The article in which Turing first proposed his test was called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Check out the paper and read it. It's fascinating, and even though I think his methodology for determining intelligence is fundamentally flawed, he was undoubtedly a genius.
Your criticism of the MIST seems to be that it is only regurgitation of facts, but the "facts" that make up the MIST are statements which are determined true or false by human consensus, not just by science. Considering that Cyc was built with much the same mindset, I don't doubt that it might score well. Which is good! It means the test is working. Cyc has some intelligence embedded into it, and we can detect that by testing it.
Compared to the totally subjective, pass/fail nature of the Turing Test, I think anyone would agree this is a step forward. I doubt Cyc could answer as many questions correctly as a person, though. It's rules aren't robust enough, yet.
(Keep in mind that the MIST is simply an intelligence test, and leaves out the question of whether or not a given entity can feel emotions or has a phenomenological quality of existence. Which is as it should be.)
Chris McKinstry of MindPixel fame proposed a new kind of test for determining the intelligence of any given system, called the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, or MIST.
The basic idea is that the testee evaluates a large corpus of true or false statements, and that the intelligence of the system being tested can be mathematically determined from the resulting score's deviation from chance.
Considering that Turing's test isn't really a "test" at all -- it's based on a 19th century parlor game where the object was to see whether the gender of a hidden person could be determined based on their answers -- I think McKinstry's idea shows inventiveness and promise.
It's a shame the MindPixel project itself is mathematically unsound. I think that's the reason the MIST isn't talked about more in Turing Test discussions.
I think the idea that children are being used as market research subjects against their will is far more troubling than the the notion of censorware itself.
The idea that companies like these are secretly eavesdropping on our children's minds in order to sell them things more effectively gives me a far deeper chill than the notion that little Jimmy can't see boobsrus.com.
Private corporations are invading the public school structure we built to educate our children and turning it into just another branch of market research or human resources. How long until we dispense with the pretense of education altogether, and simply assign Jimmy his place in the corporate empire at birth?
Just a few weeks ago, we here at 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM in Mpls/St.Paul finished the initial run of the first automated listener-programmed pirate radio station in the world.
Listeners from around the Twin Cities simply visited our homepage at 2000flushes.com, uploaded their programming in MP3 form, and listened as it was automatically broadcast over 94.1 FM just minutes later. It was a blast!
We got more than just music. We got original programming, from mock political ads making George Bush out to be a whiny coke fiend, to people shouting out their own rants, to people making up their own station IDs.
If the NAB says there's no room for microstations on the dial, then we think they must mean they want to turn over airtime on THEIR stations for the public to use. It's the only other way to address the fact that the airwaves BELONG to the public, and yet the public has absolutely NO access to them.
(We believe automated public access would be great for Low Power Radio stations, too, but if the NAB doesn't... well, they had their chance!:)
For more info: Check out the article about us at pirateradio.about.com, the press release we sent out below, or our own website at 2000flushes.com (before corporate america tries to steal it back!).
The World's First Public Access Pirate Radio Station Now Broadcasting Live on 94.1 FM
Mark the date on your calendar.
On November 6th, at 12:35 a.m., 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM burst onto the airwaveswith a totally new 24-hour-a-day format where the listeners are the broadcasters.
Using an Internet application of their own design, 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio now enables any citizen to access the airwaves. Potential broadcasters simply visit the station website at www.2000flushes.com, upload any audio in MP3 format, tune to 94.1 FM, and listen as it is automatically broadcast to the entire Twin Cities just minutes later. This makes 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM the first totally automated public access radio resource in the world.
The 2000 Flushes website has received thousands of hits as listeners scramble to upload their own spoken word and music programming before the station is shut down. Global Household Brands, manufacturer of 2000 Flushes Toilet Bowl Cleaner, has initiated action to obtain the 2000flushes.com domain, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already discovered the 2000 Flushes signal and is closing in fast.
2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM is a rallying cry against paradoxical FCC policy which claims to recognize the broadcast spectrum as a public resource while blocking public access to this medium and selling FM station licenses for millions of dollars to corporations which already own dozens of stations in other markets. The argument traditionally advanced for this system of corporate media dominance is that if everyone operated their own radio or television station, there would be so much interference that nobody would be heard.
The 2000 Flushes concept demonstrates a new working model where listeners can SHARE time on existing stations. Realizing the potential for globalizing this new way of accessing the airwaves, 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM has spun off the application division into another, separate entity, Memeradio (www.memeradio.com), which will be working to develop and spread this technology to other stations, and to lobby the FCC and the United States Congress for broadcast change.
"This could crack the world open," said one Memeradio staffer. "You ain't heard nothin' yet."
I don't need all the examples, just some in order to extract the formal relationships such as lessthan. See my posting elsewhere in this discussion tree regarding Radon and image reconstruction from a finite number of projections.
Here's the thing, though.
What you're talking about reconstructing through some variant of tomography isn't some compact, thought-producing entity like the human brain.
You are trying to reproduce the entire map of human knowledge. And filling in the blank spots by interpolation just isn't going to possible for most queries, because the canvas of human knowledge is essentially infinite -- even in small, isolated subject areas.
You would honestly have a better chance, IMHO, if you used these resources to try to model the neural firings of an actual human brain.
I just can't see where you can think that even a billion mindpixels are going to be the merest drop in the bucket. It's like shooting a shotgun at the Moon, except ludicrously more so.
I respect the fact that you are actually doing something, but I just wish it was something worthwhile. Something with a hope of succeeding.
This makes no sense at all. The domain of all human knowledge is a finite domain. There is no indication at all that it would take more than the number of atoms in the universe to store it. In fact, we ourselves are pretty successful in storing it in just a fraction of the universe's atoms:-).
Sure, the domain of all human knowledge is finite. Sure we use just a few atoms (relatively speaking) to get a lot of facts.
But McKinstry's idea is ludicrous.
Here are some statements for the MindPixel project.
1 is less than 2.
2 is less than 3.
3 is less than 4.
... etc... until we run out of atoms in the universe.
You can't get anywhere with individual statements of fact like this. Our minds can produce infinitely many. No sample size is going to be big enough to be worth a damn.
One-thousand down, a mere googolplex left to go...
on
(Artificial) Mind Meld
·
· Score: 2
McKinstry hasn't addressed why most real AI folks think his project is the equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes: There will never be enough "mindpixels" to build anything constructive with, because the amount one would need to do so exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
I feel a little sorry for folks being snookered by this, because I think other more worthwhile projects are probably getting the shaft while college students spend their evenings typing in "Cocoa Puffs taste better with milk" and other variations on that theme.
Go ahead and look at the MindPixel site. See how vague it is about what exactly he expects to DO to all these bits o' "consensus fact" to transmogrify them into thought.
There's nothing there but mysticism.
I wish it weren't so, but it's so. This is Fool's Gold.
"It wouldn't spread if people didn't want it. That's as democratic as it gets."
No, democracy is when individual people use their individual votes to create a consensus, and then create laws based on it.
Subverting laws with technology -- like driving a truck filled with explosives into the Oklahoma City Federal Building -- isn't democracy. Just because a few people like you have the power to destroy a consensus you don't agree with doesn't justify your doing so.
"Things can get fucked up with a small elite, as well as with a whole country. Just because one billion people believe one thing, doesn't make it more correct. What a person with 300 IQ believes and wants, could also be just as wrong."
I totally and completely agree.
I wasn't suggesting we move towards a one-world-order run by a few eggheads. That secenario is only slightly less preferable than turning the world into chocolate cake.
In much the same way as missile defense systems use technology to protect us from technology,
I believe that technology can be used to implement a new kind of government that could protect us from the government. The big difference is that, instead of being hierarchical, like Napster, this new government would be distributed, like Gnutella. It would be a collection of protocols which... well, let me put up an earlier post from Slashdot:
-------------
You know, whenever anyone talks about the future myriad combinations of Internet and government, we always seem to get the most obvious, uninventive predictions. "File your taxes online! Vote online! Go to the DMV online!" Faster methods of doing things exactly the same way we do them right now.
Isn't anyone else out there thinking that maybe this kind of technology has the ability to change the way we think of government itself?
For instance, I wonder to myself sometimes if there isn't a new way to model the political boundaries of the world along the lines of the Internet. Here's a vision: A world where small individual node-states conduct commerce with each other by following universally agreed upon protocols, but remain largely autonomous internally. In much the same way as it doesn't matter whether or not you hook up a Mac, Wintel, or Linux box to the net as long as you send and recieve packets the way you're supposed to, couldn't we imagine a world where these little node-states allowed people the maximum amount of freedom to live the way they wanted as long as they followed agreed-upon procedures for routing goods and people through them?
I imagine a patchwork quilt of different autonomous mini-states, like websites, each where the people living there determine their own rules. True freedom requires exactly this kind of diversity.
As the world's population gets larger and more interconnected, it's crucial to note: Democracies become less virtuous as they become large, and any sufficiently large democracy is indistinguishible from tyranny. Don't believe me? All right, here's an analogy.
Let's say we all want to go out to dinner. All 100 of us. 49 of us happen to be vegetarians.
At Restaurant X, the procedure is simple. There's one big table, and one waitron. We all go, sit down, look at the menu and vote. Everyone eats what the majority decides. Unfortunately, 51% of us wanted the Filet Mignon (which we heard was quite good here). This leaves 49% of us without anything to eat. Democracy isn't always so tasty after all.
But at Restaurant Y, they have 10 tables. You still have to vote at each table, and the majority still determines what everybody eats, but now we have 99% of our party happy: 5 tables of 10 meat-eaters, 4 tables of 10 vegetarians, and one table with 9 happy vegetarians and 1 meat-eater who doesn't get to eat what he wants. Maybe he'll ask if he can pull a chair up to the table behind him?
Extrapolate this meat-and-veggie conflict to more contentious issues like abortion (or even IP laws) and it's easy to see how democracies are only virtuous when they're small.
So how big is a node-state? I live in the U.S., and as a practical test-case, I'm going to say county-sized. I think the modern county has the approximate amount of people that the Founders based our ideal of democracy on. But in all honesty, I think science and technology could help determine what the proper size for a semi-autonomous unit of governance should be. It's not impossible to model, and the idea seems exciting to me.
In any case, I find myself excited and curious: how can the technologies we have enable us to envision new ideas of government, in which we can all live freer lives? Any thoughts the ideas I've mentioned are appreciated, too.
-------------
There's more I could say here, but I think I'll just sum up for the moment by saying that this is the most virtuous form of government I can imagine.
As far as protecting us from the New Technologies goes, I really think that this idea has a number of benefits to offer, not the least of which is that I believe the smallness of the node-state fosters a greater sense of stewardship over your corner of the world. I think part of the protocols that would regulate goods transport and economic transactions between node-states might involve a re-routing of economic transactions around you if your node is found to be polluting the network by inflicting externalities on other node-states. Sort of the equivalent of refusing to send or receive packets from a known spammer. In this case, though, the "spam" could be dumping waste in a river that flows south into your neighbors backyard, or growing genetically modified plants outdoors where the pollen can spread to the rest of the ecosystem.
Yes, there's still difficulties, but like I said somewhere else, I think this is the World's Greatest Hack. Maybe the Greatest Hack In History. Geeks have done harder things than this. Why not turn their energy to preserving democracy and freedom for everyone?
I'm working on setting up a site where interested folks can debate the idea, and start working out the kinks. One of the first things this style of government needs is a name. If you've got one, or you're just interested in pursuing these ideas further, e-mail me and I'll let you know when the site's up.
-- Dan Zap!
mr_dan_zap@yahBOYDOIHATESPAMMERShoo.com
In principle, I do think that. However, I also think that people should be held responsible for the results of their actions. I am free to use a piece of technology (say, a 2x4) but not in a way that harms others.
Held responsible by whom? If we let technology develop uncontrolled, without constructing a much stronger political infrastructure around it, no entity will be able to enforce anything.
Think Gnutella here. They were supposedly under the watchful eye of AOL, but AOL wasn't watching carefully enough. After Gnutella was released, the concept of who was responsible didn't even matter anymore. The genie was out.
Apply this sort of scenario to a genetically modifed plant, or a malicious nanotech, and you have chilling consequences. Putting the people who created, unleashed, or utilized a particular New Technology in jail isn't going to remedy the problem.
That's the bite of the New Technology.
It's not like a toxic waste spill which you fine Exxon for and clean up. Because these new technologies are self-replicating, they can have effects which simply CAN'T be cleaned up.
Take your nuclear bomb example.
What if I create a new kind of bomb? This bomb has a 49% chance of setting the atmosphere on fire. I really don't think it'll happen. But it might.
I haven't done anything wrong, and the bomb DOES have a 51% chance of just blowing up the hundred square miles I own.
When you ask me not to do it, I tell you, "Hey, if my bomb really does set the entire atmosphere on fire, you can throw me in jail."
Even though this situation is total fiction, something very much like it WILL happen in the future. At some point, if our political infrastructure continues the way it is now, a very small group will have control of an unimaginably powerful technology; a self-replicating technology that will make the a-bomb look like someone popping a brown paper bag. And they won't be inclined to use it responsibly.
To stop, or least delay this for as long as possible, we need to create structures which only allow these kind of technologies to be developed with democratic approval, and both social and technical safeguards built into the process of development.
Because if we ever have to enforce the malicious use of these kind of technologies, it will simply be too late. There may not be any of us left to do the enforcing.
The alternative is what? Stopping all innovation until we fully understand and accept its consequences?
No, that's not the alternative.
One aspect of the alternative is to democratize the corporations which produce the technology in the first place. Any organization creating something as dangerous to society as nanotech or genetic engineering needs the checks and balances of society as a whole, a society which includes those who don't purchase stock, but do have an interest in their ecological and political environments.
Before you flame on, I'd like you to consider the problem yourself. What do you think should be done? Should anyone have the freedom to create and use any technology? I doubt you believe that.
So someone has to decide what technologies can be used, and by whom. Who should that someone be? The amoral market?
My vote so far is for more autonomy to be given to states, and in the long run, to smaller collections of people than that. Democracies are only virtuous when they're small. There's really not enough room to get into what I believe here, and to be honest, I'm still working out the flaws myself.
But unlike some people, I recognize the problem. We are rapidly approaching the showdown at high noon between Technology and Humanity. Will we throw up our hands and surrender to the power of new, big technologies and the elite which control them, or will we find it within ourselves to find new ways to govern them, and preserve democratic rule?
I hate to sound hyperbolic, but nothing less than the freedom of the human race depends on it.
No one is forcing anyone else to install a Freenet node on their computer.
The argument I'm making isn't really about Freenet. My point is that the problems Freenet poses to democratic law are a dim spectre of the problems nano and genetics and other New Technologies will pose.
Freenet is not self-replicating, but, like Gnutella, it is distributed. This gives is some sense of the slipperiness society will feel in managing the New Technologies.
..if it does reach sufficient popularity to make its use safe, then "Humanity" must have spoken on the subject.
How do you make that leap?
Just because a technology (Old or New) allows you to achieve power doesn't justify the power you've achieved with it. If I take over your house by home invasion with loaded handguns, it doesn't mean that I'm justified because I can be "safe" in doing so, in that no one can stop me.
This has always happened -- a group makes an advance in technology that offers them a chance to escape some of the restrictions that everyone has been tolerating, and decide they'll go for it....If you can climb to the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder, I would suggest you do so; those who don't are likely to get stepped on.
So, Jimmy hacks a nanobot that turns everything into the world into chocolate cake. Jimmy likes chocolate cake!
Jimmy's gonna let it go, too, because he says that "anyone who hasn't climbed up onto the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder" and built an anti-chocolate cake nanobot deserves to get "stepped on".
Whee! Now the Mona Lisa, The Hoover Dam, and your house have all been turned into chocolate cake!
This can't be what you want.
The Bill Joy Point is that we have to stop thinking about technology as simply a liberating mechanism, and start reckoning with the unprecidented menace to freedom the New Technology offers.
Freenet isn't even one of the New Technologies. But I think it's a premonition of them, and a good chance for us to ask ourselves the hard questions. What if there was a Jimmy with a chocolate cake nanobot? What should we be doing now to limit the kind of control of damage any one person can have through technology?
This is the biggest hack out there, and it's one all true geeks should be interested in.
If you think progress was decided in the past by democratic means instead of by the development of technology you are (at least partially) wrong.
I don't think progress was decided in the past by democratic means.
There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
I don't particulary have any affinity for the "rules" as they stand now. I do think Humanity deserves a chance to work out for itself what the rules should be, and not have them handed to us at technological gunpoint by an elite.
You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree and call it freedom.
It, in this case, being the right of an individual to make his will universal law via technology? That doesn't resemble any kind of freedom I know.
You know, I think this is a dim shadow of the point Bill Joy was making about the fundamental difference in kind between the Old Technology and the New.
Ian Clarke, one Not Particularly Thoughtful Kid, decides copyright is bad. Or at least that he's bored. He decides to create and unleash a technology that subverts it.
And it spreads. Suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person, or one small group of people, decided it should resemble.
Take this analogy and apply it to nano, or genetics. This is the future. Or it could be. If so, welcome to the new fascism.
The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Highfalutin' words, but these is highfalutin' times. I reckon.
... it doesn't acknowledge the fact that money is a form of political power.
It treats money as if it were simply good wishes, which individuals should be free to share with others. But Libertarianism as it stands today does not acknowledge that, for instance, poor people may want to organize a government because their financial power, even en masse, may not be enough to limit the power of wealthier entities, entities which in turn will erode everyone's freedom in their favor.
In other words, short term Libertarianism will always devolve into long term economic tyranny.
This action of creating rules of society that even the richest have an obligation to follow is a completely legitmate one, and most Libertarians don't want to acknowledge that.
Money *is* a form of political power, and there is no such thing as "voting with your dollars". That's an oxymoron. A vote, by any meaningful standard, means that we both exercise an equal share of political power. If you get to exercise one billion votes, and I get to exercise my one vote, it isn't a fair election.
This isn't to say *everyone* has a perfectly equal share of political power. This isn't true in America or anywhere. It will always be easier for some people to vote than others, if merely by virtue of the fact that they live next door to the polling place. What we do demand is an acceptable *range* of difficulty between the easiest and hardest votes. This means, whether you live right next door to the polling place, or a few miles away; whether you have the day off and can stroll in, or whether you have to catch a bus across town after work, it's still an achievable act for nearly everyone.
Voting is one act of political power. Selling is another. To create a politcal economy where freedom is sustained, we have to work for an acceptable range of power between the richest and poorest entities. And the market cannot be the mechanism to decide this, because we've already noted that it's unfair to begin with.
Government is not the enemy. BIG government is.
To wrap up, the rich have advantages (economies of scale, for example) that poor people don't, and they are able to exploit them to achieve even greater advantage. If I own all the food, and you're starving, Libertarianism tells you that your best choice is to sell yourself into indentured servitude for a carrot. Libertarianism tries to tell you it's immoral to do anything less.
I don't believe the solution is to steal all the carrots in a mob, either. The solution is to let small governments set ground rules, and let the sellers who want their business learn to abide by them.
How do we keep governments small? Well, I've thought about that in a post called "The Future Of Government", which is archived here:
You'll have to cut and paste because I don't have time to go back and HTMLize this post. But I appreciate your reading this rant. Other thoughts are welcome.
Nobody said they should advertise it as "ready to ship". They should have been honest and responsible. But that doesn't mean driving away people with a stick.
The point isn't whether or not Mozilla is better or worse than other programs, the point is that they actively *discouraged* people from downloading it. And that's too bad. They could've been simply honest, and not hyperbolized the negatives like they did.
I think the reason Mozilla's dead -- and it is, really -- has less to do with feature bloat, and more to do with the facts that geeks don't know shit about marketing.
We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only! They are not stable or complete enough for daily usage. We put them here for you to try out and report the bugs you find. Its guaranteed that you'll find bugs. Lots of them.
It is very important that you understand that these binaries are not complete programs. They might crash on startup. They might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames. Our binaries also include time bombs: they will expire, and stop working, 30 days after the date at which they were built.
Well, sign me up for that!
I can't be the only one craving a crapped-out incomplete time-bombed browser that may or may not destroy every file on my hard drive.
While Netscape's browser share has been slowly sinking like the Titanic, the Mozilla folks have been standing on deck, yelling through their cardboard bullhorns about how unsafe the lifeboats are.
Microsoft's won the browser war, guys. After years of coding for the buggy-as-the-rainforest Netscape, I cringe at the mention of their name, now. They've become an anti-brand. A name I'd rather avoid.
It makes me wonder: Shouldn't big open-source projects like Mozilla include marketers as part of their team? Some sub-group who's job is to responsibly get the word out and get people downloading?
This makes perfect sense. Slashdot's only getting bigger, and the Slashdot Effect is just getting more and more annoying. We should put this in our.sigs:
Yeah, but it wasn't cool because Superman and Batman fought, it was cool because Frank Miller made a story that MEANT something out of it. There was a point to it.
I have yet to hear anyone tell me what the point of BR is supposed to be if Deckard is a replicant. Replicants are stupid, as well as short-lived? Bleh. It's as if we'd ended a *regular* Batman story with Superman walking up and punching him in the gut.
Although I don't doubt that's happened somewhere in the comics world, as well.:)
... is a spectacular book that answered this question in an interview with Ridley Scott several years ago when it was published. It's goes into wonderful depth with Syd Mead and Hampton Fancher and all the other Blade Runner players on how this masterpiece was made.
BTW: Deckard isn't NECESSARILY a Replicant. The whole "missing replicant" line is actually turns out to be a continuity gaffe on Ridley's part (OOPS! Forgot to overdub that one!) and the bit about the Unicorn only occurs in the "Director's Cut", which isn't the movie most people have seen when they're thinking "Blade Runner".
I think Ridley's attraction to the idea rather defeats the whole movie. What's the point, if Deckard IS a Rep? What in fact, IS, the story? There's no character growth then, no realization that "retiring" a replicant is nothing more than killing... there's no VALUE to the story if you choose to believe that. I think Ripley just has a childish fixation on the idea, in the same way that a 9-year-old kid thinks, "Wouldn't it be cool if Superman fought Batman?"
Slashdot Mirror
Your criticism of the MIST seems to be that it is only regurgitation of facts, but the "facts" that make up the MIST are statements which are determined true or false by human consensus, not just by science. Considering that Cyc was built with much the same mindset, I don't doubt that it might score well. Which is good! It means the test is working. Cyc has some intelligence embedded into it, and we can detect that by testing it.
Compared to the totally subjective, pass/fail nature of the Turing Test, I think anyone would agree this is a step forward. I doubt Cyc could answer as many questions correctly as a person, though. It's rules aren't robust enough, yet.
(Keep in mind that the MIST is simply an intelligence test, and leaves out the question of whether or not a given entity can feel emotions or has a phenomenological quality of existence. Which is as it should be.)
The basic idea is that the testee evaluates a large corpus of true or false statements, and that the intelligence of the system being tested can be mathematically determined from the resulting score's deviation from chance.
Considering that Turing's test isn't really a "test" at all -- it's based on a 19th century parlor game where the object was to see whether the gender of a hidden person could be determined based on their answers -- I think McKinstry's idea shows inventiveness and promise.
It's a shame the MindPixel project itself is mathematically unsound. I think that's the reason the MIST isn't talked about more in Turing Test discussions.
I think the idea that children are being used as market research subjects against their will is far more troubling than the the notion of censorware itself.
The idea that companies like these are secretly eavesdropping on our children's minds in order to sell them things more effectively gives me a far deeper chill than the notion that little Jimmy can't see boobsrus.com.
Private corporations are invading the public school structure we built to educate our children and turning it into just another branch of market research or human resources. How long until we dispense with the pretense of education altogether, and simply assign Jimmy his place in the corporate empire at birth?
Evil.
Listeners from around the Twin Cities simply visited our homepage at 2000flushes.com, uploaded their programming in MP3 form, and listened as it was automatically broadcast over 94.1 FM just minutes later. It was a blast!
We got more than just music. We got original programming, from mock political ads making George Bush out to be a whiny coke fiend, to people shouting out their own rants, to people making up their own station IDs.
If the NAB says there's no room for microstations on the dial, then we think they must mean they want to turn over airtime on THEIR stations for the public to use. It's the only other way to address the fact that the airwaves BELONG to the public, and yet the public has absolutely NO access to them.
(We believe automated public access would be great for Low Power Radio stations, too, but if the NAB doesn't... well, they had their chance!:)
For more info: Check out the article about us at pirateradio.about.com, the press release we sent out below, or our own website at 2000flushes.com (before corporate america tries to steal it back!).
-- Dan ZAP!
2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM
& Apocatopia Magazine (coming soon!)
Thanks to everyone who uploaded, and we'll be back on the air soon!
Here's the thing, though.
What you're talking about reconstructing through some variant of tomography isn't some compact, thought-producing entity like the human brain.
You are trying to reproduce the entire map of human knowledge. And filling in the blank spots by interpolation just isn't going to possible for most queries, because the canvas of human knowledge is essentially infinite -- even in small, isolated subject areas.
You would honestly have a better chance, IMHO, if you used these resources to try to model the neural firings of an actual human brain.
I just can't see where you can think that even a billion mindpixels are going to be the merest drop in the bucket. It's like shooting a shotgun at the Moon, except ludicrously more so.
I respect the fact that you are actually doing something, but I just wish it was something worthwhile. Something with a hope of succeeding.
(Then again, maybe not!)
This makes no sense at all. The domain of all human knowledge is a finite domain. There is no indication at all that it would take more than the number of atoms in the universe to store it. In fact, we ourselves are pretty successful in storing it in just a fraction of the universe's atoms :-).
Sure, the domain of all human knowledge is finite. Sure we use just a few atoms (relatively speaking) to get a lot of facts.
But McKinstry's idea is ludicrous.
Here are some statements for the MindPixel project.
1 is less than 2.
2 is less than 3.
3 is less than 4.
... etc... until we run out of atoms in the universe.
You can't get anywhere with individual statements of fact like this. Our minds can produce infinitely many. No sample size is going to be big enough to be worth a damn.
McKinstry hasn't addressed why most real AI folks think his project is the equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes: There will never be enough "mindpixels" to build anything constructive with, because the amount one would need to do so exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
I feel a little sorry for folks being snookered by this, because I think other more worthwhile projects are probably getting the shaft while college students spend their evenings typing in "Cocoa Puffs taste better with milk" and other variations on that theme.
Go ahead and look at the MindPixel site. See how vague it is about what exactly he expects to DO to all these bits o' "consensus fact" to transmogrify them into thought.
There's nothing there but mysticism.
I wish it weren't so, but it's so. This is Fool's Gold.
In the Slashdot McKinstry interview, there's no posts archived in the discussion section. What happened?
That address should read:
mr_dan_zap@yaBOYDOIHATESPAMMERShoo.com
Typos. Damn them.
"It wouldn't spread if people didn't want it. That's as democratic as it gets."
No, democracy is when individual people use their individual votes to create a consensus, and then create laws based on it.
Subverting laws with technology -- like driving a truck filled with explosives into the Oklahoma City Federal Building -- isn't democracy. Just because a few people like you have the power to destroy a consensus you don't agree with doesn't justify your doing so.
Unless you believe in fascism.
"Things can get fucked up with a small elite, as well as with a whole country. Just because one billion people believe one thing, doesn't make it more correct. What a person with 300 IQ believes and wants, could also be just as wrong."
I totally and completely agree.
I wasn't suggesting we move towards a one-world-order run by a few eggheads. That secenario is only slightly less preferable than turning the world into chocolate cake.
In much the same way as missile defense systems use technology to protect us from technology,
I believe that technology can be used to implement a new kind of government that could protect us from the government. The big difference is that, instead of being hierarchical, like Napster, this new government would be distributed, like Gnutella. It would be a collection of protocols which... well, let me put up an earlier post from Slashdot:
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You know, whenever anyone talks about the future myriad combinations of Internet and government, we always seem to get the most obvious, uninventive predictions. "File your taxes online! Vote online! Go to the DMV online!" Faster methods of doing things exactly the same way we do them right now.
Isn't anyone else out there thinking that maybe this kind of technology has the ability to change the way we think of government itself?
For instance, I wonder to myself sometimes if there isn't a new way to model the political boundaries of the world along the lines of the Internet. Here's a vision: A world where small individual node-states conduct commerce with each other by following universally agreed upon protocols, but remain largely autonomous internally. In much the same way as it doesn't matter whether or not you hook up a Mac, Wintel, or Linux box to the net as long as you send and recieve packets the way you're supposed to, couldn't we imagine a world where these little node-states allowed people the maximum amount of freedom to live the way they wanted as long as they followed agreed-upon procedures for routing goods and people through them?
I imagine a patchwork quilt of different autonomous mini-states, like websites, each where the people living there determine their own rules. True freedom requires exactly this kind of diversity.
As the world's population gets larger and more interconnected, it's crucial to note: Democracies become less virtuous as they become large, and any sufficiently large democracy is indistinguishible from tyranny. Don't believe me? All right, here's an analogy.
Let's say we all want to go out to dinner. All 100 of us. 49 of us happen to be vegetarians.
At Restaurant X, the procedure is simple. There's one big table, and one waitron. We all go, sit down, look at the menu and vote. Everyone eats what the majority decides. Unfortunately, 51% of us wanted the Filet Mignon (which we heard was quite good here). This leaves 49% of us without anything to eat. Democracy isn't always so tasty after all.
But at Restaurant Y, they have 10 tables. You still have to vote at each table, and the majority still determines what everybody eats, but now we have 99% of our party happy: 5 tables of 10 meat-eaters, 4 tables of 10 vegetarians, and one table with 9 happy vegetarians and 1 meat-eater who doesn't get to eat what he wants. Maybe he'll ask if he can pull a chair up to the table behind him?
Extrapolate this meat-and-veggie conflict to more contentious issues like abortion (or even IP laws) and it's easy to see how democracies are only virtuous when they're small.
So how big is a node-state? I live in the U.S., and as a practical test-case, I'm going to say county-sized. I think the modern county has the approximate amount of people that the Founders based our ideal of democracy on. But in all honesty, I think science and technology could help determine what the proper size for a semi-autonomous unit of governance should be. It's not impossible to model, and the idea seems exciting to me.
In any case, I find myself excited and curious: how can the technologies we have enable us to envision new ideas of government, in which we can all live freer lives? Any thoughts the ideas I've mentioned are appreciated, too.
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There's more I could say here, but I think I'll just sum up for the moment by saying that this is the most virtuous form of government I can imagine.
As far as protecting us from the New Technologies goes, I really think that this idea has a number of benefits to offer, not the least of which is that I believe the smallness of the node-state fosters a greater sense of stewardship over your corner of the world. I think part of the protocols that would regulate goods transport and economic transactions between node-states might involve a re-routing of economic transactions around you if your node is found to be polluting the network by inflicting externalities on other node-states. Sort of the equivalent of refusing to send or receive packets from a known spammer. In this case, though, the "spam" could be dumping waste in a river that flows south into your neighbors backyard, or growing genetically modified plants outdoors where the pollen can spread to the rest of the ecosystem.
Yes, there's still difficulties, but like I said somewhere else, I think this is the World's Greatest Hack. Maybe the Greatest Hack In History. Geeks have done harder things than this. Why not turn their energy to preserving democracy and freedom for everyone?
I'm working on setting up a site where interested folks can debate the idea, and start working out the kinks. One of the first things this style of government needs is a name. If you've got one, or you're just interested in pursuing these ideas further, e-mail me and I'll let you know when the site's up.
-- Dan Zap!
mr_dan_zap@yahBOYDOIHATESPAMMERShoo.com
Held responsible by whom? If we let technology develop uncontrolled, without constructing a much stronger political infrastructure around it, no entity will be able to enforce anything.
Think Gnutella here. They were supposedly under the watchful eye of AOL, but AOL wasn't watching carefully enough. After Gnutella was released, the concept of who was responsible didn't even matter anymore. The genie was out.
Apply this sort of scenario to a genetically modifed plant, or a malicious nanotech, and you have chilling consequences. Putting the people who created, unleashed, or utilized a particular New Technology in jail isn't going to remedy the problem.
That's the bite of the New Technology.
It's not like a toxic waste spill which you fine Exxon for and clean up. Because these new technologies are self-replicating, they can have effects which simply CAN'T be cleaned up.
Take your nuclear bomb example.
What if I create a new kind of bomb? This bomb has a 49% chance of setting the atmosphere on fire. I really don't think it'll happen. But it might.
I haven't done anything wrong, and the bomb DOES have a 51% chance of just blowing up the hundred square miles I own.
When you ask me not to do it, I tell you, "Hey, if my bomb really does set the entire atmosphere on fire, you can throw me in jail."
Even though this situation is total fiction, something very much like it WILL happen in the future. At some point, if our political infrastructure continues the way it is now, a very small group will have control of an unimaginably powerful technology; a self-replicating technology that will make the a-bomb look like someone popping a brown paper bag. And they won't be inclined to use it responsibly.
To stop, or least delay this for as long as possible, we need to create structures which only allow these kind of technologies to be developed with democratic approval, and both social and technical safeguards built into the process of development.
Because if we ever have to enforce the malicious use of these kind of technologies, it will simply be too late. There may not be any of us left to do the enforcing.
No, that's not the alternative.
One aspect of the alternative is to democratize the corporations which produce the technology in the first place. Any organization creating something as dangerous to society as nanotech or genetic engineering needs the checks and balances of society as a whole, a society which includes those who don't purchase stock, but do have an interest in their ecological and political environments. Before you flame on, I'd like you to consider the problem yourself. What do you think should be done? Should anyone have the freedom to create and use any technology? I doubt you believe that.
So someone has to decide what technologies can be used, and by whom. Who should that someone be? The amoral market?
My vote so far is for more autonomy to be given to states, and in the long run, to smaller collections of people than that. Democracies are only virtuous when they're small. There's really not enough room to get into what I believe here, and to be honest, I'm still working out the flaws myself.
But unlike some people, I recognize the problem. We are rapidly approaching the showdown at high noon between Technology and Humanity. Will we throw up our hands and surrender to the power of new, big technologies and the elite which control them, or will we find it within ourselves to find new ways to govern them, and preserve democratic rule?
I hate to sound hyperbolic, but nothing less than the freedom of the human race depends on it.
What would you do?
The argument I'm making isn't really about Freenet. My point is that the problems Freenet poses to democratic law are a dim spectre of the problems nano and genetics and other New Technologies will pose.
Freenet is not self-replicating, but, like Gnutella, it is distributed. This gives is some sense of the slipperiness society will feel in managing the New Technologies.
How do you make that leap?
Just because a technology (Old or New) allows you to achieve power doesn't justify the power you've achieved with it. If I take over your house by home invasion with loaded handguns, it doesn't mean that I'm justified because I can be "safe" in doing so, in that no one can stop me.
So, Jimmy hacks a nanobot that turns everything into the world into chocolate cake. Jimmy likes chocolate cake!
Jimmy's gonna let it go, too, because he says that "anyone who hasn't climbed up onto the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder" and built an anti-chocolate cake nanobot deserves to get "stepped on".
Whee! Now the Mona Lisa, The Hoover Dam, and your house have all been turned into chocolate cake!
This can't be what you want.
The Bill Joy Point is that we have to stop thinking about technology as simply a liberating mechanism, and start reckoning with the unprecidented menace to freedom the New Technology offers. Freenet isn't even one of the New Technologies. But I think it's a premonition of them, and a good chance for us to ask ourselves the hard questions. What if there was a Jimmy with a chocolate cake nanobot? What should we be doing now to limit the kind of control of damage any one person can have through technology?
This is the biggest hack out there, and it's one all true geeks should be interested in.
I don't think progress was decided in the past by democratic means.
There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
I don't particulary have any affinity for the "rules" as they stand now. I do think Humanity deserves a chance to work out for itself what the rules should be, and not have them handed to us at technological gunpoint by an elite.
You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree and call it freedom.
It, in this case, being the right of an individual to make his will universal law via technology? That doesn't resemble any kind of freedom I know.
The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Highfalutin' words, but these is highfalutin' times. I reckon.
It treats money as if it were simply good wishes, which individuals should be free to share with others. But Libertarianism as it stands today does not acknowledge that, for instance, poor people may want to organize a government because their financial power, even en masse, may not be enough to limit the power of wealthier entities, entities which in turn will erode everyone's freedom in their favor.
In other words, short term Libertarianism will always devolve into long term economic tyranny.
This action of creating rules of society that even the richest have an obligation to follow is a completely legitmate one, and most Libertarians don't want to acknowledge that.
Money *is* a form of political power, and there is no such thing as "voting with your dollars". That's an oxymoron. A vote, by any meaningful standard, means that we both exercise an equal share of political power. If you get to exercise one billion votes, and I get to exercise my one vote, it isn't a fair election.
This isn't to say *everyone* has a perfectly equal share of political power. This isn't true in America or anywhere. It will always be easier for some people to vote than others, if merely by virtue of the fact that they live next door to the polling place. What we do demand is an acceptable *range* of difficulty between the easiest and hardest votes. This means, whether you live right next door to the polling place, or a few miles away; whether you have the day off and can stroll in, or whether you have to catch a bus across town after work, it's still an achievable act for nearly everyone.
Voting is one act of political power. Selling is another. To create a politcal economy where freedom is sustained, we have to work for an acceptable range of power between the richest and poorest entities. And the market cannot be the mechanism to decide this, because we've already noted that it's unfair to begin with.
Government is not the enemy. BIG government is.
To wrap up, the rich have advantages (economies of scale, for example) that poor people don't, and they are able to exploit them to achieve even greater advantage. If I own all the food, and you're starving, Libertarianism tells you that your best choice is to sell yourself into indentured servitude for a carrot. Libertarianism tries to tell you it's immoral to do anything less.
I don't believe the solution is to steal all the carrots in a mob, either. The solution is to let small governments set ground rules, and let the sellers who want their business learn to abide by them.
How do we keep governments small? Well, I've thought about that in a post called "The Future Of Government", which is archived here:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/25/0230223.s
You'll have to cut and paste because I don't have time to go back and HTMLize this post. But I appreciate your reading this rant. Other thoughts are welcome.
Nobody said they should advertise it as "ready to ship". They should have been honest and responsible. But that doesn't mean driving away people with a stick.
The point isn't whether or not Mozilla is better or worse than other programs, the point is that they actively *discouraged* people from downloading it. And that's too bad. They could've been simply honest, and not hyperbolized the negatives like they did.
I mean, take a look at the Mozilla downloads page, for God's sake:
Well, sign me up for that!I can't be the only one craving a crapped-out incomplete time-bombed browser that may or may not destroy every file on my hard drive.
While Netscape's browser share has been slowly sinking like the Titanic, the Mozilla folks have been standing on deck, yelling through their cardboard bullhorns about how unsafe the lifeboats are.
Microsoft's won the browser war, guys. After years of coding for the buggy-as-the-rainforest Netscape, I cringe at the mention of their name, now. They've become an anti-brand. A name I'd rather avoid.
It makes me wonder: Shouldn't big open-source projects like Mozilla include marketers as part of their team? Some sub-group who's job is to responsibly get the word out and get people downloading?
That coulda saved Mozilla.
It kind of looks sick.
Someone should make a better one.
If Google can, why not Slashdot?
.sigs:
This makes perfect sense. Slashdot's only getting bigger, and the Slashdot Effect is just getting more and more annoying. We should put this in our
"End the Slashdot Effect! Support local caching!"
I might just do that.
Yeah, but it wasn't cool because Superman and Batman fought, it was cool because Frank Miller made a story that MEANT something out of it. There was a point to it.
I have yet to hear anyone tell me what the point of BR is supposed to be if Deckard is a replicant. Replicants are stupid, as well as short-lived? Bleh. It's as if we'd ended a *regular* Batman story with Superman walking up and punching him in the gut.
Although I don't doubt that's happened somewhere in the comics world, as well.
BTW: Deckard isn't NECESSARILY a Replicant. The whole "missing replicant" line is actually turns out to be a continuity gaffe on Ridley's part (OOPS! Forgot to overdub that one!) and the bit about the Unicorn only occurs in the "Director's Cut", which isn't the movie most people have seen when they're thinking "Blade Runner".
I think Ridley's attraction to the idea rather defeats the whole movie. What's the point, if Deckard IS a Rep? What in fact, IS, the story? There's no character growth then, no realization that "retiring" a replicant is nothing more than killing... there's no VALUE to the story if you choose to believe that. I think Ripley just has a childish fixation on the idea, in the same way that a 9-year-old kid thinks, "Wouldn't it be cool if Superman fought Batman?"
Bleh. Deckard's always gonna be a human to me.
I'll take you all on. :)
Buy the book, anyway.