Your test is way too extreme. Human beings are born with some built-in programming. For example, it appears that there is a limited time in human development when it is possible to learn language. A deaf child, raised among people who do not use sign-language, will never learn to talk properly or to use sign language properly as an adult. However, put a group of deaf children together, and they'll create their own sign language if not taught an existing one. It seems some mechanism for language learning is created during development. If it isn't used, it is disassembled somehow. Of course, having learned a language, it continues to exist, though the ability to learn new languages seems to be diminished.
Nevertheless, I agree with what I consider the essence of your post, that AI must be self programming. Self programming or self learning would be an essential part of real intelligence.
Absolutely. The first thing I thought when I saw the headline was that they could be planting backdoors in the ROM. Everything else in this thread is rather inconsequential by comparison in my maybe not so humble opinion.
My first car was a corvair.
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 1
I never read "Unsafe At Any Speed", but I remember it as the book that first made Ralph Nader famous. How much impact did that book actually have anyway, aside from terminating production of the corvair.
The first car I ever bought was a '62 Corvair. That was when I was in the Navy and stationed in Japan (I bought it from another GI). I paid $75 for it and it definitely had a problem with exhaust getting in the cab. I always drove it with the windows down. One thing that I recall was a time when I gave a Japanese bar girl a ride in it and she hesitated because it was a corvair. Even she had heard of "Unsafe At Any Speed". But then, she was one of the more thoughtful bar girls. That corvair was a great car to drive though with its air-cooled engine in the back. I've never had a car since that could corner like that baby.
So, how much influence really can we expect a book on software safety to have? I'm all for educating the public, and I'm not saying the author is wasting his time writing it. Just because I'm cynical doesn't mean I say don't try.
Motherboards are mostly made in various Asian countries now, aren't they? How paranoid is it to imagine the Chinese deciding to infect motherboards with spyware?
Lest you think I've got my tinfoil hat on, check out some thoughts of Ken Thompson (which I found in the discussion from the "Trojan Found In New HDs" link I provided, at least I think that's where I got it from.) http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
I know C, but I don't want to learn C++ (I gave it a try once.) I'm willing to try learning Python though (or a functional language, they intrigue me), but not C++!
I don't know if Microsoft's biggest threat is itself or not. But Microsoft uses methods of 'competing', such as locking hardware vendors into supplying only their operating system, and then making sure that competitors products don't work on new versions, that have protected it from 'normal' competition. If Microsoft were really having to compete, they would not have accumulated a mountain of cash. They would have either been forced to lower prices or plow that money into development.
OSS may be their competitor because it is more immune to their tactics than traditional commercial competitors. Google may be a successful commercial competitor because they developed in one of Microsoft's blind spots. Eventually, no matter how Microsoft locks things up, somebody is going to find a way to compete against them, and perhaps Google has done that. I'm waiting to find out.
I believe the expression "Intellectual Property" was created solely to trip people up who were trying to engage in critical thinking about how the products of human creativity should be regarded. It's designed to get unsophisticated (and lazy) thinkers to feel the same disapproval at making a copy of the music on someone's cassette say, as in stealing their cassette, or their stereo equipment, or their car. But, if you make a copy of someone's music, the person still has the music. It may not be ethical but it's just not the same as the theft of real property.
Now, that doesn't mean that if someone goes to the time and effort of creating new music that they don't have rights to it. But it's not the exact same thing as 'property'. Something like copyright law should be in place to protect and especially to encourage creative endeavor. But one shouldn't go overboard on it. Let's say, when George Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody In Blue" he assumed he would hold the copyright to it for 17 years. (I don't know the technical details, maybe copyright law was extendable then, or maybe Paul Whiteman commissioned the work so actually it was Paul Whiteman who had the rights. The details won't matter for illustrating my point.) Would George Gershwin have worked harder and made "Rhapsody In Blue" better if he'd known he and his heirs would have the rights until 100 years after his death? I doubt it.
Suppose they passed a law that said building contractors had to be paid $500,000 to build a house even if they would be willing to build it for only $200,000? That's what happens when you give copyright powers to people that are more than would be necessary to motivate them to create their best work. And that is the situation with current copyright laws.
Also, a lot of the pro-intellectual property types like to act as though only one person in the world could create some unique piece of work. It's harder to illustrate in the case of artistic works, but consider patents for inventions. By patenting an invention you restrict other people not only from using your invention but also from inventing it themselves. There's the famous story of Alexander Bell beating some other inventor to the patent office with the invention of the telephone. It seems that Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin (and his team) independently invented the iconoscope (the essential electronic camera ingredient of television). So, patents and copyrights are a kind of kluge for encouraging invention but by restricting the rights of others to use their creations they also limit the freedom of others to invent them indepedently, and I think that's a significant inefficiency in the system, though I don't have a better alternative.
At any rate, this notion of 'Intellectual Property' has gotten so tied up in greed and arrogance that it has earned the contempt a lot of people feel for it.
I can remember getting in discussions on usenet about what happens when AI exceeds human intelligence. First of all, I very much expect the future to surprise everybody, to be full of unanticipated things, simply because that's what's it's been like for previous generations. (Well, maybe the Egypt of 2200 BC wouldn't have surprised the Egyptians of 2300 BC, but never mind that). But, what might happen is that we humans don't stand by passively and let the AI's keep us as mere pets, or exterminate us as pests, but that we change too. Become cyborgs, merging with the machines. Ultimately, if mankind survives, though, I think it will have to be in some articificial form. That the AIs will succeed us more as our children than some vanquishing invasion.
I wonder how many found some infantile remarks they made in rec.arts.stereo 10 or 20 years ago (or some other site notorious for flame-fests) and cringe when they read the stuff they wrote then? Or how many liberals turned conservative, or had some other big change in attitude?
I went to this website: http://www.wqad.com/Global/link.asp?L=259460 Select a candidate quiz,
which asks you questions about various issues and then tells you how closely various candidates match what you say, and for me it was Chris Dodd, and I couldn't remember ever hearing about him before. I'm a lot more sensitized to his name now of course.
I was working at a very small software shop when OS/2 came out. We would get a customer, who wanted something to work on an apollo workstation, another one wanted it for xenix, a third for Unix BSD 4.2 (my favorite), or Unix System V (ugh!), or Dos. So, we got a project to port something to OS/2 version 1.0, and I got it to work, and it used multi-threading which I thought was pretty cute and I was proud of myself for figuring it all out just from the manuals. Then the new revision of OS/2 came out and everything I had done was broken. My boss was so mad he swore off OS/2 forever after that.
I saw the title, "A Little.Mac Security Flaw", and immediately thought of the campaign song of George B. McClellan when he challenged Abe Lincoln in the 1864 presidential primary. His campaign song began with the lines: "Little Mac, Little Mac, You're the very man, go down to Washington soon as you can." and no, it's not because I'm a history maven or Civil War buff. When I was a kid I had a record, "Huckleberry Hound for President", built around Huckleberry Hound running for president, and one of the things they did was go through old presidential campaign songs looking for something to use for Huckleberry.
The things that stick in your head from when you're a kid.
I had a job in the Navy where I was on the phone all the time. I realize phones are useful, and I still use them, but I kind of cringe when I see people driving and talking, or jaywalking and talking. And whenever I happen to overhear a snippet of conversation is usually something like, "Oh I'm on xyz street, where are you?"
I still need my quiet time, my time when I'm left alone, to think or chill.
Oh, and I'm not writing poetry with these line breaks. I spent many years pounding on manual typewriters, and years on 80x24 character display terminals, DEC VT-100s and various Hazeltine models mostly. It feels weird not to hit that carriage return on a regular basis.
Ah, I see. Well, I did use old fashioned manual typewriters for many years, and then I used the old 1980s green-screen terminals (actually, they were 1970s hazeltines mostly), and I guess old habits die hard. I'm not doing my own line brakes for this post and it feels extremely weird.
I've seen documentaries on TV about this stuff. Unfortunately, I can't cite sources only do this from memory. (Maybe somebody else can provide links/references.)
But, as I recall, there is evidence that there was a signicantly different ethnic group (race?) of people here who were possibly wiped out by the invading ancestors of present day Native Americans. There was a fossil human found in the Pacific Northwest, whose face was reconstructed and found to resemble Patrick Stewart. There's been a lot of controversy as it's a very sensitive subject for some modern day Native Americans.
If an earlier group of people were wiped out, the only genetic signatures you'd find for them would be in fossils, right?
This documentary, on PBS, supposedly used newly declassified info. The question at the time was, was the President of the US at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, asleep at the switch. According to the documentary, he wasn't. He didn't put much truck in space travel, but he was very very interested in getting spy satellites to keep tabs on the Soviet Union. The problem was the legality of satellites flying over sovereign nations. The Russians did it first, so the precedent was set. One of the talking heads in the documentary said that Eisenhower's big blunder was not appreciating the public reaction around the world. The documentary also talked about how he played his cards very close to his vest, and took his secrets to the grave, never trying to justify his actions in his memoirs or anything.
So, the question now is, were our leaders asleep at the switch or are they just playing their cards close to the vest, like Eisenhower?
What happens when they put malware in the BIOS on your motherboards. How will you know? How will you get rid of it, (I know flash the BIOS, but maybe the BIOS doesn't want to be flashed.)
There's talk that the next war will be a cyberwar. I guess that's better than the other kind, but these are some of the ways to do it I'd say.
Robotics and artificial intelligence are starting to create unmanned aircraft and cars. As many people have pointed out, there are a lot of incompetent drivers of regular cars, putting them up in the air is asking for trouble at a whole new level of magnitude. So the vehicles have to be able to fly themselves safely and reliably, and take off and land on a dime. That's a without which not condition.
The second condition would be efficiency. A dirigible like device might be efficient, though some aircraft can be pretty efficient it seems. Airplanes have flown around the world without refueling after all, and a human powered airplane has flown across the English Channel. A plane, particularly one with a lot of smarts about using updrafts and the like, could probably be designed that could be efficient. It would still have to be pretty much VTOL though.
Maybe looking old increases value to a collector who is only interested in something being old and rare. But the artist would have considered it finished when it first was ready for exhibition, and would want people to see it that way.
I was a computer programmer in the 80s, mainly on Unix type systems, so when linux came out, it was more 'natural' to me than anything since CP/M. And, my first distro was Slackware, and though I tried other distros from time to time, I always came back to slack. Probably the longest I stayed away from slack was when I was using Linux From Scratch... and Beyond. I'm preparing this post on a slackware system now. But, there have gotten to be so many different apps out there, particularly multi-media, that the research and tweaking needed to get them to work on Slack just wears a body down. It becomes easier to just try them on ubuntu. So, I've become a dual-boot guy.
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Your test is way too extreme. Human beings are born with some built-in programming. For example, it appears that there is a limited time in human development when it is possible to learn language. A deaf child, raised among people who do not use sign-language, will never learn to talk properly or to use sign language properly as an adult. However, put a group of deaf children together, and they'll create their own sign language if not taught an existing one. It seems some mechanism for language learning is created during development. If it isn't used, it is disassembled somehow. Of course, having learned a language, it continues to exist, though the ability to learn new languages seems to be diminished.
Nevertheless, I agree with what I consider the essence of your post, that AI must be self programming. Self programming or self learning would be an essential part of real intelligence.
Absolutely. The first thing I thought when I saw the headline was that they could be planting backdoors in the ROM. Everything else in this thread is rather inconsequential by comparison in my maybe not so humble opinion.
I never read "Unsafe At Any Speed", but I remember it as the book that first made Ralph Nader famous. How much impact did that book actually have anyway, aside from terminating production of the corvair.
The first car I ever bought was a '62 Corvair. That was when I was in the Navy and stationed in Japan (I bought it from another GI). I paid $75 for it and it definitely had a problem with exhaust getting in the cab. I always drove it with the windows down. One thing that I recall was a time when I gave a Japanese bar girl a ride in it and she hesitated because it was a corvair. Even she had heard of "Unsafe At Any Speed". But then, she was one of the more thoughtful bar girls. That corvair was a great car to drive though with its air-cooled engine in the back. I've never had a car since that could corner like that baby.
So, how much influence really can we expect a book on software safety to have? I'm all for educating the public, and I'm not saying the author is wasting his time writing it. Just because I'm cynical doesn't mean I say don't try.
Maybe he has synesthesia and green sounds like gentle rain
outside while other colors sound like fingernails on a blackboard.
Something like this came up before: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/11/2246246
Motherboards are mostly made in various Asian countries now, aren't they? How paranoid is it to imagine the Chinese deciding to infect motherboards with spyware?
Lest you think I've got my tinfoil hat on, check out some thoughts of Ken Thompson (which I found in the discussion from the "Trojan Found In New HDs" link I provided, at least I think that's where I got it from.) http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
I know C, but I don't want to learn C++ (I gave it a try once.) I'm willing to try learning Python though (or a functional language, they intrigue me), but not C++!
I don't know if Microsoft's biggest threat is itself or not. But Microsoft uses methods of 'competing', such as locking hardware vendors into supplying only their operating system, and then making sure that competitors products don't work on new versions, that have protected it from 'normal' competition. If Microsoft were really having to compete, they would not have accumulated a mountain of cash. They would have either been forced to lower prices or plow that money into development.
OSS may be their competitor because it is more immune to their tactics than traditional commercial competitors. Google may be a successful commercial competitor because they developed in one of Microsoft's blind spots. Eventually, no matter how Microsoft locks things up, somebody is going to find a way to compete against them, and perhaps Google has done that. I'm waiting to find out.
I believe the expression "Intellectual Property" was created solely to trip people up who were trying to engage in critical thinking about how
the products of human creativity should be regarded. It's designed to get unsophisticated (and lazy) thinkers to feel the same disapproval at making a copy of the music on someone's cassette say, as in stealing their cassette, or their stereo equipment, or their car. But, if you make a copy of someone's music, the person still has the music. It may not be ethical but it's just not the same as the theft of real property.
Now, that doesn't mean that if someone goes to the time and effort of creating new music that they don't have rights to it. But it's not the exact same thing as 'property'. Something like copyright law should be in place to protect and especially to encourage creative endeavor. But one shouldn't go overboard on it. Let's say, when George Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody In Blue" he assumed he would hold the copyright to it for 17 years. (I don't know the technical details, maybe copyright law was extendable then, or maybe Paul Whiteman commissioned the work so actually it was Paul Whiteman who had the rights. The details won't matter for illustrating my point.) Would George Gershwin have worked harder and made "Rhapsody In Blue" better if he'd known he and his heirs would have the rights until 100 years after his death? I doubt it.
Suppose they passed a law that said building contractors had to be paid $500,000 to build a house even if they would be willing to build it for only $200,000? That's what happens when you give copyright powers to people that are more than would be necessary to motivate them to create their best work. And that is the situation with current copyright laws.
Also, a lot of the pro-intellectual property types like to act as though only one person in the world could create some unique piece of work. It's harder to illustrate in the case of artistic works, but consider patents for inventions. By patenting an invention you restrict
other people not only from using your invention but also from inventing it themselves. There's the famous story of Alexander Bell beating some other inventor to the patent office with the invention of the telephone. It seems that Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin (and his team) independently invented the iconoscope (the essential electronic camera ingredient of television). So, patents and copyrights are a kind of kluge for encouraging invention but by restricting the rights of others to use their creations they also limit the freedom of others to invent them indepedently, and I think that's a significant inefficiency in the system, though I don't have a better alternative.
At any rate, this notion of 'Intellectual Property' has gotten so tied up in greed and arrogance that it has earned the contempt a lot of people feel for it.
I can remember getting in discussions on usenet about what happens when AI exceeds human intelligence. First of all, I very much expect the future to surprise everybody, to be full of unanticipated things, simply because that's what's it's been like for previous generations. (Well, maybe the Egypt of 2200 BC wouldn't have surprised the Egyptians of 2300 BC, but never mind that). But, what might happen is that we humans
don't stand by passively and let the AI's keep us as mere pets, or exterminate us as pests, but that we change too. Become cyborgs, merging with the machines. Ultimately, if mankind survives, though, I think it will have to be in some articificial form. That the AIs will succeed us more as our children than some vanquishing invasion.
I wonder how many found some infantile remarks they made in rec.arts.stereo 10 or 20 years ago (or some other site notorious for flame-fests)
and cringe when they read the stuff they wrote then? Or how many liberals turned conservative, or had some other big change in attitude?
I went to this website:
http://www.wqad.com/Global/link.asp?L=259460 Select a candidate quiz,
which asks you questions about various issues and then tells you how closely various candidates match what you say, and for me it was Chris Dodd, and I couldn't remember ever hearing about him before. I'm a lot more sensitized to his name now of course.
I was working at a very small software shop when OS/2 came out. We would get a customer, who wanted something to work on an apollo workstation, another one wanted it for xenix, a third for Unix BSD 4.2 (my favorite), or Unix System V (ugh!), or Dos. So, we got a project to port something to OS/2 version 1.0, and I got it to work, and it used multi-threading which I thought was pretty cute and I was proud of myself for figuring it all out just from the manuals. Then the new revision of OS/2 came out and everything I had done was broken. My boss was so mad he swore off OS/2 forever after that.
I saw the title, "A Little .Mac Security Flaw", and immediately thought of the campaign song of George B. McClellan when he challenged Abe Lincoln in the 1864 presidential primary. His campaign song began with the lines: "Little Mac, Little Mac, You're the very man, go down to Washington soon as you can." and no, it's not because I'm a history maven or Civil War buff. When I was a kid I had a record, "Huckleberry Hound for President", built around Huckleberry Hound running for president, and one of the things they did was go through old presidential campaign songs looking for something to use for Huckleberry.
The things that stick in your head from when you're a kid.
Do they ever say arithmatics in England?
Ah, you've never used ed, have you?
I had a job in the Navy where I was on the phone all the time. I realize
phones are useful, and I still use them, but I kind of cringe when I see
people driving and talking, or jaywalking and talking. And whenever I
happen to overhear a snippet of conversation is usually something like,
"Oh I'm on xyz street, where are you?"
I still need my quiet time, my time when I'm left alone, to think or chill.
Oh, and I'm not writing poetry with these line breaks. I spent many years
pounding on manual typewriters, and years on 80x24 character display
terminals, DEC VT-100s and various Hazeltine models mostly. It feels weird
not to hit that carriage return on a regular basis.
Ah, I see. Well, I did use old fashioned manual typewriters for many years, and then I used the old 1980s green-screen terminals (actually, they were 1970s hazeltines mostly), and I guess old habits die hard. I'm not doing my own line brakes for this post and it feels extremely weird.
No. Why do you ask?
I've seen documentaries on TV about this stuff. Unfortunately, I
can't cite sources only do this from memory. (Maybe somebody else
can provide links/references.)
But, as I recall, there is evidence that there was a signicantly
different ethnic group (race?) of people here who were possibly
wiped out by the invading ancestors of present day Native Americans.
There was a fossil human found in the Pacific Northwest, whose
face was reconstructed and found to resemble Patrick Stewart.
There's been a lot of controversy as it's a very sensitive subject
for some modern day Native Americans.
If an earlier group of people were wiped out, the only genetic
signatures you'd find for them would be in fossils, right?
This documentary, on PBS, supposedly used newly declassified info. The question at the time
was, was the President of the US at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, asleep at the switch. According
to the documentary, he wasn't. He didn't put much truck in space travel, but he was very very
interested in getting spy satellites to keep tabs on the Soviet Union. The problem was the
legality of satellites flying over sovereign nations. The Russians did it first, so the
precedent was set. One of the talking heads in the documentary said that Eisenhower's big
blunder was not appreciating the public reaction around the world. The documentary also
talked about how he played his cards very close to his vest, and took his secrets to the grave,
never trying to justify his actions in his memoirs or anything.
So, the question now is, were our leaders asleep at the switch or are they just playing their
cards close to the vest, like Eisenhower?
What happens when they put malware in the BIOS on your motherboards.
How will you know? How will you get rid of it, (I know flash the
BIOS, but maybe the BIOS doesn't want to be flashed.)
There's talk that the next war will be a cyberwar. I guess that's
better than the other kind, but these are some of the ways to do it
I'd say.
Robotics and artificial intelligence are starting to create unmanned aircraft and cars. As many people
have pointed out, there are a lot of incompetent drivers of regular cars, putting them up in the air
is asking for trouble at a whole new level of magnitude. So the vehicles have to be able to fly themselves
safely and reliably, and take off and land on a dime. That's a without which not condition.
The second condition would be efficiency. A dirigible like device might be efficient, though some aircraft
can be pretty efficient it seems. Airplanes have flown around the world without refueling after all, and
a human powered airplane has flown across the English Channel. A plane, particularly one with a lot of
smarts about using updrafts and the like, could probably be designed that could be efficient. It would still
have to be pretty much VTOL though.
>when was the last time you went to the gas station and they didn't have fuel for you
For me that was in the 1970s. I don't do much driving anymore.
Maybe looking old increases value to a collector who is
only interested in something being old and rare. But
the artist would have considered it finished when
it first was ready for exhibition, and would want people to
see it that way.
I was a computer programmer in the 80s, mainly on Unix type systems, so when linux came out, it
was more 'natural' to me than anything since CP/M. And, my first distro was Slackware, and
though I tried other distros from time to time, I always came back to slack. Probably the
longest I stayed away from slack was when I was using Linux From Scratch... and Beyond.
I'm preparing this post on a slackware system now. But, there have gotten to be so many different
apps out there, particularly multi-media, that the research and tweaking needed to get them to work
on Slack just wears a body down. It becomes easier to just try them on ubuntu. So, I've become a
dual-boot guy.