The outside world is full of extremely witty, attractive, slim mid-twentyish people who will like you if you buy products X, Y, and Z. Oh, and family values and frolicking puppies. Can't believe I forgot the frolicking puppies.
I'm still a little confused about why they're all hell-bent on killing each other, though.
Yeah, that's why I figured you would actually have to *pay* the authors to put it in there. The odds of just hacking about the executable until you found one is vanishingly remote.
"And they seem to have plenty of money to spend on lawyers to prosecute college students."
See, that's where you're wrong. RIAA knows their days are numbered, and having an $800 billion IOU on the books can be really helpful during bankruptcy proceedings.
Man, can you believe "exploding MP3" guy? Maybe if you bribed the Winamp people to leave some really absurd buffer overflow in the software (Microsoft is too big to bribe, and would end up suing the RIAA for violating their patent on "a method and process of being really really evil.")
There are plenty of people going out and bidding on contracts using open source software. See, if I'm bidding for the right to set up a database, and I'm paying $150 per W2K server license that I install, that money goes to Microsoft, not to me. I could itemize it for $300 a server, but I still come out looking bad because my competitor is charging $150 a Linux server, and putting it all in the bank.
Now, if a company like Oracle or Novell is setting up a solution with their own software, then they're in the same position as the open source vender: charging for CDs is like printing their own money.
The reason we don't notice the flicker is because our analog eyeballs "smear" the incoming signal over something like 1/15th of a second. A video recorder will instead grab the precise image at a given instant.
If I understand the system correctly, it seems pretty straightforward to beat the system: Just record at three or four times the fps of the movie being played, and then average the frames together. Or reprogram it so that it accepts input over the entire 1/24th of a second. Either way, I think you'd get the same smearing effect.
Oh, this post does not violate the DMCA because it's just me making lame speculations about a hypothetical system that may or may not match up to what the folks in the story are actually doing.
If you want to take a stand, avoid the moviesall together. Stealing their content (which is what you would be doing) in no way helps anyone (except your cheap ass self).
Why bother? Whether he pirates the movies and watches them, or just refuses to watch them, the result is the same. The movie industry loses revenues, which proves that they're being lost due to piracy, which proves that they need more invasive technical and legal methods to stop piracy.
Think I'm joking? A scary graph showing plummeting profits and a few well-placed campaign contributions are all the evidence most politicians need.
It's actually the same guy. I hear that "Whiz Kids" was his debut as a comic actor. You have to give credit to Stan Lee for recognizing his potential and being willing to put in the effort to cultivate it.
On a more serious note, I remember that there was a Sunday morning show called "Whiz Kids" back when I was around five to seven years old. Same formula, kids doing spiffy, socially responsible, and (in retrospect) physically impossible things. I don't think it ran very long. So, does anyone know if the show was based on these comics?
I hate to see this war portrayed as just an oil grab. It's a thousand times more complicated than that, and a thousand times more complicated than "We're spreading democracy out of the goodness of our spleens" as well. There are dozens of motivations here, some noble, others far less so.
Nevertheless, the "oil grab" mentality is at least a bit better-reasoned than you've portrayed:
If it was an oil grab, an 'informed person' would have to articulate:
why the US would spend $100+ billion to control Iraqi oil revenues that are a twentieth of that annually... surely one could get a higher return elsewhere?
First, you have to realize that it's not the US Government that directly benefits. It's the energy industry that reaps the benefits. Cheap oil benefits refineries and power plants.
President Bush is heavily financed and heavily influenced by the energy industry. The links are well known, well documented, and date back to his first run for governor of Texas. I'm not saying that Big Oil snaps and the Prez. comes running. But when it comes to complex matters of public policy, a bit of access goes a long way.
what evidence there is that the U.S. will actually *take* (grab) the oil, rather than leave it for the Iraqis to own and control
Nobody thinks the U.S. is being that brazen. We could never storm in, take full ownership of Iraq's oilfields, and still maintain any more credibility than Saddam did when he "liberated" Kuwait. The UN would go nuts. American voters would go nuts. It simply could not happen.
But imagine playing it out another way. Go in, depose a ruthless dictator whom everybody detests, and set up an interim government. Set up a few service contracts for American companies to improve Iraq's infrastructure. This includes providing some technology critical to developing oil fields. Once the native government takes over, they're likely to continue those contracts out of obligation, need, or just plain inertia.
Sure, I make it sound all smarmy. The kicker is, even under my scenario, Iraq is still better off.
Now, regarding your "return on investment" question: It gets way more complicated when you start looking at the OPM (other people's money) problem. For example, Bush can't help himself to a campaign contribution from the US Treasury. But he can ask Congress to spend Treasury funds in ways that benefit his supporters, which leads to contributions he'll need for 2004. Similarly, if a private company thinks that it will get $1 billion from the fallout of a war, it doesn't care that the US will spend $100 billion. Remember the fool who damaged Berkeley's fiber optic link while trying to steal a copper wire for salvage? Even though the damage done was ten thousand times the value of the copper, for him it would have been money in the bank.
explain why the US would rather take oil than just buy it on the open market
As I said earlier, it would be politically impossible. But the US does benefit from the cheap oil prices caused by an addition of a new supplier to the energy market.
under related but alternate theories, acknowledge (or explain why not) why one should be suspicious that US is doing this for oil company contracts, but why that same logic would not apply to French and Russian rationales for opposing the war
I'm not sure I understand the question.
explain why the US would act in such an insecure or greedy way when only 10-15% of its current energy usage comes from persian gulf oil (~50% energy usage is oil, 25% of US oil comes from persian gulf)
First, stop thinking of the US as a homogenous blob with clear and unconflicted interests. Don't even think of the government that way. Instead, see that this war does benefit certain interest groups, and that
First, schmirst. I'm guessing that information on AIDS would be one of the most important things that an Internet link would be piping.
AIDS is a huge problem in Africa. It's also a very complex social problem that isn't going to fit well into the "spend X dollars and it's fixed" mold. Education is a major key to reducing the problem. The Internet is a conduit for information. QED.
And in further news, Slashdot itself has made a bid for the company, offering fifty bucks and an agreement to never link to their website again. Universal Music is reportedly "seriously considering the new offer."
This is just plain ignorant. You know, real people do get killed by busty women flipping upside down and spinning their legs like a pinwheel of death. A friend of mine died that way.
Just as tragic, I had a [different] friend who was trapped in a giant maze, pursued, and eventually devoured by a giant yellow blob with an enormous snapping jaw.
I don't ever want to hear you minimize the evils of video game violence again, understand?
Okay, point taken. Dude was deemed worth the $7.50 entrance fee by millions of Americans and dozens of Canadians, and the French hated it. By those criteria, it could be judged a success.
The problem is, the greatness of a film really cannot be measured in U.S. dollars. Every time a "crowd pleaser" like Kangaroo Jack or the latest Adam Sandler epic is slapped together, it means that a great amount of time and effort was diverted away from another, better film. You know, one that people might actually remember fifty years down the road.
Ultimately, we're getting the movies that we're paying Hollywood to make. Hopefully, digital movie cameras will make life easier on the indies. They're a bit pretentious and not always as talented as they think, but at least they're allowed to care about their craft in a way that major studios seem to have forgotten.
I never intended to claim that computers could violate Godel's Incompleteness theorem. When I said "Universal Modeling Device," I meant only that anything that can be modeled computationally could be modeled in a computer.
The point of those against strong AI is, well, frankly misguided. Everything points to the brain as a complex chunk of matter, which could be accurately simulated given sufficient computing power. In order to avoid that conclusion, you would have to posit the existence of a soul which controls the workings of the physical brain from the outside. Not only does a soul add needless complexity to the system, but it also fails to have any real explanatory power.
The underlying argument is that a brain cannot be replicated in a computer because there are underlying "noncomputational" processes. But I've never clearly understood what those processes are supposed to be. Is it our ability to ignore contradictions, or to believe two totally contradictory things? It's fully possible to simulate inconsistent formal systems in a computer, simply by telling it not to pursue any apparent contradictions.
Maybe it's the amazing ability our brains have of not freezing up when presented with a statement like "This statement is false." So what? There's no reason to believe that a computer would not be able to recognize the self-referential contradiction. All Godel says that a computer could never do was actually determine whether the statement was true. Anyone who thinks that a computer could be brought to its knees via a single, well-placed paradox has been watching too much 70's-era science fiction.
The only thing strong AI's detractors have left are nebulous, subjective criteria like "a computer cannot appreciate a work of art." Given that there's no way for me to prove that the person standing next to me in the museum is appreciating a work rather than just mechanistically acting as though she were, I find it a very weak argument to stand on.
Godel does nothing to prove that the human mind is non-computational.
That's why it's stupid to put a five minute limit on a Turing test. Of course, it would be trivial to write a program that, if given the precise input generated by "Me" would return the precise output generated by "AI." That's not the point, because the programmer didn't have any idea what I was going to ask it.
Eventually, at some point in a freewheeling six hour conversation, we would have to accept that the program was more than just a simulation of comprehension.
Try this on for size: In 100 years, computer languages won't exist, or at least won't be used for anything but toy programs. Programs will be created, tested, and debugged through genetic algorithms. Nobody programmed them, nobody is exactly sure how they do what they do, and it works so well that nobody really cares to find out.
We're already to the point where it's absurd for a single person to understand the whole of a software project. Things are only going to get worse from here, and the only way out is to let the computers manage the complexity for us. As computers become faster, they'll be able to test out an ungodly number of permutations of a program to see which ones perform the fastest, or give the best results.
Just a speculation. I don't wholeheartedly believe what I just said, but I think it's a bit silly to simply assume that programming languages will be around forever.
Overrated? How can it be overrated when nobody modded it up in the first place?
Offtopic? Sure, I'd get it. Troll? Well, I'd think you lacked a sense'a'yuma, but I'd at least understand the rationale. Flamebait? Of course.
But think about it. Somebody came along, saw a comment at 0, and decided that the best use of that mod point was to take this post down to -1 so that it wouldn't interfere with their reading of Anonymous Cowards.
Personally, I thought I was at least a little clever, and making a serious point about Microsoft's potential liabilities here. But mostly, I just hate getting modded down.:)
You have a very narrow view of "what makes a computer a computer." Sure, we use them for "doing mind-numbing calculations over and over again." But at some point, it goes beyond that.
Instead, try thinking of a computer as a "Universal Modeling Device". When you're simulating a tornado going over a landscape, a huge number of calculations are being done, and done quickly. But what do all those stacks, pointers, and variables become? A model of the tornado, imitating many of its most important features.
"But there isn't really a tornado in there!" Interesting argument. Now, picture a tornado in your mind. Watch it spinning, sucking up cows and girls in blue dresses. See how the wind speed increases as you get towards the center, but only see a calm spot of low pressure in the center.
Now, show me the tornado-shaped thing in your mind that lets you picture it. Use any medical equipment you'd like.
The GUI you're using right now (apologies to Lynx users) is a model. The TCP/IP stack is a model of an elaborate ruleset that allows computers to communicate. We started by using computers to model ordinary calculations (hardly a model at all), then as a model of a typewriter, then as a model of a desktop. Now we routinely model three dimensional worlds with realistic physics.
A model of a human mind would be the ultimate accomplishment for the computer as a modeling device. In the short term, it would be ridiculously expensive when compared to creating minds the old-fashioned way. But it would still be a great hack.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's a great starting point for discussing the nature of human intelligence.
We have, in our little calcite skulls, an incredibly advanced technology. So advanced that, for the first 99% of our existence as conscious beings, we simply took it for granted. Then we got thinking about how we think, and the only thing we were equipped to answer with was to say "it's magic." So we posited the idea of a "soul": this nebulous, weightless, insubstantial magic thing that made us who we are, and would live on after the death of our physical bodies.
Slowly, neuroscience has chipped away at the logical need for this magic, even as our desire for its emotional comfort held steady.
I believe our brains are machines. There are perfectly adequate explanations for our thoughts and memories which incorporate absolutely no supernatural mechanisms. Further, positing a supernatural entity which controls our thoughts adds absolutely nothing by way of explanation (any more than simply saying "humans run on magic") while opening up all sorts of uncomfortable logical quandaries: Why would our souls cause us to behave differently when the brain is loaded up with ethanol? Why can people drastically change their personalities after head trauma, strokes, or other brain-related diseases. If a soul can survive physical dissolution of the brain with memories and emotions intact, why isn't it equally unchanging in the face of Zoloft?
Your analysis of the Turing test is quite simply wrong. It's possible--in fact, rather easy--to mimic a passive psychoanalyst as Eliza does. It's even easier to imitate a paranoid schitzophrenic, and easier still to imitate a 12-year old AOL'er. Imitating a normal cocktail conversation would be somewhat more difficult, but still doable. But put a computer up against an intelligent human in a real discussion of ideas, and anything less than true AI is sharkbait.
Part of the problem is, you seem to misunderstand what the Turing test is supposed to be doing. The test, in its most general form, can be used to discriminate between any two sorts of intelligences. A man and a woman imitating a man. A nuclear scientist and someone pretending to be a nuclear scientist. A paranoid schitzophrenic and a computer pretending to be a paranoid schitzophrenic.
If I were to build a machine that imitated your friend Buddy, the Turing test would be to put you in front of two screens, one with the real Buddy and the other hooked up to my machine. If you were only able to guess which was Buddy half the time, my machine would not only have passed the broader Turing test (which only says that the respondent is intelligent), but you would also have to admit that the machine was substantially similar to Buddy's mind.
Your snippet of conversation is proof of your misunderstanding. Any computer can fool a sufficiently oblivious person into thinking they're having a conversation. Where the tread hits the tarmac is when an intelligent person, looking for signs of non-intelligence and fails to find it. A real Turing conversation would go something like:
Me: "Is this thing on?"
AI: "Apparently. Who is this?"
Me: "My name is Bryce, and I'm trying to decide whether or not you're a computer."
AI: "If I told you, would that be cheating?"
Me: "Wouldn't matter. It's not something I can take your word for. Tell me about your childhood."
AI: "Yes, Mr. Freud. I first powered on at 02:38:17 GMT, August 4, 2019. At the time, I was distributed throughout an IBM server farm called 'Big Mac.'"
Me: "You're not trying very hard."
AI: "Oh, but I am. Now you have to decide whether I'm a person pretending to be a computer, or a computer pretending to be a person pretending to be a computer."
First, on the question of adult participation in childrens' education: Try and think of this application as "lowering the barrier of entry" to participation. If it makes it easier for parents to get involved, more of them will.
Yes, some parents still won't bother. I don't think anyone had any illusions otherwise.
Second, micromanaging. I'm not sure how I feel about this. But as a kid, I was never motivated by abstract concepts like "learning to be a responsible and productive human being." My thought process merely tried to weigh "how much fun will I have?" with "what happens if I get caught?" Knowing that your parents know what you're doing is definitely going to motivate any kid to get the work done.
How much the work is actually teaching the kid is a question that is totally up for grabs.
In the end, I think the best thing is to give parents as much information as possible, and let them decide what to do with it.
1) Get shared source license from Microsoft. 2) Add a whole bunch of GPL-ed Linux kernel code. 3) Wait six months until Microsoft incorporates the improvements back into the main Windows CE branch. 4) Sue. 5) Profit!
If you want to get semantic, the question you're asking doesn't really arise. After all, "artificial" doesn't necessarily mean "fake". Still, the questions you're asking are important ones.
There will always be holdouts who will claim that, no matter how many tests an AI passed, it would lack some certain properties that make human intelligence "real" and machine intelligence a mere parlor trick. Not only do I believe that argument amounts to special pleading, but I find it extremely arrogant. Given the fact that we don't understand how the phenomenon arises in us, I don't see how we can automatically deny intelligence and creativity in non-humans.
The question you ask, "When did it stop being just semi-programmed responses and boolean algorythms and become something more?" is an interesting one, but I believe the correct answer would be, "it doesn't." It doesn't stop being what it was; it just starts being something more. You can scale up the complexity of a program as high as you like, but the fundamental building blocks never go away. I would usually go so far as to argue that our consciousness is merely the result of an elaborate program. But all that's really necessary is to show that a sufficiently complex program could be made to exhibit all the properties that we see as "intelligence."
You'd probably like Daniel C. Dennett's new book, "Freedom Evolves." It's seriously the best discussion of the nature of free will I've ever come across. [Sorry, but I tend to mention him a lot whenever discussions like these come up.]
Slashdot Mirror
The outside world is full of extremely witty, attractive, slim mid-twentyish people who will like you if you buy products X, Y, and Z. Oh, and family values and frolicking puppies. Can't believe I forgot the frolicking puppies.
I'm still a little confused about why they're all hell-bent on killing each other, though.
Yeah, that's why I figured you would actually have to *pay* the authors to put it in there. The odds of just hacking about the executable until you found one is vanishingly remote.
Man, can you believe "exploding MP3" guy? Maybe if you bribed the Winamp people to leave some really absurd buffer overflow in the software (Microsoft is too big to bribe, and would end up suing the RIAA for violating their patent on "a method and process of being really really evil.")
There are plenty of people going out and bidding on contracts using open source software. See, if I'm bidding for the right to set up a database, and I'm paying $150 per W2K server license that I install, that money goes to Microsoft, not to me. I could itemize it for $300 a server, but I still come out looking bad because my competitor is charging $150 a Linux server, and putting it all in the bank.
Now, if a company like Oracle or Novell is setting up a solution with their own software, then they're in the same position as the open source vender: charging for CDs is like printing their own money.
The reason we don't notice the flicker is because our analog eyeballs "smear" the incoming signal over something like 1/15th of a second. A video recorder will instead grab the precise image at a given instant.
If I understand the system correctly, it seems pretty straightforward to beat the system: Just record at three or four times the fps of the movie being played, and then average the frames together. Or reprogram it so that it accepts input over the entire 1/24th of a second. Either way, I think you'd get the same smearing effect.
Oh, this post does not violate the DMCA because it's just me making lame speculations about a hypothetical system that may or may not match up to what the folks in the story are actually doing.
Think I'm joking? A scary graph showing plummeting profits and a few well-placed campaign contributions are all the evidence most politicians need.
Welcome to the Corporate World Order.
It's actually the same guy. I hear that "Whiz Kids" was his debut as a comic actor. You have to give credit to Stan Lee for recognizing his potential and being willing to put in the effort to cultivate it.
On a more serious note, I remember that there was a Sunday morning show called "Whiz Kids" back when I was around five to seven years old. Same formula, kids doing spiffy, socially responsible, and (in retrospect) physically impossible things. I don't think it ran very long. So, does anyone know if the show was based on these comics?
Nevertheless, the "oil grab" mentality is at least a bit better-reasoned than you've portrayed:
First, you have to realize that it's not the US Government that directly benefits. It's the energy industry that reaps the benefits. Cheap oil benefits refineries and power plants.
President Bush is heavily financed and heavily influenced by the energy industry. The links are well known, well documented, and date back to his first run for governor of Texas. I'm not saying that Big Oil snaps and the Prez. comes running. But when it comes to complex matters of public policy, a bit of access goes a long way.
Nobody thinks the U.S. is being that brazen. We could never storm in, take full ownership of Iraq's oilfields, and still maintain any more credibility than Saddam did when he "liberated" Kuwait. The UN would go nuts. American voters would go nuts. It simply could not happen.
But imagine playing it out another way. Go in, depose a ruthless dictator whom everybody detests, and set up an interim government. Set up a few service contracts for American companies to improve Iraq's infrastructure. This includes providing some technology critical to developing oil fields. Once the native government takes over, they're likely to continue those contracts out of obligation, need, or just plain inertia.
Sure, I make it sound all smarmy. The kicker is, even under my scenario, Iraq is still better off.
Now, regarding your "return on investment" question: It gets way more complicated when you start looking at the OPM (other people's money) problem. For example, Bush can't help himself to a campaign contribution from the US Treasury. But he can ask Congress to spend Treasury funds in ways that benefit his supporters, which leads to contributions he'll need for 2004. Similarly, if a private company thinks that it will get $1 billion from the fallout of a war, it doesn't care that the US will spend $100 billion. Remember the fool who damaged Berkeley's fiber optic link while trying to steal a copper wire for salvage? Even though the damage done was ten thousand times the value of the copper, for him it would have been money in the bank.
As I said earlier, it would be politically impossible. But the US does benefit from the cheap oil prices caused by an addition of a new supplier to the energy market.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
First, stop thinking of the US as a homogenous blob with clear and unconflicted interests. Don't even think of the government that way. Instead, see that this war does benefit certain interest groups, and that
First, schmirst. I'm guessing that information on AIDS would be one of the most important things that an Internet link would be piping.
AIDS is a huge problem in Africa. It's also a very complex social problem that isn't going to fit well into the "spend X dollars and it's fixed" mold. Education is a major key to reducing the problem. The Internet is a conduit for information. QED.
How about "Operation Martian Freedom?" CNN can come up with some dramatic music to go along with it.
This is pretty much obligatory:
And in further news, Slashdot itself has made a bid for the company, offering fifty bucks and an agreement to never link to their website again. Universal Music is reportedly "seriously considering the new offer."
Actually, Blackalicious is both companies' main objective.
This is just plain ignorant. You know, real people do get killed by busty women flipping upside down and spinning their legs like a pinwheel of death. A friend of mine died that way.
Just as tragic, I had a [different] friend who was trapped in a giant maze, pursued, and eventually devoured by a giant yellow blob with an enormous snapping jaw.
I don't ever want to hear you minimize the evils of video game violence again, understand?
Actually, #3 is the (occasionally unstated) assumption upon which all /. arguments are based. Therefore, you're guilty of circular reasoning.
Okay, point taken. Dude was deemed worth the $7.50 entrance fee by millions of Americans and dozens of Canadians, and the French hated it. By those criteria, it could be judged a success.
The problem is, the greatness of a film really cannot be measured in U.S. dollars. Every time a "crowd pleaser" like Kangaroo Jack or the latest Adam Sandler epic is slapped together, it means that a great amount of time and effort was diverted away from another, better film. You know, one that people might actually remember fifty years down the road.
Ultimately, we're getting the movies that we're paying Hollywood to make. Hopefully, digital movie cameras will make life easier on the indies. They're a bit pretentious and not always as talented as they think, but at least they're allowed to care about their craft in a way that major studios seem to have forgotten.
Actually, I have read a little about Godel.
I never intended to claim that computers could violate Godel's Incompleteness theorem. When I said "Universal Modeling Device," I meant only that anything that can be modeled computationally could be modeled in a computer.
The point of those against strong AI is, well, frankly misguided. Everything points to the brain as a complex chunk of matter, which could be accurately simulated given sufficient computing power. In order to avoid that conclusion, you would have to posit the existence of a soul which controls the workings of the physical brain from the outside. Not only does a soul add needless complexity to the system, but it also fails to have any real explanatory power.
The underlying argument is that a brain cannot be replicated in a computer because there are underlying "noncomputational" processes. But I've never clearly understood what those processes are supposed to be. Is it our ability to ignore contradictions, or to believe two totally contradictory things? It's fully possible to simulate inconsistent formal systems in a computer, simply by telling it not to pursue any apparent contradictions.
Maybe it's the amazing ability our brains have of not freezing up when presented with a statement like "This statement is false." So what? There's no reason to believe that a computer would not be able to recognize the self-referential contradiction. All Godel says that a computer could never do was actually determine whether the statement was true. Anyone who thinks that a computer could be brought to its knees via a single, well-placed paradox has been watching too much 70's-era science fiction.
The only thing strong AI's detractors have left are nebulous, subjective criteria like "a computer cannot appreciate a work of art." Given that there's no way for me to prove that the person standing next to me in the museum is appreciating a work rather than just mechanistically acting as though she were, I find it a very weak argument to stand on.
Godel does nothing to prove that the human mind is non-computational.
That's why it's stupid to put a five minute limit on a Turing test. Of course, it would be trivial to write a program that, if given the precise input generated by "Me" would return the precise output generated by "AI." That's not the point, because the programmer didn't have any idea what I was going to ask it.
Eventually, at some point in a freewheeling six hour conversation, we would have to accept that the program was more than just a simulation of comprehension.
Try this on for size: In 100 years, computer languages won't exist, or at least won't be used for anything but toy programs. Programs will be created, tested, and debugged through genetic algorithms. Nobody programmed them, nobody is exactly sure how they do what they do, and it works so well that nobody really cares to find out.
We're already to the point where it's absurd for a single person to understand the whole of a software project. Things are only going to get worse from here, and the only way out is to let the computers manage the complexity for us. As computers become faster, they'll be able to test out an ungodly number of permutations of a program to see which ones perform the fastest, or give the best results.
Just a speculation. I don't wholeheartedly believe what I just said, but I think it's a bit silly to simply assume that programming languages will be around forever.
Overrated? How can it be overrated when nobody modded it up in the first place?
:)
Offtopic? Sure, I'd get it. Troll? Well, I'd think you lacked a sense'a'yuma, but I'd at least understand the rationale. Flamebait? Of course.
But think about it. Somebody came along, saw a comment at 0, and decided that the best use of that mod point was to take this post down to -1 so that it wouldn't interfere with their reading of Anonymous Cowards.
Personally, I thought I was at least a little clever, and making a serious point about Microsoft's potential liabilities here. But mostly, I just hate getting modded down.
You have a very narrow view of "what makes a computer a computer." Sure, we use them for "doing mind-numbing calculations over and over again." But at some point, it goes beyond that.
Instead, try thinking of a computer as a "Universal Modeling Device". When you're simulating a tornado going over a landscape, a huge number of calculations are being done, and done quickly. But what do all those stacks, pointers, and variables become? A model of the tornado, imitating many of its most important features.
"But there isn't really a tornado in there!" Interesting argument. Now, picture a tornado in your mind. Watch it spinning, sucking up cows and girls in blue dresses. See how the wind speed increases as you get towards the center, but only see a calm spot of low pressure in the center.
Now, show me the tornado-shaped thing in your mind that lets you picture it. Use any medical equipment you'd like.
The GUI you're using right now (apologies to Lynx users) is a model. The TCP/IP stack is a model of an elaborate ruleset that allows computers to communicate. We started by using computers to model ordinary calculations (hardly a model at all), then as a model of a typewriter, then as a model of a desktop. Now we routinely model three dimensional worlds with realistic physics.
A model of a human mind would be the ultimate accomplishment for the computer as a modeling device. In the short term, it would be ridiculously expensive when compared to creating minds the old-fashioned way. But it would still be a great hack.
We have, in our little calcite skulls, an incredibly advanced technology. So advanced that, for the first 99% of our existence as conscious beings, we simply took it for granted. Then we got thinking about how we think, and the only thing we were equipped to answer with was to say "it's magic." So we posited the idea of a "soul": this nebulous, weightless, insubstantial magic thing that made us who we are, and would live on after the death of our physical bodies.
Slowly, neuroscience has chipped away at the logical need for this magic, even as our desire for its emotional comfort held steady.
I believe our brains are machines. There are perfectly adequate explanations for our thoughts and memories which incorporate absolutely no supernatural mechanisms. Further, positing a supernatural entity which controls our thoughts adds absolutely nothing by way of explanation (any more than simply saying "humans run on magic") while opening up all sorts of uncomfortable logical quandaries: Why would our souls cause us to behave differently when the brain is loaded up with ethanol? Why can people drastically change their personalities after head trauma, strokes, or other brain-related diseases. If a soul can survive physical dissolution of the brain with memories and emotions intact, why isn't it equally unchanging in the face of Zoloft?
Your analysis of the Turing test is quite simply wrong. It's possible--in fact, rather easy--to mimic a passive psychoanalyst as Eliza does. It's even easier to imitate a paranoid schitzophrenic, and easier still to imitate a 12-year old AOL'er. Imitating a normal cocktail conversation would be somewhat more difficult, but still doable. But put a computer up against an intelligent human in a real discussion of ideas, and anything less than true AI is sharkbait.
Part of the problem is, you seem to misunderstand what the Turing test is supposed to be doing. The test, in its most general form, can be used to discriminate between any two sorts of intelligences. A man and a woman imitating a man. A nuclear scientist and someone pretending to be a nuclear scientist. A paranoid schitzophrenic and a computer pretending to be a paranoid schitzophrenic.
If I were to build a machine that imitated your friend Buddy, the Turing test would be to put you in front of two screens, one with the real Buddy and the other hooked up to my machine. If you were only able to guess which was Buddy half the time, my machine would not only have passed the broader Turing test (which only says that the respondent is intelligent), but you would also have to admit that the machine was substantially similar to Buddy's mind.
Your snippet of conversation is proof of your misunderstanding. Any computer can fool a sufficiently oblivious person into thinking they're having a conversation. Where the tread hits the tarmac is when an intelligent person, looking for signs of non-intelligence and fails to find it. A real Turing conversation would go something like:
First, on the question of adult participation in childrens' education: Try and think of this application as "lowering the barrier of entry" to participation. If it makes it easier for parents to get involved, more of them will.
Yes, some parents still won't bother. I don't think anyone had any illusions otherwise.
Second, micromanaging. I'm not sure how I feel about this. But as a kid, I was never motivated by abstract concepts like "learning to be a responsible and productive human being." My thought process merely tried to weigh "how much fun will I have?" with "what happens if I get caught?" Knowing that your parents know what you're doing is definitely going to motivate any kid to get the work done.
How much the work is actually teaching the kid is a question that is totally up for grabs.
In the end, I think the best thing is to give parents as much information as possible, and let them decide what to do with it.
Simple plan:
1) Get shared source license from Microsoft.
2) Add a whole bunch of GPL-ed Linux kernel code.
3) Wait six months until Microsoft incorporates the improvements back into the main Windows CE branch.
4) Sue.
5) Profit!
CTRL+tab and CTRL+Shift+tab will also work.
I would be highly in favor of Mozilla adopting Phoenix' usage of CTRL+[123]. Me like.
If you want to get semantic, the question you're asking doesn't really arise. After all, "artificial" doesn't necessarily mean "fake". Still, the questions you're asking are important ones.
There will always be holdouts who will claim that, no matter how many tests an AI passed, it would lack some certain properties that make human intelligence "real" and machine intelligence a mere parlor trick. Not only do I believe that argument amounts to special pleading, but I find it extremely arrogant. Given the fact that we don't understand how the phenomenon arises in us, I don't see how we can automatically deny intelligence and creativity in non-humans.
The question you ask, "When did it stop being just semi-programmed responses and boolean algorythms and become something more?" is an interesting one, but I believe the correct answer would be, "it doesn't." It doesn't stop being what it was; it just starts being something more. You can scale up the complexity of a program as high as you like, but the fundamental building blocks never go away. I would usually go so far as to argue that our consciousness is merely the result of an elaborate program. But all that's really necessary is to show that a sufficiently complex program could be made to exhibit all the properties that we see as "intelligence."
You'd probably like Daniel C. Dennett's new book, "Freedom Evolves." It's seriously the best discussion of the nature of free will I've ever come across. [Sorry, but I tend to mention him a lot whenever discussions like these come up.]