That would depend on your definition of intelligence. First dictionary entry says: "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.", which would apply to driving a car in traffic.
Right. And it's not even that hard to test. Before you are allowed to put a driverless car on the market, you must demonstrate that a prototype can drive so many miles under a range of typical circumstances with a limited number of accidents.
I'm not saying it won't work, I'm saying the costs will be so ridiculously high for so little benefit that I just don't see the point.
With "work" I implied cost effective.
And thats worth spending trillions on is it?
No, but he's not spending trillions on it. We're still in the prototype phase, and we'll stay there until he's figured out a way to make it cheaper, or cancel the project.
But the chance of some useful niche tech as a side effect is hardly reason to blow the amount of money that this will cost
No, money will be spend to achieve the main goal. But having a few nice side effects could soften the blow of losing the money if the project is cancelled. And vacuum tech will be useful in space or on Mars.
The same dose of realism that told people that reusable rockets would never work ?
Also, in trying to solve these problems you learn a lot of stuff. Even when the project fails, that knowledge can be used in other projects, either related or totally unrelated.
You're contradicting yourself by first stating that the pill fundamentally changes the experience, then stating that the experience will be similar
Yes, I did that on purpose. It's "reductio ad absurdum" to show that the original assumption (that you can have a functional pain without the experience) leads to a contradiction, and is therefore not true.
'nagging' and 'distraction' that imply consciousness
One of the functions of pain is to focus your attention away from what you're doing, and fix the cause of the pain. You can't have that function without a nagging distraction, otherwise you would just ignore it and continue with your business.
There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines.
What you describe as two different things (sentience and a purely functional deterministic machine) are the same thing. If you made a computer advanced enough that it would be functionally equivalent to a human, it would automatically be sentient as well.
Imagine you have a terrible toothache, and I offer you a special pill for it. The pill doesn't take away the pain itself, and it doesn't change anything in your functional behavior. You will be exactly the same as before, with one difference: the pain no longer hurts. The pill takes away the conscious experience of the pain, but none of the functional aspects. You will still experience the same constantly nagging distraction urging you to take care of it, and you will avoid hot and cold foods on the tooth, as before. When describing the pain, you will use the exact same words . Half an hour later, I ask if the pill works, and you say: "no, I can't tell the difference".
If you can't tell the difference, there must be no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
This one is targeted towards neural nets. Does that work ?
A driverless car is not an AI.
That would depend on your definition of intelligence. First dictionary entry says: "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.", which would apply to driving a car in traffic.
Right. And it's not even that hard to test. Before you are allowed to put a driverless car on the market, you must demonstrate that a prototype can drive so many miles under a range of typical circumstances with a limited number of accidents.
And then you get passed by other countries left and right that don't artificially slow down their progress.
802.11 doesn't work anyway, because the round trip times will be too large for the standard ACK timeout.
The alternative is not doing either, and investing your money in a totally different project.
They better work on getting their shit together, then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Penetration of 24.3% in 2010, doesn't seem too bad.
Still, sticking a pole in the ground seems easier than keeping a balloon overhead.
'Fuck everything, we're doing a triple straw."
And an aloe strip for moisture. Fuck that, two aloe strips, and the second one lathers.
the more it seems like there's no practical solution to the problem of a straw that draws evenly from two distinct layers of liquid.
Put the two layers side by side, instead of stacked vertically.
B vitamins get peed out and don't stay in the body for too long.
B-12, one of vitamines mentioned, is stored in the liver for years.
This time we'll promise to shear them.
If our gut bacteria can produce enough B12, please explain why deficiency is so common. http://www.bmj.com/content/349...
Will it have Unix system? I ask because I know those.
They keep repeating this, because it's true. There's no B12 in plants, for instance.
mammoth DNA is pretty badly broken up
Just use some frog DNA to fix the bad parts.
You also need to eat other things, because plants don't provide a complete spectrum of nutrients. Same applies to lab grown meat, by the way.
Different people, different interests. If you would rather help existing species, go right ahead.
I'm not saying it won't work, I'm saying the costs will be so ridiculously high for so little benefit that I just don't see the point.
With "work" I implied cost effective.
And thats worth spending trillions on is it?
No, but he's not spending trillions on it. We're still in the prototype phase, and we'll stay there until he's figured out a way to make it cheaper, or cancel the project.
But the chance of some useful niche tech as a side effect is hardly reason to blow the amount of money that this will cost
No, money will be spend to achieve the main goal. But having a few nice side effects could soften the blow of losing the money if the project is cancelled. And vacuum tech will be useful in space or on Mars.
The same dose of realism that told people that reusable rockets would never work ?
Also, in trying to solve these problems you learn a lot of stuff. Even when the project fails, that knowledge can be used in other projects, either related or totally unrelated.
Fracking is totally different than digging because you pump high pressure fluids into the ground, opening up cracks.
And if you go deep enough, there won't be any gas pipes.
As long as you leave other competent people in charge of the project, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
You're contradicting yourself by first stating that the pill fundamentally changes the experience, then stating that the experience will be similar
Yes, I did that on purpose. It's "reductio ad absurdum" to show that the original assumption (that you can have a functional pain without the experience) leads to a contradiction, and is therefore not true.
'nagging' and 'distraction' that imply consciousness
One of the functions of pain is to focus your attention away from what you're doing, and fix the cause of the pain. You can't have that function without a nagging distraction, otherwise you would just ignore it and continue with your business.
There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines.
What you describe as two different things (sentience and a purely functional deterministic machine) are the same thing. If you made a computer advanced enough that it would be functionally equivalent to a human, it would automatically be sentient as well.
Imagine you have a terrible toothache, and I offer you a special pill for it. The pill doesn't take away the pain itself, and it doesn't change anything in your functional behavior. You will be exactly the same as before, with one difference: the pain no longer hurts. The pill takes away the conscious experience of the pain, but none of the functional aspects. You will still experience the same constantly nagging distraction urging you to take care of it, and you will avoid hot and cold foods on the tooth, as before. When describing the pain, you will use the exact same words
.
Half an hour later, I ask if the pill works, and you say: "no, I can't tell the difference".
If you can't tell the difference, there must be no difference.