He is fully aware that slavery did, and still does exist, but just because he addressed slaves and slave's masters, doesn't mean to say he condones it.
It doesn't? I would like to see the quote in the bible that describes slavery as the abomination that it is. If it's described in a matter-of-fact way (as it is), then that has a clear implication of approval. But really my point is the fact that it's addressed at all implies (if not out-and-out proves) that the Bible is not divinely inspired. Just the triviality of the listing of those rules. Why would God care about mere political matters, and particularly *that* one?
That is another misconception delivered up by humans and this is where the Free Will comes into it. We are given the choice to accept or reject the Gospel
Actually, I did tell a Christian friend of mine once, "Well, if Christianity is really true, then I hereby accept whatever I need to accept." Of course, I also believe that the probability of it being actually true is vanishingly close to zero, but what the hell. If it's true, then I accept it, whatever that means. Of course, I also gave a blanket acceptance to all other gods as well -- Zeus, the Pharoes, the Sun God, whatever might actually be true. Every God has pretty much exactly as much evidence as any other God, so why not cover the bases?
If the other side of this life was nothingness, it's inevitably going to catch up with us (before the age of 120) anyway, so it's either now or later.
Yeah, so? Of course it'll catch up with me eventually. That doesn't mean I want to throw away what time I have. If I eat a dish of ice cream, eventually I'll finish it, and there'll be no more. By your logic, I should just throw it away because I'll use it up eventually.
Otherwise, if, per chance, the Bible was telling us the truth, and you had a choice between eternal life or eternal damnation, why would you choose the latter?
I don't choose it. If there is a God, he set up a game with a set of no-win rules. He designed me with intelligence, then requires me to turn off my intelligence to "win" the game. Well, what can I do? As I said, it is literally impossible for me to believe in something with zero evidence. I also understand that others don't have that problem, and (based on my observation), they are totally incapable of understanding people like me that can't substitute thinking with emotion. So they think I'm just in denial, when the reality is that I can no more believe in God than I can levitate above the floor.
Now I have a question for you. Say there wasn't a God, and humans evolved in a completely naturalistic way. How would the world be different than one in which God did exist? Humans have invented literally thousands of religions throughout history, so clearly religion would still be around.
Who actually made the statement that our 'Free Will' is a process of thought anyway? One could assume or speculate that, but even that is not fact.
I certainly can't prove that our self-awareness is mechanical, since we haven't yet figured out how it works. So from the standpoint there is still a mystery, you're correct. But so far, the score is overwhelmingly on the side of science explanations, and about -- zero -- on the side of supernatural things. Maybe self-awareness will turn out to be the one thing that cannot be explained. But I doubt it.
everything I need to know about the nature of God is written in the Bible, including the part that states that "He is, He was, and He is to come".
You mean, everything that he wanted to tell you (assuming there is a God), true or otherwise. I do find it odd how, however, along with the words about his nature and the beginning of the universe, he also felt it important to tell everyone how we're supposed to treat our slaves. Doesn't seem on the same scale of importance somehow (beyond the fact that God approves of slavery). But I digress.
we can't comprehend how something could have been created from nothing.
Something wasn't created from nothing. It was created within some sort of super-universe that we'll probably never be able to measure.
It's up to you, but if you use use your free will to reject the Gospel, when this world comes to an end, you will have to account for all your actions.
As a bumper sticker once said, "God created me to be an atheist. Who are you to argue with God?" If there is a God, then he created me to be literally unable to accept something with zero evidence. And I mean literally impossible. Sure, I could go around mouthing the words "I Accept Jesus!" out of some fear of dying, but that would be a lie, and God would know it.
in fact, why, if there's no after life would you want to continue living in this life with all the heartache, misery, pain, caused by sin?
Because the alternative is nothingness. Why would I choose that?
Or perhaps designing a computer motherboard in an era when discrete transistors were still commonplace is something that you think nearly anybody can do too?
I didn't say his other accomplishments weren't impressive, I said, "Woz is a smart guy, no doubt, but a BASIC interpreter is a bad example."
And BTW, not "everyone coded in assembly or machine language" in the 1970's, as you implied.
I have no particular statistics, but while in high school from 1978-1982, programming in assembly was very commonplace. Perhaps on big iron the COBOL specialists never touched assembly, but in the microcomputer world, *everyone* who was serious (i.e., not just a BASIC dabbler) programmed in assembly, because memory was so tight, and BASIC was so slow. C only existed off in the ether somewhere. If you wanted to break out of the BASIC prison, assembly was your only choice on microcomputers.
I took a college class in IBM 370 assembly during high school, and recall specifically that the projects were basically business reports and the like. It wasn't any sort of system programming, so I know, at least from the instructor's point of view, using assembly for business wasn't some bizarre thing.
Assembly just wasn't that big of a deal back then. Really, it's not that big of a deal now. It just has this silly mythology built up around it, and for some reason everyone fears it. Programmers today think only the "hard core" are capable of using it. Assembly is trivially simple.
Woz is a smart guy, no doubt, but a BASIC interpreter is a bad example. Everyone coded in assembly or even machine language back then. It was no great trick. People these days think it's some mythical skill. And a BASIC interpreter was definitely not that hard. In fact, it was common back then to write one just for laughs (a floating point package was much trickier, on the other hand). Heck, the first issue of Dr. Dobbs had a tiny basic interpreter.
Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost our happy memories, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Star Wars universe has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of lucky pseudo-talented hacks. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether the leader George will consume the captive audience or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping him; the hack will soon be here.
And I, for one, welcome our childhood-destroying overlords. I'd like to remind George that as a trusted member of the geekdom, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in his underground mass merchandising caves.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if our thinking is "just cells reacting to stimuli", would that not make us unintelligent robots who are programmed to complete certain tasks?
No, that makes us intelligent robots programmed for reproduction, survival and self-awareness. What's your point? Is the idea that we're biological computers such a horrible idea that it "just can't" be true? Frankly, I don't find it all that horrible. It just *is*. I'm perfectly happy with the illusion of free will.
If you read through your Bible, it has all the answers to the questions we need to know. God did not have a beginning, as it says, He always was, so to answer that evolution statement, no, he didn't evolve, that's just another of your speculations.
Unfortunately, the bible answers nothing about the existence of God, since it's self-referential. Even if there is a God, it's an absolute certainty that the bible does not tell us everything about the universe he lives in. To use the programmer analogy, if I write a universe simulation, then from the point of view of the simulated life forms, the programmer is God and has always existed, since the programmer exists out of any time frame of reference of the simulation. But that tells us nothing about the nature of the programmer.
But just because we don't know the full nature of the programmer (and can't know, and can't ever measure it), that doesn't mean we can't conclude that the programmer does have some sort of laws of physics in his own universe.
What I find interesting is that you are arrogant enough to presume to know the nature of God by "just knowing" that he didn't evolve in any way. How do you conclude that?
I can make my conclusions based on logic. If God thinks, therefore, there is some mechanism that supports that thinking. Your conclusions seem to be made based on "it's just gotta be that way" emotion.
Why do we "just need" to be more than biological machines? Why does God "just have" to exist when there is absolutely zero objective evidence for it?
I'm amazed that anyone would actually invest in a stock based on a spam message.
Nobody "invests" in a stock based on a spam message. People buy the stock because they hope to cash in on the stock rise from all the other people buying the stock based on the spam. If they do it early enough, they think they can catch the same wave as the originating spammer. And some probably do, which doesn't help the problem.
Now if you believe (as I do), that what I described above is contrary to your experience and your nature, then believing in a "soul" or some other agent of "free will" isn't a big leap. Think about it - if you really have free will, science can never address the mechanism by which you make choices.
True, but your premise is wrong. Free will *is* an illusion. We *are* just cells reacting to stimuli. It's just that the decision tree is so complex that it's not easily understood.
We are cells reacting to stimuli, and what we believe is not really belief and we don't have any choice anyway, so don't be angry about it.
This is just silly. Free will is an illusion, but macroscopic choices are not. Telling me "not to be angry about it" is external stimuli, which I can balance with my internal desires of whether to be angry or not, combined with my motivations for being angry. Depending on how all the variables balance, I am angry or I am not angry. I made a choice based on all the competing factors. No actual free will involved, yet I have the illusion that I made a choice, because I'm not conscious of all the factors and the weighting.
"We only believe in what science can prove, because if science can't prove it we can't know it exists". Science becomes the sole source of knowledge. It becomes God.
I believe in what can be measured and observed. I can *speculate* about things that can't be measured and observed. Science is not a "source" of knowledge, it's a methodology for falsifying theories. The source of all knowledge is the world around us and attempting to fit theories to the facts.
God, on the other hand, is a theory of what underpins the universe. It came from the lack of explanation for the world around us. A tribal leader needed something to tell his flock about why the storms came, or why someone's child died, etc. It's a lot easier to point to the Sun God. It's a great explanation for things, because it explains everything -- except for one thing. God cannot tell us whether it doesn't exist or not.
For that, we have to use logic and experience. Our experience tells us that nearly everything that used to be chalked up to God can be explained using natural processes. Logic tells us that intelligence required mechanisms to host it. What are the mechanisms that allow God to think? Somehow, those mechanisms must have arisen either through a super-God, or through an evolutionary process. If it's a super God, then we can a "creation loop" of super-Gods, leading to a logical contradiction. If it's evolution, then it's a simpler explanation to simply eliminate God and apply evolution to humanity.
I don't understand what your phrase "model the prediction" means, but it seems you are concerned about lack of data. The article specifically mentioned that there is way too much data for any individual or team of individuals to completely analyze.
To make a prediction about the real world, you have to model reality. Sure, there is a "lot of data", but that doesn't mean that 1) the data is useful, or 2) the useful data can be interpreted by a computer.
I think it's reasonable to assume that the inputs are going to be a combination of human intelligence (HUMINT -- "go undercover"),
Sure, but that's fuzzy data that can't be interpreted by computers using our current level of technology.
natural language processing ("read the web sites"),
There is no such science as natural language processing beyond grammar and syntax analysis. No models exist at all for doing useful-level interpretation of context and meaning. They already have phrase scanners.
and communications inteligence (COMINT -- "listen to radio chatter", ala eschelon).
See previous point.
Having a computer do tactical analysis, much less strategic analysis, is so far beyond our current technology it's ridiculous.
That's a pretty awful thing to say about someone based on a press release. It's reasonable to state you don't know how this would work. It's another thing to accuse someone of dishonesty. It truly saddens me that bold, baseless insults like this get modded up so quickly.
Granted, it's just a press release, but it's a pretty specific press release by the university itself (i.e., not filtered by the mainstream media). Maybe this is just trying to model troop movements (which you *could* do on a computer, given terrain, etc), but it specifically says, "social, political, cultural, military and media influences". Not to mention I get suspicious when they start hand waving phrases like "massively complex set of computer algorithms".
Again, maybe this isn't what it seems to be claiming, which is human-level pattern analysis. Maybe this is just a normal data-mining application that's been fluffed up by the university press release crew. But it smells like snake oil to me. Just because someone works at a university doesn't mean they aren't simply interested in feeding from the public trough. It happens all the time.
Apparently there are those that have forgotten the old computer law of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Even if we had a perfect model to predict these sort of things, we don't have any way of supplying the required data to model the prediction. What's the computer going to do, go undercover in secret groups? Read the web sites? Listen to radio chatter and analyze their conversations?
Maybe someday when we have a real science of A.I. something like this might be possible, but all it shows is that this university professor will happily take government money for delivering absolutely nothing.
Economics dictate things a bit differently. Forced conversion would increase demand with unchanged supply. This will *raise* the prices, potentially a lot.
Er, if the manufacturers know the switch is coming, why wouldn't they prepare to increase supply? They will. And it's entirely possible (and I can make the case that it's likely*) they will overproduce, driving the costs down.
*Because most manufacturers will be over-exuberant on what percentage of the new market they can capture. There's only so much market to go around, leading to excess inventory.
Considering the majority of OSS code, if I were to release any of my code, I'd have to make it more amateurish.
People moderated this funny, but I was going to say the same thing. Much of OSS software is *horrible*. My favorite whipping boy is 'ssh'. What a pile of dog-poo that code is, and it's a critical application!
If this guy releases his code, he will have lots of company. Very few people seem to care about making pretty, well organized, well commented code.
"Childish" to think a supreme being can perform supreme acts?
The question is not whether a supreme being can perform supreme acts, the question is whether a supreme being (whatever that means) can perform *any* act.
Do you even know what the definition of God is!?
God: A entity that is invoked when an explanation is required for something that has no current explanation.:)
Actually, I would be curious to know what your definition of God is.
Re:Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
I've also seen convincing statements that the human brain is basically the core of an animal brain, with a couple of layers added on top (with low level functions being done in almost exactly the same way).
I think it's clearly true that humans share a lot of the same hardware with animals, with a bit of "secret sauce" mixed in that gave us the "big advantage", whatever it really is.
So while a lot of "AI" has been a horrible failure, it seems to me like one of the core problems could well be "our HW isn't fast enough to do AI well, yet".
Nothing says we have to simulate intelligence in real time. I would still be impressed if researchers could simulate something that was clearly intelligence in a month of processing that might take me a few seconds. That's the equivalent of making computers a million times faster.
It's not that we can simulate intelligence, only slowly. The point is that even if we had arbitrarely fast hardware, we simply don't know *how* to do what humans do. The game Go really addresses the issue in a fundamental way, or even chess, which still isn't understood how humans do it. We know that humans look for patterns in the game, and then somehow meld those experiences together over time into coherent strategy. And more broadly, that's how we deal with all aspects of life. Looking for patterns, with reinforcement based on success. Animals clearly have this ability. And then beyond that, somehow consciousness and self-awareness get built on that foundation.
We know all this, and very, very bright people have put a lot of effort into neural networks and we've seen tantalizing things that seem to resemble things that humans do, but we haven't made that fundamental "F = MA"-kind of discovery that explains the thing.
Re:Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
There is no elegant explanation for intelligence, because it is just a pile of stuff that has been built up over time.
There is no elegant explanation for *behavior*, which is why I think we'll never have artificial humans. We're too complex with all the chemical interaction. But I think it's reasonable to say we'll have elegant explanations for the fundamental pattern matching mechanisms that provide the basis for what we can cognitively do, and I think there'll be an elegant explanation for exactly what consciousness and self-awareness really are, and how to construct them.
Re:Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
It's tempting to add things up and declare "capacity". Or to observe state changes over time and label that rate as something akin to a CPU or bus speed. Convenient. Comforting, even.
Well, if you're going to invoke magic (as many people do when discussing cognition and intelligence), then there's little place to go in the discussion. Maybe these Go players are tapping into a global cloud of consciousness that we all contribute to in some sort of subspace brain field.
But arguing that there's something "more" than the physical, observable components to the brain is like arguing the existence of God. It's comforting to people who are uncomfortable with the idea of a mechanistic model of ourselves, but it's little more than an article of faith.
Not that I'm saying we know everything about the brain... obviously we don't. But we do know what it looks like physically, and it's not reasonable to argue that there's some "sooper-sekret" mechanism with even *more* complexity than the neural nets we already know about. Where would it be? How would the "super neurons" communicate?
Re:Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I would be really interested in knowing how you think we know that. We know they aren't consciously considering a trillion moves per second. But how do we know what kind of work the cognitive engine is doing underneath the consciousness? What if your brain evaluates quadrillions of moves per second, leaving you aware of only the best few it can find?
Because the brain only has 100 billion neurons and, at best, can fire only a couple thousand times a second. If 1% of an entire brain was dedicated to being little Go Position Computers, it would be hard to imagine how you could get a million moves a second, considering communication and infrastructure overhead. Much less a billion, or a trillion, and certainly much less than a quadrillion.
Of course, I could also make the argument just because we suck at rote computational things, and are wonderful at pattern matching things. If we really had exhaustive search capability like that, it would probably show up in some sort of everyday task.
Mission 15 and 16 include multi-generation plant experiments in low-gravity simulations in centrifuges.
Thank you! Now you've posted something relevant to the discussion. I can accept this sort of experiment as useful information. I hadn't realized they had done a centrifuge experiment. Which, of course, proves that it was apparently not obvious to everyone that clinostats gave the entire answer.
Now, again, tell me why it is obvious that a clinostat cannot be used to grow plants, only unicellular organism.
*sigh* At least read what I write, rather than what you think I (or want me to) have wrote. I never said you couldn't grow plants, only that it doesn't tell you anything conclusive. I can accept very small organisms a little more because of their small mass. But larger mass organisms are going to be affected by gravity a great deal more. Hopefully I don't have to explain the physics of mass at small scale versus large scale.
Why this isn't obvious I have no idea. Again, if I put you on a spit and rotated you around, would that simulate micro-gravity to your satisfaction?
Re:Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
One common misconception about the field of Artificial Intelligence is that it is only about trying to replicate human intelligence.
Another trend I notice is that as the field of artificial intelligence has matured, the definition of "intelligence" has become more and more watered down so that it won't seem like such an abject failure.:) In the old days, we had Turing musing on Turing Tests and how to know intelligence when we saw it. These days, any sort of brute-force algorithmic pattern recognition is seen as "intelligence" (See? See? Our field does do something useful!) Unfortunately, these gains are mostly because of faster hardware, not because of fundamental insights into the nature of intelligence.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if artificial intelligence researchers don't want to be judged by the standard of human (or even animal) intelligence, then don't call it Artificial Intelligence! Call it Pattern Recognition. Call it Decision Tree Analysis. But if it's called Intelligence, then be prepared for it to be judged by that standard.
Re:Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
How about YOU prove that *real* intelligence is anything more than fast computation.
Who said it wasn't? But what we do know is that a Go player doesn't search a trillion moves per second in his brain.
Not artificial intelligence
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The fact that we're talking about trillion move/second machines rather than even attempting to do it the way humans do it ought to tell us what the current trend in artificial intelligence is.
Basically, the current trend is the same as it was 20/30/50 years ago. This IS NO science of artificial intelligence. We don't have a freaking clue how intelligence works. I think we will someday, but it's going to take a fundamental breakthrough in theory. A "Principia Intelligentsia" (I'm probably mutilating the Latin) by some genius that throws out all the fumbling and finally Explains It All.
Stop repeating what was in the link I gave you and tell me your bvious reasons why plants can be put in clinostats.
Or, you can just read the rest of my post.
Do you really not see the difference between a lack of gravity and averaged gravity?
The original context of this is growing plants in low gravity. You seem to be asserting that we know everything we need to know about that based on these experiments, and that's just absurd. This is just a variation on "argument by authority" -- since Reeeeeaaaallly Smaaaarrrt scientists have done these turntable experiments, therefore, shut up, because they know it all and you don't. Well, sorry, but I've been around the block enough to know that theory doesn't always match reality. The *reality* of what happens when you to try grow crops in low gravity is totally unknown, and all arrogance in the world is not going to change that.
Possibly, but also likely to be 'greed' in that they don't want to deal with the support issues of third-party tools screwing up iPhones and Apple having to foot the bill to replace/fix them.
What a great idea! Why don't we make all computers like that? Steve can sell Macs totally closed to third party application development, so that they don't have "to deal with the support issues of third-party tools screwing up" the computers, and then Apple having to foot the bill!
Funny how all these other smart phones manage to allow third party development with destroying the companies that produce them. Is Apple too incompetent to do what everyone else does?
But they're not under any obligation to prevent third party applications. That's just greed. They want to eventually sell only licensed third party apps.
Slashdot Mirror
He is fully aware that slavery did, and still does exist, but just because he addressed slaves and slave's masters, doesn't mean to say he condones it.
It doesn't? I would like to see the quote in the bible that describes slavery as the abomination that it is. If it's described in a matter-of-fact way (as it is), then that has a clear implication of approval. But really my point is the fact that it's addressed at all implies (if not out-and-out proves) that the Bible is not divinely inspired. Just the triviality of the listing of those rules. Why would God care about mere political matters, and particularly *that* one?
That is another misconception delivered up by humans and this is where the Free Will comes into it. We are given the choice to accept or reject the Gospel
Actually, I did tell a Christian friend of mine once, "Well, if Christianity is really true, then I hereby accept whatever I need to accept." Of course, I also believe that the probability of it being actually true is vanishingly close to zero, but what the hell. If it's true, then I accept it, whatever that means. Of course, I also gave a blanket acceptance to all other gods as well -- Zeus, the Pharoes, the Sun God, whatever might actually be true. Every God has pretty much exactly as much evidence as any other God, so why not cover the bases?
If the other side of this life was nothingness, it's inevitably going to catch up with us (before the age of 120) anyway, so it's either now or later.
Yeah, so? Of course it'll catch up with me eventually. That doesn't mean I want to throw away what time I have. If I eat a dish of ice cream, eventually I'll finish it, and there'll be no more. By your logic, I should just throw it away because I'll use it up eventually.
Otherwise, if, per chance, the Bible was telling us the truth, and you had a choice between eternal life or eternal damnation, why would you choose the latter?
I don't choose it. If there is a God, he set up a game with a set of no-win rules. He designed me with intelligence, then requires me to turn off my intelligence to "win" the game. Well, what can I do? As I said, it is literally impossible for me to believe in something with zero evidence. I also understand that others don't have that problem, and (based on my observation), they are totally incapable of understanding people like me that can't substitute thinking with emotion. So they think I'm just in denial, when the reality is that I can no more believe in God than I can levitate above the floor.
Now I have a question for you. Say there wasn't a God, and humans evolved in a completely naturalistic way. How would the world be different than one in which God did exist? Humans have invented literally thousands of religions throughout history, so clearly religion would still be around.
Who actually made the statement that our 'Free Will' is a process of thought anyway? One could assume or speculate that, but even that is not fact.
I certainly can't prove that our self-awareness is mechanical, since we haven't yet figured out how it works. So from the standpoint there is still a mystery, you're correct. But so far, the score is overwhelmingly on the side of science explanations, and about -- zero -- on the side of supernatural things. Maybe self-awareness will turn out to be the one thing that cannot be explained. But I doubt it.
everything I need to know about the nature of God is written in the Bible, including the part that states that "He is, He was, and He is to come".
You mean, everything that he wanted to tell you (assuming there is a God), true or otherwise. I do find it odd how, however, along with the words about his nature and the beginning of the universe, he also felt it important to tell everyone how we're supposed to treat our slaves. Doesn't seem on the same scale of importance somehow (beyond the fact that God approves of slavery). But I digress.
we can't comprehend how something could have been created from nothing.
Something wasn't created from nothing. It was created within some sort of super-universe that we'll probably never be able to measure.
It's up to you, but if you use use your free will to reject the Gospel, when this world comes to an end, you will have to account for all your actions.
As a bumper sticker once said, "God created me to be an atheist. Who are you to argue with God?" If there is a God, then he created me to be literally unable to accept something with zero evidence. And I mean literally impossible. Sure, I could go around mouthing the words "I Accept Jesus!" out of some fear of dying, but that would be a lie, and God would know it.
in fact, why, if there's no after life would you want to continue living in this life with all the heartache, misery, pain, caused by sin?
Because the alternative is nothingness. Why would I choose that?
Or perhaps designing a computer motherboard in an era when discrete transistors were still commonplace is something that you think nearly anybody can do too?
I didn't say his other accomplishments weren't impressive, I said, "Woz is a smart guy, no doubt, but a BASIC interpreter is a bad example."
And BTW, not "everyone coded in assembly or machine language" in the 1970's, as you implied.
I have no particular statistics, but while in high school from 1978-1982, programming in assembly was very commonplace. Perhaps on big iron the COBOL specialists never touched assembly, but in the microcomputer world, *everyone* who was serious (i.e., not just a BASIC dabbler) programmed in assembly, because memory was so tight, and BASIC was so slow. C only existed off in the ether somewhere. If you wanted to break out of the BASIC prison, assembly was your only choice on microcomputers.
I took a college class in IBM 370 assembly during high school, and recall specifically that the projects were basically business reports and the like. It wasn't any sort of system programming, so I know, at least from the instructor's point of view, using assembly for business wasn't some bizarre thing.
Assembly just wasn't that big of a deal back then. Really, it's not that big of a deal now. It just has this silly mythology built up around it, and for some reason everyone fears it. Programmers today think only the "hard core" are capable of using it. Assembly is trivially simple.
Woz is a smart guy, no doubt, but a BASIC interpreter is a bad example. Everyone coded in assembly or even machine language back then. It was no great trick. People these days think it's some mythical skill. And a BASIC interpreter was definitely not that hard. In fact, it was common back then to write one just for laughs (a floating point package was much trickier, on the other hand). Heck, the first issue of Dr. Dobbs had a tiny basic interpreter.
So what is your criteria for what you will and won't murder ?
Things that I eat and are not domesticated are OK to kill ("murder" is specifically a human killing another human).
Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost our happy memories, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Star Wars universe has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of lucky pseudo-talented hacks. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether the leader George will consume the captive audience or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping him; the hack will soon be here.
And I, for one, welcome our childhood-destroying overlords. I'd like to remind George that as a trusted member of the geekdom, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in his underground mass merchandising caves.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if our thinking is "just cells reacting to stimuli", would that not make us unintelligent robots who are programmed to complete certain tasks?
No, that makes us intelligent robots programmed for reproduction, survival and self-awareness. What's your point? Is the idea that we're biological computers such a horrible idea that it "just can't" be true? Frankly, I don't find it all that horrible. It just *is*. I'm perfectly happy with the illusion of free will.
If you read through your Bible, it has all the answers to the questions we need to know. God did not have a beginning, as it says, He always was, so to answer that evolution statement, no, he didn't evolve, that's just another of your speculations.
Unfortunately, the bible answers nothing about the existence of God, since it's self-referential. Even if there is a God, it's an absolute certainty that the bible does not tell us everything about the universe he lives in. To use the programmer analogy, if I write a universe simulation, then from the point of view of the simulated life forms, the programmer is God and has always existed, since the programmer exists out of any time frame of reference of the simulation. But that tells us nothing about the nature of the programmer.
But just because we don't know the full nature of the programmer (and can't know, and can't ever measure it), that doesn't mean we can't conclude that the programmer does have some sort of laws of physics in his own universe.
What I find interesting is that you are arrogant enough to presume to know the nature of God by "just knowing" that he didn't evolve in any way. How do you conclude that?
I can make my conclusions based on logic. If God thinks, therefore, there is some mechanism that supports that thinking. Your conclusions seem to be made based on "it's just gotta be that way" emotion.
Why do we "just need" to be more than biological machines? Why does God "just have" to exist when there is absolutely zero objective evidence for it?
I'm amazed that anyone would actually invest in a stock based on a spam message.
Nobody "invests" in a stock based on a spam message. People buy the stock because they hope to cash in on the stock rise from all the other people buying the stock based on the spam. If they do it early enough, they think they can catch the same wave as the originating spammer. And some probably do, which doesn't help the problem.
Now if you believe (as I do), that what I described above is contrary to your experience and your nature, then believing in a "soul" or some other agent of "free will" isn't a big leap. Think about it - if you really have free will, science can never address the mechanism by which you make choices.
True, but your premise is wrong. Free will *is* an illusion. We *are* just cells reacting to stimuli. It's just that the decision tree is so complex that it's not easily understood.
We are cells reacting to stimuli, and what we believe is not really belief and we don't have any choice anyway, so don't be angry about it.
This is just silly. Free will is an illusion, but macroscopic choices are not. Telling me "not to be angry about it" is external stimuli, which I can balance with my internal desires of whether to be angry or not, combined with my motivations for being angry. Depending on how all the variables balance, I am angry or I am not angry. I made a choice based on all the competing factors. No actual free will involved, yet I have the illusion that I made a choice, because I'm not conscious of all the factors and the weighting.
"We only believe in what science can prove, because if science can't prove it we can't know it exists". Science becomes the sole source of knowledge. It becomes God.
I believe in what can be measured and observed. I can *speculate* about things that can't be measured and observed. Science is not a "source" of knowledge, it's a methodology for falsifying theories. The source of all knowledge is the world around us and attempting to fit theories to the facts.
God, on the other hand, is a theory of what underpins the universe. It came from the lack of explanation for the world around us. A tribal leader needed something to tell his flock about why the storms came, or why someone's child died, etc. It's a lot easier to point to the Sun God. It's a great explanation for things, because it explains everything -- except for one thing. God cannot tell us whether it doesn't exist or not.
For that, we have to use logic and experience. Our experience tells us that nearly everything that used to be chalked up to God can be explained using natural processes. Logic tells us that intelligence required mechanisms to host it. What are the mechanisms that allow God to think? Somehow, those mechanisms must have arisen either through a super-God, or through an evolutionary process. If it's a super God, then we can a "creation loop" of super-Gods, leading to a logical contradiction. If it's evolution, then it's a simpler explanation to simply eliminate God and apply evolution to humanity.
I don't understand what your phrase "model the prediction" means, but it seems you are concerned about lack of data. The article specifically mentioned that there is way too much data for any individual or team of individuals to completely analyze.
To make a prediction about the real world, you have to model reality. Sure, there is a "lot of data", but that doesn't mean that 1) the data is useful, or 2) the useful data can be interpreted by a computer.
I think it's reasonable to assume that the inputs are going to be a combination of human intelligence (HUMINT -- "go undercover"),
Sure, but that's fuzzy data that can't be interpreted by computers using our current level of technology.
natural language processing ("read the web sites"),
There is no such science as natural language processing beyond grammar and syntax analysis. No models exist at all for doing useful-level interpretation of context and meaning. They already have phrase scanners.
and communications inteligence (COMINT -- "listen to radio chatter", ala eschelon).
See previous point.
Having a computer do tactical analysis, much less strategic analysis, is so far beyond our current technology it's ridiculous.
That's a pretty awful thing to say about someone based on a press release. It's reasonable to state you don't know how this would work. It's another thing to accuse someone of dishonesty. It truly saddens me that bold, baseless insults like this get modded up so quickly.
Granted, it's just a press release, but it's a pretty specific press release by the university itself (i.e., not filtered by the mainstream media). Maybe this is just trying to model troop movements (which you *could* do on a computer, given terrain, etc), but it specifically says, "social, political, cultural, military and media influences". Not to mention I get suspicious when they start hand waving phrases like "massively complex set of computer algorithms".
Again, maybe this isn't what it seems to be claiming, which is human-level pattern analysis. Maybe this is just a normal data-mining application that's been fluffed up by the university press release crew. But it smells like snake oil to me. Just because someone works at a university doesn't mean they aren't simply interested in feeding from the public trough. It happens all the time.
Apparently there are those that have forgotten the old computer law of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Even if we had a perfect model to predict these sort of things, we don't have any way of supplying the required data to model the prediction. What's the computer going to do, go undercover in secret groups? Read the web sites? Listen to radio chatter and analyze their conversations?
Maybe someday when we have a real science of A.I. something like this might be possible, but all it shows is that this university professor will happily take government money for delivering absolutely nothing.
Economics dictate things a bit differently. Forced conversion would increase demand with unchanged supply. This will *raise* the prices, potentially a lot.
Er, if the manufacturers know the switch is coming, why wouldn't they prepare to increase supply? They will. And it's entirely possible (and I can make the case that it's likely*) they will overproduce, driving the costs down.
*Because most manufacturers will be over-exuberant on what percentage of the new market they can capture. There's only so much market to go around, leading to excess inventory.
Considering the majority of OSS code, if I were to release any of my code, I'd have to make it more amateurish.
People moderated this funny, but I was going to say the same thing. Much of OSS software is *horrible*. My favorite whipping boy is 'ssh'. What a pile of dog-poo that code is, and it's a critical application!
If this guy releases his code, he will have lots of company. Very few people seem to care about making pretty, well organized, well commented code.
"Childish" to think a supreme being can perform supreme acts?
The question is not whether a supreme being can perform supreme acts, the question is whether a supreme being (whatever that means) can perform *any* act.
Do you even know what the definition of God is!?
God: A entity that is invoked when an explanation is required for something that has no current explanation. :)
Actually, I would be curious to know what your definition of God is.
I've also seen convincing statements that the human brain is basically the core of an animal brain, with a couple of layers added on top (with low level functions being done in almost exactly the same way).
I think it's clearly true that humans share a lot of the same hardware with animals, with a bit of "secret sauce" mixed in that gave us the "big advantage", whatever it really is.
So while a lot of "AI" has been a horrible failure, it seems to me like one of the core problems could well be "our HW isn't fast enough to do AI well, yet".
Nothing says we have to simulate intelligence in real time. I would still be impressed if researchers could simulate something that was clearly intelligence in a month of processing that might take me a few seconds. That's the equivalent of making computers a million times faster.
It's not that we can simulate intelligence, only slowly. The point is that even if we had arbitrarely fast hardware, we simply don't know *how* to do what humans do. The game Go really addresses the issue in a fundamental way, or even chess, which still isn't understood how humans do it. We know that humans look for patterns in the game, and then somehow meld those experiences together over time into coherent strategy. And more broadly, that's how we deal with all aspects of life. Looking for patterns, with reinforcement based on success. Animals clearly have this ability. And then beyond that, somehow consciousness and self-awareness get built on that foundation.
We know all this, and very, very bright people have put a lot of effort into neural networks and we've seen tantalizing things that seem to resemble things that humans do, but we haven't made that fundamental "F = MA"-kind of discovery that explains the thing.
There is no elegant explanation for intelligence, because it is just a pile of stuff that has been built up over time.
There is no elegant explanation for *behavior*, which is why I think we'll never have artificial humans. We're too complex with all the chemical interaction. But I think it's reasonable to say we'll have elegant explanations for the fundamental pattern matching mechanisms that provide the basis for what we can cognitively do, and I think there'll be an elegant explanation for exactly what consciousness and self-awareness really are, and how to construct them.
It's tempting to add things up and declare "capacity". Or to observe state changes over time and label that rate as something akin to a CPU or bus speed. Convenient. Comforting, even.
Well, if you're going to invoke magic (as many people do when discussing cognition and intelligence), then there's little place to go in the discussion. Maybe these Go players are tapping into a global cloud of consciousness that we all contribute to in some sort of subspace brain field.
But arguing that there's something "more" than the physical, observable components to the brain is like arguing the existence of God. It's comforting to people who are uncomfortable with the idea of a mechanistic model of ourselves, but it's little more than an article of faith.
Not that I'm saying we know everything about the brain... obviously we don't. But we do know what it looks like physically, and it's not reasonable to argue that there's some "sooper-sekret" mechanism with even *more* complexity than the neural nets we already know about. Where would it be? How would the "super neurons" communicate?
I would be really interested in knowing how you think we know that. We know they aren't consciously considering a trillion moves per second. But how do we know what kind of work the cognitive engine is doing underneath the consciousness? What if your brain evaluates quadrillions of moves per second, leaving you aware of only the best few it can find?
Because the brain only has 100 billion neurons and, at best, can fire only a couple thousand times a second. If 1% of an entire brain was dedicated to being little Go Position Computers, it would be hard to imagine how you could get a million moves a second, considering communication and infrastructure overhead. Much less a billion, or a trillion, and certainly much less than a quadrillion.
Of course, I could also make the argument just because we suck at rote computational things, and are wonderful at pattern matching things. If we really had exhaustive search capability like that, it would probably show up in some sort of everyday task.
Mission 15 and 16 include multi-generation plant experiments in low-gravity simulations in centrifuges.
Thank you! Now you've posted something relevant to the discussion. I can accept this sort of experiment as useful information. I hadn't realized they had done a centrifuge experiment. Which, of course, proves that it was apparently not obvious to everyone that clinostats gave the entire answer.
Now, again, tell me why it is obvious that a clinostat cannot be used to grow plants, only unicellular organism.
*sigh* At least read what I write, rather than what you think I (or want me to) have wrote. I never said you couldn't grow plants, only that it doesn't tell you anything conclusive. I can accept very small organisms a little more because of their small mass. But larger mass organisms are going to be affected by gravity a great deal more. Hopefully I don't have to explain the physics of mass at small scale versus large scale.
Why this isn't obvious I have no idea. Again, if I put you on a spit and rotated you around, would that simulate micro-gravity to your satisfaction?
One common misconception about the field of Artificial Intelligence is that it is only about trying to replicate human intelligence.
Another trend I notice is that as the field of artificial intelligence has matured, the definition of "intelligence" has become more and more watered down so that it won't seem like such an abject failure. :) In the old days, we had Turing musing on Turing Tests and how to know intelligence when we saw it. These days, any sort of brute-force algorithmic pattern recognition is seen as "intelligence" (See? See? Our field does do something useful!) Unfortunately, these gains are mostly because of faster hardware, not because of fundamental insights into the nature of intelligence.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if artificial intelligence researchers don't want to be judged by the standard of human (or even animal) intelligence, then don't call it Artificial Intelligence! Call it Pattern Recognition. Call it Decision Tree Analysis. But if it's called Intelligence, then be prepared for it to be judged by that standard.
How about YOU prove that *real* intelligence is anything more than fast computation.
Who said it wasn't? But what we do know is that a Go player doesn't search a trillion moves per second in his brain.
The fact that we're talking about trillion move/second machines rather than even attempting to do it the way humans do it ought to tell us what the current trend in artificial intelligence is.
Basically, the current trend is the same as it was 20/30/50 years ago. This IS NO science of artificial intelligence. We don't have a freaking clue how intelligence works. I think we will someday, but it's going to take a fundamental breakthrough in theory. A "Principia Intelligentsia" (I'm probably mutilating the Latin) by some genius that throws out all the fumbling and finally Explains It All.
Stop repeating what was in the link I gave you and tell me your bvious reasons why plants can be put in clinostats.
Or, you can just read the rest of my post.
Do you really not see the difference between a lack of gravity and averaged gravity?
The original context of this is growing plants in low gravity. You seem to be asserting that we know everything we need to know about that based on these experiments, and that's just absurd. This is just a variation on "argument by authority" -- since Reeeeeaaaallly Smaaaarrrt scientists have done these turntable experiments, therefore, shut up, because they know it all and you don't. Well, sorry, but I've been around the block enough to know that theory doesn't always match reality. The *reality* of what happens when you to try grow crops in low gravity is totally unknown, and all arrogance in the world is not going to change that.
Possibly, but also likely to be 'greed' in that they don't want to deal with the support issues of third-party tools screwing up iPhones and Apple having to foot the bill to replace/fix them.
What a great idea! Why don't we make all computers like that? Steve can sell Macs totally closed to third party application development, so that they don't have "to deal with the support issues of third-party tools screwing up" the computers, and then Apple having to foot the bill!
Funny how all these other smart phones manage to allow third party development with destroying the companies that produce them. Is Apple too incompetent to do what everyone else does?
But they're not under any obligation to prevent third party applications. That's just greed. They want to eventually sell only licensed third party apps.