taking about. AI has been trying, unsuccessfully, to simulate the brain almost since its inception. They first started with simulations at a higher level and since they failed miserably they are now moving to a lower level simulation, which makes things even harder. Does this make them more cautious about predictions? of course not. "The singularity is coming".
Can you suggest a single reason why a brute-force simulation of the human brain (which we have not yet tried, because we don't yet have the capability to do so) might fail to produce a working virtual human brain?
There are so many reasons why this is unlikely to fail. For starters we have no clue what are the prebuilt wiring structures that facilitate cognitive process and furthermore we are nowhere close to learning them.
Yet we have clowns like Kurzwell saying that this around the corner and young impressionable people buying all that hot air wholesale. No reason to feel bad about it, though, strong-AI has been peddling hot air for over 60 years and always finding naive customers in every generation.
You haven't been able to suggest a single one, so far. It's clear that you haven't thought this through, but you're very much convinced that it can't work. Why is that?
Here is an alternate explanation: I've been thinking about these issues for so long that it is obvious to me that a project such as this will positively fail in the short to medium term, i.e. well past the predicted singularity event. This is so obvious that it didn't occur to me that one needed to list the reasons why we are so far from simulating the frog brain much less the human brain.
To give you an idea, I'd give you even chances that by 2029 we can simulate the fruit fly brain. We now know how some structures are formed there, there are plenty of study subjects and the built-in coding is easy to understand. I've met with people at Max Planck Institute working on this and their work looks promising.
The Human brain? no chance at all that we'll be there by 2029.
So many I don't even know where to begin. Neural networks? cyc? expert systems? natural language processing? you name it. They were all iteration over the same idea: try to make a computer that works like a human.
They have one thing in common: they all failed miserably.
Only if you are growing in dry areas like California, otherwise it usually follows the wind right back to where it started.
Why would it? AI has been trying to simulate the human brain since day one and so far that has proven the singular most unproductive avenue of attack of all those they've tried. Just because Kurzwell says it again does not make it any less incorrect and fruitless.
It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world.
[citation needed]
Seriously, last time I checked the literature (and I did check the literature rather than blow air out of my ass) immigration had a rather small role in that. It was the opening of borders and trade agreements to goods that caused the collapsed of unskilled labor wages.
This is part of a campaign trying to whitewash industrial consumption of water. Most water used in agriculture/cattle feed is not consumed in any sense of the word. It evaporates back into the atmosphere. In contrast industrial processes often break down the molecules and whatever H2O is left is usually highly polluted and thus truly consumed.
For example at the Autostadt museum they were claiming that a banana "consumes" 100L of water, while neglecting to mention that all of this water is rain that would have fallen down regardless in the first place and that most of it evaporates right back into the tropical growing lands where bananas are grown.
The CEO quoted in the article has a bug up his ass about one small area of R&D
Sure he does: that this type of robots never fail to impress noobs and starry eyed nerds in spite of their very limited progress.
Do you see a cool video of Honda robot's assemling a car? No, you get to see the clumsy useless ASIMO trudging around.
Yes but he is still waiting for the Erlang compiler to finish to verify if it works in large size projects. Should complete within the next year or so.
The logical third point would be, there are those who think Kurzweil is a genius and is spot on about the future.
Actually that one is out. He's made many predictions in the past and often been wrong. There is no way you can logically conclude that this is a valid third option: no sane person can believe that he is some type of wizard than can foretell the future since he's been wrong so often (though admittedly not always).
That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human.
Since so far they learn much slower than humans do that is a rather safe assumption, say for the next 20 years or so. I.e. way past the made up singularity by Kurzweil.
He belongs in the grand tradition of exaggerated AI claims that attract media attention. Heck there is an entire lab founded around this concept with a name to boot MIT Media lab.
while those who see things progressing more rapidly are shown as crazy lunatics.
Easy, we have 60 years of AI people saying "the machines are coming, the machines are coming, TOMORROW, or in 10 years by the latest" and they have yet to show up.
In the long run they will be right, in the short term there is no evidence that the singularity is around the corner. Heck, google translate is stuck at 95% correctness rate for about the last five years. If we cannot solve that one, what basis there is for Kurzweil alarmist scenario?
There are no bad experimental chemists.
Not for long anyhow....
Actually several legal systems disallow loopholes. That is, when the intent of the law is clear and any normal person could see that the loophole was a missing case in what was meant to be an exhaustive list, then the loophole doesn't apply.
On the other hand one can have a "to the letter" legal system which results in bills 5,000 pages long that still can be abused by anyone employing a sufficiently resourceful lawyer. This seems to be the preferred choice in the USA and several other countries but it doesn't have to be that way.
That makes them little more than freeloading scum.
You are correct. So did MItt Romney when he took advantage of a loophole in the law to move over $100 megabucks to a tax shelter in the Bahamas.
This is all perfectly legal, just like tax breaks and welfare is perfectly legal for people who are poor.
Which of these two did he choose to highlight as immoral? The poor person of course, not Apple's or his own immoral behavior.