Statements of the form "Everybody thinks X" are obvious nonsense. Alas, anyone who doesn't think X feels the need to object, producing a bunch of indignant replies. Thus, it's a common tactic for trolls to use. Of course, that doesn't mean someone who says something like that is an intentional troll, sometimes they're just stupid, or sometimes they're otherwise intelligent people displaying a momentary lapse in judgment.
In any case, it is true that you were writing nonsense, and it's a reasonable (if not necessarily correct) supposition that you were trolling.
My Japanese teacher told me, if you want to torture someone from the Japan, when you introduce yourself, tell them your name is "Laurel". The true genius of this is, people are less concerned if you mispronounce some random word than if you mispronounce their name. Talk about pressure... hehe.
Naw. He's so obviously a nutjob (and being disbarred is just going to feed the paranoia) that we want him to stick around, and keep talking to the press at every opportunity! Just as long as he can't drag innocent people through expensive court battles, he's not only harmless, he's quite helpful to have around, making his side of the debate look kooky.
He may not be very likable, in and out of the courtroom, but he's correct as it concerns grand theft auto, howard stern, hip hop music and the like. In fact, if you look at political history you can trace the political health of a regime through the music that is popular at the time.
Um, no. In fact, that's complete bullshit. Just how would you even going about quantifying the political health of a regime? Even if you could, how would then quantify music in a way that relates meaningfully? I suspect you have no studies or evidence to back that absurd proposition, but even if you did, it'd be obvious from the start that the methodology of the study is hopelessly unscientific. In other words, this is just complete and utter bullshit made up to support an argument that's just as bogus.
I will give you this: it's an old and persistent idea, it goes back at least to Plato. Of course, he had no evidence or good reason for saying it, either.
... Perhaps in 30 years time a new generation will revive computer science, but we are not advancing at all in AI.
Actually, I think we are. We spent years wasting time on horribly misguided efforts based on a Cartesian view of the mind, as a product of logic, rules, and knowledge representation -- things that are useful to a mind once you have one, but utterly unrelated to what a mind is actually made of and how it actually functions. So, rather than wasting time on these things that "pointed the way forward" to the fantasy land of how minds don't work and never did, we're spending more time on techniques and models that actually make some sort of sense, when looking at how the only known examples of intelligent machines (brains) actually do work. Things like OOP and MOP don't play a role in this, of course, since even simple message passing is overkill when modeling how minds actually work. The basic program creating an artificial mind has no need for rich semantic content, since such a thing doesn't exist on that basic a level. That's the sort of thing you feed the mind once you have it going, but it's not helpful in building it to begin with.
Recent work in neural networks and robotics have done more to advance the quest for AI than all the time wasted monkeying around with LISP/CLOS/MOP, Prolog, expert systems, and the like, IMHO.
> If you take a look at the miracles ascribed to God in the Bible, we're pretty close to sending in resumes for his job already.
> We can even resurrect dead people, if we get to them in time.
I beg to differ...
Dead is dead. If a person can be revived, he or she is, by definition, not dead! Anything else is word games... IOW "if he's resting, I'll wake him up!"
The problem with your definition of dead is, we could never declare anyone dead! Maybe we can't revive them today, but who knows what we might be able to do in the coming decades. If your definition of "dead" were in widespread use, the best we could answer to the question of "Is he dead?" is "Um, maybe, but we'll never know for sure..."
... the only difference is it is wrapped in technology instead of mysticism.
Yes, such a trivial difference. Tell you what, I'll try to boil a pot of water using technological means, while you try to do the same using mystical means. We'll see who gets to drink their tea first.
In a sense... Had Christianity not came about and caused the downfall of the Roman Empire we would still be using slave labor for most tasks today and not had the need for technological advancements.
The downfall of the Roman Empire was assured. The Dark Ages that followed, however, were as dark as they were and lasted as long as they did because of the Church. Christianity set us back centuries...
This, of course, is not provable. But it's a lot more likely than what you said.
... it could quite reasonably lead to the conclusion that consciousness is just an illusion, that there is no inherent essence to my being. You and I are just what resides in the pattern of our molecular configurations.
You and I are not illusions. We are, however, abstractions. We don't have an "inherent essence" any more than an OS process does. (Which, if you understand the difference between a program and a process, is probably even worse.) The funny part of the argument is where someone insists that shutdown down a process on one server and starting an identical process on another is death to the original process, but thinks suspending the process for eight hours and then resuming it is really any different. It is different, but only because we're using a different abstraction to describe the process. It's not different in any essential manner.
That's one way of looking at it. Of course, if you just did a memmove, you'd end up with exactly the same result, but you'd probably think of it as the same object in a different memory location.
Which view is the "correct" one? There's no fact of the matter on that. The object or objects are simply abstractions anyhow, you can think of it either way and be equally correct.
What many people fail to realize is, the same is true of people. The wetware we run on is certainly physical, but what most people thing of as the "person", the "self", "me" -- e.g., one's mind -- that too is an abstraction.
Your argument is that since the copy isn't made of the same atoms as the original, it's not the same person?
I won't argue with that. But, given you believe that, surely you realize the person who had your name and lived in your house last year is long dead, and you're just a copy of that person, right?
If you don't agree with that, that calls your first assertion into question. If you do, then what's your objection to the teleport? Is it just the timeframe? The next-year you isn't the same either way, the current you is dead either way, but you just prefer to have your molecules replaced in smaller batches over time rather than all at once? What difference does it make? You're just as much alive or dead either way...
... at which point progress will literally leap forward...
Um, I don't think it's possible for progress to literally leap. And it wouldn't be very impressive if it did, since whenever something literally leaps forward, it tends to cover a very small distance, possibly impressive for the size of the thing going the leaping, but not really very far in the grand scheme of things. Giant leaps tend to be of the metaphorical variety...
...So what happens when it determines that the biggest problem with this planet is the ugly bags of mostly water...?
Let me rephrase that:
When given a problem to solve, what happens if it determines that humans are the issue?
There's a kind of thinking error that occurs in humans a lot where their train of thought essentially jumps the tracks. They use irrelevant reasons to justify unrelated things, go off on what's really a non-sequitur and try to tie it back to the original train of thought, and such. You're basically asking what happens when the super-intelligent AI makes this same kind of fundamental logical error. If the issue is global warming, then the issue is global warming. If it's resource consumption, it's resource consumption. Etc. "Humans are the issue" only makes sense as an answer when the entity contemplating the question can't keep its eye on the ball. Possibly current human activity contributes to the problem, but concluding from that that "humans are the issue" is just really bad logic. The fact that humans do so all the time highlights how poor we are at thinking sometimes.
The only answer to "what happens" is nothing, because it doesn't happen to begin with. If it's a better-than-human intelligence, it's certainly not going to engage in that kind of sloppy thinking. It should certainly be able to juggle multiple priorities and values, just as we do, except better. Unless the problem it's asked to solve is "how do we eradicate all the humans", it should be able to find a better solution than "eradicate all the humans", indeed it should do a better job at that than we do (we seem to suck at finding solutions that don't involve eradicating humans, especially in the last eight years).
Most people place the singularity as the point we create better-than-human intelligence for precisely that reason. The term "event horizon" might be more apt. The point is, at that point, we as mere humans can't really comprehend what happens after that, any more than your cat can comprehend the impact of the Internet on the future -- both you and your cat lack the intelligence to understand what happens after that, it would require better-than-human intelligence to understand. The milestone here is not "chosen" per se. It's not a choice by us, but merely a consequence of our nature.
"We have a tax system that punishes people who are successful in exploiting a new, innovate technology, all while allowing monumentally-stupid juries to assign obscene awards." Please explain to me how "abstract reasoning" has anything to do with the statement as you wrote it. Clearly the way you wrote the sentence implies it is part of the same thought process. If the two are unrelated, they should be separated into two sentences at the least and two paragraphs is generally the accepted practice of English grammar. Perhaps I was/am being pedantic.
Actually, it's worse that that. Diagram the sentence. It actually says that the tax system is "allowing monumentally-stupid juries to assign obscene awards". There are two predicate clauses here, the first saying the tax system punishes something, and the second saying the tax system allows something. It's not merely that he didn't break up two separate thoughts -- he outright says the latter is an action of the former, then when you called him on it, tried to lambaste you for having better reading skills than his writing skills.
Apparently your failure of abstract reasoning was that you failed to read his mind. You responded to what he actually said, rather than what he meant to say. Clearly your reasoning is deficient when you can't simply read his mind and know he didn't mean what he said.;)
upload. upload. upload. Will you people PLEASE stop saying that word?
If I made a program that could react like you in every way, would you happily shoot yourself knowing that in the program you live on?
Nope. I'd want to go on living, thank you very much. But what's that got to do with your first "question"? Is the second question supposed to be some argument to support not using the term "upload"?
If I upload a file to my website, does it cease to exist on my local hard drive? Nope. Still have a copy here, even after uploading it. Do I want to delete the local copy? No, I want to keep it. Does this mean I shouldn't call uploading a file "uploading" either? I don't see why my attitude towards whether to keep or delete the original copy has any bearing on the question.
The singularity folks seem to argue "There's this cool trend of the rate of change of technology increasing. The trend can only continue past a point (the singularity) if we replace brains with computers so that we/they think faster. Therefore brains will be replaced." which is clearly a load of crap.
Um, that is a load of crap, but it also appears to be a straw-man argument, as I've never heard any of "the singularity folks" make it. The argument they make is pretty much the reverse of what you just said -- put what you have after "therefore" before it, and put what you ahve before "therefore" after it -- that's the argument they make.
You don't need unbounded recursion. If simulated universe A is simulating universe B then it makes sense for the machine running A to optimize computation by running B directly on the physical hardware. We are all running directly under the root node.
In order words, a virtual reality inside a virtual reality is not emulated (ala Bochs), but virtualized (ala VMware).;)
It makes sense, if you blindly accept the wild assumptions it makes without any real justification.
That would be a prerequisite, since that's how a logical argument works. No logical argument ever proves its conclusion is true. That is beyond the scope (and ability) of an argument. All that a logical argument proves is that its conclusion follows from its premises. What follows from that is that either the conclusion is true, or at least one of the premises is false.
What you're saying is, the argument makes perfect sense, and the conclusion is bullshit, which is fine. As the old saying goes, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.
It should be noted that the assumptions it makes "without any real justification" are deliberately chosen because they're common assumptions made by a large segment of the transhumanist futurists. The fact that they lead to a seemingly bizarre conclusion forces everyone to take a good, hard, critical look at those assumptions in a way they might not otherwise. Which is, ultimately, the goal of any philosopher. Philosophers do not now and never have had any answers; the great ones are the first to admit they know nothing. When they do service to humanity, they do so by forcing people to actually think about tough questions that they otherwise blithely assume they know the answer to. It rarely changes anyone's mind, either, but they're better off for having at least thought about it.
The day may come when computers replace human translators like me. But that day will also see the replacement of airplane pilots, surgeons, software creators, soldiers, you name it.
When the day comes that computers can replace human translators, I'd wager that all the other people on your list will have already been replaced, years or decades earlier. They all do jobs that are easier to computerize and require less in the way of human judgement. As for artistic pursuits, they'll probably get replaced after translators, but even the artist is likely to replaced eventually.
It is interesting to note that we've had a relatively stable liberal party (save for a rough spot in the 1820's) since the late 1700's, whereas we've had a succession of conservative parties that rise, go for while, often do quite well, but then implode (Federalist -> National Republican -> Whig -> Republican without even considering the side-branches and parallel ones like the American "Know-Nothing" Party and such). One has to wonder if we're heading into another episode where the conservatives revitalize themselves by breaking apart and reforming under a new banner yet again...
You may be right about the Democrats needing to prop it up, too. That rough spot in the 1820's was caused when the Federalists imploded and the Democratic-Republican party started to disintegrate simply because it had no significant opposition.
Slashdot Mirror
There goes your geek cred...
Statements of the form "Everybody thinks X" are obvious nonsense. Alas, anyone who doesn't think X feels the need to object, producing a bunch of indignant replies. Thus, it's a common tactic for trolls to use. Of course, that doesn't mean someone who says something like that is an intentional troll, sometimes they're just stupid, or sometimes they're otherwise intelligent people displaying a momentary lapse in judgment.
In any case, it is true that you were writing nonsense, and it's a reasonable (if not necessarily correct) supposition that you were trolling.
My Japanese teacher told me, if you want to torture someone from the Japan, when you introduce yourself, tell them your name is "Laurel". The true genius of this is, people are less concerned if you mispronounce some random word than if you mispronounce their name. Talk about pressure... hehe.
Um, so think both testing code and validating input have nothing to do with security? o.O
Actually, I see McCain more as a FORTRAN man.
Naw. He's so obviously a nutjob (and being disbarred is just going to feed the paranoia) that we want him to stick around, and keep talking to the press at every opportunity! Just as long as he can't drag innocent people through expensive court battles, he's not only harmless, he's quite helpful to have around, making his side of the debate look kooky.
Um, no. In fact, that's complete bullshit. Just how would you even going about quantifying the political health of a regime? Even if you could, how would then quantify music in a way that relates meaningfully? I suspect you have no studies or evidence to back that absurd proposition, but even if you did, it'd be obvious from the start that the methodology of the study is hopelessly unscientific. In other words, this is just complete and utter bullshit made up to support an argument that's just as bogus.
I will give you this: it's an old and persistent idea, it goes back at least to Plato. Of course, he had no evidence or good reason for saying it, either.
... Perhaps in 30 years time a new generation will revive computer science, but we are not advancing at all in AI.Actually, I think we are. We spent years wasting time on horribly misguided efforts based on a Cartesian view of the mind, as a product of logic, rules, and knowledge representation -- things that are useful to a mind once you have one, but utterly unrelated to what a mind is actually made of and how it actually functions. So, rather than wasting time on these things that "pointed the way forward" to the fantasy land of how minds don't work and never did, we're spending more time on techniques and models that actually make some sort of sense, when looking at how the only known examples of intelligent machines (brains) actually do work. Things like OOP and MOP don't play a role in this, of course, since even simple message passing is overkill when modeling how minds actually work. The basic program creating an artificial mind has no need for rich semantic content, since such a thing doesn't exist on that basic a level. That's the sort of thing you feed the mind once you have it going, but it's not helpful in building it to begin with.
Recent work in neural networks and robotics have done more to advance the quest for AI than all the time wasted monkeying around with LISP/CLOS/MOP, Prolog, expert systems, and the like, IMHO.
The problem with your definition of dead is, we could never declare anyone dead! Maybe we can't revive them today, but who knows what we might be able to do in the coming decades. If your definition of "dead" were in widespread use, the best we could answer to the question of "Is he dead?" is "Um, maybe, but we'll never know for sure..."
... the only difference is it is wrapped in technology instead of mysticism.Yes, such a trivial difference. Tell you what, I'll try to boil a pot of water using technological means, while you try to do the same using mystical means. We'll see who gets to drink their tea first.
The downfall of the Roman Empire was assured. The Dark Ages that followed, however, were as dark as they were and lasted as long as they did because of the Church. Christianity set us back centuries...
This, of course, is not provable. But it's a lot more likely than what you said.
... it could quite reasonably lead to the conclusion that consciousness is just an illusion, that there is no inherent essence to my being. You and I are just what resides in the pattern of our molecular configurations.You and I are not illusions. We are, however, abstractions. We don't have an "inherent essence" any more than an OS process does. (Which, if you understand the difference between a program and a process, is probably even worse.) The funny part of the argument is where someone insists that shutdown down a process on one server and starting an identical process on another is death to the original process, but thinks suspending the process for eight hours and then resuming it is really any different. It is different, but only because we're using a different abstraction to describe the process. It's not different in any essential manner.
That's one way of looking at it. Of course, if you just did a memmove, you'd end up with exactly the same result, but you'd probably think of it as the same object in a different memory location.
Which view is the "correct" one? There's no fact of the matter on that. The object or objects are simply abstractions anyhow, you can think of it either way and be equally correct.
What many people fail to realize is, the same is true of people. The wetware we run on is certainly physical, but what most people thing of as the "person", the "self", "me" -- e.g., one's mind -- that too is an abstraction.
Your argument is that since the copy isn't made of the same atoms as the original, it's not the same person?
I won't argue with that. But, given you believe that, surely you realize the person who had your name and lived in your house last year is long dead, and you're just a copy of that person, right?
If you don't agree with that, that calls your first assertion into question. If you do, then what's your objection to the teleport? Is it just the timeframe? The next-year you isn't the same either way, the current you is dead either way, but you just prefer to have your molecules replaced in smaller batches over time rather than all at once? What difference does it make? You're just as much alive or dead either way...
... at which point progress will literally leap forwardUm, I don't think it's possible for progress to literally leap. And it wouldn't be very impressive if it did, since whenever something literally leaps forward, it tends to cover a very small distance, possibly impressive for the size of the thing going the leaping, but not really very far in the grand scheme of things. Giant leaps tend to be of the metaphorical variety...
...So what happens when it determines that the biggest problem with this planet is the ugly bags of mostly water...?
Let me rephrase that:
When given a problem to solve, what happens if it determines that humans are the issue?
There's a kind of thinking error that occurs in humans a lot where their train of thought essentially jumps the tracks. They use irrelevant reasons to justify unrelated things, go off on what's really a non-sequitur and try to tie it back to the original train of thought, and such. You're basically asking what happens when the super-intelligent AI makes this same kind of fundamental logical error. If the issue is global warming, then the issue is global warming. If it's resource consumption, it's resource consumption. Etc. "Humans are the issue" only makes sense as an answer when the entity contemplating the question can't keep its eye on the ball. Possibly current human activity contributes to the problem, but concluding from that that "humans are the issue" is just really bad logic. The fact that humans do so all the time highlights how poor we are at thinking sometimes.
The only answer to "what happens" is nothing, because it doesn't happen to begin with. If it's a better-than-human intelligence, it's certainly not going to engage in that kind of sloppy thinking. It should certainly be able to juggle multiple priorities and values, just as we do, except better. Unless the problem it's asked to solve is "how do we eradicate all the humans", it should be able to find a better solution than "eradicate all the humans", indeed it should do a better job at that than we do (we seem to suck at finding solutions that don't involve eradicating humans, especially in the last eight years).
BINGO! I have no desire to "upload", but I seriously need an upgrade!
Most people place the singularity as the point we create better-than-human intelligence for precisely that reason. The term "event horizon" might be more apt. The point is, at that point, we as mere humans can't really comprehend what happens after that, any more than your cat can comprehend the impact of the Internet on the future -- both you and your cat lack the intelligence to understand what happens after that, it would require better-than-human intelligence to understand. The milestone here is not "chosen" per se. It's not a choice by us, but merely a consequence of our nature.
Actually, it's worse that that. Diagram the sentence. It actually says that the tax system is "allowing monumentally-stupid juries to assign obscene awards". There are two predicate clauses here, the first saying the tax system punishes something, and the second saying the tax system allows something. It's not merely that he didn't break up two separate thoughts -- he outright says the latter is an action of the former, then when you called him on it, tried to lambaste you for having better reading skills than his writing skills.
Apparently your failure of abstract reasoning was that you failed to read his mind. You responded to what he actually said, rather than what he meant to say. Clearly your reasoning is deficient when you can't simply read his mind and know he didn't mean what he said. ;)
upload. upload. upload. Will you people PLEASE stop saying that word?
If I made a program that could react like you in every way, would you happily shoot yourself knowing that in the program you live on?
Nope. I'd want to go on living, thank you very much. But what's that got to do with your first "question"? Is the second question supposed to be some argument to support not using the term "upload"?
If I upload a file to my website, does it cease to exist on my local hard drive? Nope. Still have a copy here, even after uploading it. Do I want to delete the local copy? No, I want to keep it. Does this mean I shouldn't call uploading a file "uploading" either? I don't see why my attitude towards whether to keep or delete the original copy has any bearing on the question.
Um, that is a load of crap, but it also appears to be a straw-man argument, as I've never heard any of "the singularity folks" make it. The argument they make is pretty much the reverse of what you just said -- put what you have after "therefore" before it, and put what you ahve before "therefore" after it -- that's the argument they make.
In order words, a virtual reality inside a virtual reality is not emulated (ala Bochs), but virtualized (ala VMware). ;)
That would be a prerequisite, since that's how a logical argument works. No logical argument ever proves its conclusion is true. That is beyond the scope (and ability) of an argument. All that a logical argument proves is that its conclusion follows from its premises. What follows from that is that either the conclusion is true, or at least one of the premises is false.
What you're saying is, the argument makes perfect sense, and the conclusion is bullshit, which is fine. As the old saying goes, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.
It should be noted that the assumptions it makes "without any real justification" are deliberately chosen because they're common assumptions made by a large segment of the transhumanist futurists. The fact that they lead to a seemingly bizarre conclusion forces everyone to take a good, hard, critical look at those assumptions in a way they might not otherwise. Which is, ultimately, the goal of any philosopher. Philosophers do not now and never have had any answers; the great ones are the first to admit they know nothing. When they do service to humanity, they do so by forcing people to actually think about tough questions that they otherwise blithely assume they know the answer to. It rarely changes anyone's mind, either, but they're better off for having at least thought about it.
When the day comes that computers can replace human translators, I'd wager that all the other people on your list will have already been replaced, years or decades earlier. They all do jobs that are easier to computerize and require less in the way of human judgement. As for artistic pursuits, they'll probably get replaced after translators, but even the artist is likely to replaced eventually.
It is interesting to note that we've had a relatively stable liberal party (save for a rough spot in the 1820's) since the late 1700's, whereas we've had a succession of conservative parties that rise, go for while, often do quite well, but then implode (Federalist -> National Republican -> Whig -> Republican without even considering the side-branches and parallel ones like the American "Know-Nothing" Party and such). One has to wonder if we're heading into another episode where the conservatives revitalize themselves by breaking apart and reforming under a new banner yet again...
You may be right about the Democrats needing to prop it up, too. That rough spot in the 1820's was caused when the Federalists imploded and the Democratic-Republican party started to disintegrate simply because it had no significant opposition.