As the administrator of the Mac GPG Project (http://macgpg.sf.net/), I've found that the person who usually needs the most help is me.:-)
I'm a good coder, but because I spend my time managing the project, I don't always have the time to research on how to fix every oddity that shows up in my code. I often post to my developer's list saying "hey, there's this weird bug in my code; someone please take a look at it" and, usually, I get some much needed help that probably would have caused me to bang my head against the wall for a long time with no results. This is what's great about having a team; things that would have stopped development when you were on your own are easilly fixed by someone whose experience is different than yours.
As for motivation, you usually have to find motivated coders. For example, when low level stuff needs fixing in GnuPG to work on the Mac, the worms come out of the wood work and I'm given patches for all sorts of things while I'm still trying to get GnuPG just to make. Also, most of our code comes from just two or three developers, but on several occasions someone came along and said "hey, I'm working on project XYZ and we could use your library if it had these bug fixes. Mind if I do them for you?".
The trick seems to build up a community and then that community will come to help. I don't really know how to build the community, since my community found me, especially after NAI officially EOL'd PGP, but also because we're the only game in town and encourage the work of others who are not part of the project to provide software for users of specific MUAs.
At any rate, for the story's submitters situation, I'd recommend helping these developers along. The best thing to do is tell them to ask any questions they might have, no matter how basic they might be, on your developers list and then answer them, even if they can be found elsewhere in common sources (or at the least point to those sources). Once you get a few good developers, then you can go back to being less tolerant of incapable programmers.;-)
I find it depends on the music. Stuff with aucustic guitars and such need to be ripped at higher bit rates to sound good. Techno is fine at MP3-128. If you put Ogg and MP3 in a bag, shake them around, they'll come out about the same. But, it's really going to be an issue of your listening skill. Personally, MP3 sounds fine to me, but then I don't have well trained ears. At the same time, my eyes are much sharper and JPEGs with more than like quality level 8 compression look bad, to me, and can be annoying.
Well, while people should go to work, DON'T go to work if where you work is a likely target. Most people should be fine (my university has closed down for the day, which I think is a dumb move since we can certainly keep on learning regardless of terrorist), though, and need to continue on, re this post.
Okay, I read a bunch of posts, but rather than reply to them one by one, I'm going to hit them all at once.
You said: "Why do people think SIs [super intelligences] will be unpredictable?"
Because they are so much smarter and intelligent than us that we have no way of knowing how they will think and thus act. Just as a moron can't write a book about a rocket scientist, an AI researcher can't write a book about a SIAI (well, at least not a rational one). In some cases, AI will act in ways that seem reasonable to us, and other times it will require a lot of thought on our part to understand their better reasoning. Still, as of right now, we can't say for sure how an AI will act or even once they are around know how they will act.
You said: "I don't think SIAI will be dangerous. They're way smarter than us and won't be evil."
Many of us in the Singularitarian community used to make this assumption, but eventually you realize that most of the reasons that we consider that an AI would act like this are antropomorphic. AIs don't have those same built in features that we do. They wouldn't even have a sense of self when first created (or maybe ever). Check out http://www.singinst.org/ for papers on Friendly AI for potential solutions and further explinations of this problem.
You said: "We'll never develop a theory of general intelligence. We're not even going to have strong AI, let alone ones that can improve their own code."
You have a lot to learn. All I can say to these kind of comments is that you need to educate yourself better on topics of cognitive science. You know, learn about physicalism (roughly, brain == mind) as opposed to dualism, learn about how information is represented in the mind, etc.. This view is mostly the result of simply have not been presented the proper information.
You said: "I don't think the Singularity will happen. I mean, look at how much stuff has been predicted and never came true."
The Singularity is a matter of life and death. In case you're wondering, the Meaning of Life right now is to reach the Singularity. Until then, anything you do is pretty much worthless unless it gets us to the Singularity faster. If we don't reach the Singularity, you are going to die sooner or later. The Singularity means you can live as long as you like, do what you want (this is a complex issue, see my site for a paper on how to protect non violation of volition post Singularity), and live happily ever after. I can't stress this enough: reaching the Singularity is a matter of life and death. If we don't make it, we all die. Maybe not today, but soon. And this is not just the fate of individuals, but of humanity and all life. If the Singularity is not reached, all life will cease to exist eventually. When looking at the Singularity in this life, you almost have to wonder why you're not already help to make it arrive sooner.
Okay, first, mine. Then, a link to another review which may be a bit beyond the average Slashdot readers full comprehension. Both are filled with spoilers.
WARNING: Plot is discussed. This is more of an analysis of aspects of the movie, not a review. You should probably read this after you see the film.
Rating: 1 out of 3 thumbs up.
AI can be summed up in one word: cute. If you've seen ET, you've already seen AI, only AI is worse because it tries to do more, but fails. For example, when David becomes frozen in ice, that would have made a fair ending; not the best ending, but a decent one. Speilberg, though, is not content to let the viewer consider such a bleak, realistic fate, but gives the audience something that is beyond reason. As I point out later on, it only makes sense that David end, frozen in ice forever, but Spielberg wants a feel good ending that will keep Joe Average coming back for more.
The problems with the film really begin in the opening scene. An AI 'scientist' is explaining how he plans to make a more human Mecca, by making it love. He believes that if it can learn to love, then all other human characteristics will follow. Aside from the silliness of this proposition, the problem is the same problem Asimov's bots had: adversarial human attitudes. The humans want to make the AI love because they believe that will make sure that it will stay in line, not harm humans, and such. Spielberg, either by accident on purpose, doesn't state this explicitly, which hides this error from the smart but underinformed viewer.
You may be saying, what's so adversarial about keeping AIs from killing and why would such a thing be bad. The problem is two folded. On one hand, no system you try to implement is going to be fool proof. The AI is a lot smarter than any human (or at least can get a lot smarter) and can use what would look like magic to us. Secondly, regardless of smartness, the AI will face a philosophical crises that will probably be the end of it. For example, David is taught to love humans, but humans, from the start, did not love him by forcing him to love rather than trusting him.
BTW, this love thing is his undoing. Much like Asimovian bots that become stuck in logic loops, David becomes stuck in a love loop. The end of the film lets him out of it, because that's the happy ending, not the one that makes the most sense.
Okay, so if you can't be adversarial and lay down some Asimovian laws or something, what can you do. You can create Friendly AI. There is quite a lot written about this topic, but the best place to start is here. Please, click this link; don't just post like an idiot that I have no clue about AI. For many of you, this will also dispel myths about Classical AI and lead you to new ideas. Just in case you missed it, you can learn about Friendly AI here.
Now, I did mention that the movie was cute, which means it has some interesting parts. For example, Dr. Know was an interesting information retrieval system, though pretty dumb considering they could create David and Google gives back better info. Also, the Transhumans at the end of the film look cool, but act far too much like humans. BTW, that's Joe at the end of the film who talks to David, not an alien. My friend who went with me to the movie seemed a bit confused about this, but hopefully she'll get it later.
For those who you who have read 'Super Toys Last All Summer', the short story this film is based on, you'll notice when the story ends and the film begins, and at that point the plot shifts to a different story: Pinocchio. The parallels are almost embarrassing. Also, there is a hint of Wizard of Oz in there (think about what is said about Dr. Know at the end and you'll get it). There are probably more, but I haven't caught them yet.
So, to sum up, is this an SF classic: no. Does it make you think: only if you don't know what AI is. Is this a cute summer movie to take Grandma, the kids, and Fluffy the dog to: yes. Or, do like me and take a date; you'll have more fun (even if you're both smart and see problems with the movie)!;-)
You can also find this Online at this place. Now, check out this more in depth review of the movie for those of you very knowledgable, seed AI type folks at, nope, sorry, no link available yet (it's on a mailing list). Well, I've pasted it below. This is by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Isaac Asimov once observed that there are three types of robot stories;
robot-as-pathos, robot-as-menace, and robot-as-device. A.I. is a
robot-as-device story, and a fairly good one. There is pathos, owing to
David's emotions, but David's emotions are depicted as the deliberate
result of a deliberate design effort.
Most of the reviewers of this movie will undoubtedly say that the AIs are
more human than the humans. This is probably the single least accurate
statement it is possible to make about A.I. The AIs are more *humane*
than the humans but are *substantially* less human. A few behaviors (for
the embodied chatbots that were the previous state of the art) or a few
emotions (for David) have been selectively transferred over, and
naturally, they tend to be nice and neighborly behaviors or emotions,
because that's what the designers would want to transfer over. But the
AIs are visibly not playing with a full deck. Evidently Luddite movie
critics cannot tell the difference between "human" and "humane" even when
slapped upside the head with a double dissocation.
The very first thing that struck me about A.I. was the rather extreme
stupidity of the AI *researchers*. The consequences of this stupidity are
depicted with the same realism, attention to detail, and lack of
anthropomorphism that characterized HAL in 2001, but even so, the amount
of human stupidity I am being asked to accept is rather extreme.
David is beta software. His emotional responses are real - we are told so
in the movie - but they show a binary, all-or-nothing quality. We see the
first instance of this where David bursts out into extremely loud
laughter, laughs for a few moments, then switches off. Be it emphasized
that this laughter is both realistic and genuine. David is the first in a
line of robots with genuine emotions. The embodied chatbot that we see in
the opening scenes of the movie - the female android whose hand is hurt -
may have more gentle laughter, but only because it is preprogrammed.
David's genuine responses are as raw and as alien as might be expected of
a "child" who is, in fact, an infant, only a few weeks old.
Then the AI researchers had the bright idea of putting this beta software
into a human body, adding in those emotions calculated to produce maximal
emotional attachment on the part of humans, and giving it as a human
surrogate to a mother already in an emotionally unstable state because her
own child has been in medical cryonic suspension for five years.
>From this single act of stupidity, and the correctly depicted
consequences, the plot of the entire movie flows. Within a day of
imprinting, David realizes that his mother will someday die, and that he
will not, and wonders if he will be alone forever - foreshadowing the end
of the movie. His mother, for whom David is allegedly an artificial
surrogate to be disposed of when no longer needed, naturally feels
enormous emotional stress at the thought of returning David to be
incinerated. Nobody thought of this back when they were building a
loving, lovable, naturally immortal, allegedly disposable child?
(One of the genuine, oft-overlooked ethical questions this movie
highlights: "Is it moral to create an AI that loves you if the AI has to
watch you die?" The prospect of voluntary immortality in our own near
future creates similar present-day issues. If you plan on bringing a
child into the world, you should plan on choosing to live forever if the
option becomes available, because a child shouldn't have to watch its
parents die.)
When David's brother, Martin, returns from suspension, we see a darker
side to David's genuine emotions. The first near-catastrophe occurs when
David nearly kills himself competing with his revived brother, by
attempting to eat; the second catastrophe occurs when David nearly drowns
his brother. In both cases, the events that occur are excellent
robot-as-device scenarios; they are the consequence of the reproduction of
certain specific geunine emotions in a beta-quality infant psychology
taught certain preprogrammed complex behaviors and placed the body of an
eight-year-old. When David's pain response is triggered by a pack of
curious children, his raw fear, like his laughter, goes from binary off to
binary on. His fear manifests itself in the only behavioral response
David knows; hiding behind Martin. The fear continues to manifest,
preventing Martin's escape, even as David and Martin sink to the bottom of
the pool.
Again, realistic; again, the AI researchers should have thought of it.
Monica, the mother, is afterwards in a hideous position; does she endanger
the household by keeping around beta-quality embodied software, or does
she return David to the manufacturer - that is, give up her child to die?
Monica's emotions are also run ragged because she is being asked to react
without anger to David's near-drowning of Martin. Again, someone at the
mecha corporation was being damn stupid and deserves to be sued into
bankruptcy. You do not give embodied software with beta-quality genuine
emotions to a human mother and ask her to treat it as her own human child.
(Call it "personality abrasion". Personality abrasion may turn out to be
a very real problem for humans dealing with any AI capable of real
thought, even if the AIs don't have human-architecture emotions or
human-looking bodies. Only AI researchers, or other people who understand
the risks and are willing to expend effort in dealing with them, should
ever come into contact with raw AIs. A Friendly AI conversing with
ordinary users should have enough knowledge to fake taking 'offense' at
insults, just because an AI that genuinely doesn't care at all about
insults may be more alienness than an ordinary user should have to deal
with. In A.I., we see the effect of personality abrasion on some poor
shmuck of a human mother.)
The penultimate consequences of the AI researchers' stupidity is visible
when, following the near-drowning of Martin, Monica (the mother) tries to
return David to the manufacturer for destruction. Of course Monica is, by
this point, too attached to David to watch him die, and tries to abandon
him in the woods instead. David's extreme response, when he suddenly
realizes that his mother is abandoning him, is the movie's greatest
moment. I choked up myself. David is an AI with a few genuine emotions,
and the strongest of them is love, and now his mother is leaving forever.
(Genuine, affecting pathos in a robot-as-device story. Realistic,
theoretically accurate AI scenarios with powerful drama. All hail
Kubrick. However... am I really supposed to believe that nobody at the
mecha corporation saw this coming?)
Later: David, wandering the forest with only his supertoy
babysitter-in-a-box teddy bear as companion, comes into contact with a
group of androids who are scavenging spare parts from a dump. This, I'm
sure, is intended to be creepy and disturbing vintage Kubrick, but I
myself immediately started wondering how this social phenomenon occurred.
It's the same question that occurred to me when I saw Gigolo Joe carving
out his identity tag on the run from the police. Why do these
nonemotional androids want to survive? We see in the opening scenes a
female android who is stabbed in the hand as part of a demonstration; when
the lead AI researcher asks "Did I hurt you?" she responds "You hurt my
hand." Am I supposed to believe that this chatbot in human form would go
and scavenge parts if she were abandoned? Am I supposed to believe that
Gigolo Joe, on realizing that he has been framed for murder, would go
rogue out of self-preservation? Having androids scouring the countryside
for spare parts is a rather disturbing social phenomenon, as is having an
android flee a police investigation, and the embodied chatbots that are
supposed to be state-of-the-art are primitive enough that the programmers
could easily have prevented both responses.
And what's with the Flesh Fair bounty hunters who attack the scavenging
robots? Did these bounty hunters come through a wormhole from
_Bladerunner_? This is what happens when Spielberg rewrites a Kubrick
movie; you have cyberpunk grunge-neon motorcycle bounty hunters chasing a
lovable android and his animate teddy bear. At any rate, David is dragged
off to the Flesh Fair, where humans watch the destruction of androids for
fun... is this where the path of "Battlebots" leads?
(At this point in the movie, I must admit to a minor objection at the
Flesh Fair robot who asked another robot to 'disconnect my pain circuits',
mostly because this is a fundamentally human way of looking at the world
and any robot who makes this request may well have crossed the border, not
just into personhood, but into our particular kind of personhood. But
expecting Hollywood to know that is asking far too much.)
At the Flesh Fair, the embodied chatbots make a few conversational pleas
as they are loaded into the cannons and the acid platforms. David's
screams invoke greater sympathy, but I'm not sure the Flesh Fair audience
made a logical conclusion. I know that David's response is genuine only
because I was told at the beginning of the movie that David has a wholly
novel cognitive architecture designed to support humanlike emotions.
David's response is genuine, but it is not humanlike. A human child,
brought into that cage, would have been almost catatonic with fear; would
have been screaming and crying long before reaching the stage; would have
been struggling long before the first drop of acid fell on him. As at the
side of the pool, we see the binary, unpolished quality of David's genuine
emotion; his fear goes from off to on as soon as the first drop of acid
falls - and manifests in his screaming requests not to be burned.
And the crowd rises and boos the ringmaster off the stage - "Mecha does
not plead for its life!" - but their decision is correct only by
coincidence. From what they saw, David really could have been just a more
advanced chatbot. David's emotions were real, but David's behaviors
weren't the responses of a genuine eight-year-old except on the surface.
Shortly thereafter, the stranger half of the movie begins. David, in the
company of Gigolo Joe, wanders the world looking for the Blue Fairy. Even
for beta software, I'm not sure this fixation is realistic - surely an
advanced AI knows what 'fiction' is, and an AI boy knows that bedtime
stories aren't true. On the other hand, perhaps David's humanlike
cognitive architecture has unexpectedly given rise to the phenomenon of
self-delusion (flinching away from hypotheses which make unpleasant
predictions), or perhaps David knows the Blue Fairy's existence is
tentative but he still sees no more plausible path leading back to his
mother.
After Joe and David leave Dr. Know, the movie has its first real "Damn,
they blew it!" moment. (Though in Spielberg's defense, an AI movie that
starts at 8PM, and gets to 9:48 before messing up, has done extremely
well.) The moment to which I refer is Gigolo Joe's speech about how
humans resent robots because they know that, in the end, robots will be
all that's left. Where did *that* come from? Joe's speech is as out of
place as Agent Smith's speech of self-justification in _The Matrix_. It
has undertones of repressed resentment, of an entire underground society
of secretly rebellious robots, and other things that have no place among
chatbots and sex droids. Even David is only a fractional human; he has a
few selected genuine emotions but certainly not a full deck of them.
Apparently the Humans Are Obsolete Speech is simply mandatory for AI
movies, no matter how ridiculously out of place. The Speech is most
certainly not justified by "foreshadowing", since it sucks at least half
of the emotional impact out of the ending. If anyone creates a Phantom
Edit of A.I., the Speech should definitely be the first thing to go (and
the second thing, of course, will be everything after the Blue Fairy
Fadeout).
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The next major scene of significance is
David confronting David-2. David's destruction of David-2 struck me as a
little strange; it involved a bit more humanness, a wider behavioral
repertoire, than had been previously depicted. I suppose that some degree
of jealousy was visible earlier in the movie, so my immediate reaction of
"Why would they have ported *that* emotion over?" may be misplaced; even
so, that kind of directed, coherent-conversation destructive tantrum
struck me as being too complex for David.
The lead AI researcher's total lack of reaction to the destruction of his
own genuinely emotional surrogate child, and his revelation that the
corporation has been directing the entire course of events since the Flesh
Fair for publicity purposes, shows again that the AI researchers are the
least humane people in the movie.
Later on, David confronts the vast hall full of Davids, a scene that was
intended to creep out the audience. But again it gives rise to questions
on my part. If there are that many Davids, why are they all designed to
have the human emotion of wanting to be unique? Was it an unintended
consequence? For that matter, what possessed the idiots in Marketing to
produce a batch of identical AIs all named David, instead of giving them
individual faces and individual voices and maybe some quirks of
personality? Do these people think that no two couples with a David will
ever meet? I'm not a parent, but I know that I'd be creeped out if I went
to a barbeque and every couple there had a copy of my little sister.
Finally, after David realizes that he is not unique, he deliberately
topples off a window ledge into the ocean. Uh... why? How is that a
means to the end of getting his mother to love him? Or alternatively, who
drew up the design specs and added in a requirement that David feel
suicidal despondency under certain conditions? Ordinary despondency I can
see, but not suicidal despondency; not in an expensive, partially human
being that parents are supposed to grow attached to. Plus, David can
operate underwater, and he knows that. This scene makes no sense.
Later, when David seeks out the Blue Fairy, and begins repeating his
eternal request, and the screen fades to black, I had the same reaction
everyone did: "Okay, movie's over! Please tell me the movie's over...
damn, it's not over." The Phantom Edit version of A.I. should end here.
After the Blue Fairy Fadeout, we see what I can only describe as Spielberg
messing up Kubrick's movie. To start with, the aliens - pardon me, I
meant the Successors - are Spielbergs. "Spielbergs"; that's the only
thing I can think of to call them. They are classic Spielberg aliens and
they don't belong on the set of A.I.
Lest I be too negative, however, I'll take this time to focus on an
example of what A.I. does right. David, revived by the Successors, leaves
the aircraft and heads for the Blue Fairy. He touches her, and she
shatters. At this point, a *bad* movie - which A.I. is not - would have
shown us some breakdown, some feeling of despair on David's part.
Instead, nothing happens - there isn't any emotion in David's limited deck
for this occasion. Three cheers for whoever wrote that scene! It's this
refusual to take the easy way out that puts A.I. into the class of science
fiction rather than space opera.
However, we then move directly on to the second "Damn, they blew it!"
moment in the movie, occurring at 10:28, when one of the Successors begins
spouting gibberish about yada-yada space-time yada-yada pathways yada-yada
DNA yada-yada only one day yada-yada. I'm sorry, I don't care how
dramatic your plot device is, you need to think up a better way to justify
it than making up totally arbitrary rules on the spot. Plus, if you can
bring back Monica for one day, you can scan her memories into permanent
storage; and, if they're retrieving Monica's immortal soul from 2000 years
in the future, they should be retrieving an old Monica from just before
the moment of her death, not the one David remembers... oh, forget it.
Finally, David gets his one day with Monica - being a little too human
throughout, it seemed to me, especially as he watches her go to sleep for
the last time. He goes to sleep with her, and - according to the final
voiceover - for the first time, begins to dream. Dream *what*? Why? I
wasn't really happy with this movie's ending.
One of the basic issues at the beginning of the movie is one that the
ending totally fails to resolve, even after going to all that plot-effort
to bring David to the one place where the question can be answered. David
is a partial human. He is both immortal, and fundamentally incomplete.
David was created without the potential to grow; he is forever young...
but on the other side of time, he can be improved and extended. David
could become a real human, if he wanted to be. Except that David doesn't
want to be human; he wants to stay with Monica forever, and being human is
only a means to that end.
The Successors could easily have given David a full deck of emotions, or
could easily have created an immortal virtual Monica that was real to the
limit of David's limited perceptions. Why didn't they? Was David, by
their standards, citizen enough not be lied to? Citizen enough not be
'improved' without consent? I know how I would have solved that problem;
I would have made David human for the course of the one perfect day he had
with Monica, and at the end of that day, he would have experienced great
grief... but he would have healed, and moved on, as complete humans have
the potential to do, and eventually joined the Successor civilization.
Both the moment of David becoming human, and the moment of his grief when
Monica faded, would have been a fine conclusion to the movie.
The ending I saw left me feeling incomplete because this basic issue went
unresolved. From the beginning, there were only four possible resolutions
to the movie: David dies; David lives forever with Monica, eternally
happy; David lives forever without Monica, eternally lonely; or David
grows beyond his limits. The ending we saw doesn't tell us which of these
events has occurred! Did David effectively switch himself off? Did David
go on forever dreaming of his last perfect day? Does David's dreaming
indicate that the Successors have gently begun to improve him out of his
cul-de-sac? Are David's dreams eternally lonely because Monica isn't
there?
I know there is a certain style of filmmaking that holds that the viewer
should be allowed to pick their own ending, and I hate that style with a
fiery passion. For me, a vague ending can ruin the impact of an entire
movie, and that came very close to happening with A.I.
Oh, well. A.I. is still a good movie. It's just that, as with many good
movies, A.I. could easily have been so much better.
And that's it. I hope you learned something.
Progression of Usage of New Media in Users
on
Yo - Pay Attention!
·
· Score: 2
Having been through it, there is a progression that people go through when it comes to these new media.
~Wonder:
This is the opening stage. People look at the new media and are in amazed by them. People stand in awe at the potentials and think of how great thier lives could be if only they got involved. This is where most people start to go wrong: they dream up their own hype.
~Adoption:
You know how this goes. First you say 'Okay, I'll try doing e-mail' and then next thing you know you're an info glutton.;-) This is just what happens, because the usage of one medium leads to the usage of others. During this stage, due to people's wide eyed dreams of how great things could be with all this technology, they adopt the usage of too many media and make habit of taking in more information than they can deal with but just don't notice it.
~Info Gluttony:
This is the stage Jon is focusing on. After adopting technology, people love it and want all the info they can get. Every little news story they can find, they read. Ever IM they get results in a big conversation. Every message board they post to turns into a huge debate. They take and give so much informaiton that they don't have time to do anything with it. This is where a lot of people are (especially all of you who post to Slashdot a lot;-P).
~Fallout:
Eventually people realize the fallacy of having more info than they can use and have a falling out with the new media. This doesn't mean giving them up, just a big reduction. No more hitting reload on the news sites every minute. Fewer IMs. Less Usenet usage. Few message board posts. Fewer mailing lists. For example, when I went through this stage, I reduced my regular Web site visits to Slashdot, Ars Technica, UF, Sluggy, and GameBoy Station. Also, I cut a lot of mailing lists that just weren't so useful to me and just went cold turkey pretty much on other stuff.
~Wise Usage:
Here in the final stage, after getting rid of all the glutt, you can make wise use of the info available. For example, I now have a few more sites that I read regularly and some that I just skim. I know what info I need, how much time I have to collect it, and how to skip that which just isn't useful. Alas, many people never make it to this final stage. Rather than becoming wise information users, they simply use the fallout as a correction that slows their info gluttony for a while, but they soon are back in full swing usage. They fall into a cycle of feasting and fasting: information spendthrifts, if you will. I know of no way to teach how to decide what information one needs wisely, other than to have a fallout, learn from it, and constantly keep evaluating how much inforormation is worth to you and what you really need.
Early on, I got into AL, back when I was in middle school. Ever since then, I've been programming little guys to live out in their worlds. The interesting thing is how it has affected me philosophically. For example, I believe in the existance of natural laws. The reason is not because of some sort of magical force making them be, but that there are certain behaviors that naturally emerge from the system. Amongst humans, we all act a certain way because we are equal, more or less. Of course, as humans evolved, there were different levels of humans living at the same time, so we developed power structures that have made it through to this day. If only we could throw off these artificial laws, the world would be a much better place.
AL has also led me to be an anarchist. To me, anarchy is the perfect system in which everything will optimize and everyone will be happy.
Anything else is a desperate attempt to optimize that, at best, might work for a few seconds until something changes. Anarchy is liquid and quick to change, while archies are slow and ridged and unable to adapt to rapidly changing situations.
I often have a hard time understanding how other people can miss such obvious truths. My best guess has been a simple lack of knowledge. Hopefully, this book and maybe a wider exposure to AL will change people's minds.
I'd just like to clarify before the flamers start in that I am fully aware that something like this probably wouldn't actually happen and that music was probably not the first thing transmitted. But, such considerations make the joke less funny. So, just enjoy the joke for what it is, and leave the logistics to real life.
Damn, you suck. I wanted to be first post, but was too busy dropping a ball. Yeah, believe it or not I had something better to do than be FP on Slashdot.
The important difference is that GNU/Linux *wants* to become the everyman's OS, whereas Mac OS users don't want that to happen. I should know: I'm a Mac user that jumps ship when Mac OS can't handle what I want to do. If Mac OS were in the position of Windows, I probably wouldn't use it. Talk to any Mac users and you'll notice right away that they have no interest in making everyone in the world us Mac OS, just the people who care enough about their experience to use Mac OS. In the past, this was the way with Linux, but now there are commercial interest trying to displace Windows, so we can bet the distro wars will flame up. I might keep using Debian or Slackware, whether they are the best or not, just becase everyone else on my street runs Red Hat or SuSE.
A lot of this comes down to what we might consider an OS. If kernel and shell is it, Unix is my best guess (though I haven't much knowledge of pre 1970s computers). In my mind, an OS just provides the basics of software to hardware interactions, and anything else that it does is just fluff. When I install Debian, I don't think that all the software that comes with it is the OS; I don't even think that everything on the base#.tgz is the OS (if you've never installed over PPP or with disk, you probably never had to use the base install).
This is true because, although he says nothing specific about technology, that is because he sees it as just another medium for speech and thus it receive the same treatment: complete freedom as allowed for by the First Amendment. No more of this insane 'the Internet is special, so let's regulate the hell out of it' stuff. Plus, he'll do some cool stuff like go for a really tight budget and improve our freedoms (I'm looking for more Second Ammendment rights and a movement to repeal the Sixtenth Ammendment (that's the income-tax one, unless I have my ammendments wrong)).
Great new keyboard and other stuff (toaster macs)
on
MacOS Keynote Coverage
·
· Score: 1
This has got to be the best stuff to come out of apple, ever. I'm getting my new keyboard and mouse right now (well, as sone as the apple store is updated, anyway), and am certainly looking to save up enough for one of those two headed monsters.
On the keyboard, this is going to be very nice for Linux. It's always been a problem not having enough keys (especially in vi and emacs), but all this is about to change. Plus, now I'll be able to get to the end of documents without scrolling forever and won't keep hitting the help key by accident anymore.
The mouse is cool. I think that the lack of buttons and sensitivity control will make it easier for people to use the mouse since everyone uses it differently. Even within the same session I might use different clicking styles depending upon what I'm doing. Not as cool as if it could tell where you press and how you pressed it, but still cool none the less.
Well, I'm still going to be getting graphite macs, but if I were getting an iMac there sure are better colors. I know that some of you think this is dumb, but if it doesn't matter to you what the compter looks like, what's wrong with an iMac if it has enough power for the task?
Finally, I like the cube but it seems kind of like a portable stuffed into a different container. Sure, there is a lot more stuff than even on a PowerBook, but I'd like it better if things weren't so cramped. Also, I'm a bit concerned about the size of the air vents. They're really huge. Oh well, the thing looks like a toaster anyway with the way that the DVD drive takes disk (and I know that I've certainly spilt things inside my toaster).
Overall, it is very cool stuff. You'll just have to give me a few days before I'll calm down and realize that maybe this new stuff isn't that great, after all (but it probably still will be).
For all of you who are in Kansas and might be thinking about going: watch out. The last time emmett was on Geeks in Space, he said about all the four letter words that premium cabel channels are willing to play (he didn't, though, say anything that even Showtime would censor). Just a kind warning incase you have virgin ears.;-)
The whole issue really comes down to one things: the code is the only thing that can be trust. No test or even real life proving provides what the code does: solid proff that the program is what it claims to be. Test after test could be run on some M$ server program and it could meet some very rigerous, formal standard, but that means nothing to me becuase they won't let me see the code, so I don't know if M$ is secretely observing my use of their program or violating the privacy of my users and myself.
Like I wrote; the only thing that can ever be trusted is the code.
Read the description of the sterotypical Amigan, I'm reminded of myself in the not so distant Dark Ages of the Mac, when some of us trancended the lines of mere userdom and joined the Evangelist. Times have changed and not so long ago the 'List ceased to exist because, in the new age of Apple, a cult is not something that's so great to have around (not to mention hard to hold together when there are so many Mac newbies invading our ranks). The Evangelista are scattered now, but if Apple ever hits another stumballing block and falls into dispare for a few years (though hopefully never as far as Amiga has fallen), you can rest assured that our little cult will return to keep the platform alive.
BTW, just to spread rummors, everyone better be watching out for the Intel version of Mac OS X (aka WinSlayer X).;-P
I agreed with the entire article until the next to last paragraph. Claiming that the command line isn't wanted/needed and that Linux will die in the water is just nonsense. To take from Neal Stehenson's/Command Line/ essay, MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workbench, an Apple created development environment) recreated the command line because it made programming easier than with GUIs. Most people just don't know that they need the command line, like to do simple tasks that don't need a GUI. True, the command line should be better integrated with Window Manager, but Apple already has that technology in place, making it easy to use drag and drop and other nice things with Terminal.app.
Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on Mac OS X Beta when MacWorld New York rolls around...
Whatever one does, stay away from Tk on the Mac. Even though the implimentation is getting better, it is still pretty bad and has all sorts of weird stuff in it. Trust me, don't go anywhere near it.
I own a Mac and my new one came with nanosaur on the restore disk, though not the system CD. Anyway, I installed it, played it, and trashed it before I ever got past three eggs (a refrence to the game, if you've played it). Anyway, the game has poor masking, polygons with many large, flat surfaces, and strange controls. The map is confusing, too, since the whole game is a 20 minute romp around this one giant map to collect some eggs. That's it! One level! After just a few minutes of play, I could see why the folks at Pangea were giving it away. I usually like their games, but this one is rediculious!
Prehaps the major issue threatening the Internet is that of copyright. Consider that before circa 1995, there was relatively little problem with the free sharing of information Online, even when copyrights were violated. Now devices like the GNU GPL and other forms of copyleft (OpenContent License (OPL), for instance) work to restore that sharing and have become very popular in the last few years because experienced Internet users are feeling their freedom slipping away. Ultimately, the enforcement of copyights make many common Internet activities nearly impossible (even parodying the name of a comercial product can now get one in thouble), and so we are at a point where copyrights must revert to their pre-1920s state or be completely eliminated, or else the Internet will cease to exist as it does currently.
One way to avoid this would be to create a new internet that would be uberencrypted and possible to break only by users, and even then only in the procesing of transmissions which they are allowed to see (so, if one is going through the correct protocals, then one can see sites on this internet and if one sends and receives mail, one can only see mail that they send or were sent). In this way, the status quo ante could be restored by keeping those who would enforce copyrights from being able to. The main limitation here is in breaking from the current standards or using the old ones and graphing new ones on to form a new network or one on top of the currently existing one. Either way, such a change produces a major shift that will likely take time to adjust to.
The Internet is much like the West in the 1800s, that by the 1900s was begining to become civilized. While government supports like to romaticize the idea that the gold strike towns and life on the open range were wild, savage, and violent with no respect for property (as corporate America trys to tell us that the Internet is a crazy place with all sorts of bad stuff happening on it), the reality was that spontanious order came out of the anarchy and offered far Westerners the opertunity to live a free life and to settle probelms for themselves. Not until the Internet has another place and time existed where so much freedom existed. Whether the Internet goes the way of the West or blazes new trails depends on how effectively its supporters can defend it and the liberty it offers.
Slashdot Mirror
As the administrator of the Mac GPG Project (http://macgpg.sf.net/), I've found that the person who usually needs the most help is me. :-)
;-)
I'm a good coder, but because I spend my time managing the project, I don't always have the time to research on how to fix every oddity that shows up in my code. I often post to my developer's list saying "hey, there's this weird bug in my code; someone please take a look at it" and, usually, I get some much needed help that probably would have caused me to bang my head against the wall for a long time with no results. This is what's great about having a team; things that would have stopped development when you were on your own are easilly fixed by someone whose experience is different than yours.
As for motivation, you usually have to find motivated coders. For example, when low level stuff needs fixing in GnuPG to work on the Mac, the worms come out of the wood work and I'm given patches for all sorts of things while I'm still trying to get GnuPG just to make. Also, most of our code comes from just two or three developers, but on several occasions someone came along and said "hey, I'm working on project XYZ and we could use your library if it had these bug fixes. Mind if I do them for you?".
The trick seems to build up a community and then that community will come to help. I don't really know how to build the community, since my community found me, especially after NAI officially EOL'd PGP, but also because we're the only game in town and encourage the work of others who are not part of the project to provide software for users of specific MUAs.
At any rate, for the story's submitters situation, I'd recommend helping these developers along. The best thing to do is tell them to ask any questions they might have, no matter how basic they might be, on your developers list and then answer them, even if they can be found elsewhere in common sources (or at the least point to those sources). Once you get a few good developers, then you can go back to being less tolerant of incapable programmers.
Oh man, this is what I want. If only they came with beige gravel. :-)
a sm ac.html
http://www.redlightrunner.com/redlightrunner/cl
I find it depends on the music. Stuff with aucustic guitars and such need to be ripped at higher bit rates to sound good. Techno is fine at MP3-128. If you put Ogg and MP3 in a bag, shake them around, they'll come out about the same. But, it's really going to be an issue of your listening skill. Personally, MP3 sounds fine to me, but then I don't have well trained ears. At the same time, my eyes are much sharper and JPEGs with more than like quality level 8 compression look bad, to me, and can be annoying.
Well, while people should go to work, DON'T go to work if where you work is a likely target. Most people should be fine (my university has closed down for the day, which I think is a dumb move since we can certainly keep on learning regardless of terrorist), though, and need to continue on, re this post.
Okay, I read a bunch of posts, but rather than reply to them one by one, I'm going to hit them all at once.
You said: "Why do people think SIs [super intelligences] will be unpredictable?"
Because they are so much smarter and intelligent than us that we have no way of knowing how they will think and thus act. Just as a moron can't write a book about a rocket scientist, an AI researcher can't write a book about a SIAI (well, at least not a rational one). In some cases, AI will act in ways that seem reasonable to us, and other times it will require a lot of thought on our part to understand their better reasoning. Still, as of right now, we can't say for sure how an AI will act or even once they are around know how they will act.
You said: "I don't think SIAI will be dangerous. They're way smarter than us and won't be evil."
Many of us in the Singularitarian community used to make this assumption, but eventually you realize that most of the reasons that we consider that an AI would act like this are antropomorphic. AIs don't have those same built in features that we do. They wouldn't even have a sense of self when first created (or maybe ever). Check out http://www.singinst.org/ for papers on Friendly AI for potential solutions and further explinations of this problem.
You said: "We'll never develop a theory of general intelligence. We're not even going to have strong AI, let alone ones that can improve their own code."
You have a lot to learn. All I can say to these kind of comments is that you need to educate yourself better on topics of cognitive science. You know, learn about physicalism (roughly, brain == mind) as opposed to dualism, learn about how information is represented in the mind, etc.. This view is mostly the result of simply have not been presented the proper information.
You said: "I don't think the Singularity will happen. I mean, look at how much stuff has been predicted and never came true."
The Singularity is a matter of life and death. In case you're wondering, the Meaning of Life right now is to reach the Singularity. Until then, anything you do is pretty much worthless unless it gets us to the Singularity faster. If we don't reach the Singularity, you are going to die sooner or later. The Singularity means you can live as long as you like, do what you want (this is a complex issue, see my site for a paper on how to protect non violation of volition post Singularity), and live happily ever after. I can't stress this enough: reaching the Singularity is a matter of life and death. If we don't make it, we all die. Maybe not today, but soon. And this is not just the fate of individuals, but of humanity and all life. If the Singularity is not reached, all life will cease to exist eventually. When looking at the Singularity in this life, you almost have to wonder why you're not already help to make it arrive sooner.
JON SUCKS!
Sorry, I'd have an intelligent conmment, but Jon still isn't paying me to read his stuff. Send me a few dollars via PayPal and then I'll come back.
:^)
Okay, first, mine. Then, a link to another review which may be a bit beyond the average Slashdot readers full comprehension. Both are filled with spoilers.
WARNING: Plot is discussed. This is more of an analysis of aspects of the movie, not a review. You should probably read this after you see the film.
Rating: 1 out of 3 thumbs up.
AI can be summed up in one word: cute. If you've seen ET, you've already seen AI, only AI is worse because it tries to do more, but fails. For example, when David becomes frozen in ice, that would have made a fair ending; not the best ending, but a decent one. Speilberg, though, is not content to let the viewer consider such a bleak, realistic fate, but gives the audience something that is beyond reason. As I point out later on, it only makes sense that David end, frozen in ice forever, but Spielberg wants a feel good ending that will keep Joe Average coming back for more.
The problems with the film really begin in the opening scene. An AI 'scientist' is explaining how he plans to make a more human Mecca, by making it love. He believes that if it can learn to love, then all other human characteristics will follow. Aside from the silliness of this proposition, the problem is the same problem Asimov's bots had: adversarial human attitudes. The humans want to make the AI love because they believe that will make sure that it will stay in line, not harm humans, and such. Spielberg, either by accident on purpose, doesn't state this explicitly, which hides this error from the smart but underinformed viewer.
You may be saying, what's so adversarial about keeping AIs from killing and why would such a thing be bad. The problem is two folded. On one hand, no system you try to implement is going to be fool proof. The AI is a lot smarter than any human (or at least can get a lot smarter) and can use what would look like magic to us. Secondly, regardless of smartness, the AI will face a philosophical crises that will probably be the end of it. For example, David is taught to love humans, but humans, from the start, did not love him by forcing him to love rather than trusting him.
BTW, this love thing is his undoing. Much like Asimovian bots that become stuck in logic loops, David becomes stuck in a love loop. The end of the film lets him out of it, because that's the happy ending, not the one that makes the most sense.
Okay, so if you can't be adversarial and lay down some Asimovian laws or something, what can you do. You can create Friendly AI. There is quite a lot written about this topic, but the best place to start is here. Please, click this link; don't just post like an idiot that I have no clue about AI. For many of you, this will also dispel myths about Classical AI and lead you to new ideas. Just in case you missed it, you can learn about Friendly AI here.
Now, I did mention that the movie was cute, which means it has some interesting parts. For example, Dr. Know was an interesting information retrieval system, though pretty dumb considering they could create David and Google gives back better info. Also, the Transhumans at the end of the film look cool, but act far too much like humans. BTW, that's Joe at the end of the film who talks to David, not an alien. My friend who went with me to the movie seemed a bit confused about this, but hopefully she'll get it later.
For those who you who have read 'Super Toys Last All Summer', the short story this film is based on, you'll notice when the story ends and the film begins, and at that point the plot shifts to a different story: Pinocchio. The parallels are almost embarrassing. Also, there is a hint of Wizard of Oz in there (think about what is said about Dr. Know at the end and you'll get it). There are probably more, but I haven't caught them yet.
So, to sum up, is this an SF classic: no. Does it make you think: only if you don't know what AI is. Is this a cute summer movie to take Grandma, the kids, and Fluffy the dog to: yes. Or, do like me and take a date; you'll have more fun (even if you're both smart and see problems with the movie)! ;-)
You can also find this Online at this place. Now, check out this more in depth review of the movie for those of you very knowledgable, seed AI type folks at, nope, sorry, no link available yet (it's on a mailing list). Well, I've pasted it below. This is by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Isaac Asimov once observed that there are three types of robot stories;
robot-as-pathos, robot-as-menace, and robot-as-device. A.I. is a
robot-as-device story, and a fairly good one. There is pathos, owing to
David's emotions, but David's emotions are depicted as the deliberate
result of a deliberate design effort.
Most of the reviewers of this movie will undoubtedly say that the AIs are
more human than the humans. This is probably the single least accurate
statement it is possible to make about A.I. The AIs are more *humane*
than the humans but are *substantially* less human. A few behaviors (for
the embodied chatbots that were the previous state of the art) or a few
emotions (for David) have been selectively transferred over, and
naturally, they tend to be nice and neighborly behaviors or emotions,
because that's what the designers would want to transfer over. But the
AIs are visibly not playing with a full deck. Evidently Luddite movie
critics cannot tell the difference between "human" and "humane" even when
slapped upside the head with a double dissocation.
The very first thing that struck me about A.I. was the rather extreme
stupidity of the AI *researchers*. The consequences of this stupidity are
depicted with the same realism, attention to detail, and lack of
anthropomorphism that characterized HAL in 2001, but even so, the amount
of human stupidity I am being asked to accept is rather extreme.
David is beta software. His emotional responses are real - we are told so
in the movie - but they show a binary, all-or-nothing quality. We see the
first instance of this where David bursts out into extremely loud
laughter, laughs for a few moments, then switches off. Be it emphasized
that this laughter is both realistic and genuine. David is the first in a
line of robots with genuine emotions. The embodied chatbot that we see in
the opening scenes of the movie - the female android whose hand is hurt -
may have more gentle laughter, but only because it is preprogrammed.
David's genuine responses are as raw and as alien as might be expected of
a "child" who is, in fact, an infant, only a few weeks old.
Then the AI researchers had the bright idea of putting this beta software
into a human body, adding in those emotions calculated to produce maximal
emotional attachment on the part of humans, and giving it as a human
surrogate to a mother already in an emotionally unstable state because her
own child has been in medical cryonic suspension for five years.
>From this single act of stupidity, and the correctly depicted
consequences, the plot of the entire movie flows. Within a day of
imprinting, David realizes that his mother will someday die, and that he
will not, and wonders if he will be alone forever - foreshadowing the end
of the movie. His mother, for whom David is allegedly an artificial
surrogate to be disposed of when no longer needed, naturally feels
enormous emotional stress at the thought of returning David to be
incinerated. Nobody thought of this back when they were building a
loving, lovable, naturally immortal, allegedly disposable child?
(One of the genuine, oft-overlooked ethical questions this movie
highlights: "Is it moral to create an AI that loves you if the AI has to
watch you die?" The prospect of voluntary immortality in our own near
future creates similar present-day issues. If you plan on bringing a
child into the world, you should plan on choosing to live forever if the
option becomes available, because a child shouldn't have to watch its
parents die.)
When David's brother, Martin, returns from suspension, we see a darker
side to David's genuine emotions. The first near-catastrophe occurs when
David nearly kills himself competing with his revived brother, by
attempting to eat; the second catastrophe occurs when David nearly drowns
his brother. In both cases, the events that occur are excellent
robot-as-device scenarios; they are the consequence of the reproduction of
certain specific geunine emotions in a beta-quality infant psychology
taught certain preprogrammed complex behaviors and placed the body of an
eight-year-old. When David's pain response is triggered by a pack of
curious children, his raw fear, like his laughter, goes from binary off to
binary on. His fear manifests itself in the only behavioral response
David knows; hiding behind Martin. The fear continues to manifest,
preventing Martin's escape, even as David and Martin sink to the bottom of
the pool.
Again, realistic; again, the AI researchers should have thought of it.
Monica, the mother, is afterwards in a hideous position; does she endanger
the household by keeping around beta-quality embodied software, or does
she return David to the manufacturer - that is, give up her child to die?
Monica's emotions are also run ragged because she is being asked to react
without anger to David's near-drowning of Martin. Again, someone at the
mecha corporation was being damn stupid and deserves to be sued into
bankruptcy. You do not give embodied software with beta-quality genuine
emotions to a human mother and ask her to treat it as her own human child.
(Call it "personality abrasion". Personality abrasion may turn out to be
a very real problem for humans dealing with any AI capable of real
thought, even if the AIs don't have human-architecture emotions or
human-looking bodies. Only AI researchers, or other people who understand
the risks and are willing to expend effort in dealing with them, should
ever come into contact with raw AIs. A Friendly AI conversing with
ordinary users should have enough knowledge to fake taking 'offense' at
insults, just because an AI that genuinely doesn't care at all about
insults may be more alienness than an ordinary user should have to deal
with. In A.I., we see the effect of personality abrasion on some poor
shmuck of a human mother.)
The penultimate consequences of the AI researchers' stupidity is visible
when, following the near-drowning of Martin, Monica (the mother) tries to
return David to the manufacturer for destruction. Of course Monica is, by
this point, too attached to David to watch him die, and tries to abandon
him in the woods instead. David's extreme response, when he suddenly
realizes that his mother is abandoning him, is the movie's greatest
moment. I choked up myself. David is an AI with a few genuine emotions,
and the strongest of them is love, and now his mother is leaving forever.
(Genuine, affecting pathos in a robot-as-device story. Realistic,
theoretically accurate AI scenarios with powerful drama. All hail
Kubrick. However... am I really supposed to believe that nobody at the
mecha corporation saw this coming?)
Later: David, wandering the forest with only his supertoy
babysitter-in-a-box teddy bear as companion, comes into contact with a
group of androids who are scavenging spare parts from a dump. This, I'm
sure, is intended to be creepy and disturbing vintage Kubrick, but I
myself immediately started wondering how this social phenomenon occurred.
It's the same question that occurred to me when I saw Gigolo Joe carving
out his identity tag on the run from the police. Why do these
nonemotional androids want to survive? We see in the opening scenes a
female android who is stabbed in the hand as part of a demonstration; when
the lead AI researcher asks "Did I hurt you?" she responds "You hurt my
hand." Am I supposed to believe that this chatbot in human form would go
and scavenge parts if she were abandoned? Am I supposed to believe that
Gigolo Joe, on realizing that he has been framed for murder, would go
rogue out of self-preservation? Having androids scouring the countryside
for spare parts is a rather disturbing social phenomenon, as is having an
android flee a police investigation, and the embodied chatbots that are
supposed to be state-of-the-art are primitive enough that the programmers
could easily have prevented both responses.
And what's with the Flesh Fair bounty hunters who attack the scavenging
robots? Did these bounty hunters come through a wormhole from
_Bladerunner_? This is what happens when Spielberg rewrites a Kubrick
movie; you have cyberpunk grunge-neon motorcycle bounty hunters chasing a
lovable android and his animate teddy bear. At any rate, David is dragged
off to the Flesh Fair, where humans watch the destruction of androids for
fun... is this where the path of "Battlebots" leads?
(At this point in the movie, I must admit to a minor objection at the
Flesh Fair robot who asked another robot to 'disconnect my pain circuits',
mostly because this is a fundamentally human way of looking at the world
and any robot who makes this request may well have crossed the border, not
just into personhood, but into our particular kind of personhood. But
expecting Hollywood to know that is asking far too much.)
At the Flesh Fair, the embodied chatbots make a few conversational pleas
as they are loaded into the cannons and the acid platforms. David's
screams invoke greater sympathy, but I'm not sure the Flesh Fair audience
made a logical conclusion. I know that David's response is genuine only
because I was told at the beginning of the movie that David has a wholly
novel cognitive architecture designed to support humanlike emotions.
David's response is genuine, but it is not humanlike. A human child,
brought into that cage, would have been almost catatonic with fear; would
have been screaming and crying long before reaching the stage; would have
been struggling long before the first drop of acid fell on him. As at the
side of the pool, we see the binary, unpolished quality of David's genuine
emotion; his fear goes from off to on as soon as the first drop of acid
falls - and manifests in his screaming requests not to be burned.
And the crowd rises and boos the ringmaster off the stage - "Mecha does
not plead for its life!" - but their decision is correct only by
coincidence. From what they saw, David really could have been just a more
advanced chatbot. David's emotions were real, but David's behaviors
weren't the responses of a genuine eight-year-old except on the surface.
Shortly thereafter, the stranger half of the movie begins. David, in the
company of Gigolo Joe, wanders the world looking for the Blue Fairy. Even
for beta software, I'm not sure this fixation is realistic - surely an
advanced AI knows what 'fiction' is, and an AI boy knows that bedtime
stories aren't true. On the other hand, perhaps David's humanlike
cognitive architecture has unexpectedly given rise to the phenomenon of
self-delusion (flinching away from hypotheses which make unpleasant
predictions), or perhaps David knows the Blue Fairy's existence is
tentative but he still sees no more plausible path leading back to his
mother.
After Joe and David leave Dr. Know, the movie has its first real "Damn,
they blew it!" moment. (Though in Spielberg's defense, an AI movie that
starts at 8PM, and gets to 9:48 before messing up, has done extremely
well.) The moment to which I refer is Gigolo Joe's speech about how
humans resent robots because they know that, in the end, robots will be
all that's left. Where did *that* come from? Joe's speech is as out of
place as Agent Smith's speech of self-justification in _The Matrix_. It
has undertones of repressed resentment, of an entire underground society
of secretly rebellious robots, and other things that have no place among
chatbots and sex droids. Even David is only a fractional human; he has a
few selected genuine emotions but certainly not a full deck of them.
Apparently the Humans Are Obsolete Speech is simply mandatory for AI
movies, no matter how ridiculously out of place. The Speech is most
certainly not justified by "foreshadowing", since it sucks at least half
of the emotional impact out of the ending. If anyone creates a Phantom
Edit of A.I., the Speech should definitely be the first thing to go (and
the second thing, of course, will be everything after the Blue Fairy
Fadeout).
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The next major scene of significance is
David confronting David-2. David's destruction of David-2 struck me as a
little strange; it involved a bit more humanness, a wider behavioral
repertoire, than had been previously depicted. I suppose that some degree
of jealousy was visible earlier in the movie, so my immediate reaction of
"Why would they have ported *that* emotion over?" may be misplaced; even
so, that kind of directed, coherent-conversation destructive tantrum
struck me as being too complex for David.
The lead AI researcher's total lack of reaction to the destruction of his
own genuinely emotional surrogate child, and his revelation that the
corporation has been directing the entire course of events since the Flesh
Fair for publicity purposes, shows again that the AI researchers are the
least humane people in the movie.
Later on, David confronts the vast hall full of Davids, a scene that was
intended to creep out the audience. But again it gives rise to questions
on my part. If there are that many Davids, why are they all designed to
have the human emotion of wanting to be unique? Was it an unintended
consequence? For that matter, what possessed the idiots in Marketing to
produce a batch of identical AIs all named David, instead of giving them
individual faces and individual voices and maybe some quirks of
personality? Do these people think that no two couples with a David will
ever meet? I'm not a parent, but I know that I'd be creeped out if I went
to a barbeque and every couple there had a copy of my little sister.
Finally, after David realizes that he is not unique, he deliberately
topples off a window ledge into the ocean. Uh... why? How is that a
means to the end of getting his mother to love him? Or alternatively, who
drew up the design specs and added in a requirement that David feel
suicidal despondency under certain conditions? Ordinary despondency I can
see, but not suicidal despondency; not in an expensive, partially human
being that parents are supposed to grow attached to. Plus, David can
operate underwater, and he knows that. This scene makes no sense.
Later, when David seeks out the Blue Fairy, and begins repeating his
eternal request, and the screen fades to black, I had the same reaction
everyone did: "Okay, movie's over! Please tell me the movie's over...
damn, it's not over." The Phantom Edit version of A.I. should end here.
After the Blue Fairy Fadeout, we see what I can only describe as Spielberg
messing up Kubrick's movie. To start with, the aliens - pardon me, I
meant the Successors - are Spielbergs. "Spielbergs"; that's the only
thing I can think of to call them. They are classic Spielberg aliens and
they don't belong on the set of A.I.
Lest I be too negative, however, I'll take this time to focus on an
example of what A.I. does right. David, revived by the Successors, leaves
the aircraft and heads for the Blue Fairy. He touches her, and she
shatters. At this point, a *bad* movie - which A.I. is not - would have
shown us some breakdown, some feeling of despair on David's part.
Instead, nothing happens - there isn't any emotion in David's limited deck
for this occasion. Three cheers for whoever wrote that scene! It's this
refusual to take the easy way out that puts A.I. into the class of science
fiction rather than space opera.
However, we then move directly on to the second "Damn, they blew it!"
moment in the movie, occurring at 10:28, when one of the Successors begins
spouting gibberish about yada-yada space-time yada-yada pathways yada-yada
DNA yada-yada only one day yada-yada. I'm sorry, I don't care how
dramatic your plot device is, you need to think up a better way to justify
it than making up totally arbitrary rules on the spot. Plus, if you can
bring back Monica for one day, you can scan her memories into permanent
storage; and, if they're retrieving Monica's immortal soul from 2000 years
in the future, they should be retrieving an old Monica from just before
the moment of her death, not the one David remembers... oh, forget it.
Finally, David gets his one day with Monica - being a little too human
throughout, it seemed to me, especially as he watches her go to sleep for
the last time. He goes to sleep with her, and - according to the final
voiceover - for the first time, begins to dream. Dream *what*? Why? I
wasn't really happy with this movie's ending.
One of the basic issues at the beginning of the movie is one that the
ending totally fails to resolve, even after going to all that plot-effort
to bring David to the one place where the question can be answered. David
is a partial human. He is both immortal, and fundamentally incomplete.
David was created without the potential to grow; he is forever young...
but on the other side of time, he can be improved and extended. David
could become a real human, if he wanted to be. Except that David doesn't
want to be human; he wants to stay with Monica forever, and being human is
only a means to that end.
The Successors could easily have given David a full deck of emotions, or
could easily have created an immortal virtual Monica that was real to the
limit of David's limited perceptions. Why didn't they? Was David, by
their standards, citizen enough not be lied to? Citizen enough not be
'improved' without consent? I know how I would have solved that problem;
I would have made David human for the course of the one perfect day he had
with Monica, and at the end of that day, he would have experienced great
grief... but he would have healed, and moved on, as complete humans have
the potential to do, and eventually joined the Successor civilization.
Both the moment of David becoming human, and the moment of his grief when
Monica faded, would have been a fine conclusion to the movie.
The ending I saw left me feeling incomplete because this basic issue went
unresolved. From the beginning, there were only four possible resolutions
to the movie: David dies; David lives forever with Monica, eternally
happy; David lives forever without Monica, eternally lonely; or David
grows beyond his limits. The ending we saw doesn't tell us which of these
events has occurred! Did David effectively switch himself off? Did David
go on forever dreaming of his last perfect day? Does David's dreaming
indicate that the Successors have gently begun to improve him out of his
cul-de-sac? Are David's dreams eternally lonely because Monica isn't
there?
I know there is a certain style of filmmaking that holds that the viewer
should be allowed to pick their own ending, and I hate that style with a
fiery passion. For me, a vague ending can ruin the impact of an entire
movie, and that came very close to happening with A.I.
Oh, well. A.I. is still a good movie. It's just that, as with many good
movies, A.I. could easily have been so much better.
And that's it. I hope you learned something.
Having been through it, there is a progression that people go through when it comes to these new media.
;-) This is just what happens, because the usage of one medium leads to the usage of others. During this stage, due to people's wide eyed dreams of how great things could be with all this technology, they adopt the usage of too many media and make habit of taking in more information than they can deal with but just don't notice it.
;-P).
;-)
~Wonder:
This is the opening stage. People look at the new media and are in amazed by them. People stand in awe at the potentials and think of how great thier lives could be if only they got involved. This is where most people start to go wrong: they dream up their own hype.
~Adoption:
You know how this goes. First you say 'Okay, I'll try doing e-mail' and then next thing you know you're an info glutton.
~Info Gluttony:
This is the stage Jon is focusing on. After adopting technology, people love it and want all the info they can get. Every little news story they can find, they read. Ever IM they get results in a big conversation. Every message board they post to turns into a huge debate. They take and give so much informaiton that they don't have time to do anything with it. This is where a lot of people are (especially all of you who post to Slashdot a lot
~Fallout:
Eventually people realize the fallacy of having more info than they can use and have a falling out with the new media. This doesn't mean giving them up, just a big reduction. No more hitting reload on the news sites every minute. Fewer IMs. Less Usenet usage. Few message board posts. Fewer mailing lists. For example, when I went through this stage, I reduced my regular Web site visits to Slashdot, Ars Technica, UF, Sluggy, and GameBoy Station. Also, I cut a lot of mailing lists that just weren't so useful to me and just went cold turkey pretty much on other stuff.
~Wise Usage:
Here in the final stage, after getting rid of all the glutt, you can make wise use of the info available. For example, I now have a few more sites that I read regularly and some that I just skim. I know what info I need, how much time I have to collect it, and how to skip that which just isn't useful. Alas, many people never make it to this final stage. Rather than becoming wise information users, they simply use the fallout as a correction that slows their info gluttony for a while, but they soon are back in full swing usage. They fall into a cycle of feasting and fasting: information spendthrifts, if you will. I know of no way to teach how to decide what information one needs wisely, other than to have a fallout, learn from it, and constantly keep evaluating how much inforormation is worth to you and what you really need.
BTW, here's $1 for reading all of that.
Early on, I got into AL, back when I was in middle school. Ever since then, I've been programming little guys to live out in their worlds. The interesting thing is how it has affected me philosophically. For example, I believe in the existance of natural laws. The reason is not because of some sort of magical force making them be, but that there are certain behaviors that naturally emerge from the system. Amongst humans, we all act a certain way because we are equal, more or less. Of course, as humans evolved, there were different levels of humans living at the same time, so we developed power structures that have made it through to this day. If only we could throw off these artificial laws, the world would be a much better place.
AL has also led me to be an anarchist. To me, anarchy is the perfect system in which everything will optimize and everyone will be happy.
Anything else is a desperate attempt to optimize that, at best, might work for a few seconds until something changes. Anarchy is liquid and quick to change, while archies are slow and ridged and unable to adapt to rapidly changing situations.
I often have a hard time understanding how other people can miss such obvious truths. My best guess has been a simple lack of knowledge. Hopefully, this book and maybe a wider exposure to AL will change people's minds.
I'd just like to clarify before the flamers start in that I am fully aware that something like this probably wouldn't actually happen and that music was probably not the first thing transmitted. But, such considerations make the joke less funny. So, just enjoy the joke for what it is, and leave the logistics to real life.
...for the first time, a man with a metal plate in his head said: "Where is that music coming from!?!".
Do christians (or, other religions, too) have a problem with using any of the BSDs you've worked on due to the daemon mascot?
Damn, you suck. I wanted to be first post, but was too busy dropping a ball. Yeah, believe it or not I had something better to do than be FP on Slashdot.
M$ sold the shares. That's the end of it. The news media just didn't pick it up because the news was too much in Apple's favor and mad M$ look bad.
The important difference is that GNU/Linux *wants* to become the everyman's OS, whereas Mac OS users don't want that to happen. I should know: I'm a Mac user that jumps ship when Mac OS can't handle what I want to do. If Mac OS were in the position of Windows, I probably wouldn't use it. Talk to any Mac users and you'll notice right away that they have no interest in making everyone in the world us Mac OS, just the people who care enough about their experience to use Mac OS. In the past, this was the way with Linux, but now there are commercial interest trying to displace Windows, so we can bet the distro wars will flame up. I might keep using Debian or Slackware, whether they are the best or not, just becase everyone else on my street runs Red Hat or SuSE.
A lot of this comes down to what we might consider an OS. If kernel and shell is it, Unix is my best guess (though I haven't much knowledge of pre 1970s computers). In my mind, an OS just provides the basics of software to hardware interactions, and anything else that it does is just fluff. When I install Debian, I don't think that all the software that comes with it is the OS; I don't even think that everything on the base#.tgz is the OS (if you've never installed over PPP or with disk, you probably never had to use the base install).
This is true because, although he says nothing specific about technology, that is because he sees it as just another medium for speech and thus it receive the same treatment: complete freedom as allowed for by the First Amendment. No more of this insane 'the Internet is special, so let's regulate the hell out of it' stuff. Plus, he'll do some cool stuff like go for a really tight budget and improve our freedoms (I'm looking for more Second Ammendment rights and a movement to repeal the Sixtenth Ammendment (that's the income-tax one, unless I have my ammendments wrong)).
This has got to be the best stuff to come out of apple, ever. I'm getting my new keyboard and mouse right now (well, as sone as the apple store is updated, anyway), and am certainly looking to save up enough for one of those two headed monsters.
On the keyboard, this is going to be very nice for Linux. It's always been a problem not having enough keys (especially in vi and emacs), but all this is about to change. Plus, now I'll be able to get to the end of documents without scrolling forever and won't keep hitting the help key by accident anymore.
The mouse is cool. I think that the lack of buttons and sensitivity control will make it easier for people to use the mouse since everyone uses it differently. Even within the same session I might use different clicking styles depending upon what I'm doing. Not as cool as if it could tell where you press and how you pressed it, but still cool none the less.
Well, I'm still going to be getting graphite macs, but if I were getting an iMac there sure are better colors. I know that some of you think this is dumb, but if it doesn't matter to you what the compter looks like, what's wrong with an iMac if it has enough power for the task?
Finally, I like the cube but it seems kind of like a portable stuffed into a different container. Sure, there is a lot more stuff than even on a PowerBook, but I'd like it better if things weren't so cramped. Also, I'm a bit concerned about the size of the air vents. They're really huge. Oh well, the thing looks like a toaster anyway with the way that the DVD drive takes disk (and I know that I've certainly spilt things inside my toaster).
Overall, it is very cool stuff. You'll just have to give me a few days before I'll calm down and realize that maybe this new stuff isn't that great, after all (but it probably still will be).
For all of you who are in Kansas and might be thinking about going: watch out. The last time emmett was on Geeks in Space, he said about all the four letter words that premium cabel channels are willing to play (he didn't, though, say anything that even Showtime would censor). Just a kind warning incase you have virgin ears. ;-)
---
The whole issue really comes down to one things: the code is the only thing that can be trust. No test or even real life proving provides what the code does: solid proff that the program is what it claims to be. Test after test could be run on some M$ server program and it could meet some very rigerous, formal standard, but that means nothing to me becuase they won't let me see the code, so I don't know if M$ is secretely observing my use of their program or violating the privacy of my users and myself.
Like I wrote; the only thing that can ever be trusted is the code.
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Read the description of the sterotypical Amigan, I'm reminded of myself in the not so distant Dark Ages of the Mac, when some of us trancended the lines of mere userdom and joined the Evangelist. Times have changed and not so long ago the 'List ceased to exist because, in the new age of Apple, a cult is not something that's so great to have around (not to mention hard to hold together when there are so many Mac newbies invading our ranks). The Evangelista are scattered now, but if Apple ever hits another stumballing block and falls into dispare for a few years (though hopefully never as far as Amiga has fallen), you can rest assured that our little cult will return to keep the platform alive.
;-P
BTW, just to spread rummors, everyone better be watching out for the Intel version of Mac OS X (aka WinSlayer X).
I agreed with the entire article until the next to last paragraph. Claiming that the command line isn't wanted/needed and that Linux will die in the water is just nonsense. To take from Neal Stehenson's /Command Line/ essay, MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workbench, an Apple created development environment) recreated the command line because it made programming easier than with GUIs. Most people just don't know that they need the command line, like to do simple tasks that don't need a GUI. True, the command line should be better integrated with Window Manager, but Apple already has that technology in place, making it easy to use drag and drop and other nice things with Terminal.app.
Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on Mac OS X Beta when MacWorld New York rolls around...
Whatever one does, stay away from Tk on the Mac. Even though the implimentation is getting better, it is still pretty bad and has all sorts of weird stuff in it. Trust me, don't go anywhere near it.
I own a Mac and my new one came with nanosaur on the restore disk, though not the system CD. Anyway, I installed it, played it, and trashed it before I ever got past three eggs (a refrence to the game, if you've played it). Anyway, the game has poor masking, polygons with many large, flat surfaces, and strange controls. The map is confusing, too, since the whole game is a 20 minute romp around this one giant map to collect some eggs. That's it! One level! After just a few minutes of play, I could see why the folks at Pangea were giving it away. I usually like their games, but this one is rediculious!
Prehaps the major issue threatening the Internet is that of copyright. Consider that before circa 1995, there was relatively little problem with the free sharing of information Online, even when copyrights were violated. Now devices like the GNU GPL and other forms of copyleft (OpenContent License (OPL), for instance) work to restore that sharing and have become very popular in the last few years because experienced Internet users are feeling their freedom slipping away. Ultimately, the enforcement of copyights make many common Internet activities nearly impossible (even parodying the name of a comercial product can now get one in thouble), and so we are at a point where copyrights must revert to their pre-1920s state or be completely eliminated, or else the Internet will cease to exist as it does currently.
One way to avoid this would be to create a new internet that would be uberencrypted and possible to break only by users, and even then only in the procesing of transmissions which they are allowed to see (so, if one is going through the correct protocals, then one can see sites on this internet and if one sends and receives mail, one can only see mail that they send or were sent). In this way, the status quo ante could be restored by keeping those who would enforce copyrights from being able to. The main limitation here is in breaking from the current standards or using the old ones and graphing new ones on to form a new network or one on top of the currently existing one. Either way, such a change produces a major shift that will likely take time to adjust to.
The Internet is much like the West in the 1800s, that by the 1900s was begining to become civilized. While government supports like to romaticize the idea that the gold strike towns and life on the open range were wild, savage, and violent with no respect for property (as corporate America trys to tell us that the Internet is a crazy place with all sorts of bad stuff happening on it), the reality was that spontanious order came out of the anarchy and offered far Westerners the opertunity to live a free life and to settle probelms for themselves. Not until the Internet has another place and time existed where so much freedom existed. Whether the Internet goes the way of the West or blazes new trails depends on how effectively its supporters can defend it and the liberty it offers.