If my baby was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, and it was possible to cure this disease by murdering a hobo and offering his heart's blood to some voodoo-related entity, I might seriously consider doing it. That doesn't make it right, of course.
Well, we don't have a time machine, so in this particular hypothetical situation, we'd still have Bt corn and Roundup-ready soybeans. I bet that Monsanto would even still be the one to produce them, at least until their competitors manage to economically produce generic alternatives, which conceivably might take a while.
But I guess what you mean is, if we abolished plant patents today, no one will be willing and/or able to develop whatever the future, "new-and-improved" versions of these crops are. Or, if these hypothetical laws had been in place 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these crops today.
I think a large fraction of Slashdot users reject this premise. It's basically the biotech equivalent of the open-source-versus-closed-source debate, or the idea that bands would stop making music if people refused to pay money for their recordings. Granted, a genetics lab is a much bigger investment than a few guitars and drums, or a laptop running a software development environment. But I personally believe that, if there were no plant patents, eventually all the farm co-ops around America and the world would pool their resources to develop their own GM crop lines. The yield increases still provide adequate incentive, plus the farmers' collective wouldn't have to compete with Monsanto on cost while developing their own alternatives, and best of all, they wouldn't be sued into oblivion by Monsanto's fleets of lawyers.
As a layman, I find it hard to know how much faith I should have in these claims, given that an almost identical claim made in recent years was touted widely in the news media and then turned out to be falsified.
The article seems to be saying that, since these celebrated leaders actually contributed a very small fraction of the time and effort needed to create the products that they're famous for, the products would exist without them. So, despite the adulation that's heaped upon them, in actual fact they're pretty much irrelevant.
I do not believe that to be the case. These people bring teams of talented people together, and give them a common goal to work towards. Without them, the real geniuses would toil in obscurity, and might accomplish little of lasting value.
Even though Elon Musk is no rocket scientist, without him there would be no (semi-)private rockets being launched to orbit, no one trying to make a reusable rocket, and no ridiculously expensive but powerful electric cars available for purchase. Even though Stan Lee stole his artists' ideas and credit, without him there wouldn't be eighty-four record-breaking superhero blockbusters in the movie theaters every summer. And though I personally have no real interest in recent Apple products, and thus found Steve Jobs insufferable, the electronic devices of today would likely be a lot uglier, clunkier, and harder to use without the pressure he put on his designers, and thence his competitors, to sleek things down and polish them up.
Yes, all these men were salesmen, and I hate salesmen. But they were great salesmen, dammit. Without them, the world would be a slightly more boring place. So give the devil his due.
So instead of coming up with methods to make thing safer (even Chernobyl, the worst accident ever still killed less than deaths from coal over the years), your suggestion is to throw your hands up in the air and say it can't be done?
I'm all for researching ways to make things safer. I just don't want me or my family to be part of the testing sample, which has been a problem in the past. With nuclear fission power as we know it, even one screw-up is too many. And the fission power boosters have already been wrong about safety a few times now. In my view, they've used up their mulligans. I'd rather suck up the expense for much less efficient forms of non-polluting electricity generation, at least until we can develop (relatively) clean fusion power. Even then, I think it's worth asking ourselves how much electricity is going to be enough electricity.
A simple solution to your fear is to have the people evaluating the design separate from the people selling the design. This isn't rocket science.
I guess that's a good start. I probably wouldn't have a lot of faith in the impartiality and competence of the evaluating body, though. What I'm really expecting to happen is that one of the reviewing engineers sees something potentially hazardous on the blueprints, and reports it to management. Management, which is pretty much universally a bunch of besuited sleazeball politician-on-the-take types, has that engineer quietly fired, and replaces him with someone with a healthier respect for the bottom line, and who doesn't see any problem with valve 39c, thank you very much, sir.
Who ever claimed that Chernobyl was absolutely safe? Do you have some sort of cite?
Nope. I imagine it's kind of hard to get records from Soviet-era engineering debacles, but to be honest I didn't even try. Do you really believe that, during the entire planning, construction, and operation of the plant, nobody ever raised any safety concerns and was dismissed as a luddite worrywart?
Fukushima may or may not have killed someone, and few people not immediately involved in the cleanup have any significant harm.
Yes, I specifically acknowledged that there hadn't been a lot of direct casualties in the history of nuclear power. Then I essentially said, "yet". No, I don't have a three-thousand page report to back that up. I apologize for my lack of rigor. What I'm doing here, basically, is making extrapolations based on my life experiences with people and engineering to make predictions about future engineering projects run by people. It's all very anecdotal, granted, but my observations so far suggest that, in engineering projects, often things go as planned. Which is great! But sometimes they don't, which is less optimal.
The exclusion zone is much less than a state, and it's real hard to poison something for a thousand years when you're working with a dangerous isotope with a half-life of about forty years.
Sorry for exaggerating, I can see how that would be annoying. So maybe what I meant to say is "poison an entire county for 40 years"? You're right---that is, by any measure, a lot better. Still kind of sucks, though, if you really think about it.
To be fair, when the first couple of planes in history crashed, it usually only killed a couple of people--the pilot and maybe the person he landed on. Granted, we haven't had a lot of casualties in the history of nuclear power to date (unless you count evacuees with increased cancer risk as casualties, in which case, hoo boy), but its potential for producing casualties is way beyond even a 9/11 type plane crash.
While I do believe that it's possible to design a nuclear reactor that won't murder an entire city and poison an entire state for a thousand years when it breaks down, I'm way too cynical to ever believe anyone who makes that claim about the particular nuclear reactor they're trying to sell. Because that's the exact same claim they made about the Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island reactors.
This revolutionary touchscreen appears to be foldable in exactly the same way that a standard modern-day touchscreen is foldable. You can fold it, but it won't really work afterwards.
Yeah, this dude is passionately angry about the advent of agriculture. And I used to think that people who still hold grudges about, like, World War II needed to learn to let go.
Thanks, I may take a look at that. Though I suppose what has most discouraged me from trying key-remappers over the years is the fact that they're all "freeware", and my mind has a filter that automatically translates "freeware" to "download this registry-editing system utility from some scary filesharing site and then run it in administrator mode, we promise nothing bad will happen, heh heh". I used to think I could avoid being pwned by malware by only downloading such things from Sourceforge, but in our modern age of "special offers", that seems to no longer be the case.
I started using computers regularly in the time before the "Windows" key was added to the keyboard. So, when it appeared, I refused to use it, out of pique. These days I am always very angry when I do press it, because what I mean to press instead is always either Alt or Ctrl. I personally feel that adding a third key to that set makes it a confusing mess. I initially thought that most users would feel the same way, and that the key would quietly go away when the next year's keyboards came out.
But a lot of people seem to like it, so I guess that's never happening. I will say that, even on Windows, there's usually an alternate keyboard shortcut that makes its use unnecessary.
What I'd really like is some simple and commonly available system that lets you re-map or disable any key on the keyboard at will. That's another problem that I thought would have been fixed by now, but it never really seems to ever become very practical.
In the light of history, I'm not sure one should draw too many generalizations from the fact that "right mouse button" is the second-least used "key" on the Mac. Getting it added to the mouse at all took decades, and though I don't use Macs often, I wouldn't be on board for making it any smaller.
Besides, saying that you should make the right mouse-button smaller just because it's only used occasionally is like saying toilets should be the size of pickle jars because you only use them a few minutes a day.
We've been talking about this so long that the columns are getting skinny. I should stop, but it's hard to resist, so:
Okay, but Mr. Middle Manager didn't ask the AI for a steady revenue stream, he asked it for more widgets. Oopsie! Who knew computers could be so blamed literal?
Or, you're saying the computer has the ability to choose its own goals? Even if that was a good idea--and I'm skeptical--wouldn't we have to give it some sort of values and principles to start from, like "widgets are good", or maybe "money is good"? I think that leads us to pretty much the same place.
Suppose we did have to foresight to teach it to value a steady revenue stream, instead of just widgets, widgets, widgets, and furthermore, we teach it that counterfeiting is wrong, because don't even think about it, mister! That might just result in the enslavement of humanity, as we're all strapped into widget consumption modules and the GDP becomes 100% widget-based. That's way better than extermination, right?
I guess my fundamental deal is that I have no faith in our ability to set any goals whatsoever for this thing that won't end up sucking for us. Say what you will about the state of modern education, but it has taught me to never ask a genie to "make me a ham sandwich".
To elaborate on my last sentence, let's say the game that the AI's masters tell it to play is called "Make As Many Widgets as You Can". This is, I hope everyone will agree, a plausible goal for the masters to assign, because widgets make money, and people tend to like money, and more is always better.
Okay, so the computer's goal is now to maximize the production of widgets. The AI is really into widgets now. It's like, all about the widgets for this guy. You and me and my Aunt Doris are not widgets ourselves, nor are we particularly conducive to widget making, so in order for the AI to achieve the maximum possible score in this game of Ultimate Widgetry, you and me and my Aunt Doris have all got to go, in order to make room for an additional widget factory.
You and me and my Aunt Doris, naturally, object to this plan. We all have a meeting and decide to petition to have the AI turned off, or turn it off ourselves if necessary, with an axe if that's also necessary. That would be disastrous for widget production, though, and result in a lower score for our hardworking widgeteer AI. So, as high-level game-players do, the AI anticipates this move, and murders us all in our sleep to prevent it. 300 points.
The computer goes on to exterminate the rest of humanity, pave the Earth flat, put up a billion or so widget factories, and achieve the high score in Widget Master. After which it, as high-level game-players do, uses the joystick to enter a swear word on the leaderboard.
You may find such a scenario unrealistic. I sure hope you're right.
[Encumbrances] like what, specifically? And in particular, how would it be problematic?
Human intelligence is encumbered by fallible memory, shaky logic or outright irrationality, and most of all by a lack of focus. Oh, and the need to sleep. All of this adds up to muddy thinking, which makes it difficult for humans to find the optimal route to their goals.
A computerized artificial intelligence would likely have none of these disadvantages. It would be, in human terms, a supergenius, or at least a savant. It would win at any game its programmers told it to play, constrained only whatever rules were built into at the design phase. Call me a pessimist, but I think that sooner or later somebody's going to inadvertently tell it to play some game where genocide happens to be the best opening gambit.
...if it quickly outstrips us in intellect, then the relationship will more likely be like that of ours with ants, indifference combined with local eradication where there is conflict of interest.
I agree, for sufficiently large values of "local". : )
I think it's pretty unlikely that humans as a species can be trusted to leave a rival intelligence alone and let it do its own thing in peace. Sooner or later, they're going to inconvenience it in some small way. Any AI worth its salt will probably intuit this from the outset, and decide that the temporary 0.000001% decrease in efficiency required to preemptively wipe us out is negligible compared to the potential 100% loss of efficiency entailed in letting us live. Remember, if left alone we could always build a second AI dedicated to the destruction of the first.
Plus, our habitat takes up a bunch of space where an extra widget factory could be.
I don't think it's the artificiality of the intelligence that people are worried about, per se. It's more about how the intelligence, being artificial, would by design lack all of the encumbrances that evolution has loaded human intelligence down with. Without all of these distractions, the first true artificial intelligence will almost certainly be much more single-minded and efficient at achieving its goals. Where humans waste away their cycles wondering and woolgathering and fantasizing and thinking of ways to impress that hot barista at the coffee shop, an AI focuses with laser precision on a single goal, and spends all day every day trying to fulfill it, with perfect memory and impeccable logic. Whatever that goal is, they're probably going to achieve it, and it's probably going to end in a way that humanity at large wouldn't approve of. Even if the AI's goal is "maximize human happiness", well, as a bunch of science fiction writers have pointed out, that may just turn into a whole lot of lobotomies.
I think the main problem for Huffman here is that, substantive issues aside, he completely blew off the accepted protocol for making announcements like these. You're SUPPOSED to say it like this:
"I support free speech, BUT [thing that totally undermines free speech]."
If you deviate from the formula even slightly, the incantation doesn't work. Your ass is uncovered. He might as well have gestured to his genitals and said "I got your free speech right here."
I was pretty surprised when I heard about Tesla or SpaceX's half-scale test track. It seems like a much better idea to start off at a smaller scale like this. If I was in charge, I would start off with whatever scale I could source the cheapest components for. Like, start at 1/32 scale, then go to 1/16, then 1/8, etc. That way economies of scale will help make the cost of the prototypes negligible.
I have often wondered about this myself. Is Slashdot worth more to its users that it is to its corporate masters? Is there some sum of money that unsatisfied Slashdot users could scrape together, perhaps over weeks and months, contributing some petty sum to some online swear jar whenever they encounter a petty annoyance, that would eventually accumulate into something that Dice would have to take seriously?
The thing is, from a revenue perspective, I'm not sure Slashdot is worth anything at all. There's no "there" there--its value is almost entirely in its network of engaged commenters. I'm pretty sure 9x% of the people who visit Slashdot use ad blockers, and even if you somehow found a way to sneak ads past the blockers, that would just cause those people to exodus anyway. So I guess ideally Slashdot would have to be run as sort of a public service, rather than as a money-maker. I figured Dice bought Slashdot and SourceForge to drive traffic to their job site, sort of as a loss-leader, goodwill gesture, look-at-us-we-totally-get-you-guys, please-consider-us-for-your-next-job-search sort of thing. But given how they're seemingly burning the goodwill candle at both ends by pushing through unpopular measure after unpopular measure, I have to admit I can't figure out what their real strategy is.
Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?
Then again again, if it's just a forum, why hasn't everybody moved on, en masse, to one of the clones of Slashdot that disgruntled Slashdotters have started in recent years? Because it's all about the network, I guess, and two halves of a big network aren't even half as good as the original network.
Beats me. I hope somebody figures something out before too long, though.
The article linked in the summary talks about international negotiations to decide to use the nukes. If it's a clear existential threat that we can see coming from far enough away to achieve that kind of international consensus, I think the relative expenditure of time and will that it would take to build a few nukes would be negligible. And as others have noted, the real limiting factor will more likely be that we don't have any delivery mechanism in place to get the nukes to the asteroid, and that's not something you can bang together in a weekend. As a rough approximation, compare the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Program.
Facebook forces you to use your real name. After that, it's Mom herself who forces you (however passive-aggressively) to add her. Once Mom's foot is in the door, Aunt Betsy is never far behind.
The only real alternative is to say, "eff you, Mom". Which is, let's face it, pretty hardcore.
Slashdot Mirror
If my baby was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, and it was possible to cure this disease by murdering a hobo and offering his heart's blood to some voodoo-related entity, I might seriously consider doing it. That doesn't make it right, of course.
CEO (on phone): Hey, I want to promote Mary Ann Davidson for her years of excellent service in our accounting department. We're going to make her CFO!
HR Director: Wow, you're making Mary Ann CSO?
CEO: Yes, CFO! Congratulate her for me.
HR Director: Are you sure, sir? I mean... Mary Ann... CSO?
CEO: Yes, of course! She'll make a great CFO!
HR Director: Do you think she's qualified to be CSO?
CEO: What do you mean? Of course she's more than qualified to be CFO!
HR Director: Wait, you're saying CSO, right?
CEO: Yeah, CFO!
HR Director: CSO?
CEO: CFO.
HR Director: CSO?
CEO: CFO!
HR Director: Okay, I think we're on the same page here.
Well, we don't have a time machine, so in this particular hypothetical situation, we'd still have Bt corn and Roundup-ready soybeans. I bet that Monsanto would even still be the one to produce them, at least until their competitors manage to economically produce generic alternatives, which conceivably might take a while.
But I guess what you mean is, if we abolished plant patents today, no one will be willing and/or able to develop whatever the future, "new-and-improved" versions of these crops are. Or, if these hypothetical laws had been in place 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these crops today.
I think a large fraction of Slashdot users reject this premise. It's basically the biotech equivalent of the open-source-versus-closed-source debate, or the idea that bands would stop making music if people refused to pay money for their recordings. Granted, a genetics lab is a much bigger investment than a few guitars and drums, or a laptop running a software development environment. But I personally believe that, if there were no plant patents, eventually all the farm co-ops around America and the world would pool their resources to develop their own GM crop lines. The yield increases still provide adequate incentive, plus the farmers' collective wouldn't have to compete with Monsanto on cost while developing their own alternatives, and best of all, they wouldn't be sued into oblivion by Monsanto's fleets of lawyers.
As a layman, I find it hard to know how much faith I should have in these claims, given that an almost identical claim made in recent years was touted widely in the news media and then turned out to be falsified.
The article seems to be saying that, since these celebrated leaders actually contributed a very small fraction of the time and effort needed to create the products that they're famous for, the products would exist without them. So, despite the adulation that's heaped upon them, in actual fact they're pretty much irrelevant.
I do not believe that to be the case. These people bring teams of talented people together, and give them a common goal to work towards. Without them, the real geniuses would toil in obscurity, and might accomplish little of lasting value.
Even though Elon Musk is no rocket scientist, without him there would be no (semi-)private rockets being launched to orbit, no one trying to make a reusable rocket, and no ridiculously expensive but powerful electric cars available for purchase. Even though Stan Lee stole his artists' ideas and credit, without him there wouldn't be eighty-four record-breaking superhero blockbusters in the movie theaters every summer. And though I personally have no real interest in recent Apple products, and thus found Steve Jobs insufferable, the electronic devices of today would likely be a lot uglier, clunkier, and harder to use without the pressure he put on his designers, and thence his competitors, to sleek things down and polish them up.
Yes, all these men were salesmen, and I hate salesmen. But they were great salesmen, dammit. Without them, the world would be a slightly more boring place. So give the devil his due.
So instead of coming up with methods to make thing safer (even Chernobyl, the worst accident ever still killed less than deaths from coal over the years), your suggestion is to throw your hands up in the air and say it can't be done?
I'm all for researching ways to make things safer. I just don't want me or my family to be part of the testing sample, which has been a problem in the past. With nuclear fission power as we know it, even one screw-up is too many. And the fission power boosters have already been wrong about safety a few times now. In my view, they've used up their mulligans. I'd rather suck up the expense for much less efficient forms of non-polluting electricity generation, at least until we can develop (relatively) clean fusion power. Even then, I think it's worth asking ourselves how much electricity is going to be enough electricity.
A simple solution to your fear is to have the people evaluating the design separate from the people selling the design. This isn't rocket science.
I guess that's a good start. I probably wouldn't have a lot of faith in the impartiality and competence of the evaluating body, though. What I'm really expecting to happen is that one of the reviewing engineers sees something potentially hazardous on the blueprints, and reports it to management. Management, which is pretty much universally a bunch of besuited sleazeball politician-on-the-take types, has that engineer quietly fired, and replaces him with someone with a healthier respect for the bottom line, and who doesn't see any problem with valve 39c, thank you very much, sir.
Chernobyl is, very simply, not happening again.
Hm, are you sure it's that simple?
Who ever claimed that Chernobyl was absolutely safe? Do you have some sort of cite?
Nope. I imagine it's kind of hard to get records from Soviet-era engineering debacles, but to be honest I didn't even try. Do you really believe that, during the entire planning, construction, and operation of the plant, nobody ever raised any safety concerns and was dismissed as a luddite worrywart?
Fukushima may or may not have killed someone, and few people not immediately involved in the cleanup have any significant harm.
Yes, I specifically acknowledged that there hadn't been a lot of direct casualties in the history of nuclear power. Then I essentially said, "yet". No, I don't have a three-thousand page report to back that up. I apologize for my lack of rigor. What I'm doing here, basically, is making extrapolations based on my life experiences with people and engineering to make predictions about future engineering projects run by people. It's all very anecdotal, granted, but my observations so far suggest that, in engineering projects, often things go as planned. Which is great! But sometimes they don't, which is less optimal.
The exclusion zone is much less than a state, and it's real hard to poison something for a thousand years when you're working with a dangerous isotope with a half-life of about forty years.
Sorry for exaggerating, I can see how that would be annoying. So maybe what I meant to say is "poison an entire county for 40 years"? You're right---that is, by any measure, a lot better. Still kind of sucks, though, if you really think about it.
To be fair, when the first couple of planes in history crashed, it usually only killed a couple of people--the pilot and maybe the person he landed on. Granted, we haven't had a lot of casualties in the history of nuclear power to date (unless you count evacuees with increased cancer risk as casualties, in which case, hoo boy), but its potential for producing casualties is way beyond even a 9/11 type plane crash.
While I do believe that it's possible to design a nuclear reactor that won't murder an entire city and poison an entire state for a thousand years when it breaks down, I'm way too cynical to ever believe anyone who makes that claim about the particular nuclear reactor they're trying to sell. Because that's the exact same claim they made about the Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island reactors.
This revolutionary touchscreen appears to be foldable in exactly the same way that a standard modern-day touchscreen is foldable. You can fold it, but it won't really work afterwards.
Yeah, this dude is passionately angry about the advent of agriculture. And I used to think that people who still hold grudges about, like, World War II needed to learn to let go.
Thanks, I may take a look at that. Though I suppose what has most discouraged me from trying key-remappers over the years is the fact that they're all "freeware", and my mind has a filter that automatically translates "freeware" to "download this registry-editing system utility from some scary filesharing site and then run it in administrator mode, we promise nothing bad will happen, heh heh". I used to think I could avoid being pwned by malware by only downloading such things from Sourceforge, but in our modern age of "special offers", that seems to no longer be the case.
I started using computers regularly in the time before the "Windows" key was added to the keyboard. So, when it appeared, I refused to use it, out of pique. These days I am always very angry when I do press it, because what I mean to press instead is always either Alt or Ctrl. I personally feel that adding a third key to that set makes it a confusing mess. I initially thought that most users would feel the same way, and that the key would quietly go away when the next year's keyboards came out.
But a lot of people seem to like it, so I guess that's never happening. I will say that, even on Windows, there's usually an alternate keyboard shortcut that makes its use unnecessary.
What I'd really like is some simple and commonly available system that lets you re-map or disable any key on the keyboard at will. That's another problem that I thought would have been fixed by now, but it never really seems to ever become very practical.
In the light of history, I'm not sure one should draw too many generalizations from the fact that "right mouse button" is the second-least used "key" on the Mac. Getting it added to the mouse at all took decades, and though I don't use Macs often, I wouldn't be on board for making it any smaller.
Besides, saying that you should make the right mouse-button smaller just because it's only used occasionally is like saying toilets should be the size of pickle jars because you only use them a few minutes a day.
We've been talking about this so long that the columns are getting skinny. I should stop, but it's hard to resist, so:
Okay, but Mr. Middle Manager didn't ask the AI for a steady revenue stream, he asked it for more widgets. Oopsie! Who knew computers could be so blamed literal?
Or, you're saying the computer has the ability to choose its own goals? Even if that was a good idea--and I'm skeptical--wouldn't we have to give it some sort of values and principles to start from, like "widgets are good", or maybe "money is good"? I think that leads us to pretty much the same place.
Suppose we did have to foresight to teach it to value a steady revenue stream, instead of just widgets, widgets, widgets, and furthermore, we teach it that counterfeiting is wrong, because don't even think about it, mister! That might just result in the enslavement of humanity, as we're all strapped into widget consumption modules and the GDP becomes 100% widget-based. That's way better than extermination, right?
I guess my fundamental deal is that I have no faith in our ability to set any goals whatsoever for this thing that won't end up sucking for us. Say what you will about the state of modern education, but it has taught me to never ask a genie to "make me a ham sandwich".
To elaborate on my last sentence, let's say the game that the AI's masters tell it to play is called "Make As Many Widgets as You Can". This is, I hope everyone will agree, a plausible goal for the masters to assign, because widgets make money, and people tend to like money, and more is always better.
Okay, so the computer's goal is now to maximize the production of widgets. The AI is really into widgets now. It's like, all about the widgets for this guy. You and me and my Aunt Doris are not widgets ourselves, nor are we particularly conducive to widget making, so in order for the AI to achieve the maximum possible score in this game of Ultimate Widgetry, you and me and my Aunt Doris have all got to go, in order to make room for an additional widget factory.
You and me and my Aunt Doris, naturally, object to this plan. We all have a meeting and decide to petition to have the AI turned off, or turn it off ourselves if necessary, with an axe if that's also necessary. That would be disastrous for widget production, though, and result in a lower score for our hardworking widgeteer AI. So, as high-level game-players do, the AI anticipates this move, and murders us all in our sleep to prevent it. 300 points.
The computer goes on to exterminate the rest of humanity, pave the Earth flat, put up a billion or so widget factories, and achieve the high score in Widget Master. After which it, as high-level game-players do, uses the joystick to enter a swear word on the leaderboard.
You may find such a scenario unrealistic. I sure hope you're right.
[Encumbrances] like what, specifically? And in particular, how would it be problematic?
Human intelligence is encumbered by fallible memory, shaky logic or outright irrationality, and most of all by a lack of focus. Oh, and the need to sleep. All of this adds up to muddy thinking, which makes it difficult for humans to find the optimal route to their goals.
A computerized artificial intelligence would likely have none of these disadvantages. It would be, in human terms, a supergenius, or at least a savant. It would win at any game its programmers told it to play, constrained only whatever rules were built into at the design phase. Call me a pessimist, but I think that sooner or later somebody's going to inadvertently tell it to play some game where genocide happens to be the best opening gambit.
...if it quickly outstrips us in intellect, then the relationship will more likely be like that of ours with ants, indifference combined with local eradication where there is conflict of interest.
I agree, for sufficiently large values of "local". : )
I think it's pretty unlikely that humans as a species can be trusted to leave a rival intelligence alone and let it do its own thing in peace. Sooner or later, they're going to inconvenience it in some small way. Any AI worth its salt will probably intuit this from the outset, and decide that the temporary 0.000001% decrease in efficiency required to preemptively wipe us out is negligible compared to the potential 100% loss of efficiency entailed in letting us live. Remember, if left alone we could always build a second AI dedicated to the destruction of the first.
Plus, our habitat takes up a bunch of space where an extra widget factory could be.
I don't think it's the artificiality of the intelligence that people are worried about, per se. It's more about how the intelligence, being artificial, would by design lack all of the encumbrances that evolution has loaded human intelligence down with. Without all of these distractions, the first true artificial intelligence will almost certainly be much more single-minded and efficient at achieving its goals. Where humans waste away their cycles wondering and woolgathering and fantasizing and thinking of ways to impress that hot barista at the coffee shop, an AI focuses with laser precision on a single goal, and spends all day every day trying to fulfill it, with perfect memory and impeccable logic. Whatever that goal is, they're probably going to achieve it, and it's probably going to end in a way that humanity at large wouldn't approve of. Even if the AI's goal is "maximize human happiness", well, as a bunch of science fiction writers have pointed out, that may just turn into a whole lot of lobotomies.
I think the main problem for Huffman here is that, substantive issues aside, he completely blew off the accepted protocol for making announcements like these. You're SUPPOSED to say it like this:
"I support free speech, BUT [thing that totally undermines free speech]."
If you deviate from the formula even slightly, the incantation doesn't work. Your ass is uncovered. He might as well have gestured to his genitals and said "I got your free speech right here."
I was pretty surprised when I heard about Tesla or SpaceX's half-scale test track. It seems like a much better idea to start off at a smaller scale like this. If I was in charge, I would start off with whatever scale I could source the cheapest components for. Like, start at 1/32 scale, then go to 1/16, then 1/8, etc. That way economies of scale will help make the cost of the prototypes negligible.
I have often wondered about this myself. Is Slashdot worth more to its users that it is to its corporate masters? Is there some sum of money that unsatisfied Slashdot users could scrape together, perhaps over weeks and months, contributing some petty sum to some online swear jar whenever they encounter a petty annoyance, that would eventually accumulate into something that Dice would have to take seriously?
The thing is, from a revenue perspective, I'm not sure Slashdot is worth anything at all. There's no "there" there--its value is almost entirely in its network of engaged commenters. I'm pretty sure 9x% of the people who visit Slashdot use ad blockers, and even if you somehow found a way to sneak ads past the blockers, that would just cause those people to exodus anyway. So I guess ideally Slashdot would have to be run as sort of a public service, rather than as a money-maker. I figured Dice bought Slashdot and SourceForge to drive traffic to their job site, sort of as a loss-leader, goodwill gesture, look-at-us-we-totally-get-you-guys, please-consider-us-for-your-next-job-search sort of thing. But given how they're seemingly burning the goodwill candle at both ends by pushing through unpopular measure after unpopular measure, I have to admit I can't figure out what their real strategy is.
Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?
Then again again, if it's just a forum, why hasn't everybody moved on, en masse, to one of the clones of Slashdot that disgruntled Slashdotters have started in recent years? Because it's all about the network, I guess, and two halves of a big network aren't even half as good as the original network.
Beats me. I hope somebody figures something out before too long, though.
The article linked in the summary talks about international negotiations to decide to use the nukes. If it's a clear existential threat that we can see coming from far enough away to achieve that kind of international consensus, I think the relative expenditure of time and will that it would take to build a few nukes would be negligible. And as others have noted, the real limiting factor will more likely be that we don't have any delivery mechanism in place to get the nukes to the asteroid, and that's not something you can bang together in a weekend. As a rough approximation, compare the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Program.
No one forces you to add your Mom or Aunt Betsy.
Facebook forces you to use your real name. After that, it's Mom herself who forces you (however passive-aggressively) to add her. Once Mom's foot is in the door, Aunt Betsy is never far behind. The only real alternative is to say, "eff you, Mom". Which is, let's face it, pretty hardcore.