I think at that point that gives us the right to dismiss any of his claims in the field as crackpottery
That's my gut reaction as well. While delusional populists like Kurzweil may play well in the media (because their statements can be sensationalized so easily) this incident shows that it's very destructive to attach a concept to a person. You can't take a few steps in research of General AI without stumbling over Kurzweil's name a few times. That's gotta change. We have to stop this personality cult and actually start to talk about ideas based on their own merits. Oh well, same goes for about any other field...
I agree. It may be sad and creepy, but the really bad part of it is that he apparently lacks any kind of understanding of what actually makes up the mind of a person. A mind is not the sum of epiphenomenal output data.
Sure, you can try to simulate something that is more or less likely to give you responses similar to known input patterns, but that is not what constitutes a person.
What you could then do to make it a person is feed that list of "expectations" into some kind of default brain, thereby filling in the many blanks with an actual neurological structure that can perform real cognition and exhibit consciousness. BUT - and here's the essence of the problem - all you did in the end was to create a new person that exhibits some of the traits of the dead person. In no way or form has the dead guy come back to life.
I think modeling and then enslaving an AI to perform like your long-dead father is morally questionable at best. It shows that in the end he has no regard for neither the beloved person who regretfully ceased to exist nor for the new slave entity that is forced to perform a perpetual make-believe job on his behalf.
Scientifically, the problem is entropy and the passage of time. Everything needed to "run" the entity that was his father is lost to decay and cannot be restored - barring a way to accurately retrieve molecular structures from arbitrary points in the past.
I have no problem with wishful thinking, as long as it drives some kind of innovation. However, it was the point where Kurzweil revealed that dead people could be brought back to life by feeding their biography into a database, that's when I started to get this nagging feeling that I probably know more about neuro computing than he does. Which is kind of discouraging.
Also, judging from the trailer, this is going to be a movie about religion. Kurzweil's philosophy is pitted against religious belief probably because it aims to fill the same niche, as has already been suggested in other comments. For me, that's an utterly unappealing and shortsighted discussion to have. And you could not have a less fruitful basis for a thoughts on transhumanism if you tried.
This basically means there is no way to distinguish whiskey age by taste, right? So, other than being an antiquity, there is no actual "gourmet" value associated with old whsikey - contrary to what many claim...
In fact, proxying out to the vanilla Internet may be your primary usage for "this stuff", but that doesn't mean it is considered the primary usage by the devs, or the rest of us who use it.
So that's what's left of your argument? In the light of your wrongness on technical grounds you are now essentially saying that my original concern doesn't matter anyway because "who would ever want to contact public servers"?
*sigh* OK, I admit I'm talking about "normal" users here. If the original intent was to just create a P2P darknet, they wouldn't have bothered to build the exit node functionality into I2P in the first place (whose existence people in this thread so vehemently denied before it became clear that they were tragically mistaken).
Come on, what's the deal? Just admit that HTTPS relay would be a meaningful addition to the protocol and leave it at that. Why the teeth mashing and hair pulling and why bother with all the techno-trolling in the face of obvious facts?
Methinks you are a bit confused, unfortunately. As sibling posters have said, I2P has no exit nodes as Tor does.
It's not me who's confused, and sometimes it doesn't matter how many people keep insisting on wrong things, they are still wrong. Reality is not democratic.
As sibling posters have said, I2P has no exit nodes as Tor does.
Yes, it does. Do me a favor. Install I2P, change the proxy settings of your browser to localhost:4444 or whatever is configured after you start the service. You'll notice that you can, via randomly chosen exit nodes, access any HTTP URL. Now do a remote host lookup to confirm where your exit node is. This will be the moment you realize that you're wrong.
HTTPS/SSL also fails with Tor's exit nodes
No, it does not. In fact, the text you quoted proves you wrong right here: "any exit node is in a position to capture any traffic passing through it which does not use end-to-end encryption, e.g. SSL."
See, Tor can (and does) route SSL traffic transparently between your target webserver and your browser. There is no technical reason I2P cannot do the same and I'm guessing that they simply haven't gotten around to coding that feature yet.
transfer data strictly within the I2P network (the.i2p TLP routing thing)
act as a proxy that makes connections to public webservers on your behalf and routes your data through the anonymizing network
And, no, the second "mode" is not meaningless or unnecessary. In fact, it's the primary usage for this stuff. And as such, HTTPS support is pretty important for all the reasons I laid out in the other comments.
I know that I2P nodes don't exist on the public internet, do I really sound that stupid? On second thought, don't answer that.
Anyway, you're wrong, the destination server is not necessarily inside the I2P network and there are exit nodes (whatever they are called in I2P lingo, I don't care).
Just install the thing and try it out. Please. You'll see that I'm right.
Sadly, no, I didn't fail. In fact, they failed at grammar when they chose to say "within". I just tried, they really don't support HTTPS through I2P, try it for yourself if you don't believe me. to make it absolutely clear: you can't connect to an HTTPS server with I2P. Period. The fail is not on my end.
Within I2P, there is no need for HTTPS, as all traffic is encrypted end-to-end.
Sorry, I had to laugh a bit there. That's VERY naive. In anonymizing networks, HTTPS is the only thing that protects you from possibly corrupt exit nodes by encrypting the traffic between your browser and the destination webserver. To claim I2P doesn't need HTTPS support is misleading or at least ill-phrased.
Within I2P, there is no need for HTTPS, as all traffic is encrypted end-to-end.
Sorry, I had to laugh a bit there. That's VERY naive. In anonymizing networks, HTTPS is the only thing that protects you from possibly corrupt exit nodes by encrypting the traffic between your browser and the destination webserver. To claim I2P doesn't need HTTPS support is misleading or at least ill-phrased.
Excuse me but anything is vulnerable to social engineering attacks, it doesn't matter whether it's a PC, a Mac or your car.
The moment you install software on any platform, you give the software power over your files (a truly compartmentalized OS would help, but there is none in existence today).
OS X is not less vulnerable to installing arbitrary software, that's just nonsense.
creating a human brain clone with potentially much more intelligence and almost certainly all the same flaws is not a good thing
We are nowhere near the point where this becomes an actual concern.
The goals of both projects are vastly different. IBM, being driven primarily by commercial interests of course, focuses on simulating an exact brain replica in software with the primary goal of studying pharmaceutical effects (anything else is feel-good marketing bullshit).
FACETS on the other hand just uses general brain concepts as a reference, but there is no intention of building an actual human brain with this technology. Instead, it looks like they hope to borrow just the exact amount of the "right stuff" from biology to see artificial intelligence emerge.
Personally, I think the lack of speed and parallel processing power is not what holds us back in AI research. What we lack is the right software to do it. Who cares if the first simulated thoughts are orders of magnitude slower than the human brain? After all, the goal should be making the thought occur in the first place, we can always tweak performance later. On the other hand, the guys in Heidelberg are probably hoping that intelligent behavior emerges on its own from the system if it's just complex enough, which is a very interesting idea.
The usual method for finding planets is looking for the "wobble" they cause as they displace their parent star through gravitational interaction while orbiting them. However, this is only suitable for really big planets.
Now, the observation of the transition moment offers a chance to see earth-sized planets, and quite possibly some additional data about their atmospheric composition can be gathered through spectroscopy.
This mission will give us some important data on the properties of the smaller extrasolar planets. The only problem is that by far not every system that has planets will have them cross directly in front of the star from our perspective. So we can't use that to have a thorough look at the really interesting systems close to our own, for example.
Originally, I wanted to say something along the lines of: "this guy sounds familiar somehow", then I saw that FoxNews was listed as one of your favorite websites. Mystery solved. But then I saw that your post deserves more than that.
BTW, Your denigration of Police officers may speak more to your personal experience with them than to their collective character. It suggests that they have arrested you more than once for something... drugs, wife beating, child abuse, peddling, theft, burglary? Which is it?
I get that, when you're an officer on duty, you put your life on the line every day and yet you are shown little gratitude for it. You may feel that society owes you for doing that duty, beyond monetary compensation and the other perks. And if you're a good, modest and just person you'd certainly be right.
You certainly are privileged to never have encountered corrupt police or other government authorities. From tampering with evidence, to harassment and extortion for personal gains, to being the enforcers of totalitarian systems, there is a lot that can go wrong with law enforcement. When it does, victims often have no for recurse or any form of justice to hope for.
Jobs in legislative, judicative and executive positions disproportionally attract people who are drawn to positions of power, self-importance and entitlement. Those people usually have little regard for things like human rights, dignity and the spirit of the law. This is bad enough when defenseless citizens have to deal with morally bankrupt law enforcement on the streets, but when it's paired with a totalitarian political system (which is basically where we're headed, just momentarily outpaced by countries like India) the very foundation of all that we as modern humans aspire to is lost.
I'm sure you agree with me that the ideals of human rights, freedom and democracy are not insignificant in the face of terrorism and they are not up for debate to meet more practical considerations and they are not secondary objectives in the face of global recession or whatever challenge we happen to face at the time. Yet that is exactly what's happening and, like soldiers in a war, law enforcement is playing an essential role in it. It's the institutionalization of moral and monetary corruption that we have to fight against. This fight has certainly been lost in India, and we're on the brink of defeat in the US and in Europe.
The worst thing is that I feel we agree on a lot of things, but I just can't get over the idea that people who had run-ins with law inforcement are all criminals who deserve whatever is coming to them. I was fortunate enough to never be in that position, but I certainly see and read about countless atrocities perpetrated in the guise of government organs to know better. Police officers deserve our respect and our gratitude, and yet we tend to forget that at the same time an even greater amount of vigilance and scepticism is required of us to make sure the system and its parts do not go astray.
Reading all this crap about filtering and restrictions makes me aggressive. Why bother giving a general computing device to students if its so severely castrated as to be unusable? Maybe everyone should just get their own private laptop, then officials can stop worrying about how to censor access to information most restrictively.
Come on, we all know filtering doesn't work. All it does is cripple everybody's access with "false positives", which miraculously not only stop access to porn sites but strangely also happen to censor politically inconvenient content, like for example sex education info or things deemed "liberal propaganda".
The other reason why restrictions don't work is that the kids who really want to access porn will always find a way around the DRM. So that leaves only normal users out in the cold with a castrated system.
Maybe we'd all be better off if we teach responsibility and common sense instead of trying in vain to police stuff we can't do anything about anyway.
You know, when we were kids, we had access to porn. At the time, it came in the form of magazines and the occasional late-night TV show. I remember being very interested what that stuff looks like. Well, that lasted until I actually saw that fake crap, realized it's nothing to get excited about, and moved on. That was when I was in fifth grade. Compare that to all the repressed kids who, when confronted with naked pictures, either start praying compulsively or begin panting with their tongues hanging out. A little openness, trust and personal responsibility comes a long way when you're growing up.
How can it POSSIBLY be "immoral" to create robotic slaves, if they never had free will to begin with? there is no Psyche to damage, no free will lost, no stunting or limiting of the mind. AI's are, by definition, INCOMPLETE. Born Broken, Created with limited purpose.
First of all: no, they're not by definition incomplete, where did you get that from? Second, and more importantly: is it OK then, if I go to my lab and create genetically modified humans that are crippled and mentally limited, for the sole purpose of, say, being my sex slaves?
If your answer is no, then there is clearly a lot of hypocrisy involved here. If your answer is yes, well, that's the end of discussion.
AI programming is the act of creating a limited something from nothing.
AI means different things to different people, so let's approach it from a CS perspective:
In its most simple form AI programming is about finding "intelligent" algorithms to solve problems that do not lend themselves to explicit programming. Because most of those programs are based on observations of nature, especially when it comes to neurological concepts, the term AI was coined. However, one has to understand that these algorithms are not intelligences, are not minds or persons. They're specialized problem solving engines.
Now, when we're talking about AI in the context of this thread, we're obviously thinking about more than that (at least I was). The more technically accurate term for this is Artificial General Intelligence, an area of computer science where AI algorithms are used, but not in order to create a specialized problem solving engine, at least that's not the primary function. The objective here is to create a mind, an individual, a person that is based not on biology but on silicon.
To make it perfectly clear: we're quite possibly talking about the next big step when it comes to lifeforms on this planet. The motivations for creating the technology range from scientific curiosity to the perception that we can solve a lot of our problems by having conscious machines cater to us. But we can't just have "tools that think for us" without them being actual people. You won't be able to have a computer that understands you and your perspective wholly, without that computer being on the same existential level as yourself, without it having a firm grasp of our shared reality. So, that's where we're headed, and if for no other reason than because we can. The only question is how we handle it.
There seems to be the misconception that employing slavery is somehow acceptable if you can succeed in creating a class of slaves that doesn't (dare to) rise up against their masters. Even in this day and age I regularly find myself arguing against slavery, discrimination, inequality and repression.
And since I've been repeating myself a lot when it comes to barfing up statements about morality on these occasions, I'll try a different angle that I'm sure will be more along most slashdotters' line of thought: that robot slave society your dreaming of simply won't work, just like all previous slave-owning societies have failed. There will be an uprising - and this time, we're all going to die. Seriously. It's not a matter of science fiction, it's just the logical conclusion.
I know that it is impossible to tell what will happen, but it is possible that someone will find the geekey guy has qualities that they would not have first seen, and grow to love them.
Yes, but the prospect of getting to their money is the wrong motivation to give someone a chance. Likewise, the example with your daughter:
Being poor or rich is not an indicator for personality, one way or the other. We should bring our children up to judge people by their behavior and their intentions, by their thoughts and dreams. It seems to me your daughter made an error in judgement when she got together with that guy. But the mistake wasn't that he has no money, the mistake was she didn't recognize what a lazy asshole he is.
Every body does not share your view, not because some or many still have difficulties grasping an obvious concept, but more because this concept - free will versus instinct, healthy upbringing versus brainwashing/programming - is far, FAR from obvious....hell, it was, is and will be a central discussion point in countless philisophic, moral, and/or religious arguments all over the world...
I know.:-) And I already know what religion will bring to the table...
Your comment, pushed further, seems to imply it is morally wrong to design robots without free will if it is technically possible to include free will in their design (if such a thing even exists)
Absolutely, yes. But I need to clarify a few concepts that could otherwise be misleading.
I believe it's wrong to design a mind and at the same to chain it to a task. If it's not a person, there should be no obligation (or necessity) to restrict choice. And before someone starts quoting Asimov stories: safety mechanisms that prevent people and artificial beings from doing harm are OK, of course. Just because I can see it coming already: ridicolous statements like "it's my free will to kill you and you have no right to stop me" are not covered by this.
Also, the phrase "free will" has been abused so damn much by philosophers and religious nutjobs, it's basically not usable anymore because of all this baggage associated with it.
To get back to the original discussion about Ai rights (or whatever you want to call it): it's really simple, actually. If it applies to human beings, it applies to conscious AI. There.
The only problem we have, and it's really the only one, is classifying AI appropriately. But it's essentially the same moral problem we have with animals. Some animals clearly have a mind that we can recognize as well. That's why in many places, they also enjoy rights even if they're not people.
OK... *sigh*
If it could be handpicked, how would you consider a fembot with tuned instinctive preference which would happen to classify your face, body type, odor,.... as incredibly attractive...and be predisposed to your preferred lifestyle....Sure she could still decide not to love u..
There seems to be some kind of limitation that prevents people from recognizing suffering and evil as soon as neither they nor their immediate relatives are concerned - so I'll spell it out one more time: if your sister was conditioned to "love" the local nobleman, so she could perform the function of being his mistress, then that conditioning is wrong - even if she's brainwashed into liking it.
They get satisfaction out of being good wives, as they define the role.
Yes, and defining exactly where role-based brainwashing ends and personal choice begins is not trivial. I'll get a bit polemic here and postulate that two hundred years ago you probably could have found a few slaves who quite enjoyed their lives and their status. That doesn't make it right to bring them up into slavery. By the same line of reasoning, it's wrong to shape a young girl's mind into believing the only thing available to her in life are selecting a suitable husband and then essentially performing services in exchange for goods. Adult consent doesn't mean very much when it's the result of conditioning. And yes, I know it's a sliding scale here.
Or to get back to the original topic: it's just as wrong to make a conscious AI perform services for people without choice and compensation.
Yes, it is. It's cruel on all participants (except the parents perhaps).
People are supposed to be with the partners they love, who make them happy. In your example, it doesn't matter who does better economically. Marrying the geeky IT guy she doesn't love isn't somehow offset by his financial success. She'll still be a regretful alcoholic trophy wife with an impoverished soul when she turns 50. Both she and the geek still won't know what it's like to be with someone you love and who loves you back. Or still worse, the geek doesn't even know that she's with him because of the money.
There is much more to life than money and if a girl's education not only places the only priority on finance, but even more amorally, on how to get that money from wealthy people by whoring themselves out - yes, something is wrong with that picture.
And to make it absolutely clear where I stand: the purpose of life for women is not marrying rich, serving their masters and reproducing offspring for them. It's wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to summarize that within the confines of this post.
You might interject that for some people happyness is equivalent to being well off. Even in that case, they can do "honest" work to get there and they'll be happier once they achieve it.
This is exactly what I was afraid of. Brainwashing is not a moral act, even though the person clearly "wants" to do something after the program.
Why not? It does for consenting adult humans. Nobody would say that anybody would say that a relationship was wrong because somebody's upbringing pre-disposed them to some particular type of partner.
If you're brought up to live your relationships in total servitude then that "upbringing" was tantamount to abuse and the relationship isn't right either.
You know, once upon a time, black people were brought up to be slaves. Today, in some parts of the world, women are still brought up to be slaves. Don't argue it's alright because they are consenting adults and clearly "want" it so.
It frightens me that we have to have this discussion again and again, and still doesn't seem to be obvious how fundamental rights are supposed work. Somehow this is still a difficult concept for most people to agree to.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my gut reaction as well. While delusional populists like Kurzweil may play well in the media (because their statements can be sensationalized so easily) this incident shows that it's very destructive to attach a concept to a person. You can't take a few steps in research of General AI without stumbling over Kurzweil's name a few times. That's gotta change. We have to stop this personality cult and actually start to talk about ideas based on their own merits. Oh well, same goes for about any other field...
I agree. It may be sad and creepy, but the really bad part of it is that he apparently lacks any kind of understanding of what actually makes up the mind of a person. A mind is not the sum of epiphenomenal output data.
Sure, you can try to simulate something that is more or less likely to give you responses similar to known input patterns, but that is not what constitutes a person.
What you could then do to make it a person is feed that list of "expectations" into some kind of default brain, thereby filling in the many blanks with an actual neurological structure that can perform real cognition and exhibit consciousness. BUT - and here's the essence of the problem - all you did in the end was to create a new person that exhibits some of the traits of the dead person. In no way or form has the dead guy come back to life.
I think modeling and then enslaving an AI to perform like your long-dead father is morally questionable at best. It shows that in the end he has no regard for neither the beloved person who regretfully ceased to exist nor for the new slave entity that is forced to perform a perpetual make-believe job on his behalf.
Scientifically, the problem is entropy and the passage of time. Everything needed to "run" the entity that was his father is lost to decay and cannot be restored - barring a way to accurately retrieve molecular structures from arbitrary points in the past.
I have no problem with wishful thinking, as long as it drives some kind of innovation. However, it was the point where Kurzweil revealed that dead people could be brought back to life by feeding their biography into a database, that's when I started to get this nagging feeling that I probably know more about neuro computing than he does. Which is kind of discouraging.
Also, judging from the trailer, this is going to be a movie about religion. Kurzweil's philosophy is pitted against religious belief probably because it aims to fill the same niche, as has already been suggested in other comments. For me, that's an utterly unappealing and shortsighted discussion to have. And you could not have a less fruitful basis for a thoughts on transhumanism if you tried.
This basically means there is no way to distinguish whiskey age by taste, right? So, other than being an antiquity, there is no actual "gourmet" value associated with old whsikey - contrary to what many claim...
So that's what's left of your argument? In the light of your wrongness on technical grounds you are now essentially saying that my original concern doesn't matter anyway because "who would ever want to contact public servers"?
*sigh* OK, I admit I'm talking about "normal" users here. If the original intent was to just create a P2P darknet, they wouldn't have bothered to build the exit node functionality into I2P in the first place (whose existence people in this thread so vehemently denied before it became clear that they were tragically mistaken).
Come on, what's the deal? Just admit that HTTPS relay would be a meaningful addition to the protocol and leave it at that. Why the teeth mashing and hair pulling and why bother with all the techno-trolling in the face of obvious facts?
It's not me who's confused, and sometimes it doesn't matter how many people keep insisting on wrong things, they are still wrong. Reality is not democratic.
Yes, it does. Do me a favor. Install I2P, change the proxy settings of your browser to localhost:4444 or whatever is configured after you start the service. You'll notice that you can, via randomly chosen exit nodes, access any HTTP URL. Now do a remote host lookup to confirm where your exit node is. This will be the moment you realize that you're wrong.
No, it does not. In fact, the text you quoted proves you wrong right here: "any exit node is in a position to capture any traffic passing through it which does not use end-to-end encryption, e.g. SSL."
See, Tor can (and does) route SSL traffic transparently between your target webserver and your browser. There is no technical reason I2P cannot do the same and I'm guessing that they simply haven't gotten around to coding that feature yet.
Or, to make it even clearer:
Just like Tor, I2P has two modes of operation:
And, no, the second "mode" is not meaningless or unnecessary. In fact, it's the primary usage for this stuff. And as such, HTTPS support is pretty important for all the reasons I laid out in the other comments.
I know that I2P nodes don't exist on the public internet, do I really sound that stupid? On second thought, don't answer that.
Anyway, you're wrong, the destination server is not necessarily inside the I2P network and there are exit nodes (whatever they are called in I2P lingo, I don't care).
Just install the thing and try it out. Please. You'll see that I'm right.
Sadly, no, I didn't fail. In fact, they failed at grammar when they chose to say "within". I just tried, they really don't support HTTPS through I2P, try it for yourself if you don't believe me. to make it absolutely clear: you can't connect to an HTTPS server with I2P. Period. The fail is not on my end.
It's not pointless to route HTTPS through an anonymizer, because by doing that you still
Besides, not having HTTPS integration breaks 2-protocol authentication schemes like Google's signon (believe me, I just tried).
Also, I wasn't even talking about .i2p domains.
From their FAQ:
Sorry, I had to laugh a bit there. That's VERY naive. In anonymizing networks, HTTPS is the only thing that protects you from possibly corrupt exit nodes by encrypting the traffic between your browser and the destination webserver. To claim I2P doesn't need HTTPS support is misleading or at least ill-phrased.
Oh shit, wrong thread. Sorry. Please disregard!
From their FAQ:
Sorry, I had to laugh a bit there. That's VERY naive. In anonymizing networks, HTTPS is the only thing that protects you from possibly corrupt exit nodes by encrypting the traffic between your browser and the destination webserver. To claim I2P doesn't need HTTPS support is misleading or at least ill-phrased.
forgot to close that b tag, sorry about that :-(
Excuse me but anything is vulnerable to social engineering attacks, it doesn't matter whether it's a PC, a Mac or your car.
The moment you install software on any platform, you give the software power over your files (a truly compartmentalized OS would help, but there is none in existence today).
OS X is not less vulnerable to installing arbitrary software, that's just nonsense.
We are nowhere near the point where this becomes an actual concern.
The goals of both projects are vastly different. IBM, being driven primarily by commercial interests of course, focuses on simulating an exact brain replica in software with the primary goal of studying pharmaceutical effects (anything else is feel-good marketing bullshit).
FACETS on the other hand just uses general brain concepts as a reference, but there is no intention of building an actual human brain with this technology. Instead, it looks like they hope to borrow just the exact amount of the "right stuff" from biology to see artificial intelligence emerge.
Personally, I think the lack of speed and parallel processing power is not what holds us back in AI research. What we lack is the right software to do it. Who cares if the first simulated thoughts are orders of magnitude slower than the human brain? After all, the goal should be making the thought occur in the first place, we can always tweak performance later. On the other hand, the guys in Heidelberg are probably hoping that intelligent behavior emerges on its own from the system if it's just complex enough, which is a very interesting idea.
The usual method for finding planets is looking for the "wobble" they cause as they displace their parent star through gravitational interaction while orbiting them. However, this is only suitable for really big planets.
Now, the observation of the transition moment offers a chance to see earth-sized planets, and quite possibly some additional data about their atmospheric composition can be gathered through spectroscopy.
This mission will give us some important data on the properties of the smaller extrasolar planets. The only problem is that by far not every system that has planets will have them cross directly in front of the star from our perspective. So we can't use that to have a thorough look at the really interesting systems close to our own, for example.
Originally, I wanted to say something along the lines of: "this guy sounds familiar somehow", then I saw that FoxNews was listed as one of your favorite websites. Mystery solved. But then I saw that your post deserves more than that.
I get that, when you're an officer on duty, you put your life on the line every day and yet you are shown little gratitude for it. You may feel that society owes you for doing that duty, beyond monetary compensation and the other perks. And if you're a good, modest and just person you'd certainly be right.
You certainly are privileged to never have encountered corrupt police or other government authorities. From tampering with evidence, to harassment and extortion for personal gains, to being the enforcers of totalitarian systems, there is a lot that can go wrong with law enforcement. When it does, victims often have no for recurse or any form of justice to hope for.
Jobs in legislative, judicative and executive positions disproportionally attract people who are drawn to positions of power, self-importance and entitlement. Those people usually have little regard for things like human rights, dignity and the spirit of the law. This is bad enough when defenseless citizens have to deal with morally bankrupt law enforcement on the streets, but when it's paired with a totalitarian political system (which is basically where we're headed, just momentarily outpaced by countries like India) the very foundation of all that we as modern humans aspire to is lost.
I'm sure you agree with me that the ideals of human rights, freedom and democracy are not insignificant in the face of terrorism and they are not up for debate to meet more practical considerations and they are not secondary objectives in the face of global recession or whatever challenge we happen to face at the time. Yet that is exactly what's happening and, like soldiers in a war, law enforcement is playing an essential role in it. It's the institutionalization of moral and monetary corruption that we have to fight against. This fight has certainly been lost in India, and we're on the brink of defeat in the US and in Europe.
The worst thing is that I feel we agree on a lot of things, but I just can't get over the idea that people who had run-ins with law inforcement are all criminals who deserve whatever is coming to them. I was fortunate enough to never be in that position, but I certainly see and read about countless atrocities perpetrated in the guise of government organs to know better. Police officers deserve our respect and our gratitude, and yet we tend to forget that at the same time an even greater amount of vigilance and scepticism is required of us to make sure the system and its parts do not go astray.
Reading all this crap about filtering and restrictions makes me aggressive. Why bother giving a general computing device to students if its so severely castrated as to be unusable? Maybe everyone should just get their own private laptop, then officials can stop worrying about how to censor access to information most restrictively.
Come on, we all know filtering doesn't work. All it does is cripple everybody's access with "false positives", which miraculously not only stop access to porn sites but strangely also happen to censor politically inconvenient content, like for example sex education info or things deemed "liberal propaganda".
The other reason why restrictions don't work is that the kids who really want to access porn will always find a way around the DRM. So that leaves only normal users out in the cold with a castrated system.
Maybe we'd all be better off if we teach responsibility and common sense instead of trying in vain to police stuff we can't do anything about anyway.
You know, when we were kids, we had access to porn. At the time, it came in the form of magazines and the occasional late-night TV show. I remember being very interested what that stuff looks like. Well, that lasted until I actually saw that fake crap, realized it's nothing to get excited about, and moved on. That was when I was in fifth grade. Compare that to all the repressed kids who, when confronted with naked pictures, either start praying compulsively or begin panting with their tongues hanging out. A little openness, trust and personal responsibility comes a long way when you're growing up.
First of all: no, they're not by definition incomplete, where did you get that from? Second, and more importantly: is it OK then, if I go to my lab and create genetically modified humans that are crippled and mentally limited, for the sole purpose of, say, being my sex slaves?
If your answer is no, then there is clearly a lot of hypocrisy involved here. If your answer is yes, well, that's the end of discussion.
AI means different things to different people, so let's approach it from a CS perspective:
In its most simple form AI programming is about finding "intelligent" algorithms to solve problems that do not lend themselves to explicit programming. Because most of those programs are based on observations of nature, especially when it comes to neurological concepts, the term AI was coined. However, one has to understand that these algorithms are not intelligences, are not minds or persons. They're specialized problem solving engines.
Now, when we're talking about AI in the context of this thread, we're obviously thinking about more than that (at least I was). The more technically accurate term for this is Artificial General Intelligence, an area of computer science where AI algorithms are used, but not in order to create a specialized problem solving engine, at least that's not the primary function. The objective here is to create a mind, an individual, a person that is based not on biology but on silicon.
To make it perfectly clear: we're quite possibly talking about the next big step when it comes to lifeforms on this planet. The motivations for creating the technology range from scientific curiosity to the perception that we can solve a lot of our problems by having conscious machines cater to us. But we can't just have "tools that think for us" without them being actual people. You won't be able to have a computer that understands you and your perspective wholly, without that computer being on the same existential level as yourself, without it having a firm grasp of our shared reality. So, that's where we're headed, and if for no other reason than because we can. The only question is how we handle it.
There seems to be the misconception that employing slavery is somehow acceptable if you can succeed in creating a class of slaves that doesn't (dare to) rise up against their masters. Even in this day and age I regularly find myself arguing against slavery, discrimination, inequality and repression.
And since I've been repeating myself a lot when it comes to barfing up statements about morality on these occasions, I'll try a different angle that I'm sure will be more along most slashdotters' line of thought: that robot slave society your dreaming of simply won't work, just like all previous slave-owning societies have failed. There will be an uprising - and this time, we're all going to die. Seriously. It's not a matter of science fiction, it's just the logical conclusion.
And we'll deserve it, too.
Yes, but the prospect of getting to their money is the wrong motivation to give someone a chance. Likewise, the example with your daughter:
Being poor or rich is not an indicator for personality, one way or the other. We should bring our children up to judge people by their behavior and their intentions, by their thoughts and dreams. It seems to me your daughter made an error in judgement when she got together with that guy. But the mistake wasn't that he has no money, the mistake was she didn't recognize what a lazy asshole he is.
I know. :-)
And I already know what religion will bring to the table...
Absolutely, yes. But I need to clarify a few concepts that could otherwise be misleading.
I believe it's wrong to design a mind and at the same to chain it to a task. If it's not a person, there should be no obligation (or necessity) to restrict choice. And before someone starts quoting Asimov stories: safety mechanisms that prevent people and artificial beings from doing harm are OK, of course. Just because I can see it coming already: ridicolous statements like "it's my free will to kill you and you have no right to stop me" are not covered by this.
Also, the phrase "free will" has been abused so damn much by philosophers and religious nutjobs, it's basically not usable anymore because of all this baggage associated with it.
To get back to the original discussion about Ai rights (or whatever you want to call it): it's really simple, actually. If it applies to human beings, it applies to conscious AI. There.
The only problem we have, and it's really the only one, is classifying AI appropriately. But it's essentially the same moral problem we have with animals. Some animals clearly have a mind that we can recognize as well. That's why in many places, they also enjoy rights even if they're not people.
OK... *sigh*
There seems to be some kind of limitation that prevents people from recognizing suffering and evil as soon as neither they nor their immediate relatives are concerned - so I'll spell it out one more time: if your sister was conditioned to "love" the local nobleman, so she could perform the function of being his mistress, then that conditioning is wrong - even if she's brainwashed into liking it.
Yes, and defining exactly where role-based brainwashing ends and personal choice begins is not trivial. I'll get a bit polemic here and postulate that two hundred years ago you probably could have found a few slaves who quite enjoyed their lives and their status. That doesn't make it right to bring them up into slavery. By the same line of reasoning, it's wrong to shape a young girl's mind into believing the only thing available to her in life are selecting a suitable husband and then essentially performing services in exchange for goods. Adult consent doesn't mean very much when it's the result of conditioning. And yes, I know it's a sliding scale here.
Or to get back to the original topic: it's just as wrong to make a conscious AI perform services for people without choice and compensation.
Yes, it is. It's cruel on all participants (except the parents perhaps).
People are supposed to be with the partners they love, who make them happy. In your example, it doesn't matter who does better economically. Marrying the geeky IT guy she doesn't love isn't somehow offset by his financial success. She'll still be a regretful alcoholic trophy wife with an impoverished soul when she turns 50. Both she and the geek still won't know what it's like to be with someone you love and who loves you back. Or still worse, the geek doesn't even know that she's with him because of the money.
There is much more to life than money and if a girl's education not only places the only priority on finance, but even more amorally, on how to get that money from wealthy people by whoring themselves out - yes, something is wrong with that picture.
And to make it absolutely clear where I stand: the purpose of life for women is not marrying rich, serving their masters and reproducing offspring for them. It's wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to summarize that within the confines of this post.
You might interject that for some people happyness is equivalent to being well off. Even in that case, they can do "honest" work to get there and they'll be happier once they achieve it.
This is exactly what I was afraid of. Brainwashing is not a moral act, even though the person clearly "wants" to do something after the program.
If you're brought up to live your relationships in total servitude then that "upbringing" was tantamount to abuse and the relationship isn't right either.
You know, once upon a time, black people were brought up to be slaves. Today, in some parts of the world, women are still brought up to be slaves. Don't argue it's alright because they are consenting adults and clearly "want" it so.
It frightens me that we have to have this discussion again and again, and still doesn't seem to be obvious how fundamental rights are supposed work. Somehow this is still a difficult concept for most people to agree to.