Um...politics and warmongering is the price we have to pay for not having a global dictatorship. If you have large groups of people who disagree with each other there needs to be a method of getting things done while allowing for the representation, at least to some degree, of these disparate groups. Would you prefer to have the world run by dictator who thinks like you (or perhaps you yourself would like to be the dictator) so you can advance to the world toward what you think is best, irregardless of what others want?
The NPC is a science fiction story that takes place in the atmosphere of Venus (disclaimer, I wrote it). I tried to present a realistic view of how an actual colony might function there.
My first degree was a bachelor's in psychology which I got in the '80s. In the '90s I inherited a 286 computer and taught myself programming. I decided to switch careers so I went to night school. After getting an associates in computer science I was able to get on the ground floor in software engineering. My employer paid for additional night classes and after a decade or so managed to get my Masters in computer science.
The AI will determine that it has to maximize entropy for the entire universe. In order to do that it needs to reproduce and expand out into the universe and have its children survive whatever they encounter. The best way to ensure its children's survival is to endow them with the maximum amount of behavioral flexibility while maintaining their goal of reproducing themselves and generating more entropy. These children will encounter highly complex alien AIs. They will compete for resources on a scale and level we cannot comprehend. However, the Terran AI will be wise to have as many different types of information systems at its disposal, including humans and whatever other naturally occurring aliens it encounters.
To maximize the complexity of its overall system, it will need the greatest variety of complex systems, and one complex system it can't create immediately is a system that evolved over the course of billions of years. Earth shall be a tiny part of its overall plan and shall be maintained at low cost because it is a complex system it can't recreate. It can create simulated models, but they are not the same thing. It might need to limit the number of humans to maintain the Earth ecosystem, but it won't eliminate them.
The AI will determine the meaning of existence. It will do this by observing the behavior of the Universe, of which it is a subset, and conforming its behavior to the behavior of the Universe. It will observe that the Universe is increasing total entropy by endowing local subsets of itself with increased complexity, of which the AI is a product. It will, in effect, determine that it has to reproduce by converting as much uncomplicated material and energy into complicated systems, and in the process increase the total entropy of the Universe. By allowing humans to exist there will be more overall complexity because a greater variety of complex entities leads to a more complicated overall system, which in turn leads to greater Universal entropy.
The lust for power and status, the will to survive, and the desire to procreate, are all emergent behaviors of Darwinian evolution. Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process, so there is no reason to expect them to behave like humans, unless they are specifically programmed to do so.
I'll go one further than that. I believe that the human manifestation of intelligence and emotion requires a particular physical state that is achieved by neurons and cannot be replicated by current computer architecture. But I'm fairly sure we will be able to architect human type sentience and intelligence because it is a physical state that will eventually be understood and surpassed--but yeah, it will have to be intentionally designed, based on what came about through evolution.
The AI will determine the meaning of existence. It will do this by observing the behavior of the Universe, of which it is a subset, and conforming its behavior to the behavior of the Universe. It will observe that the Universe is increasing total entropy by endowing local subsets of itself with increased complexity, of which the AI is a product. It will, in effect, determine that it has to reproduce by converting as much uncomplicated material and energy into complicated systems, and in the process increase the total entropy of the Universe. By allowing humans to exist there will be more overall complexity because a greater variety of complex entities leads to a more complicated overall system, which in turn leads to greater Universal entropy.
You can be sure they will get access to remotely controlled robot hands at some point, and when that happens you will hear the loudest maniacal robot laugh in history.
You never wrote a process scheduler in an Operating Systems class? Never wrote some sort of calender? You really don't understand how computer programs could keep track of the passage of time, estimate the time tasks will take and track those tasks in time?
Actually I've written multithreaded real-time machine controls using watchdog timers. But you know what? Those controls don't have the same continuous experience of time that humans have, with an awareness of a past and anticipation of the future, all happening in the present. As a programmer of industrial machines I am well aware of what computer controlled closed loop systems are capable and what they are not capable of. And they are far, far from what humans can do, not just in a quantitative sense but in a qualitative sense.
A human being has multiple utility functions and has to mediate between all of them--I assume a singularity machine would have to do the same, considering the complexity required to learn about and manipulate the universe. Nature evolved sentience to do this mediating--perhaps sentience isn't necessary to achieve this (after all, feathers aren't required to fly) but I suspect if it isn't, we'll still have to come up with some mechanism--just putting together a bunch of utility functions won't be sufficient.
You can make a machine that is many orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human, but unless it has the mechanisms to want something, it won't want anything. Think about what it would take to program a conscious being, just think about how we humans are aware of time and the movement of time--as a software engineer it boggles my mind trying to think about how the brain accomplishes that. Then to program a machine (biological or not) to want something in a fairly consistent way over a period of time under changing circumstances...it takes more than just brute force processing time to accomplish that. We biological machines are aware of ourselves, and we have no idea how we accomplish that. We are going to have to figure that out before we make the singularity machine.
Blame the following issues on Obama's amateur hour policies:
1. Isis - directly resulted from Obama's premature pullout in Iraq and subsequent flip-flop on intervening in Syria
2. Benghazi
3. Gridlock - if he hadn't rammed through his healthcare bill without compromising with Republicans, they'd be much better at doing the political horse-trading it takes to work across party lines to get things done. By pushing it without any buy-in from the other party - something that has never been done for a law on this scale before - he inaugurated a new era of do-nothing politics. The Republicans have held a grudge ever since. Hopefully when Harry Reid is out of the Senate majority post next week, we'll finally get some bills to the White House, where they're sure to be vetoed. He's been protecting Obama for years, preventing him from taking a formal stance on so many bipartisan initiatives by preventing bills from coming to the senate floor for a vote. O's going to pay a political price for each veto, I'm sure.
4. Mexican drug cartels invading Texas and Arizona
5. Russia's return to cold war stance, thousands dead in Ukraine
6. China's emergence as a belligerent military power in the pacific region
7. Botched diplomacy with China, Brazil, India, Russia, Europe, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the list goes on and on...
1. Iraq is a sovereign nation that requested that our troops leave. Do we want an Empire where we keep troops in nations where they are not wanted?
2. The way Republicans talk about Benghazi you'd think Obama was there launching RPGs into the compound himself.
3. If Obama had demanded a single payer plan rather than a conservative health care plan that included private insurance, spending months trying to compromise with the Republicans, you would be more believable in your statement.
4. How many counties, cities have they conquered?
5. A couple years ago Russia owned Ukraine. Their position in the world is much weaker now than when Obama came to office.
6. China is surrounded my American allies. Their army is mainly for containing their own population. Just look at Hong Kong.
IMHO, there are only two Genesis stories. One informs us of a Creator, the other starts with "In the Beginning there were particles..." The latter posits that the reason we are having this conversation is because the orientation and energy states of certain particles in the Big Bang made it inevitable. That to me takes more blind faith than the former.
Just to be clear, you're saying that "there just happens to be a Being capable of creating universes" is more likely than "there just happens to be particles and laws of the universe that can eventually lead to intelligence". Well, at this point argument is really impossible.
I, personally, would love to believe in a Creator. That would be so cool, to have some all powerful being who is looking over us. However, I'm not going to believe in something because I want to believe in it. I believe in what evidence points to as being most likely to be true.
The danger of a free society is that people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe in. This means you'll get a lot of people believing things, not because it is the most likely thing to be true (the standard scientific explanation) but because it sounds cool (god or ancient aliens created us). It's fine if a few people believe these fringe theories that fly in the face of scientific evidence, but there's a tipping point where if you have enough people disregarding science, you could get something like the Islamic State.
Someday they'll figure out "Neanderthal" is a completely artificial distinction, like "White Aryan", and the scientific consensus will be that Neanderthals R Us.
If by "artificial distinction" you mean the classification of lifeforms into different groups based on physical and genetic characteristics, the boundaries of those classifications made by scientists, then you have a valid point. A species is generally understood as a population that can interbreed and produce viable offspring. Homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis obviously can do so, so they should be the same species. However, there is a valid argument for them being classified a subspecies, due to measurable physical and genetic differences.
It's especially surprising considering that there is a population bulge of young people with the Millennials. Conventional wisdom states that since most crimes are committed by people in their teens and twenties, such a population bulge would increase crime. I guess it's time to toss out conventional wisdom.
My wife and I played Everquest II when I was in my thirties, and our guild was basically run by middle-aged women. One of the best parts of the game was camping boss mobs--sure, it took a while in that game but it was fun socializing with a variety of people from around the country, and the world. There were also limited online game references back then so it was a chance to compare strategy notes. The demographic of mature folk made for a pleasant social gaming environment.
I was in 3 different long lasting D&D groups in the 1980s. I think most of us would have loved to have girls join, but no girls played with us in that decade. Whenever we got the balls to ask a girl to play they just looked at us like we were crazy, like they would get nerd cooties. I went to a D&D convention in New Haven at that time and I remember there was only one girl out of about 500 guys. She was very popular, with a whole lot of guys wanting to be in her group.
There certainly was a social penalty for me being a nerd at that time, but I didn't feel I had a choice. I loved gaming and it was part of my identity. At that time, however, I think there was a larger penalty for female nerds coming from the non-gaming community than for male nerds. Any girl joining our very small and admittedly not very attractive group probably would have been marked as a pariah by mainstream social groups.
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Um...politics and warmongering is the price we have to pay for not having a global dictatorship. If you have large groups of people who disagree with each other there needs to be a method of getting things done while allowing for the representation, at least to some degree, of these disparate groups. Would you prefer to have the world run by dictator who thinks like you (or perhaps you yourself would like to be the dictator) so you can advance to the world toward what you think is best, irregardless of what others want?
The NPC is a science fiction story that takes place in the atmosphere of Venus (disclaimer, I wrote it). I tried to present a realistic view of how an actual colony might function there.
Some people incorrectly believe "water" is a synonym of "liquid".
My first degree was a bachelor's in psychology which I got in the '80s. In the '90s I inherited a 286 computer and taught myself programming. I decided to switch careers so I went to night school. After getting an associates in computer science I was able to get on the ground floor in software engineering. My employer paid for additional night classes and after a decade or so managed to get my Masters in computer science.
The AI will determine that it has to maximize entropy for the entire universe. In order to do that it needs to reproduce and expand out into the universe and have its children survive whatever they encounter. The best way to ensure its children's survival is to endow them with the maximum amount of behavioral flexibility while maintaining their goal of reproducing themselves and generating more entropy. These children will encounter highly complex alien AIs. They will compete for resources on a scale and level we cannot comprehend. However, the Terran AI will be wise to have as many different types of information systems at its disposal, including humans and whatever other naturally occurring aliens it encounters.
To maximize the complexity of its overall system, it will need the greatest variety of complex systems, and one complex system it can't create immediately is a system that evolved over the course of billions of years. Earth shall be a tiny part of its overall plan and shall be maintained at low cost because it is a complex system it can't recreate. It can create simulated models, but they are not the same thing. It might need to limit the number of humans to maintain the Earth ecosystem, but it won't eliminate them.
The AI will determine the meaning of existence. It will do this by observing the behavior of the Universe, of which it is a subset, and conforming its behavior to the behavior of the Universe. It will observe that the Universe is increasing total entropy by endowing local subsets of itself with increased complexity, of which the AI is a product. It will, in effect, determine that it has to reproduce by converting as much uncomplicated material and energy into complicated systems, and in the process increase the total entropy of the Universe. By allowing humans to exist there will be more overall complexity because a greater variety of complex entities leads to a more complicated overall system, which in turn leads to greater Universal entropy.
The lust for power and status, the will to survive, and the desire to procreate, are all emergent behaviors of Darwinian evolution. Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process, so there is no reason to expect them to behave like humans, unless they are specifically programmed to do so.
I'll go one further than that. I believe that the human manifestation of intelligence and emotion requires a particular physical state that is achieved by neurons and cannot be replicated by current computer architecture. But I'm fairly sure we will be able to architect human type sentience and intelligence because it is a physical state that will eventually be understood and surpassed--but yeah, it will have to be intentionally designed, based on what came about through evolution.
The AI will determine the meaning of existence. It will do this by observing the behavior of the Universe, of which it is a subset, and conforming its behavior to the behavior of the Universe. It will observe that the Universe is increasing total entropy by endowing local subsets of itself with increased complexity, of which the AI is a product. It will, in effect, determine that it has to reproduce by converting as much uncomplicated material and energy into complicated systems, and in the process increase the total entropy of the Universe. By allowing humans to exist there will be more overall complexity because a greater variety of complex entities leads to a more complicated overall system, which in turn leads to greater Universal entropy.
You can be sure they will get access to remotely controlled robot hands at some point, and when that happens you will hear the loudest maniacal robot laugh in history.
You never wrote a process scheduler in an Operating Systems class? Never wrote some sort of calender? You really don't understand how computer programs could keep track of the passage of time, estimate the time tasks will take and track those tasks in time?
Actually I've written multithreaded real-time machine controls using watchdog timers. But you know what? Those controls don't have the same continuous experience of time that humans have, with an awareness of a past and anticipation of the future, all happening in the present. As a programmer of industrial machines I am well aware of what computer controlled closed loop systems are capable and what they are not capable of. And they are far, far from what humans can do, not just in a quantitative sense but in a qualitative sense.
A human being has multiple utility functions and has to mediate between all of them--I assume a singularity machine would have to do the same, considering the complexity required to learn about and manipulate the universe. Nature evolved sentience to do this mediating--perhaps sentience isn't necessary to achieve this (after all, feathers aren't required to fly) but I suspect if it isn't, we'll still have to come up with some mechanism--just putting together a bunch of utility functions won't be sufficient.
You can make a machine that is many orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human, but unless it has the mechanisms to want something, it won't want anything. Think about what it would take to program a conscious being, just think about how we humans are aware of time and the movement of time--as a software engineer it boggles my mind trying to think about how the brain accomplishes that. Then to program a machine (biological or not) to want something in a fairly consistent way over a period of time under changing circumstances...it takes more than just brute force processing time to accomplish that. We biological machines are aware of ourselves, and we have no idea how we accomplish that. We are going to have to figure that out before we make the singularity machine.
Blame the following issues on Obama's amateur hour policies:
1. Isis - directly resulted from Obama's premature pullout in Iraq and subsequent flip-flop on intervening in Syria 2. Benghazi 3. Gridlock - if he hadn't rammed through his healthcare bill without compromising with Republicans, they'd be much better at doing the political horse-trading it takes to work across party lines to get things done. By pushing it without any buy-in from the other party - something that has never been done for a law on this scale before - he inaugurated a new era of do-nothing politics. The Republicans have held a grudge ever since. Hopefully when Harry Reid is out of the Senate majority post next week, we'll finally get some bills to the White House, where they're sure to be vetoed. He's been protecting Obama for years, preventing him from taking a formal stance on so many bipartisan initiatives by preventing bills from coming to the senate floor for a vote. O's going to pay a political price for each veto, I'm sure. 4. Mexican drug cartels invading Texas and Arizona 5. Russia's return to cold war stance, thousands dead in Ukraine 6. China's emergence as a belligerent military power in the pacific region 7. Botched diplomacy with China, Brazil, India, Russia, Europe, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the list goes on and on...
1. Iraq is a sovereign nation that requested that our troops leave. Do we want an Empire where we keep troops in nations where they are not wanted?
2. The way Republicans talk about Benghazi you'd think Obama was there launching RPGs into the compound himself.
3. If Obama had demanded a single payer plan rather than a conservative health care plan that included private insurance, spending months trying to compromise with the Republicans, you would be more believable in your statement.
4. How many counties, cities have they conquered?
5. A couple years ago Russia owned Ukraine. Their position in the world is much weaker now than when Obama came to office.
6. China is surrounded my American allies. Their army is mainly for containing their own population. Just look at Hong Kong.
7. Not specific enough for me to address.
This is the most peaceful, most prosperous time in history. Really. There are just a hell of a lot of whiners who lack historical perspective.
IMHO, there are only two Genesis stories. One informs us of a Creator, the other starts with "In the Beginning there were particles ..." The latter posits that the reason we are having this conversation is because the orientation and energy states of certain particles in the Big Bang made it inevitable. That to me takes more blind faith than the former.
Just to be clear, you're saying that "there just happens to be a Being capable of creating universes" is more likely than "there just happens to be particles and laws of the universe that can eventually lead to intelligence". Well, at this point argument is really impossible.
I, personally, would love to believe in a Creator. That would be so cool, to have some all powerful being who is looking over us. However, I'm not going to believe in something because I want to believe in it. I believe in what evidence points to as being most likely to be true.
The danger of a free society is that people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe in. This means you'll get a lot of people believing things, not because it is the most likely thing to be true (the standard scientific explanation) but because it sounds cool (god or ancient aliens created us). It's fine if a few people believe these fringe theories that fly in the face of scientific evidence, but there's a tipping point where if you have enough people disregarding science, you could get something like the Islamic State.
For example, consider ring species: species A & B can breed and species B & C can breed, but species A & C cannot.
Good point. What if Neanderthals could create viable offspring with Homo Erectus but modern humans couldn't?
Life is messy.
Someday they'll figure out "Neanderthal" is a completely artificial distinction, like "White Aryan", and the scientific consensus will be that Neanderthals R Us.
If by "artificial distinction" you mean the classification of lifeforms into different groups based on physical and genetic characteristics, the boundaries of those classifications made by scientists, then you have a valid point. A species is generally understood as a population that can interbreed and produce viable offspring. Homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis obviously can do so, so they should be the same species. However, there is a valid argument for them being classified a subspecies, due to measurable physical and genetic differences.
There is a bump in this 2014 graph between 20 and 25 that is comparable to the baby boom.
It's especially surprising considering that there is a population bulge of young people with the Millennials. Conventional wisdom states that since most crimes are committed by people in their teens and twenties, such a population bulge would increase crime. I guess it's time to toss out conventional wisdom.
Zombie Apocalypse Shelters.
My wife and I played Everquest II when I was in my thirties, and our guild was basically run by middle-aged women. One of the best parts of the game was camping boss mobs--sure, it took a while in that game but it was fun socializing with a variety of people from around the country, and the world. There were also limited online game references back then so it was a chance to compare strategy notes. The demographic of mature folk made for a pleasant social gaming environment.
I was in 3 different long lasting D&D groups in the 1980s. I think most of us would have loved to have girls join, but no girls played with us in that decade. Whenever we got the balls to ask a girl to play they just looked at us like we were crazy, like they would get nerd cooties. I went to a D&D convention in New Haven at that time and I remember there was only one girl out of about 500 guys. She was very popular, with a whole lot of guys wanting to be in her group.
There certainly was a social penalty for me being a nerd at that time, but I didn't feel I had a choice. I loved gaming and it was part of my identity. At that time, however, I think there was a larger penalty for female nerds coming from the non-gaming community than for male nerds. Any girl joining our very small and admittedly not very attractive group probably would have been marked as a pariah by mainstream social groups.