""Honestly, the only reason anyone ought to care what a politician thinks about creationism is if they decide what's taught in public schools.""
I completely disagree with that statement. While I have no problem with a politician holding deep spiritual or religious views, when those views selectively filter out scientific fact, their entire mental facility should be called into question.
If someone lets their spiritual/religious beliefs override the truth, then they are clearly should not be allowed to make any decisions on behalf of the people.
Many spiritual/religious people are able to balance a belief in God with an acceptance of scientific fact. To not be able to do this, shows a profound lack of either intelligence or logic. And even worse, likely shows that the person has the ability to be at ease with contradictory policy.
Do you really want a politician in office who will support contradictory policy? That is precisely how a government stagnates. As ours has done for quite some time.
"While assassins were absolutely useless twits who could barely take care of equally leveled monsters without cooldowns"
I take it you played until about level 30?:) Assassins are very strong if played correctly.
Healers have been toned down quite a bit, and the ToS is scheduled for their last nerf soon. In general though, sins can destroy any healing class in about 3 attacks.
"Grouping was also a complete joke. The game plan every single time boiled down to "Let tank pile up mobs, spam aoe, repeat."
So you're talking about grouping trash mobs for experience.... well yes.. weak field mobs aren't very exciting. I take it you never actually set foot in a dungeon? Way different ballgame, and imo, way harder than WoW, and on par with EQ1's hardest single group dungeons.
"The direction attacks make it incredibly easy for those with less lag to take advantage of those with lag"
Since when has lag not effected game play? If you have a laggy connection, you'll be at a disadvantage in any game.
"the list of bugs at the time I left was mind boggling, the poor balance, and add in the lack of any real communication from funcom"
The list of bugs at the 4 month point is drastically smaller. They had a smoother launch than most games. Most people who complained about the bugs were comparing 4+ year old games to the new AoC. Not fair.
Balance is group vs group, not player vs player.
Funcom communicates on the test live forums more than most game companies. If you think they were lacking in communication, it is probably because you were expecting the devs to post in the general forums, which they do not. Get on the testing forums, and you'll see multiple posts per day per dev.
I can say that it is by far the best mmorpg I've ever played.
Well, let me step back:) It is by far the mmorpg with the most potential I've every played.
Currently gear gives you at max, a 25% increase in power overall. The latest patch will push that to closer to 50%. This will give most "wow'ish", or older "EQ1'ish" players a more familiar feeling concerning item power.
This has been one of the harder selling points of AoC since its launch: namely, there seems to be very little you can do to improve you character. Once you reach max level, and even if you raid and dungeon crawl for all the best gear, you are, quite literally, not much more powerful than a naked max level character.
Funcom decided to make the game skill based, focused on pvp, and gear was to be secondary. However, what they found was most players preferred an even mix. Hence, Funcom chose to do 2 things:
1. PVP levels. You can reach up to pvp level 5, which unlocks new gear upgrades along the way. PVP level 5 is VERY hard to get (assuming you don't cheat grr). And I come from EQ1, so saying "hard to get" means a lot here.
2. Patch 1.05 will increase the benefits of gear, as well as give and overhaul to the under used crafting system.
Now, back to the original point: AoC being the mmorpg with the most potential.
It has all the traditional things that an mmorpg has, plus a very real feeling in terms of maturity. That aside, what sets it apart is a feeling of control when in pvp combat.
The thing most overlooked by new players, is the shielding and directional attacks of combos. You see, not only do you have cc (crowd control) and other standard mmorpg moves, you can also choose to direct attacks to certain areas of a person (top left right down, etc..).
The defender can move his shields to block those attacks, and in addition to active blocking, sacrificing endurance/stamina to block more damage.
Thats pvp. In the pve world, the game is fantastic, and getting better each patch. While I do think that raids are a bit too simplistic right now, the general pve is equal to any mmorpg or better, and the graphics are light years ahead of wow or other like mmorpgs.
Most people didn't really know how to play AoC, given that it's shielding and combat system were totally different.
I bet if you got into the game again, and tried a melee character, you'd be hooked.
The graphics alone are amazing (assuming you have a dx10 card and machine to support it).
Having come from EQ1, then played WoW, and then AoC, I'll say this:
If EQ1 is the baseline, WoW is EQ1 with training wheels, and AoC is somewhere in between. And I'm thinking of the relative level of skill required.
AoC's shielding and directional attacks are just amazingly fun imo. For those that do not want to get into the melee game, the casters play a bit like standard. Although to not learn where combo's land from melee, means you'll be one dead caster:)
There wasn't much follow-up though. I suppose he didn't push much further after receiving the response in his favor.
Still, he lost a job. It would have been nice if he sought salary damages in a civil suit against BMI. That might have helped prevent them from doing this again.
I agree. It seems like even if a procedure to produce a result, took years of research to develop (said procedure) at a hefty cost, then the goal of the company shouldn't be a patent on the procedure, but a patent on the results of the procedure.
Around 15 years ago, I recall a couple small programming shops that employed ~5-6 people each in my original home town.
Each of the offices supported only a handful of industrial clients, creating unique software for them. They had been doing so for over 10 years (might have been a bit less, I forget).
One office, for instance, produced the software that 2-3 of the biggest fruit warehouses in the country used. Very very specific software. Sold pre-installed on the server, which was basically a closed system/appliance.
Fast forward to today. The couple small programming shops are gone, and the last I heard, the fruit warehouses hired a small team of younger computer'ish people. I'm pretty sure they aren't very experienced programmers. I think they patched a bunch of open source + commerical stuff together to mimic what the propriety programs used to do.
"despite them feeling they are superior, they are in fact amateurs"
This reminds me of the years I spent in IT for a large hospital chain.
Replace air-industry with medical-industry. Replace air traffic controller with doctor, etc..
In many ways, they ARE superior in their field of expertise, they just seem to have a problem understanding that they are not experts in everything.
I've had many a highly trained physician do idiotic things on computers, and, left to their own devices, I'm sure they would have made horrible system choices. Thankfully at our hospital, the IT choices were centralized with the experts (trained system analysts, programmers, etc..)
I wonder how their IT gets done. All contracted, all in house, some mix?
If most of it is contracted, they need to get some highly trained computer experts to work in-house long enough to know both air-industry and software/architecture design. Contractors that I have worked with pretty much ignore the long term. And often they are not privy (or the client, not knowing computers, neglects to mention some critical piece of info) to what changes over time are happening in the air industry.
If most of their IT needs are done in-house, then they need better HR practices to get the right people.
"It strikes me as being just as misguided as expecting the people who maintain our roads to be responsible for people smuggling drugs across the border"
I used to think this way. Even got into an argument with my sister (who is a lawyer) about it.
I was talking about why I don't think the Pirate Bay should be in any trouble, even under US law (if it applied).
My argument went like this:
We all know that facilitating/helping illegal drug sales, is, well.. illegal. That said, say I bought a private piece of land in the city, and named it "Drug Park - our motto: sell and use drugs here! - open to the public".
The park itself was a big flat open grassy park. Exactly like the public parks the city maintains. The single only difference is I put a sign on it, saying "Drug Park".
Could I be charged with facilitating drug sales? I'm not 'doing' anything really. My sister, the lawyer, said yes. I said no. I never really investigated which of us was correct.
But anyway, back to the original quote up top, 'expecting road maintainers to be responsible for what happens on the road'.
I do not think that is a good example any longer. If someone built a private road/tunnel system, told everyone it is open to the public, but it just happened to have 99% illegal drug traffic and 1% legit, do you really think that the cops would let you continue to maintain those roads and toll fees?
"Open to the public" does not automatically give immunity to owners of a privately funded 'anything'.
One thing I thought about, was when a relative of mine opened a museum devoted to agriculture in a small town, and wanted it to have a non-profit status for tax benefits, etc..
There were a lot of conditions that needed to be met to gain those benefits.
I wonder if a similar thing would be a good idea for internet services that wish to truly be considered a 'free/non profit/open to the public' venture. Ianal, so I'm not sure if it would give them any immunity to prosecution, but it seems like it should.
Oh, and lets all get to work on the next-gen p2p protocol that doesn't rely on a central server, is tor'ish and hides your IP, while at the same time very fast:)
How do we know that it actually required the sum of the universes energy?
Maybe in the same way that catalysts can make chemical reactions occur faster/easier, there might be a technique some day to warp space time with a less raw power approach.
Actually, its not possible at all to have the computing power of the human mind run on any current hardware.
The brain can perform 10^16 synapse operations per second. http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html
You can see that even the fastest supercomputer http://www.top500.org/system/performance/9707
Is not even remotely close in terms of operations per second.
What RK is saying, is that if the trends continue, we'll reach 10^16 shortly, and with our better and better software models of the brain, and emulation will be possible.
Whether it works well, not at all, or 'wakes' up as an official AI is anyone's guess.
The nice thing about AI (as opposed to fusion) is that the speed of hardware increasing towards that 10^16th goal. It is easy to say "On such and such a date, 10^16 calculations per second will be reached" (assuming past trends continue).
Fusion doesn't have an easy way to measure its progress like that.
At that point, the AI creates the next AI, the next AI creates a new faster circuit, etc..
It will, for all intensive purposes, feel like advances are coming too fast to fathom.
"In any case, we're going to hit an unclimbable wall soon: just like you can't escape conservation of energy"
If you are talking about the raw limits of computational power, we have plenty to spare in reaching many times the power of the human mind.
His books address this pretty well.
Its after that, to have many billions of billions of minds of power, that he divulges into talking about harnessing the computation power of atoms/quantum stuff, and then extrapolating that into how many computations could be done given all the atoms on the moon, etc...
Getting to that first AI or 2 is well within our hardware limits in the next 20-40 years or so.
You spelled 'cool' as 'kewl'. By chance did you happen to play Everquest 1 on the Luclin Server?:)
That spelling, 'kewl' brought back memories, as I and another friend started using it on the server often, to see if it would spread and replace 'cool'.
It did! kewl just feels easier to type than cool, and as Everquest 1 was basically EverChat, the faster you typed, the more you got done.
The spread of kewl across Luclin seemed to coincide with a much more massive adoption of all the older internet abbreviations (lol, lmao, etc..) into the mmorpg world.
"First he's ignoring some physical limitations, such as with the size of computers"
Read his books. He talks quite a bit about things like using a solid block of matter as a quantum computer. Theoretically it sounds possible, but obviously not with todays technology. I think he envisioned something like a rock being the computer, and a device reading and changing the states of the atoms to perform computations.
So the reader might be larger, but the 'computer' could be a few atoms.
An in terms of the politics: He addresses that in his books also.
If someone releases an "open source AI" program, and eventually computers advance the way he says they will, we could all have advanced AI on our wristwatch.
At that point, is there really any way for the government to control anything?
If your AI can tell you how to make a bomb, a mind reader, or any number of things in seconds, what would be the limiting factor?
I suppose access to rare materials, if needed. But what if you ask your AI, how to make nano bots? Remember now, computers in 50 years will be more powerful than many many brains combined.
Could it answer the question 'how to design a nano bot to build things from the atomic level'? Maybe. Its possible I suppose. What if it happened to be time consuming but possible using pretty common components?
At that point, the government just lost control by limiting materials.
Etc etc etc..
It is pretty hard to imagine now, but even if we are not entering an exponential curve in computing, that first day that computers are powerful enough to simulate a human brain, and the software is designed that takes advantage of it, that software will be able to regressively improve itself, design better circuits, etc.. to spiral things rapidly out of the control of any poltical system.
Good points. But the one I haven't heard mentioned as of yet in the threads, is after the invention of that first AI, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.. will come nearly instantly.
After you can produce one, that one will produce the next one, only much better. Repeat.
The is the exponential part of all this. Whether its 40 years from now, or 60 or 100 is somewhat irrelevant.
Once the software model and hardware are available to turn on that very first AI, boom, the world changes.
You've got to start somewhere. At least Obama is starting.
And people need to stop complaining about Obama's budget. We needed stimulus to get the economy back up to speed.
I wish we could a parallel universe where Obama did no/limited stimulus during an economic crisis, and in the other universe, he did a big stimulus/big budget (like he really did).
I'll pretty much guarantee that the big spend/stimulus is a faster route to LOWERING our deficit through increased tax revenue in a shorter time period than wallowing in a recession for much longer than needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that there has a been a long list of well respected people in history who have reported seeing something unidentified in the sky.
President Jimmy Carter, various astronauts, tons of military personnel at all levels, etc..
Most of them just say "I have no idea what it was", only a few come out and say "that is not from this earth".
""Honestly, the only reason anyone ought to care what a politician thinks about creationism is if they decide what's taught in public schools.""
I completely disagree with that statement. While I have no problem with a politician holding deep spiritual or religious views, when those views selectively filter out scientific fact, their entire mental facility should be called into question.
If someone lets their spiritual/religious beliefs override the truth, then they are clearly should not be allowed to make any decisions on behalf of the people.
Many spiritual/religious people are able to balance a belief in God with an acceptance of scientific fact. To not be able to do this, shows a profound lack of either intelligence or logic. And even worse, likely shows that the person has the ability to be at ease with contradictory policy.
Do you really want a politician in office who will support contradictory policy? That is precisely how a government stagnates. As ours has done for quite some time.
"While assassins were absolutely useless twits who could barely take care of equally leveled monsters without cooldowns"
I take it you played until about level 30?:) Assassins are very strong if played correctly.
Healers have been toned down quite a bit, and the ToS is scheduled for their last nerf soon. In general though, sins can destroy any healing class in about 3 attacks.
"Grouping was also a complete joke. The game plan every single time boiled down to "Let tank pile up mobs, spam aoe, repeat."
So you're talking about grouping trash mobs for experience.... well yes.. weak field mobs aren't very exciting. I take it you never actually set foot in a dungeon? Way different ballgame, and imo, way harder than WoW, and on par with EQ1's hardest single group dungeons.
"The direction attacks make it incredibly easy for those with less lag to take advantage of those with lag"
Since when has lag not effected game play? If you have a laggy connection, you'll be at a disadvantage in any game.
"the list of bugs at the time I left was mind boggling, the poor balance, and add in the lack of any real communication from funcom"
The list of bugs at the 4 month point is drastically smaller. They had a smoother launch than most games. Most people who complained about the bugs were comparing 4+ year old games to the new AoC. Not fair.
Balance is group vs group, not player vs player.
Funcom communicates on the test live forums more than most game companies. If you think they were lacking in communication, it is probably because you were expecting the devs to post in the general forums, which they do not. Get on the testing forums, and you'll see multiple posts per day per dev.
People keep mentioning 'balance', but AoC has never claimed 1v1 balance. They said it was group vs group balance, and that works fairly well.
I can say that it is by far the best mmorpg I've ever played.
Well, let me step back:) It is by far the mmorpg with the most potential I've every played.
Currently gear gives you at max, a 25% increase in power overall. The latest patch will push that to closer to 50%. This will give most "wow'ish", or older "EQ1'ish" players a more familiar feeling concerning item power.
This has been one of the harder selling points of AoC since its launch: namely, there seems to be very little you can do to improve you character. Once you reach max level, and even if you raid and dungeon crawl for all the best gear, you are, quite literally, not much more powerful than a naked max level character.
Funcom decided to make the game skill based, focused on pvp, and gear was to be secondary. However, what they found was most players preferred an even mix. Hence, Funcom chose to do 2 things:
1. PVP levels. You can reach up to pvp level 5, which unlocks new gear upgrades along the way. PVP level 5 is VERY hard to get (assuming you don't cheat grr). And I come from EQ1, so saying "hard to get" means a lot here.
2. Patch 1.05 will increase the benefits of gear, as well as give and overhaul to the under used crafting system.
Now, back to the original point: AoC being the mmorpg with the most potential.
It has all the traditional things that an mmorpg has, plus a very real feeling in terms of maturity. That aside, what sets it apart is a feeling of control when in pvp combat.
The thing most overlooked by new players, is the shielding and directional attacks of combos. You see, not only do you have cc (crowd control) and other standard mmorpg moves, you can also choose to direct attacks to certain areas of a person (top left right down, etc..).
The defender can move his shields to block those attacks, and in addition to active blocking, sacrificing endurance/stamina to block more damage.
Thats pvp. In the pve world, the game is fantastic, and getting better each patch. While I do think that raids are a bit too simplistic right now, the general pve is equal to any mmorpg or better, and the graphics are light years ahead of wow or other like mmorpgs.
Most people didn't really know how to play AoC, given that it's shielding and combat system were totally different.
I bet if you got into the game again, and tried a melee character, you'd be hooked.
The graphics alone are amazing (assuming you have a dx10 card and machine to support it).
Having come from EQ1, then played WoW, and then AoC, I'll say this:
If EQ1 is the baseline, WoW is EQ1 with training wheels, and AoC is somewhere in between. And I'm thinking of the relative level of skill required.
AoC's shielding and directional attacks are just amazingly fun imo. For those that do not want to get into the melee game, the casters play a bit like standard. Although to not learn where combo's land from melee, means you'll be one dead caster:)
If you were a rare book expert during the turn of the century, why isn't your slashdot ID smaller?
;
Very interesting read. Thanks for that link.
There wasn't much follow-up though. I suppose he didn't push much further after receiving the response in his favor.
Still, he lost a job. It would have been nice if he sought salary damages in a civil suit against BMI. That might have helped prevent them from doing this again.
Is the practice of given money to a consumer to not buy a competitors product only illegal if you are deemed a monopoly?
If AMD did this would it be legal?
I agree. It seems like even if a procedure to produce a result, took years of research to develop (said procedure) at a hefty cost, then the goal of the company shouldn't be a patent on the procedure, but a patent on the results of the procedure.
Don't some university research profs patent their results also?
http://www.yale.edu/ocr/pfg/policies/patents.html
If you scroll down, you see a section where they very specifically talk about the money made from an invention and how it is to be split up.
I assume if something is patented and earning a university money that they aren't going to let the world have it for free.
I didn't read it all so there might be a clause saying "Oh, and the patent expires in one year and must be released to the world".
I know what you mean.
Around 15 years ago, I recall a couple small programming shops that employed ~5-6 people each in my original home town.
Each of the offices supported only a handful of industrial clients, creating unique software for them. They had been doing so for over 10 years (might have been a bit less, I forget).
One office, for instance, produced the software that 2-3 of the biggest fruit warehouses in the country used. Very very specific software. Sold pre-installed on the server, which was basically a closed system/appliance.
Fast forward to today. The couple small programming shops are gone, and the last I heard, the fruit warehouses hired a small team of younger computer'ish people. I'm pretty sure they aren't very experienced programmers. I think they patched a bunch of open source + commerical stuff together to mimic what the propriety programs used to do.
I'd be willing to bet that it is very insecure.
"despite them feeling they are superior, they are in fact amateurs"
This reminds me of the years I spent in IT for a large hospital chain.
Replace air-industry with medical-industry.
Replace air traffic controller with doctor, etc..
In many ways, they ARE superior in their field of expertise, they just seem to have a problem understanding that they are not experts in everything.
I've had many a highly trained physician do idiotic things on computers, and, left to their own devices, I'm sure they would have made horrible system choices. Thankfully at our hospital, the IT choices were centralized with the experts (trained system analysts, programmers, etc..)
I wonder how their IT gets done. All contracted, all in house, some mix?
If most of it is contracted, they need to get some highly trained computer experts to work in-house long enough to know both air-industry and software/architecture design. Contractors that I have worked with pretty much ignore the long term. And often they are not privy (or the client, not knowing computers, neglects to mention some critical piece of info) to what changes over time are happening in the air industry.
If most of their IT needs are done in-house, then they need better HR practices to get the right people.
"It strikes me as being just as misguided as expecting the people who maintain our roads to be responsible for people smuggling drugs across the border"
I used to think this way. Even got into an argument with my sister (who is a lawyer) about it.
I was talking about why I don't think the Pirate Bay should be in any trouble, even under US law (if it applied).
My argument went like this:
We all know that facilitating/helping illegal drug sales, is, well.. illegal. That said, say I bought a private piece of land in the city, and named it "Drug Park - our motto: sell and use drugs here! - open to the public".
The park itself was a big flat open grassy park. Exactly like the public parks the city maintains. The single only difference is I put a sign on it, saying "Drug Park".
Could I be charged with facilitating drug sales? I'm not 'doing' anything really. My sister, the lawyer, said yes. I said no. I never really investigated which of us was correct.
But anyway, back to the original quote up top, 'expecting road maintainers to be responsible for what happens on the road'.
I do not think that is a good example any longer. If someone built a private road/tunnel system, told everyone it is open to the public, but it just happened to have 99% illegal drug traffic and 1% legit, do you really think that the cops would let you continue to maintain those roads and toll fees?
"Open to the public" does not automatically give immunity to owners of a privately funded 'anything'.
One thing I thought about, was when a relative of mine opened a museum devoted to agriculture in a small town, and wanted it to have a non-profit status for tax benefits, etc..
There were a lot of conditions that needed to be met to gain those benefits.
I wonder if a similar thing would be a good idea for internet services that wish to truly be considered a 'free/non profit/open to the public' venture. Ianal, so I'm not sure if it would give them any immunity to prosecution, but it seems like it should.
Oh, and lets all get to work on the next-gen p2p protocol that doesn't rely on a central server, is tor'ish and hides your IP, while at the same time very fast:)
I was curious, so I checked out bitnabber.
Is it just me, or is 25gigs for 20 dollars a month pretty pricey? Thats only 4-5 movies if high quality, making them ~5 dollars apiece.
Netflix streaming and other services seem far cheaper.
Of course, thats just talking about movies/music. If you were to use it to download certain software.. it certainly would be a better deal.
"Private companies are always better."
Better at making money sure. Not necessarily better at providing maximum benefit for their clients.
How do we know that it actually required the sum of the universes energy?
Maybe in the same way that catalysts can make chemical reactions occur faster/easier, there might be a technique some day to warp space time with a less raw power approach.
Who knows. Interesting to think about though.
Actually, its not possible at all to have the computing power of the human mind run on any current hardware.
The brain can perform 10^16 synapse operations per second. http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html
You can see that even the fastest supercomputer
http://www.top500.org/system/performance/9707
Is not even remotely close in terms of operations per second.
What RK is saying, is that if the trends continue, we'll reach 10^16 shortly, and with our better and better software models of the brain, and emulation will be possible.
Whether it works well, not at all, or 'wakes' up as an official AI is anyone's guess.
The nice thing about AI (as opposed to fusion) is that the speed of hardware increasing towards that 10^16th goal. It is easy to say "On such and such a date, 10^16 calculations per second will be reached" (assuming past trends continue).
Fusion doesn't have an easy way to measure its progress like that.
A lot of his premise rests on AI being developed.
At that point, the AI creates the next AI, the next AI creates a new faster circuit, etc..
It will, for all intensive purposes, feel like advances are coming too fast to fathom.
"In any case, we're going to hit an unclimbable wall soon: just like you can't escape conservation of energy"
If you are talking about the raw limits of computational power, we have plenty to spare in reaching many times the power of the human mind.
His books address this pretty well.
Its after that, to have many billions of billions of minds of power, that he divulges into talking about harnessing the computation power of atoms/quantum stuff, and then extrapolating that into how many computations could be done given all the atoms on the moon, etc...
Getting to that first AI or 2 is well within our hardware limits in the next 20-40 years or so.
Sorry, but completely off topic:
You spelled 'cool' as 'kewl'. By chance did you happen to play Everquest 1 on the Luclin Server? :)
That spelling, 'kewl' brought back memories, as I and another friend started using it on the server often, to see if it would spread and replace 'cool'.
It did! kewl just feels easier to type than cool, and as Everquest 1 was basically EverChat, the faster you typed, the more you got done.
The spread of kewl across Luclin seemed to coincide with a much more massive adoption of all the older internet abbreviations (lol, lmao, etc..) into the mmorpg world.
"First he's ignoring some physical limitations, such as with the size of computers"
Read his books. He talks quite a bit about things like using a solid block of matter as a quantum computer. Theoretically it sounds possible, but obviously not with todays technology. I think he envisioned something like a rock being the computer, and a device reading and changing the states of the atoms to perform computations.
So the reader might be larger, but the 'computer' could be a few atoms.
An in terms of the politics: He addresses that in his books also.
If someone releases an "open source AI" program, and eventually computers advance the way he says they will, we could all have advanced AI on our wristwatch.
At that point, is there really any way for the government to control anything?
If your AI can tell you how to make a bomb, a mind reader, or any number of things in seconds, what would be the limiting factor?
I suppose access to rare materials, if needed. But what if you ask your AI, how to make nano bots? Remember now, computers in 50 years will be more powerful than many many brains combined.
Could it answer the question 'how to design a nano bot to build things from the atomic level'? Maybe. Its possible I suppose. What if it happened to be time consuming but possible using pretty common components?
At that point, the government just lost control by limiting materials.
Etc etc etc..
It is pretty hard to imagine now, but even if we are not entering an exponential curve in computing, that first day that computers are powerful enough to simulate a human brain, and the software is designed that takes advantage of it, that software will be able to regressively improve itself, design better circuits, etc.. to spiral things rapidly out of the control of any poltical system.
Good points. But the one I haven't heard mentioned as of yet in the threads, is after the invention of that first AI, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.. will come nearly instantly.
After you can produce one, that one will produce the next one, only much better. Repeat.
The is the exponential part of all this. Whether its 40 years from now, or 60 or 100 is somewhat irrelevant.
Once the software model and hardware are available to turn on that very first AI, boom, the world changes.
"So his argument boils down to: "Lots of cool stuff has happened in the past. If we extrapolate, then OMG ponies!!!!!"
No, more like, we have been developing along an exponential curve. We've been in the shallow base of that curve for a while.
Here's some evidence that I think points to us entering the steeper part of the curve.
By 2045 technological gain rates will approach infinity.
So, to shorten that:
His argument boils down to: "We've had a pretty slow beginning, but its picking up speed exponentially"
You've got to start somewhere. At least Obama is starting.
And people need to stop complaining about Obama's budget. We needed stimulus to get the economy back up to speed.
I wish we could a parallel universe where Obama did no/limited stimulus during an economic crisis, and in the other universe, he did a big stimulus/big budget (like he really did).
I'll pretty much guarantee that the big spend/stimulus is a faster route to LOWERING our deficit through increased tax revenue in a shorter time period than wallowing in a recession for much longer than needed.