Just because we haven't yet figured out things like consciousness, doesn't mean you should allow yourself to say "fuck it" and fall back on the ages-old flaw in the human brain that looks for simple one-line 'explanations' for complex concepts, and in essence say "god did it" -- and that, in essence, is what this is. It's a cop-out, and I find it to be intellectually reprehensible. Anyone who calls themselves a 'scientist' but espouses opinions like this, under the auspices of them being a 'scientist', is reprehensible, and should be censured.
In the past several years I have often said "people are getting dumber, not smarter", and things like this are part of that: rejecting science, logic, and reason, and reverting to what I'll call in this case 'caveman logic'. I'm not totally clear to me whether it's just here in the U.S. or whether it's a global phenomenon, but it seems as though people are rejecting science, logic, reason, and real truth, en masse, and I find the trend to be very disturbing.
As we delve deeper into complex issues like how the human brain produces the phenomenon we call 'consciousness', and deeper into how the underlying fabric of our physical Universe works, we will without a doubt uncover the processes and mechanisms by which all the above, and many more things work; we humans are clever, inquisitive, and posess the potential to be capable of so much more than we are at this moment in time, but we cannot allow ourselves, as a species, to backslide. I feel we are at a crossroads in our development as a species; we must choose carefully and wisely, or we might find ourselves living in another Dark Age.
This has been posited to me before, and I admit there is a logic to it -- but just like uncovering a nest of cockroaches, you find yourself disgusted and nauseated, and you still have to clear it out and clean it up. Not happy about any of the above. It'll take decades to undo the damage the traitor in the Whitehouse has done so far.
I ride a bike quite a bit too, friend, and I'll tell you this: if and when the day comes that we're all either prohibited (in one way or another, or to one degree or another) from riding bicycles anywhere, or are required to have some sort of gods-be-damned license plate on them so they can track us, then we'll know that it's time for Civil War II to start, because things will have officially Gone Way Too Far, and "government by the people for the people" will no longer have any meaning, we'll be living in a full-on police state and have no rights anymore.
That's what some of (not all*) of our law enforcement in this country is turning into, and I in part** blame Trump for this. Haivng the Pussy-grabber-in-chief sitting in the Whitehouse has brought some of the worst kinds of people out of the shadows, emboldened them.
* I am not going to claim that all police are jackbooted thugs; some genuinely believe in law-and-order, and want to help people.
** I'm also not going to lay 100% of the blame on Trump; many of his predecessors have contributed to this problem and/or set the stage for things that are manifesting now. Trump however appears to be the catalyst in many cases.
Delta-V isn't the issue, it's time, namely the difference between getting to the Moon and getting to Mars.
Also the lack of resources on the Moon is a feature not a problem; if we can make a colony work on the Moon then it'll probably be easier to deal with Mars, and all so much closer to Earth.
As much as I'm wired to look at what can go wrong with things (because ignoring that could be disasterous), I really hate to have to be that way with this subject. However there's so many things that can go wrong, most of them fatal, that you really can't ignore it.
The first few attempts at human colonization of Mars will likely be disasters where all the participants end up dead for one reason or another; sadly, anyone who agrees to go has to accept that it's very possibly a suicide mission. There is no rescue from Earth; there likely won't be any way of escaping back to Earth; the Martian atmosphere, such as it is, isn't breathable, and it's thin enough that (if I understand it correctly) radiation from the sun is a problem -- as is radiation exposure just getting there in the first place. Any habitat built there has to be 100% self contained, 100% self sufficient, essentially like a spacecraft except rooted to the planets surface, and with some notable exceptions: you have to be able to grow your own food in a sustainable way, you're not bringing all your food with you like you would for a LEO mission or to go live on the ISS. And so on, and so on. A whole list of things that, if they aren't done right, can kill everyone in the colony. That's not even taking into consideration the unknown unknowns that could also kill everyone. Assuming we stuck with it, there'd have to be several attempts at a Mars colony, before you got one that actually didn't end up with everyone dead. At least at our current level of technology, that is. Fifty years from now might be a different story entirely. Of course, fifty years from now, we might not even be capable of putting anything in LEO, for all we know.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We need to learn to walk before we can learn to run. We need Training Wheels on this particular bike -- and luckily for us, we've got the perfect place to practice right in our local neighborhood: the Moon. We should be building a permanent human presence on the Moon first, with all the infrastructure that implies, followed by industry to support space operations. We can make all our mistakes on the Moon, first, where it's possible to come up from Earth to fix them and/or rescue inhabitants. Industry built there can support any Mars missions (or asteroid missions, or whatever) easier than having to launch from Earth all the time. There would be many more advantages to this than I can easily list here.
Last time I checked, aren't monopolies bad for capitalism, and by extension, bad for a national economy in general? Am I right? All the above-named corporations have de-facto monopolies. Add Microsoft and AT&T to that list, by the way, just for starters; there are many others, too.
While we're at it, how about we repeal the decision to consider corporations to be 'people' in the eyes of the law, and also ban them from contributing to political campaigns. In fact, I'd prefer that all campaign funds come from a neutral source, so no corporations or rich individuals can influence politics.
People know what they're getting into when they buy a phone.
LOL no they don't, most people are dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to technology, all they know is it's shiny and new and they can play Candy Crush (or whatever) and watch movies on it, they have no idea what's under the hood and they give little-to-no thought as to whether the battery can be replaced or not or anything else service-related. Besides which do you think marketers want people to care about things like that? Hell no, marketers want people to throw the thing away in a year and buy a brand new one regardless of whether it's dying or not.
A telephone should not be a lifestyle choice and it seems like that's what most people treat it as (eyes glued to the thing to the point where they walk into stationary objects because they're not paying attention to where they're walking), and I see that as a mistake. To a similar extent it seems like people treat their cars as a lifestyle choice, too, and I don't think that's particularly smart, either.
Scientists today announced findings of decades-long research: The Human Race is unsustainable, and urged world leaders to draft agreements to phase out human life as soon as possible. In related news, PETA and Vegans are delighted with the news and fully endorse the validity of the study.
I absolutely disagree. By staying you make the dissenting voice heard, and perhaps that alone can sway the opinions of other members of the committee. That's what I meant when I said "make yourself a pain in the ass". With dissent our entire system of government fails; it's no different in this case.
Turn off the spellchecker on your phone; 'archiving' != 'achieving'.
To be quite honest that's how I feel about it. What we currently have isn't 'general AI', but this 'slightly smarter than just a plain old computer program' half-assed AI. When we actually understand what it is in our own biological brains that produces the phenomenons of true sentience, self-awareness, and consciousness, then we'll be able to design hardware and software that can likewise produce that. Until then we're stuck with these weak 'approximations' that just mimick some of the more trivial aspects of a brain.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are so difficult to understand, only a few very smart computer scientists know how to build them.
Which, amplified by 'fantasy' input from television, movies, fiction, and the media, is probably why apparently the vast majority of people over-estimate the capabilities of so-called 'AI', attributing capabilities to it that it does not and cannot posess, and trust the technology way too much.
The tool, called Cortex, uses a graphical user interface to make it so that building an AI model doesn't require a PhD.
Great. Now we'll have unqualified people, with an almost total lack of understanding, believing they can be 'AI Scientists', creating even more half-assed excuses for AI. Wonderful.
Coming soon to a Best Buy near you: Do-it-yourself Home Nuclear Reactor kits! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you know what they say: nothing more dangerous than a 'true believer'.
It's often the case that people who know in their heart-of-hearts that they're 100% right who commit the worst atrocities, cause the most damage.
Come to think of it, wonder how much they'd charge you if you don't even have an email address? Something tells me they'd refuse to insure you at all..
It's good that he sees through the bullshit and is willing to speak up about it, but it was the wrong move for him to resign from the committee; they'll just recruit someone who is a bobble-headed yes-man and will go along with the corporate cronyism, swamp-filling (as opposed to swamp-draining) bullshit that Ajit Pai is promoting. He should have stayed, and made it his mission to be the biggest pain in the ass the FCC has ever seen.
There's annoying, and then there's what they apparently did here, which is 'say something stupid'. It's closer to trolling than anything else.
It's stupid because:
1. A 'tablet' is actually a 'tablet computer'. Just because it doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse doesn't mean it's not a computer -- and you can connect a keyboard and mouse to it if you want regardless.
2. There will always be many, many applications where the power and flexibility of a full-size desktop computer are necessary or desirable. Now, someone will come along and say "Tablets will become more powerful to the point where desktops and laptop/notebook computers are irrelevant", but that's just plain wrong, too, because more traditional form-factor computing devices will also get more powerful simultaneously.
Really, the basic, incorrect assumption here is that a 'tablet computer' is some totally different device compared to any other computer; it's not, it's just a different form-factor that doesn't include a keyboard and a pointing device (not counting the touchscreen interface) by default -- and you can add them easily.
To be fair, I should also say: Not all law enforcement types are like this, it's just what's (sadly) typical of the breed. It's not that being in law enforcement creates this type of person, it's that it attracts this type of person. They try to screen them out, but they have a way of hiding their natural tendencies.
They must be using one of the half-assed excuses for 'AI' everyone keeps trotting out, convincing customers that it's fully sentient and incapable of making mistakes, even if you can't talk to it or in any way have it explain it's 'reasoning' (in quotes because they're utterly devoid of any actual capacity for 'reasoning'), and therefore aren't having humans audit it's output.
Slashdot Mirror
We've discovered everything we're ever going to discover
That's what you sound like. Get out of my face.
Just because we haven't yet figured out things like consciousness, doesn't mean you should allow yourself to say "fuck it" and fall back on the ages-old flaw in the human brain that looks for simple one-line 'explanations' for complex concepts, and in essence say "god did it" -- and that, in essence, is what this is. It's a cop-out, and I find it to be intellectually reprehensible. Anyone who calls themselves a 'scientist' but espouses opinions like this, under the auspices of them being a 'scientist', is reprehensible, and should be censured.
In the past several years I have often said "people are getting dumber, not smarter", and things like this are part of that: rejecting science, logic, and reason, and reverting to what I'll call in this case 'caveman logic'. I'm not totally clear to me whether it's just here in the U.S. or whether it's a global phenomenon, but it seems as though people are rejecting science, logic, reason, and real truth, en masse, and I find the trend to be very disturbing.
As we delve deeper into complex issues like how the human brain produces the phenomenon we call 'consciousness', and deeper into how the underlying fabric of our physical Universe works, we will without a doubt uncover the processes and mechanisms by which all the above, and many more things work; we humans are clever, inquisitive, and posess the potential to be capable of so much more than we are at this moment in time, but we cannot allow ourselves, as a species, to backslide. I feel we are at a crossroads in our development as a species; we must choose carefully and wisely, or we might find ourselves living in another Dark Age.
Guess I'll get arrested then, because I wouldn't play along with that bullshit for a single minute.
This has been posited to me before, and I admit there is a logic to it -- but just like uncovering a nest of cockroaches, you find yourself disgusted and nauseated, and you still have to clear it out and clean it up. Not happy about any of the above. It'll take decades to undo the damage the traitor in the Whitehouse has done so far.
"Bread and circuses"
I ride a bike quite a bit too, friend, and I'll tell you this: if and when the day comes that we're all either prohibited (in one way or another, or to one degree or another) from riding bicycles anywhere, or are required to have some sort of gods-be-damned license plate on them so they can track us, then we'll know that it's time for Civil War II to start, because things will have officially Gone Way Too Far, and "government by the people for the people" will no longer have any meaning, we'll be living in a full-on police state and have no rights anymore.
That's what some of (not all*) of our law enforcement in this country is turning into, and I in part** blame Trump for this. Haivng the Pussy-grabber-in-chief sitting in the Whitehouse has brought some of the worst kinds of people out of the shadows, emboldened them.
* I am not going to claim that all police are jackbooted thugs; some genuinely believe in law-and-order, and want to help people.
** I'm also not going to lay 100% of the blame on Trump; many of his predecessors have contributed to this problem and/or set the stage for things that are manifesting now. Trump however appears to be the catalyst in many cases.
Delta-V isn't the issue, it's time, namely the difference between getting to the Moon and getting to Mars.
Also the lack of resources on the Moon is a feature not a problem; if we can make a colony work on the Moon then it'll probably be easier to deal with Mars, and all so much closer to Earth.
..at first.
As much as I'm wired to look at what can go wrong with things (because ignoring that could be disasterous), I really hate to have to be that way with this subject. However there's so many things that can go wrong, most of them fatal, that you really can't ignore it.
The first few attempts at human colonization of Mars will likely be disasters where all the participants end up dead for one reason or another; sadly, anyone who agrees to go has to accept that it's very possibly a suicide mission. There is no rescue from Earth; there likely won't be any way of escaping back to Earth; the Martian atmosphere, such as it is, isn't breathable, and it's thin enough that (if I understand it correctly) radiation from the sun is a problem -- as is radiation exposure just getting there in the first place. Any habitat built there has to be 100% self contained, 100% self sufficient, essentially like a spacecraft except rooted to the planets surface, and with some notable exceptions: you have to be able to grow your own food in a sustainable way, you're not bringing all your food with you like you would for a LEO mission or to go live on the ISS. And so on, and so on. A whole list of things that, if they aren't done right, can kill everyone in the colony. That's not even taking into consideration the unknown unknowns that could also kill everyone. Assuming we stuck with it, there'd have to be several attempts at a Mars colony, before you got one that actually didn't end up with everyone dead. At least at our current level of technology, that is. Fifty years from now might be a different story entirely. Of course, fifty years from now, we might not even be capable of putting anything in LEO, for all we know.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We need to learn to walk before we can learn to run. We need Training Wheels on this particular bike -- and luckily for us, we've got the perfect place to practice right in our local neighborhood: the Moon. We should be building a permanent human presence on the Moon first, with all the infrastructure that implies, followed by industry to support space operations. We can make all our mistakes on the Moon, first, where it's possible to come up from Earth to fix them and/or rescue inhabitants. Industry built there can support any Mars missions (or asteroid missions, or whatever) easier than having to launch from Earth all the time. There would be many more advantages to this than I can easily list here.
Last time I checked, aren't monopolies bad for capitalism, and by extension, bad for a national economy in general? Am I right? All the above-named corporations have de-facto monopolies. Add Microsoft and AT&T to that list, by the way, just for starters; there are many others, too.
While we're at it, how about we repeal the decision to consider corporations to be 'people' in the eyes of the law, and also ban them from contributing to political campaigns. In fact, I'd prefer that all campaign funds come from a neutral source, so no corporations or rich individuals can influence politics.
People know what they're getting into when they buy a phone.
LOL no they don't, most people are dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to technology, all they know is it's shiny and new and they can play Candy Crush (or whatever) and watch movies on it, they have no idea what's under the hood and they give little-to-no thought as to whether the battery can be replaced or not or anything else service-related. Besides which do you think marketers want people to care about things like that? Hell no, marketers want people to throw the thing away in a year and buy a brand new one regardless of whether it's dying or not.
A telephone should not be a lifestyle choice and it seems like that's what most people treat it as (eyes glued to the thing to the point where they walk into stationary objects because they're not paying attention to where they're walking), and I see that as a mistake. To a similar extent it seems like people treat their cars as a lifestyle choice, too, and I don't think that's particularly smart, either.
Scientists today announced findings of decades-long research: The Human Race is unsustainable, and urged world leaders to draft agreements to phase out human life as soon as possible. In related news, PETA and Vegans are delighted with the news and fully endorse the validity of the study.
IoT version
Thanks, you made me spit my coffee all over the place. xD
I absolutely disagree. By staying you make the dissenting voice heard, and perhaps that alone can sway the opinions of other members of the committee. That's what I meant when I said "make yourself a pain in the ass". With dissent our entire system of government fails; it's no different in this case.
Turn off the spellchecker on your phone; 'archiving' != 'achieving'.
To be quite honest that's how I feel about it. What we currently have isn't 'general AI', but this 'slightly smarter than just a plain old computer program' half-assed AI. When we actually understand what it is in our own biological brains that produces the phenomenons of true sentience, self-awareness, and consciousness, then we'll be able to design hardware and software that can likewise produce that. Until then we're stuck with these weak 'approximations' that just mimick some of the more trivial aspects of a brain.
Here, I'll write you a 'President Intelligence' right here:
10 print "I thought it would be easier."
20 end
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are so difficult to understand, only a few very smart computer scientists know how to build them.
Which, amplified by 'fantasy' input from television, movies, fiction, and the media, is probably why apparently the vast majority of people over-estimate the capabilities of so-called 'AI', attributing capabilities to it that it does not and cannot posess, and trust the technology way too much.
The tool, called Cortex, uses a graphical user interface to make it so that building an AI model doesn't require a PhD.
Great. Now we'll have unqualified people, with an almost total lack of understanding, believing they can be 'AI Scientists', creating even more half-assed excuses for AI. Wonderful.
Coming soon to a Best Buy near you: Do-it-yourself Home Nuclear Reactor kits! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you know what they say: nothing more dangerous than a 'true believer'.
It's often the case that people who know in their heart-of-hearts that they're 100% right who commit the worst atrocities, cause the most damage.
Come to think of it, wonder how much they'd charge you if you don't even have an email address? Something tells me they'd refuse to insure you at all..
It's good that he sees through the bullshit and is willing to speak up about it, but it was the wrong move for him to resign from the committee; they'll just recruit someone who is a bobble-headed yes-man and will go along with the corporate cronyism, swamp-filling (as opposed to swamp-draining) bullshit that Ajit Pai is promoting. He should have stayed, and made it his mission to be the biggest pain in the ass the FCC has ever seen.
There's annoying, and then there's what they apparently did here, which is 'say something stupid'. It's closer to trolling than anything else.
It's stupid because:
1. A 'tablet' is actually a 'tablet computer'. Just because it doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse doesn't mean it's not a computer -- and you can connect a keyboard and mouse to it if you want regardless.
2. There will always be many, many applications where the power and flexibility of a full-size desktop computer are necessary or desirable. Now, someone will come along and say "Tablets will become more powerful to the point where desktops and laptop/notebook computers are irrelevant", but that's just plain wrong, too, because more traditional form-factor computing devices will also get more powerful simultaneously.
Really, the basic, incorrect assumption here is that a 'tablet computer' is some totally different device compared to any other computer; it's not, it's just a different form-factor that doesn't include a keyboard and a pointing device (not counting the touchscreen interface) by default -- and you can add them easily.
To be fair, I should also say: Not all law enforcement types are like this, it's just what's (sadly) typical of the breed. It's not that being in law enforcement creates this type of person, it's that it attracts this type of person. They try to screen them out, but they have a way of hiding their natural tendencies.
Hate to think how much more they'd charge someone with an AOL email address, then.
They must be using one of the half-assed excuses for 'AI' everyone keeps trotting out, convincing customers that it's fully sentient and incapable of making mistakes, even if you can't talk to it or in any way have it explain it's 'reasoning' (in quotes because they're utterly devoid of any actual capacity for 'reasoning'), and therefore aren't having humans audit it's output.