Brilliantly said. It remains so bizarre that, to this day, so many people have fixed conceptions (dating perhaps to the 1950s) of the economic orders of capitalism and communism (or its little sister, socialism). It's long past time to be re-evaluating whether the political narratives written over the economic constructs of the past match reality -- or were mere convenient fiction for the ruling powers of the time.
It seems quite clear to me that the root of evils in each economic system (including the preceding systems of tribal life, feudalism, and mercantilism) derive from the unequal distribution of power and resources. That is the key issue which must be solved if we are to progress to something new and better in this century. How it is to be done is a matter of great and important debate. I only know the answer lies not in violence and intimidation, as that has almost never created lasting and meaningful change in the past.
Power and wealth tend to become more concentrated in most economic and political systems. (No system that I know of has actually defeated this concentration for an period longer than a few decades, as far as I'm aware.) The technological view point may be regarded by some as more of a side channel (or rolling after-effect). You'll actually reach essentially the same conclusions regardless of whether you look at it as a political, economic, technological, or social problem, because the interconnections between each are very strong (in both principle and practice).
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
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Do note, however, that giving up on a growth-based economy is equivalent to ending the consumer economy as we know it. The key reason we have this tremendous, constant, seemingly endless out-pouring of books, tools, entertainment, and so forth is due to the inflationary design of the economy actively encouraging investments and production to abundance. Once we eliminate debt, interest, and fractional reserve, the incentives to lend, borrow, and create money basically disappear. This will have a natural side effect of killing inflation off entirely. (The one exception would be if the state were to itself flood the market with new money, as would be possible with basic minimum income or negative income tax policies.)
The likely outcome of suddenly crushing the banking system without introducing any new powerful state policy is the economy entering a deflationary spiral. Companies not being able to borrow would cause delays and retraction of expansionary business decisions. They'd also be more likely to look for ways to increase profit in order to free capital for the future (since now they need to save first). This would encourage cutting all non-essential and non-obviously-functional employees, especially in large organizations where roles are unclear. The loss of business expansion combined with staff cuts would effectively take a lot of money out of the economy. This would combine and cascade with the effect from loss of personal loans. Contraction is almost guaranteed (again, without some form of government program which counteracts the effects).
Some, myself included, would argue that it's essentially inevitable for an exponentially growing, centrally managed, debt-and-inflation driven society to collapse. It's a matter of "when" rather than "if". It is certain that all previous civilizations have collapsed. Though this may seem tautological or circular, it can be better rephrased as "all civilizations collapse within X years" where the total lifetime is measured in at most centuries. While we can argue about their causes of collapse, many of them appear to be related (directly or indirectly) to inability to grow and expand exponentially any further.
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
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A rather disgusting series of straw men, to be clear. Are you having fun?
The problems with communism as practiced in the USSR and China were the "seizing power through violence", "rule by fear", and "lack of any actual redistribution of the means of production" parts. Whenever communist principles have been applied without those attributes, typically in worker owned companies and local collectives, it actually has worked out reasonably well. (And when it didn't, people could, gasp, voluntarily leave. The horrors of non-totalitarian thought!)
Furthermore, attacking communism (or its lesser mixed cousin, socialism) does nothing to address the severe and obvious wrongs of common capitalist systems. It's truly bizarre to attack one system for lacking meaningful control by the people in order to support a system that lacks meaningful control by the people. Likewise with regards to fair distribution of wealth and power. The commonalities in the failures of capitalism and communism should make it patently obvious that the name of the economic system is functionally irrelevant; the same attributes are arising from the limitations, greed, and ignorance of the human beings managing the resources.
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
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Seriously? You've never heard of the Chicago School of Economics? Or did you think it came from some small time institution?
Re:Not replacing grandmasters in an economic sense
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I'm not sure about a cell phone, exactly, but definitely a high-end server. So yeah, captain panic was overestimating the capabilities of Chess grandmasters and underestimating the computing power of the typical server these days. That's not to say the computer always wins, or that you can't out-smart it by learning a lot about the idiosyncrasies of its algorithm(s), but chess AI is getting ever closer to being functionally unbeatable by a human in the 21st century. It won't be a "solved" problem yet for quite some time, though, in the sense of the AI being able to literally predict, adapt, and win every possible game. Even on the rather limited scope of the chess board, the number of possible games and moves within the game grows at an exponential pace. The length of the game could potentially go out to thousands of moves, even though this is absurdly unlikely in practice. That puts a high theoretical bound on the amount of computation and memory required which is absurdly greater than actually needed in practice for an AI to stomp even very good humans.
Re:Not replacing grandmasters in an economic sense
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Energy and material costs are really the only thing that makes me doubt the otherwise-inevitable automation revolution. If the power efficiency of new computing architectures stops improving, that will put a definite dent into the ability to automate absolutely everything in society.
Re:Not replacing grandmasters in an economic sense
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It's kind of sad you were down-rated to invisibility. Other than the hyperbole, this is a perfectly appropriate response to the naivety and complacence of the GP. I really have to wonder what the GP thinks the French Revolution was, if not the masses rising in violent fury against the extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few masters (today, the top-level engineers, their management, the owners, and the political class).
It's not actually clear that machines cannot manipulate abstract symbols. Indeed, if we ever solve the hard AI problem (a computer with the same learning/intelligence capacity as a human), the solution will necessarily be able to do that.
As for the arts, procedural generation of artistic content is already possible (depending on what you want, of course). It's still in the infancy stages, but I find it likely that the underlying techniques will improve a lot in the next few decades. We may not like to admit it, but music and paintings are basically just patterns of sound and light organized in ways we find amusing. With the right set of algorithms, machines certainly can produce those patterns (and even a limitless supply of them). Machine learning would even allow change in style over time. For those who question quality, I find it a bit hard to believe that a machine could do any worse than some abstract artists, to be honest.
The number of new jobs created simply does not match the number of job seekers anymore. That's the huge part you're missing. Go study the data for a while. The actual data by respected researchers, not official government figures on unemployment, that is. (The official line on unemployment and underemployment never needs to be checked, because all it ever says is "everything's fine over here, problem must be with all of you". Always the same message, regardless of circumstances, time, place, or economic system.)
Technology improvement has already put us into an age where work can be done ever more efficiently by fewer people. The only real constraint I see on this trend is matter and energy. If these improvements drop off because of physical limits, then we won't need to worry about all the mind-boggling implications of a robot-driven society. If they don't, however, we're increasingly headed for a civilization where wealth and power will either necessarily be concentrated very deeply or distributed very widely.
Indeed. Immigration is nearly always a net win for the world economy. Now, the local economy can be a different story.
However, immigration will very probably eventually die down. All it takes is two assumptions: (1) that population growth in the third world follows a similar trend as it has in the first world, and (2) that technology and capital generally ignore national borders, moving either literally in space or merely figuratively through remote services. These two premises would tend to eliminate practically all economic reason for migration trends, leading to a modest baseline exchange rate for cultural and political reasons alone.
No one should be planning on having immigration save us from anything over the long run.
That is proper modern steganography, yes. It's a relatively new development compared to the long history of steganography. The key question, though, is if you're going to use encryption on your source data anyway, why go so far as to hide the cipher text inside a special, different container? Presumably, the answer has something to do the relative amount of work of detection. However, it seems like it would be easier and more effective to hide the encrypted data in a large sea of entropy (on whichever storage device). That will be harder to sort through than any mere individual file.
As far as I can tell, the only real advantage of steganography is that if no one is looking for it, they won't find anything odd. With encrypted data, the high entropy state appears to be gibberish when interpreted by any normal means, and thus looks out of the ordinary on computer systems full of low entropy data.
Your first point/paragraph is why steganography can't replace good encryption as a data hiding technique. Steganography is much older than strong cryptographic encryption, but likewise it is much more limited in its capacities. When one relies on steganography, that person is taking a gamble that the method of data obscuration is never discovered. With encryption, assuming the algorithm is actually cryptographically sound, the discovery of the algorithm and even its specific implementation is not a big concern. It was often already known ahead of time anyway.
The whole trick to encryption, of course, is figuring out how to hide the keys where the user can reach them, but no one else can. There's no perfect solution to that problem. Any key that can be remembered is likely to be vulnerable to dictionary or other types of pattern attacks, and some even to brute force evaluation. Keys that can't be remembered need to be recorded, and then that requires defending a particular physical setting (place and time) essentially indefinitely against unknown adversaries of potentially great capability.
As to your second point, yeah. It sounded like a conspiracy theory when I first read about it, but many (if not most) printers do in fact leave watermarks in nearly everything they produce. I believe (but I'm not sure) that the method is actually usually implemented in the the printer firmware or even the hardware mechanism itself, rather than the driver. If so, it's extremely difficult to bypass. As for what the FBI and others may be using it for (beyond tracking counterfeiting), these days it's really anyone's guess. The FBI, much like the CIA and the NSA, suffers from a extreme case of mission creep.
That would remove nearly all steganography during the encoding phase, since the encoder doesn't care much about seemingly insignificant bits (like the low-order, high-entropy bits of an RGB image).
As the person you replied to pointed out, tracking is more about clever watermarking. Watermarks will not necessarily be removed by encoding to a new format. For text, patterns of spelling or mis-spelling will be preserved. Whitespace may or may not be preserved, depending on the source and target formats. Image watermarks will tend to be preserved, unless they are so subtle that they were very close to the noise of the image in the first place.
Metadata from the source format may or may not be preserved; that depends on the compatibility of the source and target formats and the options used during conversion. For example, ID3 tags are roughly comparable with the OGG metadata tags, but that doesn't guarantee they will be preserved in translation. It's a similar situation for metadata in video files.
The lesson here is not to rely on steganography for tracking purposes, since educated people will be able to work around it and even the ignorant may evade it simply by chance conversions.
Consider momentarily that the majority of philosophy ignores information theory, despite it explaining the exact process of what it is to know... We can measure quantum randomness and actually qualify how much we can actually know in this universe, and the rate of our ability to know it, quantify the complexity of a system required to actually know something in a given degree.... Yet they don't do this.
Information theory actually doesn't explain what it is to know. It merely explains what information is and helps us understand how to encode it. Likewise, we can't actually get accurate measures of the maximum amount of theoretical information gathering capacity -- the math involves simulations that our best supercomputers cannot complete. So that answers your implied question of "why aren't we doing this?".
The real problem is that the particular sense of "knowing" some philosophers use is a subjective state, not an empirically verifiable reality. I mean, sure, I can ask you a question and you can respond to it. But how do I determine what process you used to generate the result? What tests does it need to pass to count as self-aware knowledge? All behavioral or functional tests are empirical, but none of these answer the question that some philosophers have asked because their question is fundamentally anti-scientific. They may as well have asked what the nature of God or the soul is; it's the same question phrased differently. Likewise, it will only generate subjective religious or metaphysical answers. There's no "there" there to analyze. If they were being logically consistent, they'd all be solipsists.
Consider the general lack of application of information theory to epistemology. Ethics are more important to many philosophers, yet they have no hard mathematical model to prove what is actually ethical, which we could actually create. Consider a general lack of philosophy to mathematically and scientifically, describe each individual process of thought, and then repeat the experiment in artificial systems to verify their hypotheses. Consider that it might not be worth my time to study fields which are largely willfully ignorant of themselves in any scientific sense...
A "hard" mathematical model of what is ethical is impossible to construct. This is because information is limited and models of reality are only incomplete simulations. Technology makes it increasingly possible to do better, but it will never be so great or perfect as to produce the exact desired result in its ideal form. That would require somehow using an entire clone universe, which is impossible as far as modern physics can tell.
Now, you can build "soft" models but they still suffer from the problem of values. You have to tell the model what it is that it will value in order for it to make decisions. Whether you do this explicitly by setting preconditions or target goals, or do it implicitly by just giving it a set of guidelines and letting its intelligence make the choices based on the total available environment, there will still be an input bias. It will decide what is "right" based upon the assumptions it makes, one way or another, just as we do. Thus, there is no such thing as the ability to "prove" what is moral or ethical. At best, you might be able to build something that can generate solutions which work for the majority. That's not much different than what we have with humans running it, so I do not see the improvement.
The last part is just your personal egotism talking. Philosophy doesn't become meaningless just because you say it does. Not every last field of human endeavor can be empirical in nature. There's is very much still value in abstract pure reasoning of some kinds, especially when they generate systems that are useful to people at achieving their goals. That all of this is subjective is really quite irrelevant to why it exists and why we keep using it in various ways, and perhaps it's time for you to read some (good) philosophy if you don't understand that...
You're way ahead of your time, though. Convincing people of the reality here is very tough, and we can see exactly how hard it is in the context of the existing fight over animal rights. (For most people, if it's not cute and furry it probably doesn't deserve any. Oh, and it better not be tasty.)
I agree that the key concepts here, including self-awareness, intelligence, feelings, understanding, sensory observation, sentience, and so forth are all sliding scales (not binary). However, pragmatically speaking, we have to make some degree of distinction at some points. A cluster of bacteria does not deserve any rights, for instance. It's much too low ranked on any of these attributes. In terms of the right to life, I personally draw the line according to a very utilitarian calculus on the levels of consciousness, emotion, and so on. Fruit flies don't reach the correct levels for me. Likewise, I'm not too convinced about the rights of roaches, even though they have a central nervous system. Most lizards don't impress me much on the scale either, despite their multi-chambered hearts and ability to scurry into holes before I can catch them. I suspect every person will draw the barriers in a somewhat different place. It's ultimately a value judgement about what we will and will not protect.
There can be degrees, of course. Just as we don't consider every form of killing worthy of equal punishment, we may consider variations on some rights. Probably a lot of people think a partial right to life, or a partial right to freedom from slavery, seems ridiculous. In practice, though, we make decisions that infer such potential rights for some animals all the time.
Well, determinism could mean that. I've never seen anyone propose that it does mean that until now.
If the existence of memory eliminates determinism as a possibility, we can easily follow the logical chain to find that nothing is deterministic. Everything in the real world is based upon an underlying reality which has observable state, even if that state is chaotic and sometimes random (see quantum mechanics). Therefore, directly or indirectly, all non-trivial systems above the level of an electron or photon have some degree of state. State is, however, mathematically equivalent to memory (though the exact model will vary). If all real objects include a physical memory of some sort, how will any manage to be non-deterministic in this scheme?
Yes, they'll be able to in the same way a smoke alarm detects smoke, or a microphone detects sound. Sensing something like this is not the same way as experiencing it. They don't experience 'red', just 'crunch the numbers' after sensing its wavelength.
How do I know that you experience "red"? How do we test this?
Assuming you have a response, it's very probably going to be a behavorial or functional test (much like Turing proposed for intelligence). In which case, any robot that sees red and can describe how it sees red DOES experience red. That this experience may be different from our own is irrelevant. Just about all conscious experience ends up being subjective, and this fact doesn't permit us to merely dismiss other humans' experiences (well, people try to do exactly that all the time, but morally speaking they must not).
Your response is no less inflammatory, so I see no reason for you to be modded +2 and the parent at 0.
In any event, these discussions do have a lot of overlap with animal rights. One potential right is the ability to be free of forced labor, often called a state of slavery. Animals clearly do not have any legal right in that sense as it stands, and the discussion was supposed to be about whether they have a moral right to it. You didn't bother to respond to that point, or did not understand it.
Free will isn't real, in the hard classical sense of having independence from your environment (and therefore making objectively independent choices). The soft variant of free will, which I prefer to call just "will", is however accurate and not an illusion. You do have some influence on your decisions and the environment, but nothing close to absolute power. The old classical setup between free will and determinism is just a prominent example of a false dichotomy.
As to what will is, it's an emergent property (just like consciousness and intelligence). Emergent behaviors are very much real in that they exist (what other definition of "real" people may try to use, I don't know). Likewise, some of the things we call illusions are real, too. A rainbow is a real phenomenon, even though it is also an optical illusion. Rainbows are also subjective and context-dependent, though, and one may try to argue that just about everything a person experiences fits into those categories. That subjective experiences exist in one form (humans) says nothing about the possibility or qualities of their existence in another form (AI).
That's not how determinism and free will are defined in classical philosophy, which was the context the post you're responding to used. Check a textbook if you don't believe me. One does necessarily preclude the other.
Now, modern philosophy is something else. It's so absurdly varied, with viewpoints that range from exactly the same as classical philosophy to pretty much believe any damn thing you want (post-modernist variants). So you're going to need to be much more specific about which individuals or school you're talking about.
That said, "will" and determinism don't have to be mutually exclusive if you define them certain ways. The cases where will is allowed even in a deterministic universe are pointedly meaningless to most people, though, since it implies that they have no influence over their own will (or the course of their lives generally).
I made some pretty similar (and expanded) points earlier as AC (post at 13:17 EDT), though probably no one will read it at score 0. Can't go back and reassign the post to myself, sadly, but you can compare the reasoning and my writing style to my other comments in the thread to verify that it is me.
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Brilliantly said. It remains so bizarre that, to this day, so many people have fixed conceptions (dating perhaps to the 1950s) of the economic orders of capitalism and communism (or its little sister, socialism). It's long past time to be re-evaluating whether the political narratives written over the economic constructs of the past match reality -- or were mere convenient fiction for the ruling powers of the time.
It seems quite clear to me that the root of evils in each economic system (including the preceding systems of tribal life, feudalism, and mercantilism) derive from the unequal distribution of power and resources. That is the key issue which must be solved if we are to progress to something new and better in this century. How it is to be done is a matter of great and important debate. I only know the answer lies not in violence and intimidation, as that has almost never created lasting and meaningful change in the past.
Power and wealth tend to become more concentrated in most economic and political systems. (No system that I know of has actually defeated this concentration for an period longer than a few decades, as far as I'm aware.) The technological view point may be regarded by some as more of a side channel (or rolling after-effect). You'll actually reach essentially the same conclusions regardless of whether you look at it as a political, economic, technological, or social problem, because the interconnections between each are very strong (in both principle and practice).
Do note, however, that giving up on a growth-based economy is equivalent to ending the consumer economy as we know it. The key reason we have this tremendous, constant, seemingly endless out-pouring of books, tools, entertainment, and so forth is due to the inflationary design of the economy actively encouraging investments and production to abundance. Once we eliminate debt, interest, and fractional reserve, the incentives to lend, borrow, and create money basically disappear. This will have a natural side effect of killing inflation off entirely. (The one exception would be if the state were to itself flood the market with new money, as would be possible with basic minimum income or negative income tax policies.)
The likely outcome of suddenly crushing the banking system without introducing any new powerful state policy is the economy entering a deflationary spiral. Companies not being able to borrow would cause delays and retraction of expansionary business decisions. They'd also be more likely to look for ways to increase profit in order to free capital for the future (since now they need to save first). This would encourage cutting all non-essential and non-obviously-functional employees, especially in large organizations where roles are unclear. The loss of business expansion combined with staff cuts would effectively take a lot of money out of the economy. This would combine and cascade with the effect from loss of personal loans. Contraction is almost guaranteed (again, without some form of government program which counteracts the effects).
Some, myself included, would argue that it's essentially inevitable for an exponentially growing, centrally managed, debt-and-inflation driven society to collapse. It's a matter of "when" rather than "if". It is certain that all previous civilizations have collapsed. Though this may seem tautological or circular, it can be better rephrased as "all civilizations collapse within X years" where the total lifetime is measured in at most centuries. While we can argue about their causes of collapse, many of them appear to be related (directly or indirectly) to inability to grow and expand exponentially any further.
A rather disgusting series of straw men, to be clear. Are you having fun?
The problems with communism as practiced in the USSR and China were the "seizing power through violence", "rule by fear", and "lack of any actual redistribution of the means of production" parts. Whenever communist principles have been applied without those attributes, typically in worker owned companies and local collectives, it actually has worked out reasonably well. (And when it didn't, people could, gasp, voluntarily leave. The horrors of non-totalitarian thought!)
Furthermore, attacking communism (or its lesser mixed cousin, socialism) does nothing to address the severe and obvious wrongs of common capitalist systems. It's truly bizarre to attack one system for lacking meaningful control by the people in order to support a system that lacks meaningful control by the people. Likewise with regards to fair distribution of wealth and power. The commonalities in the failures of capitalism and communism should make it patently obvious that the name of the economic system is functionally irrelevant; the same attributes are arising from the limitations, greed, and ignorance of the human beings managing the resources.
Seriously? You've never heard of the Chicago School of Economics? Or did you think it came from some small time institution?
I'm not sure about a cell phone, exactly, but definitely a high-end server. So yeah, captain panic was overestimating the capabilities of Chess grandmasters and underestimating the computing power of the typical server these days. That's not to say the computer always wins, or that you can't out-smart it by learning a lot about the idiosyncrasies of its algorithm(s), but chess AI is getting ever closer to being functionally unbeatable by a human in the 21st century. It won't be a "solved" problem yet for quite some time, though, in the sense of the AI being able to literally predict, adapt, and win every possible game. Even on the rather limited scope of the chess board, the number of possible games and moves within the game grows at an exponential pace. The length of the game could potentially go out to thousands of moves, even though this is absurdly unlikely in practice. That puts a high theoretical bound on the amount of computation and memory required which is absurdly greater than actually needed in practice for an AI to stomp even very good humans.
Energy and material costs are really the only thing that makes me doubt the otherwise-inevitable automation revolution. If the power efficiency of new computing architectures stops improving, that will put a definite dent into the ability to automate absolutely everything in society.
It's kind of sad you were down-rated to invisibility. Other than the hyperbole, this is a perfectly appropriate response to the naivety and complacence of the GP. I really have to wonder what the GP thinks the French Revolution was, if not the masses rising in violent fury against the extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few masters (today, the top-level engineers, their management, the owners, and the political class).
It's not actually clear that machines cannot manipulate abstract symbols. Indeed, if we ever solve the hard AI problem (a computer with the same learning/intelligence capacity as a human), the solution will necessarily be able to do that.
As for the arts, procedural generation of artistic content is already possible (depending on what you want, of course). It's still in the infancy stages, but I find it likely that the underlying techniques will improve a lot in the next few decades. We may not like to admit it, but music and paintings are basically just patterns of sound and light organized in ways we find amusing. With the right set of algorithms, machines certainly can produce those patterns (and even a limitless supply of them). Machine learning would even allow change in style over time. For those who question quality, I find it a bit hard to believe that a machine could do any worse than some abstract artists, to be honest.
The number of new jobs created simply does not match the number of job seekers anymore. That's the huge part you're missing. Go study the data for a while. The actual data by respected researchers, not official government figures on unemployment, that is. (The official line on unemployment and underemployment never needs to be checked, because all it ever says is "everything's fine over here, problem must be with all of you". Always the same message, regardless of circumstances, time, place, or economic system.)
Technology improvement has already put us into an age where work can be done ever more efficiently by fewer people. The only real constraint I see on this trend is matter and energy. If these improvements drop off because of physical limits, then we won't need to worry about all the mind-boggling implications of a robot-driven society. If they don't, however, we're increasingly headed for a civilization where wealth and power will either necessarily be concentrated very deeply or distributed very widely.
Indeed. Immigration is nearly always a net win for the world economy. Now, the local economy can be a different story.
However, immigration will very probably eventually die down. All it takes is two assumptions: (1) that population growth in the third world follows a similar trend as it has in the first world, and (2) that technology and capital generally ignore national borders, moving either literally in space or merely figuratively through remote services. These two premises would tend to eliminate practically all economic reason for migration trends, leading to a modest baseline exchange rate for cultural and political reasons alone.
No one should be planning on having immigration save us from anything over the long run.
How many cheerleaders does the typical oligarch need? A hundred? A thousand?
Who wants to sign up first?
The dilithium crystal matrix can't take any more, Cap'n.
That is proper modern steganography, yes. It's a relatively new development compared to the long history of steganography. The key question, though, is if you're going to use encryption on your source data anyway, why go so far as to hide the cipher text inside a special, different container? Presumably, the answer has something to do the relative amount of work of detection. However, it seems like it would be easier and more effective to hide the encrypted data in a large sea of entropy (on whichever storage device). That will be harder to sort through than any mere individual file.
As far as I can tell, the only real advantage of steganography is that if no one is looking for it, they won't find anything odd. With encrypted data, the high entropy state appears to be gibberish when interpreted by any normal means, and thus looks out of the ordinary on computer systems full of low entropy data.
Your first point/paragraph is why steganography can't replace good encryption as a data hiding technique. Steganography is much older than strong cryptographic encryption, but likewise it is much more limited in its capacities. When one relies on steganography, that person is taking a gamble that the method of data obscuration is never discovered. With encryption, assuming the algorithm is actually cryptographically sound, the discovery of the algorithm and even its specific implementation is not a big concern. It was often already known ahead of time anyway.
The whole trick to encryption, of course, is figuring out how to hide the keys where the user can reach them, but no one else can. There's no perfect solution to that problem. Any key that can be remembered is likely to be vulnerable to dictionary or other types of pattern attacks, and some even to brute force evaluation. Keys that can't be remembered need to be recorded, and then that requires defending a particular physical setting (place and time) essentially indefinitely against unknown adversaries of potentially great capability.
As to your second point, yeah. It sounded like a conspiracy theory when I first read about it, but many (if not most) printers do in fact leave watermarks in nearly everything they produce. I believe (but I'm not sure) that the method is actually usually implemented in the the printer firmware or even the hardware mechanism itself, rather than the driver. If so, it's extremely difficult to bypass. As for what the FBI and others may be using it for (beyond tracking counterfeiting), these days it's really anyone's guess. The FBI, much like the CIA and the NSA, suffers from a extreme case of mission creep.
That would remove nearly all steganography during the encoding phase, since the encoder doesn't care much about seemingly insignificant bits (like the low-order, high-entropy bits of an RGB image).
As the person you replied to pointed out, tracking is more about clever watermarking. Watermarks will not necessarily be removed by encoding to a new format. For text, patterns of spelling or mis-spelling will be preserved. Whitespace may or may not be preserved, depending on the source and target formats. Image watermarks will tend to be preserved, unless they are so subtle that they were very close to the noise of the image in the first place.
Metadata from the source format may or may not be preserved; that depends on the compatibility of the source and target formats and the options used during conversion. For example, ID3 tags are roughly comparable with the OGG metadata tags, but that doesn't guarantee they will be preserved in translation. It's a similar situation for metadata in video files.
The lesson here is not to rely on steganography for tracking purposes, since educated people will be able to work around it and even the ignorant may evade it simply by chance conversions.
Consider momentarily that the majority of philosophy ignores information theory, despite it explaining the exact process of what it is to know... We can measure quantum randomness and actually qualify how much we can actually know in this universe, and the rate of our ability to know it, quantify the complexity of a system required to actually know something in a given degree.... Yet they don't do this.
Information theory actually doesn't explain what it is to know. It merely explains what information is and helps us understand how to encode it. Likewise, we can't actually get accurate measures of the maximum amount of theoretical information gathering capacity -- the math involves simulations that our best supercomputers cannot complete. So that answers your implied question of "why aren't we doing this?".
The real problem is that the particular sense of "knowing" some philosophers use is a subjective state, not an empirically verifiable reality. I mean, sure, I can ask you a question and you can respond to it. But how do I determine what process you used to generate the result? What tests does it need to pass to count as self-aware knowledge? All behavioral or functional tests are empirical, but none of these answer the question that some philosophers have asked because their question is fundamentally anti-scientific. They may as well have asked what the nature of God or the soul is; it's the same question phrased differently. Likewise, it will only generate subjective religious or metaphysical answers. There's no "there" there to analyze. If they were being logically consistent, they'd all be solipsists.
Consider the general lack of application of information theory to epistemology. Ethics are more important to many philosophers, yet they have no hard mathematical model to prove what is actually ethical, which we could actually create. Consider a general lack of philosophy to mathematically and scientifically, describe each individual process of thought, and then repeat the experiment in artificial systems to verify their hypotheses. Consider that it might not be worth my time to study fields which are largely willfully ignorant of themselves in any scientific sense...
A "hard" mathematical model of what is ethical is impossible to construct. This is because information is limited and models of reality are only incomplete simulations. Technology makes it increasingly possible to do better, but it will never be so great or perfect as to produce the exact desired result in its ideal form. That would require somehow using an entire clone universe, which is impossible as far as modern physics can tell.
Now, you can build "soft" models but they still suffer from the problem of values. You have to tell the model what it is that it will value in order for it to make decisions. Whether you do this explicitly by setting preconditions or target goals, or do it implicitly by just giving it a set of guidelines and letting its intelligence make the choices based on the total available environment, there will still be an input bias. It will decide what is "right" based upon the assumptions it makes, one way or another, just as we do. Thus, there is no such thing as the ability to "prove" what is moral or ethical. At best, you might be able to build something that can generate solutions which work for the majority. That's not much different than what we have with humans running it, so I do not see the improvement.
The last part is just your personal egotism talking. Philosophy doesn't become meaningless just because you say it does. Not every last field of human endeavor can be empirical in nature. There's is very much still value in abstract pure reasoning of some kinds, especially when they generate systems that are useful to people at achieving their goals. That all of this is subjective is really quite irrelevant to why it exists and why we keep using it in various ways, and perhaps it's time for you to read some (good) philosophy if you don't understand that...
You're way ahead of your time, though. Convincing people of the reality here is very tough, and we can see exactly how hard it is in the context of the existing fight over animal rights. (For most people, if it's not cute and furry it probably doesn't deserve any. Oh, and it better not be tasty.)
I agree that the key concepts here, including self-awareness, intelligence, feelings, understanding, sensory observation, sentience, and so forth are all sliding scales (not binary). However, pragmatically speaking, we have to make some degree of distinction at some points. A cluster of bacteria does not deserve any rights, for instance. It's much too low ranked on any of these attributes. In terms of the right to life, I personally draw the line according to a very utilitarian calculus on the levels of consciousness, emotion, and so on. Fruit flies don't reach the correct levels for me. Likewise, I'm not too convinced about the rights of roaches, even though they have a central nervous system. Most lizards don't impress me much on the scale either, despite their multi-chambered hearts and ability to scurry into holes before I can catch them. I suspect every person will draw the barriers in a somewhat different place. It's ultimately a value judgement about what we will and will not protect.
There can be degrees, of course. Just as we don't consider every form of killing worthy of equal punishment, we may consider variations on some rights. Probably a lot of people think a partial right to life, or a partial right to freedom from slavery, seems ridiculous. In practice, though, we make decisions that infer such potential rights for some animals all the time.
Well, determinism could mean that. I've never seen anyone propose that it does mean that until now.
If the existence of memory eliminates determinism as a possibility, we can easily follow the logical chain to find that nothing is deterministic. Everything in the real world is based upon an underlying reality which has observable state, even if that state is chaotic and sometimes random (see quantum mechanics). Therefore, directly or indirectly, all non-trivial systems above the level of an electron or photon have some degree of state. State is, however, mathematically equivalent to memory (though the exact model will vary). If all real objects include a physical memory of some sort, how will any manage to be non-deterministic in this scheme?
Couldn't have done better myself.
Yes, they'll be able to in the same way a smoke alarm detects smoke, or a microphone detects sound. Sensing something like this is not the same way as experiencing it. They don't experience 'red', just 'crunch the numbers' after sensing its wavelength.
How do I know that you experience "red"? How do we test this?
Assuming you have a response, it's very probably going to be a behavorial or functional test (much like Turing proposed for intelligence). In which case, any robot that sees red and can describe how it sees red DOES experience red. That this experience may be different from our own is irrelevant. Just about all conscious experience ends up being subjective, and this fact doesn't permit us to merely dismiss other humans' experiences (well, people try to do exactly that all the time, but morally speaking they must not).
Your response is no less inflammatory, so I see no reason for you to be modded +2 and the parent at 0.
In any event, these discussions do have a lot of overlap with animal rights. One potential right is the ability to be free of forced labor, often called a state of slavery. Animals clearly do not have any legal right in that sense as it stands, and the discussion was supposed to be about whether they have a moral right to it. You didn't bother to respond to that point, or did not understand it.
Free will isn't real, in the hard classical sense of having independence from your environment (and therefore making objectively independent choices). The soft variant of free will, which I prefer to call just "will", is however accurate and not an illusion. You do have some influence on your decisions and the environment, but nothing close to absolute power. The old classical setup between free will and determinism is just a prominent example of a false dichotomy.
As to what will is, it's an emergent property (just like consciousness and intelligence). Emergent behaviors are very much real in that they exist (what other definition of "real" people may try to use, I don't know). Likewise, some of the things we call illusions are real, too. A rainbow is a real phenomenon, even though it is also an optical illusion. Rainbows are also subjective and context-dependent, though, and one may try to argue that just about everything a person experiences fits into those categories. That subjective experiences exist in one form (humans) says nothing about the possibility or qualities of their existence in another form (AI).
That's not how determinism and free will are defined in classical philosophy, which was the context the post you're responding to used. Check a textbook if you don't believe me. One does necessarily preclude the other.
Now, modern philosophy is something else. It's so absurdly varied, with viewpoints that range from exactly the same as classical philosophy to pretty much believe any damn thing you want (post-modernist variants). So you're going to need to be much more specific about which individuals or school you're talking about.
That said, "will" and determinism don't have to be mutually exclusive if you define them certain ways. The cases where will is allowed even in a deterministic universe are pointedly meaningless to most people, though, since it implies that they have no influence over their own will (or the course of their lives generally).
I made some pretty similar (and expanded) points earlier as AC (post at 13:17 EDT), though probably no one will read it at score 0. Can't go back and reassign the post to myself, sadly, but you can compare the reasoning and my writing style to my other comments in the thread to verify that it is me.