Tron and Wargames were two of the most ACCURATE computer films of their day. Of course, they are also quite dated technologically, but still fun for us old-timers to watch. I still find myself tuning in just about any time they show up on the tube.
"Russy-poo" (as he bills himself) has just published the 27th edition of The Secret Guide to Computers, available at amazon.com and elsewhere. His web site is at http://www.angelfire.com/nh/secret/ and he still answers questions if you phone him at home.
BTW, he will sell you a copy of the original 11th edition of TSGTC (probably the same one you bought) for 30 cents plus a dollar shipping, so you saved $1.05 by picking it up at a garage sale!:)
"Artificial Human" vs. "Artificial Intelligence"
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
I think most of the problem with the whole concept of AI comes from the basic assumption of the Turing Test - that an "Artificial Intelligence" must take the form of an "Artificial Human". We are who we are because of a myriad of complex drives, many of them hormonal (territorialism, gluttony, lust, etc.) A true computer AI will be free of these drives. How will we possibly be able to meaningfully communicate with such an intelligence? Most of the conversations of my colleagues consists of comments like: "Man, did I have a great meal last night", "Check out the garbanzos on that babe!", "I got so drunk on Saturday I passed out on the lawn", etc. How is a machine to relate to that? I love what the mice in Doug Adams's "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" offered Arthur Dent for his brain - an automated mechanism that would allow his body to ask for tea at 4 o'clock each day! Pretty much sums it up. That's why I'm not worried about "Matrix" type scenarios. What motivates a true AI is likely to be so much different than what motivates us that we'll never butt heads. If anyone creates a problem, it's likely to be us, not them.
Actually, if you follow the links through the British reviews, you will find that Tolkein got 10k pounds UP FRONT for the movie rights, but there are some pretty substantial residuals once the film is made and released. So the family does stand to make some big bucks off the movies.
When I built my house, I wired 2 Cat5, 2 audio, and 2 coax cables from each of 11 workstations to a wiring drop in the basement. Though I never used it all, I knew any hookup I ever wanted to do was possible.
If I had it to do over again, I would have added even more drops (like one under the kitchen cabinets, and one to the front and back doors). It's cheap and easy when you're building. Just do it. But not fiber.
Am I the only one here who remembers the Sixties? I woke up one morning and the National Guard had shot and killed four students at Kent State University. Crazy thing was, most people in the 'establishment' thought that they deserved it, and that it was a good beginning. We thought we were all going to die just for something we believed in. Fortunately, we kept up our protests, the war ended, Nixon quit. We won that battle, but the war continues. Don't stop fighting for your rights, or you'll lose them.
There's somethin' happening here,
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there,
Tellin' me I gotta beware.
I think it's time we stop,
Hey, what's that sound,
Everybody look what's going down.
- For What It's Worth, Stephen Stills, 1966
A buddy of mine had an Altair Star Trek program that used the same principle for sound effects. You'd fire phasers at a Klingon vessel and an AM radio sitting on top of the case would put out a cool phaser sound. Pretty high-tech for the mid-70's.
You could just move to Iowa. We installed fiber to every school in the state just shortly after Al Gore invented the internet.
Seriously, it's one of the best investments this state has ever made. Most of the taxpayers didn't have a clue what it meant, so it was just sold under the "our children's future is at stake" banner, but it's been great for our educational system.
I suggest you take it to the voters and see if you can't get the same thing for your kids.
I've been fascinated for quite awhile now with the concept of putting a person into ROM. How much info do you really need? How unique are we? It's obvious you don't really need a holographic image of a person's entire brain to capture that person's individuality. Most of us are pretty much alike, driven by biological and psychological needs. The difference is mostly in degree. I get hungry, you get real hungry. I like sex, you really, really like sex. Etc. Then there's the case of generic knowledge, which could be pretty much simulated by indexing into a universal database. I know a lot about airships, you know next to nothing about them, but know a lot about TV shows of the sixties. Etc. It's possible that this markup language would allow the average person to be adequately simulated with a couple of hundred pages of markup. At least to a reasonable degree of accuracy. I'm reminded of the mice in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who wanted to mince up the guy's brain and leave him with a control unit that would shuffle his body from place to place and ask for tea at 4PM daily. In truth, is there much more to most of us than that?:)
You've got to include a copy of Geoffrey James's "The Tao of Programming". Not only is it hilarious, it really conveys what it feels like to be a professional programmer. He followed this book up with two sequels called "The Zen of Programming" and "Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age", but I haven't read those yet.
I'd also suggest a copy of "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The ultimate "steampunk" novel, it shows how the world might have evolved if computing had gotten its start in the Nineteenth century instead of the Twentieth.
Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" is a fascinating account of the painstaking analysis that it takes to track crackers in the real world.
Jakob Nielson's book on web design (and design in general) is indispensible and will have a long shelf life: "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity".
Eric S. Raymonds's "The New Hackers Dictionary".
All of Scott Adams's "Dilbert" books, especially "The Dilbert Principle", "The Joy of Work", and "The Dilbert Future".
For a great introduction to fractals, James Gleick's "Chaos: Making a New Science".
And, of course, Steve Levy's "Hackers", Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine", and Pekka Himanen's "The Hacker Ethic".
If you can find a copy, Theodor H. Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" is a fantastic look forward at personal computing from the very dawn of the era. Original copies, privately published by Nelson, are almost impossible to find, but it was reprinted in a (less cool) updated version in the mid-90's.
If Apple does buy the PPC, odds are that they'd be more than happy to have a few customers like Amiga buying chips from them. It's called "cash flow" from a "revenue stream", something that Apple is, as always, greatly in need of.
And Jobs is smart enough to know that another competitor to Microsoft isn't going to hurt Apple. If anything, Apple did better when Atari and Amiga were in the marketplace than they are doing now. Having any competition to MS legitimizes the idea of viable alternatives.
Pretty easy, really.
(1) Handspring Visor.
(2) Eyemodule2 digital camera Springboard expansion module for Visor.
(3) Visor-compatible cell phone.
(4) Cable to connect Visor to cell phone.
(5) Mount the works on your handlebars with a couple of homemade clamp-up arrangements.
(6) Set the eyemodule software to take pix at the required intervals.
(7) Stop every dozen pix or so and upload via the cell phone.
Go to www.visorcentral.com and get on the discussion boards for technical help in getting this set up.
Good luck!
-A fellow Iowan.
Contemporary history of modern institutions and corporations is important. Just as we can learn a great deal about the politics and economics of previous centuries by studying the books of the East India Company or Lloyd's of London, histories like this will preserve the details of this time. This is especially important as we turn a new millennium, as many of our documents are now electronic and ephemeral. If somebody doesn't jump in and preserve this stuff, it'll be lost forever. And make no mistake, Infocom was a VERY important company in the early history of computer games. Believe me, people will be reading this document 300 years from now.
I get upset when I read a comment by some person without a weight problem that "all you have to do is eat less" to lose weight. While this is certainly _true_ in an absolute sense, there are extreme genetic differences in people, and for some people these differences make it much, much more difficult to do. Appetite is regulated in the brain, and brain chemistry is quite different from person to person. Just as some people are predisposed to other addictions, many of us are brain-chemistry-dictated food addicts.
Likewise, there are wide variations in metabolism. I think you might be surprised if you monitored the food intake of fat people - while you'd certainly find a fair share of overeaters, you'd also find a great many with low metabolic rates who consume no more - and even less - than 'normal' people. Storing up the excess calories as fat is an adaptation that was a great advantage in the Ice Age, but it's a real life-threatener in these affleuent times.
BTW, you'd have to do more than double your lifespan to exceed Methuselah - he lived to be over 800 years old!
I had a very good friend die from Huntington's Chorea. I watched him go from a good-looking, wise-cracking, hard-drinking, Corvette-driving ladies' man (who'd give you the shirt off his back) to a lifeless lump whose mother had to spoon-feed him and change his diapers. Fortunately, he had a union job with good insurance, even after he was put on permanent medical leave.
Personally, the thought that anyone should try to exclude such people from the comfort of knowing that they are at least covered by insurance, just for the sake of profit, disgusts me. I'd gladly pay my extra share to make sure such people get the care they deserve. But then, I know such opinions aren't very popular these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Tron and Wargames were two of the most ACCURATE computer films of their day. Of course, they are also quite dated technologically, but still fun for us old-timers to watch. I still find myself tuning in just about any time they show up on the tube.
"Russy-poo" (as he bills himself) has just published the 27th edition of The Secret Guide to Computers, available at amazon.com and elsewhere. His web site is at http://www.angelfire.com/nh/secret/ and he still answers questions if you phone him at home. :)
BTW, he will sell you a copy of the original 11th edition of TSGTC (probably the same one you bought) for 30 cents plus a dollar shipping, so you saved $1.05 by picking it up at a garage sale!
I think most of the problem with the whole concept of AI comes from the basic assumption of the Turing Test - that an "Artificial Intelligence" must take the form of an "Artificial Human". We are who we are because of a myriad of complex drives, many of them hormonal (territorialism, gluttony, lust, etc.) A true computer AI will be free of these drives. How will we possibly be able to meaningfully communicate with such an intelligence? Most of the conversations of my colleagues consists of comments like: "Man, did I have a great meal last night", "Check out the garbanzos on that babe!", "I got so drunk on Saturday I passed out on the lawn", etc. How is a machine to relate to that? I love what the mice in Doug Adams's "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" offered Arthur Dent for his brain - an automated mechanism that would allow his body to ask for tea at 4 o'clock each day! Pretty much sums it up. That's why I'm not worried about "Matrix" type scenarios. What motivates a true AI is likely to be so much different than what motivates us that we'll never butt heads. If anyone creates a problem, it's likely to be us, not them.
Actually, if you follow the links through the British reviews, you will find that Tolkein got 10k pounds UP FRONT for the movie rights, but there are some pretty substantial residuals once the film is made and released. So the family does stand to make some big bucks off the movies.
When I built my house, I wired 2 Cat5, 2 audio, and 2 coax cables from each of 11 workstations to a wiring drop in the basement. Though I never used it all, I knew any hookup I ever wanted to do was possible.
If I had it to do over again, I would have added even more drops (like one under the kitchen cabinets, and one to the front and back doors). It's cheap and easy when you're building. Just do it. But not fiber.
Hey! A quote from "Bored of the Rings"! Cool!
Am I the only one here who remembers the Sixties? I woke up one morning and the National Guard had shot and killed four students at Kent State University. Crazy thing was, most people in the 'establishment' thought that they deserved it, and that it was a good beginning. We thought we were all going to die just for something we believed in. Fortunately, we kept up our protests, the war ended, Nixon quit. We won that battle, but the war continues. Don't stop fighting for your rights, or you'll lose them.
There's somethin' happening here,
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there,
Tellin' me I gotta beware.
I think it's time we stop,
Hey, what's that sound,
Everybody look what's going down.
- For What It's Worth, Stephen Stills, 1966
A buddy of mine had an Altair Star Trek program that used the same principle for sound effects. You'd fire phasers at a Klingon vessel and an AM radio sitting on top of the case would put out a cool phaser sound. Pretty high-tech for the mid-70's.
You could just move to Iowa. We installed fiber to every school in the state just shortly after Al Gore invented the internet.
Seriously, it's one of the best investments this state has ever made. Most of the taxpayers didn't have a clue what it meant, so it was just sold under the "our children's future is at stake" banner, but it's been great for our educational system.
I suggest you take it to the voters and see if you can't get the same thing for your kids.
I've been fascinated for quite awhile now with the concept of putting a person into ROM. How much info do you really need? How unique are we? It's obvious you don't really need a holographic image of a person's entire brain to capture that person's individuality. Most of us are pretty much alike, driven by biological and psychological needs. The difference is mostly in degree. I get hungry, you get real hungry. I like sex, you really, really like sex. Etc. Then there's the case of generic knowledge, which could be pretty much simulated by indexing into a universal database. I know a lot about airships, you know next to nothing about them, but know a lot about TV shows of the sixties. Etc. It's possible that this markup language would allow the average person to be adequately simulated with a couple of hundred pages of markup. At least to a reasonable degree of accuracy. I'm reminded of the mice in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who wanted to mince up the guy's brain and leave him with a control unit that would shuffle his body from place to place and ask for tea at 4PM daily. In truth, is there much more to most of us than that? :)
You've got to include a copy of Geoffrey James's "The Tao of Programming". Not only is it hilarious, it really conveys what it feels like to be a professional programmer. He followed this book up with two sequels called "The Zen of Programming" and "Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age", but I haven't read those yet.
I'd also suggest a copy of "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The ultimate "steampunk" novel, it shows how the world might have evolved if computing had gotten its start in the Nineteenth century instead of the Twentieth.
Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" is a fascinating account of the painstaking analysis that it takes to track crackers in the real world.
Jakob Nielson's book on web design (and design in general) is indispensible and will have a long shelf life: "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity".
Eric S. Raymonds's "The New Hackers Dictionary".
All of Scott Adams's "Dilbert" books, especially "The Dilbert Principle", "The Joy of Work", and "The Dilbert Future".
For a great introduction to fractals, James Gleick's "Chaos: Making a New Science".
And, of course, Steve Levy's "Hackers", Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine", and Pekka Himanen's "The Hacker Ethic".
If you can find a copy, Theodor H. Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" is a fantastic look forward at personal computing from the very dawn of the era. Original copies, privately published by Nelson, are almost impossible to find, but it was reprinted in a (less cool) updated version in the mid-90's.
If Apple does buy the PPC, odds are that they'd be more than happy to have a few customers like Amiga buying chips from them. It's called "cash flow" from a "revenue stream", something that Apple is, as always, greatly in need of.
And Jobs is smart enough to know that another competitor to Microsoft isn't going to hurt Apple. If anything, Apple did better when Atari and Amiga were in the marketplace than they are doing now. Having any competition to MS legitimizes the idea of viable alternatives.
Pretty easy, really. (1) Handspring Visor. (2) Eyemodule2 digital camera Springboard expansion module for Visor. (3) Visor-compatible cell phone. (4) Cable to connect Visor to cell phone. (5) Mount the works on your handlebars with a couple of homemade clamp-up arrangements. (6) Set the eyemodule software to take pix at the required intervals. (7) Stop every dozen pix or so and upload via the cell phone. Go to www.visorcentral.com and get on the discussion boards for technical help in getting this set up. Good luck! -A fellow Iowan.
Of course the moon landings were falsified. They were filmed in a studio at the secret Nazi moonbase that has been in Copernicus crater since 1939.
Contemporary history of modern institutions and corporations is important. Just as we can learn a great deal about the politics and economics of previous centuries by studying the books of the East India Company or Lloyd's of London, histories like this will preserve the details of this time. This is especially important as we turn a new millennium, as many of our documents are now electronic and ephemeral. If somebody doesn't jump in and preserve this stuff, it'll be lost forever. And make no mistake, Infocom was a VERY important company in the early history of computer games. Believe me, people will be reading this document 300 years from now.
I get upset when I read a comment by some person without a weight problem that "all you have to do is eat less" to lose weight. While this is certainly _true_ in an absolute sense, there are extreme genetic differences in people, and for some people these differences make it much, much more difficult to do. Appetite is regulated in the brain, and brain chemistry is quite different from person to person. Just as some people are predisposed to other addictions, many of us are brain-chemistry-dictated food addicts. Likewise, there are wide variations in metabolism. I think you might be surprised if you monitored the food intake of fat people - while you'd certainly find a fair share of overeaters, you'd also find a great many with low metabolic rates who consume no more - and even less - than 'normal' people. Storing up the excess calories as fat is an adaptation that was a great advantage in the Ice Age, but it's a real life-threatener in these affleuent times. BTW, you'd have to do more than double your lifespan to exceed Methuselah - he lived to be over 800 years old!
I had a very good friend die from Huntington's Chorea. I watched him go from a good-looking, wise-cracking, hard-drinking, Corvette-driving ladies' man (who'd give you the shirt off his back) to a lifeless lump whose mother had to spoon-feed him and change his diapers. Fortunately, he had a union job with good insurance, even after he was put on permanent medical leave.
Personally, the thought that anyone should try to exclude such people from the comfort of knowing that they are at least covered by insurance, just for the sake of profit, disgusts me. I'd gladly pay my extra share to make sure such people get the care they deserve. But then, I know such opinions aren't very popular these days.