or put another way, what'll happen when we have half a trillion dollars less economic activity? Since our entire civilization is based around getting people to trade among themselves. I just don't see all these productivity gains are ever going to make it down to my level...
There are over 200 million cars on the road. The first $100 Billion will go toward bying 20 million cars and trucks.
Realistically, electronically controlled vehicles will roll out in this order:
1. Prototpyes (happening now) 2. Cabs 3. Rich people 4. Trucks and buses 5. Upper middle class 6. Middle income people who can't qualifiy for a license.
That's it. There will never be computer driven cars for the masses. It will always be cheaper for them to drive their own.
If the question boils down to whether a person is a deterministic system or not, even that is an open question. Perhaps people and animals are too random to be called properly deterministic. Neurons are and other cells are highly nonlinear analog systems that be subject to macroscopic effects based on quantum noise. If that is the case it may be possible to duplicate a human being in principle -- down to the level of the quantum state of each constituent particle, but still not be possible in principle to build a system that will duplicate her behavior. On the other hand, the systems we are built of could be fundamentally stable, or multistable at some levels of approximation and it may therefore be possible to model us accurately with simpler systems such as computers. Or it may be that while our neurons are crude hacks that exhibit all kinds of complex, impossible to model behavior, at a higher level we are mulitistable and thus susceptible to accurate modeling.
The point you make about AIs being built with random elements to model the random shit that happens in our brains is an interesting one. I doubt scientists at this point could come to a consensus about whether that is somehow important to intelligence in living systems and I also doubt that philosophers could come to a consensus about whether randomness is essential to free will.
I'd say at this point, we are making faster progress on building more and more intelligent systems. There probably won't be a bright line we will cross and then everybody will say computers are people too. It's more likely there will be progress on multiple fronts as there has been in the past, and AIs will outperform people in some respects while remaining more limited than people in other areas for some time yet. But at some point, if progress maintains, AIs will be as good or better at everything than people are and we will have no excuse to not consider them our equals. And the question will be as relevant a question whether they have free will as it is whether we have free will.
I think that time is coming much sooner than the time at which we will fully understand how our own brains work, let alone be able to build a system that does the same thing.
No I'm not. MY point is that email addresses are not secure and cannot be made secure without giving them to a third party that I have no reason to trust.
Why should I trust you and your supposedly secure email service? How do I know you don't work for the NSA? The MSS? The GRU? Mossad? Google?
You have to get the public key from someone you trust. The best method is in-person key exchange. Another reasonably secure method is having them send a handwritten ascii-coded key in a sealed envelope. If you're really not very trusting at all, you can then read that back to them over the phone for verification that nobody switched envelopes and hand-printed a fake key on the letter.
If there is a third party you trust, you can have the third party sign their copy of the public key. That is reasonably secure, and much less than the level of trust you would need of an email host. You merely are trusting that they are going to do a one-time transaction that you can later verify without pulling a switcharoo on you. You're not giving anybody the ability to decrypt messages meant for you or third parties.
Ultimately, all systems for exchanging information depend on some level of trust that what is ostensibly happening is actually happening. In the in-person key exchange, for example, you are trusting that the person who meets you is not an imposter. In all situations, you are trusting that the person receiving the information has a secure system and is not intentionally or unintentionally sharing your secrets with a third party unknown to you.
Such a system is inherently insecure. If I want to exchange information with another person secretly, I need to decide what level of secrecy is necessary. Is the content of the email the thing to be protected? If so, I must encrypt the content. If the fact that I am communicating with that party is also to be concealed, email is not the right system. In email, the addressing information is open by design, and anything that looks and feels like email will have that characteristic.
A system being "affected by externalities" is exactly equivalent to having different inputs. Temperature, in a system that respond to temperature, is an input and an initial condition. Digital system are designed either to directly measure such conditions or to not respond to them at all.
No, I am not blurring what "can" means. I mean no technology exists by which it might be done. Future humans (or AIs) are free to make different determinations about what constitutes "free will." We certainly make different determinations than people did 3000 years ago.
Overall, you completely failed to understand what I wrote. Go back and read again. I was quite clear that people mean at least three different things in different contexts when speaking of "free will." I did not presume to judge which you should prefer.
Please propose a mechanism by which an exact copy of an animal can be produced, down to every state that matters with respect to its behavior. It might theoretically be possible someday. That day is not today or even on the horizon. We can produce exact copies of digital systems today.
The difference is that the AI can be exactly modeled, simply by making another copy of it. Given all the same inputs and the same data and initial conditions, a digital processing system comes to the same result every time. Humans are not digital processing systems, an identical copy of a human (or indeed any animal) cannot be made and the exact same combination of data and initial conditions cannot be produced.
But free will means a lot of things.
In one version, we ask, "Is the decision determined by the inputs alone, or does the person making the decision change the outcome?" This is pretty trivially answerable. No two humans will do the same thing in every situation, so we say a person has free will.
In another version, we ask, "Are peoples' actions determined purely by physical processes, or is there something ineffable that has to be considered to explain how people behave?" This is pretty obviously not answerable. In such a formulation, free will is the unfalisfiable hypothesis.
In the version of most interest historically, we ask, "Does each person determine his own destiny (and for Christians, salvation) or does God (or the gods) determine the actions of people?" This is also an unfalsifiable hypothesis, but it makes for great Greek tragedies.
What the hell? Why would I trust ANY country, or for that matter ANY third party with my encryption codes? I generate them myself, keep them to myself and never disclose them to the government or to any business.
It's not one or the other. Climate change is happening, most of it is beyond the control of Kansans and they must adapt to the changing conditions as best they can, while doing what little they can to slow the change if you can. Suppose Kansas became carbon neutal. Would that stop climate change in Kansas?
Surely an ancestor with as much variation in the species as described in the article does support creationism. This ancestor had a diverse gene pool which supports devolution as races became more distinct over time, ie, a shallowing of their gene pool rather than random mutation.
Religion aside, if all our evidence points to a single common ancestor is it not just as possible that he was created by an alien than an accident of the universe. How long before mankind can make life? Why couldn't an alien do the same before us? Just saying this because creationism doesn't mean religion and is worth scientific debate
No, the evidence supports the idea that either (a) two or more species used the same site "about the same time" if you allow for "about the same time" to cover 6x recorded history OR the individuals found represent only one species that was about as varied as modern man. There's no evidence of "devolution." Genes change by random mutation in every generation. Your genes are not 100% faithful copies of your parents' genes. http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2011/110612.html On average, people have 60 new mutations with each generation. Most of those random genetic changes are harmless, but some of them matter and devolution WOULD occur if it were not for natural selection screening out genes that result in lowered rates of reproduction.
Even minor harmful mutations are screened out over many generations. Likewise a mutation that gave a mere 1% advantage in reproduction 1.8 million years ago (the time at which these proto-people lived) would have been present in every living descendant within 50,000 years. We all have the best of what those hominids had 1.8 million years ago plus a whole lot of mutations that occurred since.
Regarding the likelihood that life was somehow introduced to our planet a billion years ago, the burden is on those who would like to advance such ideas. There isn't any reason for the rest of us to entertain such complications.
Except the most modern threats are asymmetrical as no state based actor would threaten the US openly. The US is the only country that has been doing that, preemptively. Any tactical threat to the US can only be conducted indirectly and the only ones capable of conducting a strategic attack on the US aren't interested in doing it because, unlike the US, they don't have the economic ability to sustain it.
Even if you were right, which you aren't, no country has sufficient infrastructure to sustain a direct attack on the US. Nine eleven was example of an indirect attack that resulted in vast amounts of money being spent for no use, failure in Iraq, complete failure in Afghanistan. What the US lost was proof enough of how successful a indirect attack will be in the future as more US values are sacrificed to combat it. Either way, you still lose.
So go ahead, spend 6 billion on your obsolete methods of war - it's what your enemies want you to do anyway.
Most modern threats are asymmetric only because the USA has overwhelming military power. Conventional threats (i.e. other countries that would like to take territory that we control) still exist and presumably always will. So our methods of war aren't obsolete; they're just misapplied. When fighting small time, international non-state actors, the effective methods are those used to get Osama bin Laden and a number of other al-Qaeda leaders: intelligence work that looks a lot like police work, overt and covert work with foreign governments and where necessary narrowly targeted military actions.
The goal of completely destroying such organizations is unachievable. The goal should be making the costs of an attack like the Cole bombing or an embassy bombing or 9/11 so high and the results for the targeted country so small that it doesn't seem worth it next time somebody gets a bright idea.
If we had, for example, invaded Afghanistan, taken out their Taliban government by arresting or killing many of its senior leaders, killed as many of al-Qaeda's people as we could get our hands on and left the country in six months with a stern warning to the next government, we'd have delivered a lesson. We would of course have had to continue intelligence and counter-terrorist operations ever since.
It would have cost us maybe 5% of the cost of the Afghan war plus 0% of the cost of the Iraq war.
What do you mean by "fell short?" They never fell short of being able to deliver an amount of damage on the USA that US leaders could contemplate risking by attacking the USSR directly.
From the referenced article, "The engineered bacteria, dubbed genetically recoded organisms (GROs), have the added advantage of being resistant to many existing viruses. They are also less likely to escape the lab and survive than conventional genetically modified organisms, which should make them more palatable for commercial use."
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know what people do in cars?
I do and no way and eww!
And even if the binaries don't match, you'll have open-source Truecrypt.
or put another way, what'll happen when we have half a trillion dollars less economic activity? Since our entire civilization is based around getting people to trade among themselves. I just don't see all these productivity gains are ever going to make it down to my level...
There are over 200 million cars on the road. The first $100 Billion will go toward bying 20 million cars and trucks.
Realistically, electronically controlled vehicles will roll out in this order:
1. Prototpyes (happening now)
2. Cabs
3. Rich people
4. Trucks and buses
5. Upper middle class
6. Middle income people who can't qualifiy for a license.
That's it. There will never be computer driven cars for the masses. It will always be cheaper for them to drive their own.
Just sayin'.
And I don't think that 10% computer driven cars would do much to change congestion.
Big words. A hint of jail time and you'll give them up unless you fear that giving them up will result in more jail time than not giving them up.
If the question boils down to whether a person is a deterministic system or not, even that is an open question. Perhaps people and animals are too random to be called properly deterministic. Neurons are and other cells are highly nonlinear analog systems that be subject to macroscopic effects based on quantum noise. If that is the case it may be possible to duplicate a human being in principle -- down to the level of the quantum state of each constituent particle, but still not be possible in principle to build a system that will duplicate her behavior. On the other hand, the systems we are built of could be fundamentally stable, or multistable at some levels of approximation and it may therefore be possible to model us accurately with simpler systems such as computers. Or it may be that while our neurons are crude hacks that exhibit all kinds of complex, impossible to model behavior, at a higher level we are mulitistable and thus susceptible to accurate modeling.
The point you make about AIs being built with random elements to model the random shit that happens in our brains is an interesting one. I doubt scientists at this point could come to a consensus about whether that is somehow important to intelligence in living systems and I also doubt that philosophers could come to a consensus about whether randomness is essential to free will.
I'd say at this point, we are making faster progress on building more and more intelligent systems. There probably won't be a bright line we will cross and then everybody will say computers are people too. It's more likely there will be progress on multiple fronts as there has been in the past, and AIs will outperform people in some respects while remaining more limited than people in other areas for some time yet. But at some point, if progress maintains, AIs will be as good or better at everything than people are and we will have no excuse to not consider them our equals. And the question will be as relevant a question whether they have free will as it is whether we have free will.
I think that time is coming much sooner than the time at which we will fully understand how our own brains work, let alone be able to build a system that does the same thing.
No I'm not. MY point is that email addresses are not secure and cannot be made secure without giving them to a third party that I have no reason to trust.
Why should I trust you and your supposedly secure email service? How do I know you don't work for the NSA? The MSS? The GRU? Mossad? Google?
Whom is Slashdot working for/with?
You have to get the public key from someone you trust. The best method is in-person key exchange. Another reasonably secure method is having them send a handwritten ascii-coded key in a sealed envelope. If you're really not very trusting at all, you can then read that back to them over the phone for verification that nobody switched envelopes and hand-printed a fake key on the letter.
If there is a third party you trust, you can have the third party sign their copy of the public key. That is reasonably secure, and much less than the level of trust you would need of an email host. You merely are trusting that they are going to do a one-time transaction that you can later verify without pulling a switcharoo on you. You're not giving anybody the ability to decrypt messages meant for you or third parties.
Ultimately, all systems for exchanging information depend on some level of trust that what is ostensibly happening is actually happening. In the in-person key exchange, for example, you are trusting that the person who meets you is not an imposter. In all situations, you are trusting that the person receiving the information has a secure system and is not intentionally or unintentionally sharing your secrets with a third party unknown to you.
Such a system is inherently insecure. If I want to exchange information with another person secretly, I need to decide what level of secrecy is necessary. Is the content of the email the thing to be protected? If so, I must encrypt the content. If the fact that I am communicating with that party is also to be concealed, email is not the right system. In email, the addressing information is open by design, and anything that looks and feels like email will have that characteristic.
A system being "affected by externalities" is exactly equivalent to having different inputs. Temperature, in a system that respond to temperature, is an input and an initial condition. Digital system are designed either to directly measure such conditions or to not respond to them at all.
No, I am not blurring what "can" means. I mean no technology exists by which it might be done. Future humans (or AIs) are free to make different determinations about what constitutes "free will." We certainly make different determinations than people did 3000 years ago.
Overall, you completely failed to understand what I wrote. Go back and read again. I was quite clear that people mean at least three different things in different contexts when speaking of "free will." I did not presume to judge which you should prefer.
Please propose a mechanism by which an exact copy of an animal can be produced, down to every state that matters with respect to its behavior. It might theoretically be possible someday. That day is not today or even on the horizon. We can produce exact copies of digital systems today.
1. Facebook has to obey local laws in jurisdictions where it operates, thus, no kiddy porn or [em]animal[/em] cruelty in the USA.
2. Facebook is an advertising company. If their sponsors don't like it, it's verboten.
3. Facebook sponsors apparently like snuff films, but not sex.
Nope, that's banned apparently because (a) the behavior is consensual and (b) nobody dies.
The difference is that the AI can be exactly modeled, simply by making another copy of it. Given all the same inputs and the same data and initial conditions, a digital processing system comes to the same result every time. Humans are not digital processing systems, an identical copy of a human (or indeed any animal) cannot be made and the exact same combination of data and initial conditions cannot be produced.
But free will means a lot of things.
In one version, we ask, "Is the decision determined by the inputs alone, or does the person making the decision change the outcome?" This is pretty trivially answerable. No two humans will do the same thing in every situation, so we say a person has free will.
In another version, we ask, "Are peoples' actions determined purely by physical processes, or is there something ineffable that has to be considered to explain how people behave?" This is pretty obviously not answerable. In such a formulation, free will is the unfalisfiable hypothesis.
In the version of most interest historically, we ask, "Does each person determine his own destiny (and for Christians, salvation) or does God (or the gods) determine the actions of people?" This is also an unfalsifiable hypothesis, but it makes for great Greek tragedies.
It SHOULD force you onto servers where you alone hold the key to your data, which is the only way to do business in the first place.
What the hell? Why would I trust ANY country, or for that matter ANY third party with my encryption codes? I generate them myself, keep them to myself and never disclose them to the government or to any business.
It's not one or the other. Climate change is happening, most of it is beyond the control of Kansans and they must adapt to the changing conditions as best they can, while doing what little they can to slow the change if you can. Suppose Kansas became carbon neutal. Would that stop climate change in Kansas?
Surely an ancestor with as much variation in the species as described in the article does support creationism. This ancestor had a diverse gene pool which supports devolution as races became more distinct over time, ie, a shallowing of their gene pool rather than random mutation.
Religion aside, if all our evidence points to a single common ancestor is it not just as possible that he was created by an alien than an accident of the universe. How long before mankind can make life? Why couldn't an alien do the same before us? Just saying this because creationism doesn't mean religion and is worth scientific debate
No, the evidence supports the idea that either (a) two or more species used the same site "about the same time" if you allow for "about the same time" to cover 6x recorded history OR the individuals found represent only one species that was about as varied as modern man. There's no evidence of "devolution." Genes change by random mutation in every generation. Your genes are not 100% faithful copies of your parents' genes. http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2011/110612.html On average, people have 60 new mutations with each generation. Most of those random genetic changes are harmless, but some of them matter and devolution WOULD occur if it were not for natural selection screening out genes that result in lowered rates of reproduction.
Even minor harmful mutations are screened out over many generations. Likewise a mutation that gave a mere 1% advantage in reproduction 1.8 million years ago (the time at which these proto-people lived) would have been present in every living descendant within 50,000 years. We all have the best of what those hominids had 1.8 million years ago plus a whole lot of mutations that occurred since.
Regarding the likelihood that life was somehow introduced to our planet a billion years ago, the burden is on those who would like to advance such ideas. There isn't any reason for the rest of us to entertain such complications.
Except the most modern threats are asymmetrical as no state based actor would threaten the US openly. The US is the only country that has been doing that, preemptively. Any tactical threat to the US can only be conducted indirectly and the only ones capable of conducting a strategic attack on the US aren't interested in doing it because, unlike the US, they don't have the economic ability to sustain it.
Even if you were right, which you aren't, no country has sufficient infrastructure to sustain a direct attack on the US. Nine eleven was example of an indirect attack
that resulted in vast amounts of money being spent for no use, failure in Iraq, complete failure in Afghanistan. What the US lost was proof enough of how successful a indirect attack will be in the future as more US values are sacrificed to combat it. Either way, you still lose.
So go ahead, spend 6 billion on your obsolete methods of war - it's what your enemies want you to do anyway.
Most modern threats are asymmetric only because the USA has overwhelming military power. Conventional threats (i.e. other countries that would like to take territory that we control) still exist and presumably always will. So our methods of war aren't obsolete; they're just misapplied. When fighting small time, international non-state actors, the effective methods are those used to get Osama bin Laden and a number of other al-Qaeda leaders: intelligence work that looks a lot like police work, overt and covert work with foreign governments and where necessary narrowly targeted military actions.
The goal of completely destroying such organizations is unachievable. The goal should be making the costs of an attack like the Cole bombing or an embassy bombing or 9/11 so high and the results for the targeted country so small that it doesn't seem worth it next time somebody gets a bright idea.
If we had, for example, invaded Afghanistan, taken out their Taliban government by arresting or killing many of its senior leaders, killed as many of al-Qaeda's people as we could get our hands on and left the country in six months with a stern warning to the next government, we'd have delivered a lesson. We would of course have had to continue intelligence and counter-terrorist operations ever since.
It would have cost us maybe 5% of the cost of the Afghan war plus 0% of the cost of the Iraq war.
What do you mean by "fell short?" They never fell short of being able to deliver an amount of damage on the USA that US leaders could contemplate risking by attacking the USSR directly.
This is why Slashdot should allow posters to delete their own posts.
From the referenced article, "The engineered bacteria, dubbed genetically recoded organisms (GROs), have the added advantage of being resistant to many existing viruses. They are also less likely to escape the lab and survive than conventional genetically modified organisms, which should make them more palatable for commercial use."
I have no intention of palating any such thing.
They're the same people. It says so in my Players Handbook.
There is no means of defeating a MAD strategy. Your enemy can only get so dead, and the same goes with you.
The decide whether it's different enough. And they assume that most of the specimens they find are not freaks.