I heard that your goal is to cut delivery times, the target delivery time is one hour, is that right?
Well, in all my days of dealing with technology, I noticed one very fast delivery mechanism. It is so fast and so simple.
Seeing as how the delivery person is merely an interface between the storage and the home, there is already an existing technology that reduces the delivery interface. I'll bet you already know what that technology is, because you're incredibly smart. But for the other people on this forum, the technology is called "vending machine."
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Economies of scale in Amazon fulfillment centers allow for efficient distribution of goods, beating traditional stores and vending machines (full of stuff no one seems to want). Yet the notion of having someone deliver purchases directly into my home seems to be over the top inefficient too. I wouldn't even touch the security risk with a ten foot pole attached to a cattle prod. The pendulum swings too far the other way, doesn't it? A possible middle may be numerous pickup centers where people can collect close to home.
Sure they saw how science + warfare could increase destructiveness, but there's no more reason they should have anticipated Nukes in 20-30 years in 1920 than 1820.
That's the problem of being in the earlier decades of a century. In another 20 or 30 years, people will feel more urgent to have done something because the century will have worn away or the weight of the questions from earlier parts of the century will be felt. Also there is more confidence in the middle or later century that many questions have been answered and bold steps can be taken. Sending a man to the moon or bringing down the Berlin wall might not have been done at the turn of a century. People would be too into thinking what the new era should be rather than trying to effect what it seems to be.
So, we should have good reason to predict powerful AI in 20 to 30 years, or perhaps breaking the lightspeed barrier.
if you have no capital you may find yourself with no means to obtain it because your labor is now worthless.
So it is nowadays with the developed world versus the third world. What can you do, right? You have to find your niche.
There are a lot of ways to look at this:
My blood runs cold. My memory has just been sold. My angel is a centerfold
Conjoin this with the question "What do you call a blonde with two brain cells?"
Let's accept the gambit of the devil's advocate and look at the situation where the production from human genius is worthless. What kind of world is this? Are there machines making amazing discoveries or incredible products? Who is the consumer? Just the wealthy? Are results just popped into warehouses or dropped off in fields?
Perhaps it's better to be considered worthless or inconsequential. Be harmless and unnoticeable like ants.
Suppose everything on Amazon was available for the low low price of zero down zero payments until hell freezes over. Suppose that they parked a burro or cube van on your front lawn filled with newfangled things you never seen before, and you can take your pick until you have everything you want, you send it away and it's replaced with another one filled with more stuff, ad infinitum.
What about a world where you are valued for your opinion (but not expressed in words)? Your behavior is read remotely (in great detail, so much for privacy), and these observations are used as feedback to the machines to tell them what to produce. The goal is not necessarily your pleasure or pain, but somehow your behavior is a form of knowledge suggesting how to direct the use of resources. As ever there is scarcity and the need for choice, but it is human activity (minus any self serving brought on by knowledge of being observed) that plays some role in the choice. Because humans have adapted themselves to this world, human opinion or human well-being could be a harbinger of good times for man and machine alike.
There doesn't even need to be a malevolent AI to take over humanity. It could be a benevolent takeover that is prompted by people.
The whole idea of takeover presuppose freedom of the will.
But people and even machines are bound by physical "laws". Our brains behave precisely as they MUST while the rest of the universe ticks onwards to its destiny. AI does not have the free choice to take over insofar as it does not have the freedom to control its own fate even if it was placed into a galaxy of abundant resources.
As a minor observation, we can further restrict machines' freedoms.
The thing is, we aren't really to fear being taken over by machine intelligence. We are already using machines to take over ourselves, recursively. Often we find our decisions are based on what we see on the Internet. Consider an example. All I know about Donald Trump is from the media. I haven't actually seen the guy in front of me. He already sounds like a fictional character. If I find out he's an elaborate fiction - fake news! - it would merely reaffirm a saner view of the world. However, I willingly play along with the media reports so far, letting gullibility run free, as there is little contradictory evidence.
It would be unsurprising if humans were taken over (who knows by what - other humans? other species? AI? corporations?). We're actually a pretty silly lot, thinking we are smart, but mired in our limited minds. Even those that take over would likely be apples falling close to the tree, and it would be a toss up as to which side (of 2? 3? more?) is dominant at any day.
Here's the dealio. Information is becoming vast and ubiquitous, yet it needs to be made available cohesively. You could fetch your own water, but you would rather pay for a water utility. Perhaps it is time for a local news utility funded by your taxes. If you trust your local government to pipe drinkable water to you and not poison, you can trust them to supply you the news, or so you hope.
> > Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell > > them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires. > > Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who > > loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped > > cover.
> You want moneylosing local journalism, fund it yourself.
Well, if they really found themselves not guilty they wouldn't have even said they were hacked. Hacked? Us? Of course not because such an occurrence would mean we were fallible.
Meta thought
Equifax sits in judgment of ALL. Who is a good creditor? Ask Equifax.
On the one hand, that makes Equifax a big target, and they probably beat off hackers with a stick.
So yeah, he learns there's some anomalies in the logs. Suspects there's been a breach. Gets approval for stock sale because hey, no one knows yet. Then he triggers an official review. Keep in mind *something* triggered the discovery of the breach. It sure as hell wasn't a routine action that uncovered it, given initial intrusions were done in March and it was only "discovered" July 29.
Reminds me of the argument that we do not really have free will. Typically, we are conscious of acts being acts of free will, or rather, we believe that they are. Yet before the act itself, the brain had accumulated the data and processed it, coming to certain beliefs. Then the action occurs.
Example, I see a jar of pickles. I make the free choice to unscrew the lid, thereby opening the jar and having access to the pickles. If I was a caveman, I might be making the free choice to whack open the jar with a small stone. There was a free choice or free act, i.e., the action.
Then again, the executive could say "What can I say? I was texting while juggling my portfolio."
Does it make sense to buy anything with bitcoin? A few months ago I heard bitcoin was worth $1000. Then I heard it was $6000. If I was taking a chance I would just keep holding it. There is a possibility of a crash, but then what? How would I sell or spend it fast enough while it's still worth something?
yeah, the flaw in your technique is buying just one drive
If you really want to keep your data safe, I would say prefer hard disks or dvd's over tape due to the fragility of tape. I had some good experiences with tape recovery; the drive was industrial quality, but that was only a year back in an era when hard drives were on the cusp of becoming cheap.
...and promptly crashes into a tree which, according to your assertion, he cannot see.
I've stood beside a T Rex skeleton. If he crashes into a tree, that would be like me crashing into an artificial Christmas tree, the little one that stands on a table.
But that being said, people could outrun the T Rex for sure, because it would take one step for Usain Bolt's ten running steps so it wouldn't even be running. It would just kind of lean over, and inhale like I would over a plate of spaghetti. I'm pretty sure I would be about the right size for its dental floss.
the problem with making AI is that we don't know precisely what we need to simulate, or exactly how much of it to get something that looks intelligent.
Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".
And that reflects the large amounts of cashish being thrown at AI. That's just human nature or business nature.
The underlying and more scary socioeconomics should be considered - competing AI in business. It was one thing when people competed against people, but machine against machine is far more serious even if people are not directly in harm's way. The problem is that machines, smart or not, are still pretty competent at brute force. A machine that is losing knows only to search longer and overturn more stones. Any practical process is likely to be less than 50% efficient so say hello to frightful amounts of waste. Yet if the smart machine is the most productive gorilla in the room or in the stock exchange, people will bet the most bananas on it. In this world, any company who wants to survive will claim to do AI.
The mining computation should be changed to calculate for folding@home.
Bitcoins security model is dependent upon a PoW which must have a very granular difficulty adjustment where blocks are discovered on a Poisson Distribution curve. Searching for primes or folding@home would not fulfill this requirement. Additionally, It is necessarily wasteful as part of bitcoins security model due to the fact that real costs must be sunk into attacking the currency instead of simply bootstrapping it to some other task you would be doing anyways for no added cost.
Something that might work is to put the folding@home finished results into a distributed queue. All results will be accepted and the queue is distributed to ensure that no one can sneak to the front of the line. In short, the difficulty idea ought to be dismissed.
For one thing, bitcoin miners ought to be assigned difficult tasks, because they will be rewarded for their efforts. Anyone can do folding@home even for no reward so in essence, bitcoin mining is paid work. Indeed, any bitcoin miner can do some chest thumping right now by also computing folding@home and only submit their bitcoin calculations after their folding@home calculations have completed. Extrapolation - if folding@home was compulsory for every miner that would level the playing field, but if it was compulsory, all the terahash calculations can be dispensed with. Let the folding@home calculations stand for the mining result.
Have you seen the price lately? Please check the 8 year returns , 1 year returns , and 1 week returns
I don't want to look. I don't think I can understand what it implies. If I'm supposed to get a fat juicy return, then why would I spend bitcoin? That would be like volunteering to pay extra taxes. If I don't get a fat juicy return why would I bother dealing with bitcoin unless there was no other painless currency? I can understand that there will be fair number of people who want to hold as many bitcoins as possible because there is a chance that they will be worth something. It's like some people buying tons of houses, even though you can only live in one. Surely the world will become overpopulated and then profeeeet. Nothing wrong with taking a chance. The casino of bitcoin is as good as any other.
I'll believe in the wonders of the bitcoin economy when I see advertisers touting televisions, cars, burgers for bitcoin. Then it'll come down to earth, and start making some sense.
What's new is how anyone can bring themselves to hurt bitcoin. Ok, so maybe that isn't so out of this world.
Why would anyone hate bitcoin?
Without bitcoin there wouldn't be so much need for electricity power generation. And your power bill goes up and your bandwidth goes down because bitcoin is an artificial consumer of resources. The consumption is artificial because much of the effect of the consumption is pure garbage. Mining bitcoins is basically acquiring bitcoins by lottery. bitcoin is a casino. What do people do with their losing lottery tickets in real life? They throw them away. In the bitcoin lottery, the loser's calculation is electricity down the toilet.
So if people are to LOVE bitcoin, let's have the proof of work be updated to be a proof of real work, work that does not become so much lost energy. The mining computation should be changed to calculate for folding@home. Then the results could be put into a queue. This queue can be distributed so that it is agreed upon by the entire bitcoin network. With first in first out fairness, miners can be rewarded with bitcoins based on how much computational effort they put in. Also, there are no losers if every miner calculates independent parts of the problem. No losers, all winners.
The upshot is if people love bitcoin, they would get behind hardening the infrastructure to protect against hackers. So, bitcoin miners, take heed, if you want all your expenditure in electricity bills to not be all for nothing one day, make yourself heard asking for the mining calculation to updated to do something useful.
Let's face it, the cost of a bitcoin is supposed to go up up up. If this holds true, who would ever want to spend bitcoin for anything? It would be like those Microsoft people who sold their stock early and bought toys. A few years later they realized that if they kept their stock they would be zillionaires. So bitcoin mining would be pointless if there will be fewer and fewer transactions. People just want to buy and hold. Unless what they buy will not appreciate. Then they dump and run. That makes bitcoin mining pointless because bitcoins wouldn't be worth anything.
All this fear could dissipate if bitcoin mining were to calculate useful results. People would be encouraged to use bitcoin in their lives because the mining actually benefits everyone.
For the most of us, AI is trouble ahead that needs to be stopped and slowed down.
Perhaps Mr. Bezos should read a bit of Herbert's Dune to know what happens when you let technological progress go unchecked. The end result is worse than what it would be if humanity were included.
Progress is checked, just for you, mind.
There's the quantum mechanical theory of uncertainty. One of the problems is being unable to tell exactly what is the momentum and position of a particle.
Then there's the speed of light capping everything, like a salary cap in the NHL. Can't buy yourself Stanley.
To top it off dark energy is making the universe expand. One day, we'll just be cold and alone. Isn't that something you want technologists to get working on posthaste?
Without progress, we'd just be protoplasm running amok. But with progress rearing its ugly head, you want to draw a line. With Moore's law gasping for air, I'm not getting enough time to visit my pr0n, so clearly, there's not enough progress.
Star Trek is the better example. They ask the computer what they want done, the computer figures it out and presents them the output. They're programming, but not. Or how they program the holodeck - they ask the computer to generate a character on the holodeck, then load up various behaviours using commands. They can even program simulations of characters.
Or how they reprogram the Universal Translator with a few parmeter changes and get it working again, or adjust the phasers to transmit in some way You think it up and with a few keystrokes, everything is reconfigured.
The question was about an infinitely fast computer. Star Trek is a few steps beyond current computer speeds but still not infinite. Still, thinking Star Trek is better than what some others are thinking so far.
When you go into a physical library, you see knowledge and other works somehow compiled, for all you know over an infinite past amount of work. You wouldn't dream of spewing such an output within your own predicted lifetime. Then being a slashdotter, you ask yourself, what is the ultimate state of the Library of Congress if it simply progresses linearly yet to perpetuity? It will be nothing less than boggling.
So perhaps there is a command in the idealized programming language that looks like this: querylibraryofcongress, or perhaps: askjeeves. Even such commands underestimate the power of infinity. When considering an infinite computer, it's time to reverse engineer. You ask yourself, how would I make a light saber?, not ever living in a world where one exists - that's the kind of reverse engineering going on here. Now, reverse engineer the infinite computer...
Here's another command: costzero. I.e., run without costing anything! Somehow it will figure out how to do so. Naturally, a computer of infinite speed would be ensured to be connected sufficiently to the universe in order to obey.
Here's another command: goaheadmakemyday. The output will make you happier than whatever you can imagine you want.
This isn't so much about modeling thought processes as it is about illustrating how even in a simplified model one of our debugging approaches fails.
The logic that they're arguing appears to be:
"If we can't even properly reverse engineer an extremely simple deterministic computer chip using fault modeling, it's extremely unlikely that we can infer the mechanisms of an extremely complex non-deterministic processor like the brain."
I do wonder at what level the reverse engineering is done. Also I wonder if their method was pure enough to initially consider the 6502 to be analog rather than digital. That would be a nice trip down the garden path right from the get go.
Now I would say that many fields of study at the higher levels, such as economics, medicine, etc. etc., are incomplete. There's a lot still to be learned. And taking a sidestep of looking at an artificial "brain" from a neuroscience perspective is a good way to navel gaze, fix up your own thought processes. Learning about learning often involves testing your harebrained theories on something not tailored to your experience. Especially neuroscience is the ultimate in learning about learning, if it can be believed that the biological mechanism that does the most learning is made up of neurons networked together, the good ol' neural net.
So to the question of how deep the reverse engineering went. If you want to study the brain, you want to look at low and high levels. The quantum level is the lowest that one probably has to go, and the highest level may involve different groups of minds (psychology of the masses). Computers and brains can be considered at such low and high levels analogously. The first time a neuroscientist looks at an electronic brain, the depth of analysis would probably eschew the quantum level as being too onerous.
I wonder how well neuroscience can explain the functioning of a transistor from a reverse engineering standpoint. The forward engineering of a transistor is to use it for a particular purpose. The neuroscientist would have to calculate what that purpose is. Certainly an engineer would have to be able to calculate whether the transistor actual serves the purpose and does not misbehave. The engineer would design a circuit that is amenable to such a calculation. All anyone neuroscientist or not has to do is to acquire the electrical characteristics of each circuit element (transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, power, conductors) and then apply equations that are derived from energy balances and electromagnetism. That should be within the realm of someone who studies brains. Quite possibly brains involve even more complex physical phenomena at the quantum level. Even the complexities of the chemical level outstrip the complexities of electrical circuits, particularly compared to the 6502. All the same, someone who knows physics and who even is given the full knowledge about the physical structure of a 6502 would see that calculating the behavior of this system would be a bit of a job. Chip designers themselves require massive computing to derive that their creations will work exactly.
Paradoxically, this exacting might be the neuroscientists' undoing. Brains aren't exact. Brains fart (malfunction). Perhaps it is enough for a neuroscientist to reverse engineer an adder circuit, a bit shift circuit, a memory writer circuit, etc., and then to determine a handful of microinstructions.
Now I wonder, reflect this analysis back to the brain. I don't know much about this. Are there microinstructions in our heads?
My brain decides to store things I don't care about and refuses to store things I specifically study.
From your perspective that's a bug. From your brain's perspective it's a feature. Your agenda is getting a good mark in your course. Your brain's agenda is to survive, reproduce, and generally have a good time while doing so.
The brain's "agenda" is not at cross purposes with studying. Either the studying is being done wrong or the presentation of the knowledge is wrong. Not that I will say how to do either, far be it from me to do so. However, I will suggest to look back at times when remembering something was easy and figure out what made remembering work for you.
Even the amount of knowledge needed for someone to be competent in a field, particularly when that knowledge is written out in detail, is enough to fill a bookcase or two. Then you get a revenue hungry author that tries to cram stuff into a textbook. The knowledge becomes spottier than rocks sticking out of a creek that you are trying to cross. That is kind of lifestyle brains try to avoid. You come to a stream, you don't see hordes of people coming to cross for the fun of it.
Moore's law has been ticking along for decades, and you can carry all your books in your hand if they were digitized. I've seen some digital books with a lot of detail, even videos embedded. There's hope for better and better knowledge presentation, though it's a lot of work to compile.
And then... head jacks for connecting to the Matrix.
My prediction - PCs as the boxen they are today will become passe. The rise of more intelligent software will cause the greater need for people to augment their own abilities in order to compete for the resources that other people also want. How would this all come to be? Even now, machines are taking over more and more. People are becoming less able. They know less and can do less compared to the top experts and the newfangled systems. In order for people to become worthy of resources, become worthy of living in better housing than cardboard boxes, they must acquire more knowledge and process that knowledge better. In other words, they have to be smarter.
Being smart enough will require even more computing power than a PC or laptop can provide. Hence, the PC will not be the computer of choice. It's just not good enough.
What then? How can people have the equipment they need to keep up with the Joneses?
Enter the self-driving car. When you need to have a luggable, practically your own mainframe attached to your hip or at least within walking distance or a short wifi hop away, just have the computing equipment follow you around like a puppy dog. That way you can be productive yet not chained to a fixed computer. Taking measures to stay at the top of the food chain is merely a matter of evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Amazon,
I heard that your goal is to cut delivery times, the target delivery time is one hour, is that right?
Well, in all my days of dealing with technology, I noticed one very fast delivery mechanism. It is so fast and so simple.
Seeing as how the delivery person is merely an interface between the storage and the home, there is already an existing technology that reduces the delivery interface. I'll bet you already know what that technology is, because you're incredibly smart. But for the other people on this forum, the technology is called "vending machine."
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Economies of scale in Amazon fulfillment centers allow for efficient distribution of goods, beating traditional stores and vending machines (full of stuff no one seems to want). Yet the notion of having someone deliver purchases directly into my home seems to be over the top inefficient too. I wouldn't even touch the security risk with a ten foot pole attached to a cattle prod. The pendulum swings too far the other way, doesn't it? A possible middle may be numerous pickup centers where people can collect close to home.
The million dollar question is: can A.I. become _actually_ conscious?
Imagine the answer to that day is "Yes" and a future day where Scientists have _finally_ figured out how Consciousness is represented.
They can:
* download it
* duplicate it
* upload it
The first outcome: conscious sex toys.
Cogito ergo sum
It means I'm here in your face
Sure they saw how science + warfare could increase destructiveness, but there's no more reason they should have anticipated Nukes in 20-30 years in 1920 than 1820.
That's the problem of being in the earlier decades of a century. In another 20 or 30 years, people will feel more urgent to have done something because the century will have worn away or the weight of the questions from earlier parts of the century will be felt. Also there is more confidence in the middle or later century that many questions have been answered and bold steps can be taken. Sending a man to the moon or bringing down the Berlin wall might not have been done at the turn of a century. People would be too into thinking what the new era should be rather than trying to effect what it seems to be.
So, we should have good reason to predict powerful AI in 20 to 30 years, or perhaps breaking the lightspeed barrier.
if you have no capital you may find yourself with no means to obtain it because your labor is now worthless.
So it is nowadays with the developed world versus the third world. What can you do, right? You have to find your niche.
There are a lot of ways to look at this:
My blood runs cold. My memory has just been sold.
My angel is a centerfold
Conjoin this with the question "What do you call a blonde with two brain cells?"
Let's accept the gambit of the devil's advocate and look at the situation where the production from human genius is worthless. What kind of world is this? Are there machines making amazing discoveries or incredible products? Who is the consumer? Just the wealthy? Are results just popped into warehouses or dropped off in fields?
Perhaps it's better to be considered worthless or inconsequential. Be harmless and unnoticeable like ants.
Suppose everything on Amazon was available for the low low price of zero down zero payments until hell freezes over. Suppose that they parked a burro or cube van on your front lawn filled with newfangled things you never seen before, and you can take your pick until you have everything you want, you send it away and it's replaced with another one filled with more stuff, ad infinitum.
What about a world where you are valued for your opinion (but not expressed in words)? Your behavior is read remotely (in great detail, so much for privacy), and these observations are used as feedback to the machines to tell them what to produce. The goal is not necessarily your pleasure or pain, but somehow your behavior is a form of knowledge suggesting how to direct the use of resources. As ever there is scarcity and the need for choice, but it is human activity (minus any self serving brought on by knowledge of being observed) that plays some role in the choice. Because humans have adapted themselves to this world, human opinion or human well-being could be a harbinger of good times for man and machine alike.
There doesn't even need to be a malevolent AI to take over humanity. It could be a benevolent takeover that is prompted by people.
The whole idea of takeover presuppose freedom of the will.
But people and even machines are bound by physical "laws". Our brains behave precisely as they MUST while the rest of the universe ticks onwards to its destiny. AI does not have the free choice to take over insofar as it does not have the freedom to control its own fate even if it was placed into a galaxy of abundant resources.
As a minor observation, we can further restrict machines' freedoms.
The thing is, we aren't really to fear being taken over by machine intelligence. We are already using machines to take over ourselves, recursively. Often we find our decisions are based on what we see on the Internet. Consider an example. All I know about Donald Trump is from the media. I haven't actually seen the guy in front of me. He already sounds like a fictional character. If I find out he's an elaborate fiction - fake news! - it would merely reaffirm a saner view of the world. However, I willingly play along with the media reports so far, letting gullibility run free, as there is little contradictory evidence.
It would be unsurprising if humans were taken over (who knows by what - other humans? other species? AI? corporations?). We're actually a pretty silly lot, thinking we are smart, but mired in our limited minds. Even those that take over would likely be apples falling close to the tree, and it would be a toss up as to which side (of 2? 3? more?) is dominant at any day.
Here's the dealio. Information is becoming vast and ubiquitous, yet it needs to be made available cohesively. You could fetch your own water, but you would rather pay for a water utility. Perhaps it is time for a local news utility funded by your taxes. If you trust your local government to pipe drinkable water to you and not poison, you can trust them to supply you the news, or so you hope.
> > Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell
> > them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires.
> > Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who
> > loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped
> > cover.
> You want moneylosing local journalism, fund it yourself.
Well, if they really found themselves not guilty they wouldn't have even said they were hacked. Hacked? Us? Of course not because such an occurrence would mean we were fallible.
Meta thought
Equifax sits in judgment of ALL. Who is a good creditor? Ask Equifax.
On the one hand, that makes Equifax a big target, and they probably beat off hackers with a stick.
But Equifax is fallible
So yeah, he learns there's some anomalies in the logs. Suspects there's been a breach. Gets approval for stock sale because hey, no one knows yet. Then he triggers an official review. Keep in mind *something* triggered the discovery of the breach. It sure as hell wasn't a routine action that uncovered it, given initial intrusions were done in March and it was only "discovered" July 29.
Reminds me of the argument that we do not really have free will. Typically, we are conscious of acts being acts of free will, or rather, we believe that they are. Yet before the act itself, the brain had accumulated the data and processed it, coming to certain beliefs. Then the action occurs.
Example, I see a jar of pickles. I make the free choice to unscrew the lid, thereby opening the jar and having access to the pickles. If I was a caveman, I might be making the free choice to whack open the jar with a small stone. There was a free choice or free act, i.e., the action.
Then again, the executive could say "What can I say? I was texting while juggling my portfolio."
> because I'm basically just heating the room I'm usually sitting in.
That's how it works for supermodels. Which is why I use them for my heating.
Does it make sense to buy anything with bitcoin? A few months ago I heard bitcoin was worth $1000. Then I heard it was $6000. If I was taking a chance I would just keep holding it. There is a possibility of a crash, but then what? How would I sell or spend it fast enough while it's still worth something?
Elon, get in line. There are already takers for the the third one.
> Whoops, tape drive isn't working right anymore
yeah, the flaw in your technique is buying just one drive
If you really want to keep your data safe, I would say prefer hard disks or dvd's over tape due to the fragility of tape. I had some good experiences with tape recovery; the drive was industrial quality, but that was only a year back in an era when hard drives were on the cusp of becoming cheap.
"If the state currently does not collect sales tax, and this is a sales taxes,"
It's not a sales tax. A sales tax is a percentage of the sale. This is an excise tax, which is a set amount per item sold.
Go back to grade school, guvnor Kate. The spelling is exercise tax.
...and promptly crashes into a tree which, according to your assertion, he cannot see.
I've stood beside a T Rex skeleton. If he crashes into a tree, that would be like me crashing into an artificial Christmas tree, the little one that stands on a table.
But that being said, people could outrun the T Rex for sure, because it would take one step for Usain Bolt's ten running steps so it wouldn't even be running. It would just kind of lean over, and inhale like I would over a plate of spaghetti. I'm pretty sure I would be about the right size for its dental floss.
the problem with making AI is that we don't know precisely what we need to simulate, or exactly how much of it to get something that looks intelligent.
Simulating brunettes would get the job done.
Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".
And that reflects the large amounts of cashish being thrown at AI. That's just human nature or business nature.
The underlying and more scary socioeconomics should be considered - competing AI in business. It was one thing when people competed against people, but machine against machine is far more serious even if people are not directly in harm's way. The problem is that machines, smart or not, are still pretty competent at brute force. A machine that is losing knows only to search longer and overturn more stones. Any practical process is likely to be less than 50% efficient so say hello to frightful amounts of waste. Yet if the smart machine is the most productive gorilla in the room or in the stock exchange, people will bet the most bananas on it. In this world, any company who wants to survive will claim to do AI.
The mining computation should be changed to calculate for folding@home.
Bitcoins security model is dependent upon a PoW which must have a very granular difficulty adjustment where blocks are discovered on a Poisson Distribution curve. Searching for primes or folding@home would not fulfill this requirement. Additionally, It is necessarily wasteful as part of bitcoins security model due to the fact that real costs must be sunk into attacking the currency instead of simply bootstrapping it to some other task you would be doing anyways for no added cost.
Something that might work is to put the folding@home finished results into a distributed queue. All results will be accepted and the queue is distributed to ensure that no one can sneak to the front of the line. In short, the difficulty idea ought to be dismissed.
For one thing, bitcoin miners ought to be assigned difficult tasks, because they will be rewarded for their efforts. Anyone can do folding@home even for no reward so in essence, bitcoin mining is paid work. Indeed, any bitcoin miner can do some chest thumping right now by also computing folding@home and only submit their bitcoin calculations after their folding@home calculations have completed. Extrapolation - if folding@home was compulsory for every miner that would level the playing field, but if it was compulsory, all the terahash calculations can be dispensed with. Let the folding@home calculations stand for the mining result.
Have you seen the price lately? Please check the 8 year returns , 1 year returns , and 1 week returns
I don't want to look. I don't think I can understand what it implies. If I'm supposed to get a fat juicy return, then why would I spend bitcoin? That would be like volunteering to pay extra taxes. If I don't get a fat juicy return why would I bother dealing with bitcoin unless there was no other painless currency? I can understand that there will be fair number of people who want to hold as many bitcoins as possible because there is a chance that they will be worth something. It's like some people buying tons of houses, even though you can only live in one. Surely the world will become overpopulated and then profeeeet. Nothing wrong with taking a chance. The casino of bitcoin is as good as any other.
I'll believe in the wonders of the bitcoin economy when I see advertisers touting televisions, cars, burgers for bitcoin. Then it'll come down to earth, and start making some sense.
What's new is how anyone can bring themselves to hurt bitcoin. Ok, so maybe that isn't so out of this world.
Why would anyone hate bitcoin?
Without bitcoin there wouldn't be so much need for electricity power generation. And your power bill goes up and your bandwidth goes down because bitcoin is an artificial consumer of resources. The consumption is artificial because much of the effect of the consumption is pure garbage. Mining bitcoins is basically acquiring bitcoins by lottery. bitcoin is a casino. What do people do with their losing lottery tickets in real life? They throw them away. In the bitcoin lottery, the loser's calculation is electricity down the toilet.
So if people are to LOVE bitcoin, let's have the proof of work be updated to be a proof of real work, work that does not become so much lost energy. The mining computation should be changed to calculate for folding@home. Then the results could be put into a queue. This queue can be distributed so that it is agreed upon by the entire bitcoin network. With first in first out fairness, miners can be rewarded with bitcoins based on how much computational effort they put in. Also, there are no losers if every miner calculates independent parts of the problem. No losers, all winners.
The upshot is if people love bitcoin, they would get behind hardening the infrastructure to protect against hackers. So, bitcoin miners, take heed, if you want all your expenditure in electricity bills to not be all for nothing one day, make yourself heard asking for the mining calculation to updated to do something useful.
Let's face it, the cost of a bitcoin is supposed to go up up up. If this holds true, who would ever want to spend bitcoin for anything? It would be like those Microsoft people who sold their stock early and bought toys. A few years later they realized that if they kept their stock they would be zillionaires. So bitcoin mining would be pointless if there will be fewer and fewer transactions. People just want to buy and hold. Unless what they buy will not appreciate. Then they dump and run. That makes bitcoin mining pointless because bitcoins wouldn't be worth anything.
All this fear could dissipate if bitcoin mining were to calculate useful results. People would be encouraged to use bitcoin in their lives because the mining actually benefits everyone.
For the most of us, AI is trouble ahead that needs to be stopped and slowed down.
Perhaps Mr. Bezos should read a bit of Herbert's Dune to know what happens when you let technological progress go unchecked. The end result is worse than what it would be if humanity were included.
Progress is checked, just for you, mind.
There's the quantum mechanical theory of uncertainty. One of the problems is being unable to tell exactly what is the momentum and position of a particle.
Then there's the speed of light capping everything, like a salary cap in the NHL. Can't buy yourself Stanley.
To top it off dark energy is making the universe expand. One day, we'll just be cold and alone. Isn't that something you want technologists to get working on posthaste?
Without progress, we'd just be protoplasm running amok. But with progress rearing its ugly head, you want to draw a line. With Moore's law gasping for air, I'm not getting enough time to visit my pr0n, so clearly, there's not enough progress.
Star Trek is the better example. They ask the computer what they want done, the computer figures it out and presents them the output. They're programming, but not. Or how they program the holodeck - they ask the computer to generate a character on the holodeck, then load up various behaviours using commands. They can even program simulations of characters.
Or how they reprogram the Universal Translator with a few parmeter changes and get it working again, or adjust the phasers to transmit in some way You think it up and with a few keystrokes, everything is reconfigured.
The question was about an infinitely fast computer. Star Trek is a few steps beyond current computer speeds but still not infinite. Still, thinking Star Trek is better than what some others are thinking so far.
When you go into a physical library, you see knowledge and other works somehow compiled, for all you know over an infinite past amount of work. You wouldn't dream of spewing such an output within your own predicted lifetime. Then being a slashdotter, you ask yourself, what is the ultimate state of the Library of Congress if it simply progresses linearly yet to perpetuity? It will be nothing less than boggling.
So perhaps there is a command in the idealized programming language that looks like this: querylibraryofcongress, or perhaps: askjeeves. Even such commands underestimate the power of infinity. When considering an infinite computer, it's time to reverse engineer. You ask yourself, how would I make a light saber?, not ever living in a world where one exists - that's the kind of reverse engineering going on here. Now, reverse engineer the infinite computer ...
Here's another command: costzero. I.e., run without costing anything! Somehow it will figure out how to do so. Naturally, a computer of infinite speed would be ensured to be connected sufficiently to the universe in order to obey.
Here's another command: goaheadmakemyday. The output will make you happier than whatever you can imagine you want.
This isn't so much about modeling thought processes as it is about illustrating how even in a simplified model one of our debugging approaches fails.
The logic that they're arguing appears to be:
"If we can't even properly reverse engineer an extremely simple deterministic computer chip using fault modeling, it's extremely unlikely that we can infer the mechanisms of an extremely complex non-deterministic processor like the brain."
I do wonder at what level the reverse engineering is done. Also I wonder if their method was pure enough to initially consider the 6502 to be analog rather than digital. That would be a nice trip down the garden path right from the get go.
Now I would say that many fields of study at the higher levels, such as economics, medicine, etc. etc., are incomplete. There's a lot still to be learned. And taking a sidestep of looking at an artificial "brain" from a neuroscience perspective is a good way to navel gaze, fix up your own thought processes. Learning about learning often involves testing your harebrained theories on something not tailored to your experience. Especially neuroscience is the ultimate in learning about learning, if it can be believed that the biological mechanism that does the most learning is made up of neurons networked together, the good ol' neural net.
So to the question of how deep the reverse engineering went. If you want to study the brain, you want to look at low and high levels. The quantum level is the lowest that one probably has to go, and the highest level may involve different groups of minds (psychology of the masses). Computers and brains can be considered at such low and high levels analogously. The first time a neuroscientist looks at an electronic brain, the depth of analysis would probably eschew the quantum level as being too onerous.
I wonder how well neuroscience can explain the functioning of a transistor from a reverse engineering standpoint. The forward engineering of a transistor is to use it for a particular purpose. The neuroscientist would have to calculate what that purpose is. Certainly an engineer would have to be able to calculate whether the transistor actual serves the purpose and does not misbehave. The engineer would design a circuit that is amenable to such a calculation. All anyone neuroscientist or not has to do is to acquire the electrical characteristics of each circuit element (transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, power, conductors) and then apply equations that are derived from energy balances and electromagnetism. That should be within the realm of someone who studies brains. Quite possibly brains involve even more complex physical phenomena at the quantum level. Even the complexities of the chemical level outstrip the complexities of electrical circuits, particularly compared to the 6502. All the same, someone who knows physics and who even is given the full knowledge about the physical structure of a 6502 would see that calculating the behavior of this system would be a bit of a job. Chip designers themselves require massive computing to derive that their creations will work exactly.
Paradoxically, this exacting might be the neuroscientists' undoing. Brains aren't exact. Brains fart (malfunction). Perhaps it is enough for a neuroscientist to reverse engineer an adder circuit, a bit shift circuit, a memory writer circuit, etc., and then to determine a handful of microinstructions.
Now I wonder, reflect this analysis back to the brain. I don't know much about this. Are there microinstructions in our heads?
My brain decides to store things I don't care about and refuses to store things I specifically study.
From your perspective that's a bug. From your brain's perspective it's a feature. Your agenda is getting a good mark in your course. Your brain's agenda is to survive, reproduce, and generally have a good time while doing so.
The brain's "agenda" is not at cross purposes with studying. Either the studying is being done wrong or the presentation of the knowledge is wrong. Not that I will say how to do either, far be it from me to do so. However, I will suggest to look back at times when remembering something was easy and figure out what made remembering work for you.
Even the amount of knowledge needed for someone to be competent in a field, particularly when that knowledge is written out in detail,
is enough to fill a bookcase or two. Then you get a revenue hungry author that tries to cram stuff into a textbook. The knowledge becomes spottier than rocks sticking out of a creek that you are trying to cross. That is kind of lifestyle brains try to avoid. You come to a stream, you don't see hordes of people coming to cross for the fun of it.
Moore's law has been ticking along for decades, and you can carry all your books in your hand if they were digitized. I've seen some digital books with a lot of detail, even videos embedded. There's hope for better and better knowledge presentation, though it's a lot of work to compile.
And then ... head jacks for connecting to the Matrix.
My prediction - PCs as the boxen they are today will become passe. The rise of more intelligent software will cause the greater need for people to augment their own abilities in order to compete for the resources that other people also want. How would this all come to be? Even now, machines are taking over more and more. People are becoming less able. They know less and can do less compared to the top experts and the newfangled systems. In order for people to become worthy of resources, become worthy of living in better housing than cardboard boxes, they must acquire more knowledge and process that knowledge better. In other words, they have to be smarter.
Being smart enough will require even more computing power than a PC or laptop can provide. Hence, the PC will not be the computer of choice. It's just not good enough.
What then? How can people have the equipment they need to keep up with the Joneses?
Enter the self-driving car. When you need to have a luggable, practically your own mainframe attached to your hip or at least within walking distance or a short wifi hop away, just have the computing equipment follow you around like a puppy dog. That way you can be productive yet not chained to a fixed computer. Taking measures to stay at the top of the food chain is merely a matter of evolution.
Any casino that agrees to use someone else's cards has accepted the dare and does not deserve to chicken out.
But this is the year of the chicken.