I built the one from the original Popular Electronics article, with some modifications. The HP-made hexadecimal displays were $45 each back then; no way I could afford that, so I used LEDs. No toggle switches, cheap side switches. $20 for the 1802 processor was bad enough! Was a kid, had no job, just my allowance, and parents who were semi-hostile towards this whole 'electronics' thing. They thought it was all a waste of time, and I should be 'saving my money' (for what?) and learning to be a carpenter (like my father -- LOL that would have been a disaster!). Later I designed and built a board with 8kB of static RAM (2114's, 1k by 4 each), and bought a 2kB integer BASIC interpreter that came on two 2708 EPROMs. Interfaced an AY-5-1013 UART to it. Got and repaired a broken ASR-33 TTY with paper tape punch and reader, built a 20mA to RS232 converter, used the TTY as my terminal. Loaded the I/O for the BASIC interpreter from paper tape (wrote the I/O myself, wrote the machine code to write it out to paper tape, wrote the 'bootloader' that read it back in from paper tape, launched the BASIC interpreter). Had a bunch of inadequately heatsinked 7805's supplying 5V to everything. Somewhere in there I experimented with the CDP1861 video chip, but I could never really get it to work right, and the resolution was way too low to really be useful regardless. I was 15 years old. This was when computers were fun!:-)
Now just you wait a minute.. don't you assume I'm dumb, or that I'm trolling, because I'm not. There's more than enough precedent out in the wild about the following:
* Mobile devices being hacked (yes this isn't 'mobile' but shares many attributes with such)
* Mobile devices being leveraged by law enforcement (FBI) and intelligence services (NSA, CIA, HLS) to surveil people of interest (regardless of whether you think you're 'of interest' or not)
* Device manufacturers (smart TVs, etc) having their devices record and report what they see/hear
* Google being 'evil'
* ISPs and online companies collecting personally-identifiable information
I'm sure if I wasn't pressed for time this morning I'd be able to come up with more relevant examples.
Meanwhile you have a device that sits there powered 24/7/365, that has a microphone in it, an Internet connection, and you have no idea if it's really not listening in on/recording/reporting everything going on in your house or not.
keywords
What if there are more 'keywords' it's listening for than you think? What if, theoretically, there's a whole list of keywords/keyphrases it's listening for that you're not aware of ('bomb', 'president', 'allahu akbar', 'god is great', '72 virgins', etc) and once triggered by them, it starts recording and reporting? Unless you've pulled a complete live memory image from the thing and analyzed it, do you really know what it is and is not doing, or are you just 'taking it on faith' that it's not possible for it to do that? Do you run Wireshark on the same network, even, and analyze all it's traffic, for, say, a month, to be sure what it is and is not phoning home about? Don't even bother giving me the 'we're not interesting enough to bother surveilling' or 'we're not doing anything wrong so we have nothing to fear' lines, either, because that's not relevant. Don't bother with the 'tinfoil hat' insults either. What I'm saying is credible, possible, and not totally unrealistic in this day and age, taking into consideration things I've mentioned above. It's not like I'm pulling 'what if' examples out of my ass and making up wild conspiracy theories, as previously stated there's plenty of precedent out there already.
The vast majority of 'consumers' have no idea what's going on 'under the hood' of the hardware and software tech they're using and how the corporations that tech interacts with (or 'is ultimately controlled by', if you prefer), and if they did have a thorough understanding I guarantee you they'd be far less than 'happy' about it, they'd own less tech, and (with any luck at all) there'd be a strong outcry for vast, far-reaching reforms in the areas of product testing, product reliability, privacy, and security. I can also guarantee you that this would also very much include so-called 'self driving cars' and other areas of so-called 'machine intelligence' (I refuse to call it 'AI'). Corporations have no real legal, moral, or ethical responsibility for full disclosure about their products and practices to the public, and as a result people are lied to by way of omission every single day, all in the name of the Almighty Profit.
I don't believe we'll ever reach that point, either, and in fact I think that 'self driving cars' are mostly a meme and media hype, and will be for quite some time to come, in addition to most people not wanting to have anything to do with a vehicle they can't control themselves; it's just against human nature to not feel in control of your situation. Also there are of course so many circumstances where a so-called 'autonomous' vehicle just won't be capable of doing what needs to be done, or capable of navigating on it's own; what do you do when it can't find the off-road path you have to take, and it just stops cold and won't go any farther? There has to be manual controls, and you have to know how to drive. What if you go somewhere where you need to park in a makeshift 'parking lot' in the middle of a field? Also I'd like to see one of these parallel park successfully. And so on. There's too many 'exceptions' that I can't see any automated system handling. At best, for the next 10 to 20 years, I think it'll be just more sophisticated 'driver assist' systems, and more sophisticated 'cruise control' systems, that can handle long highway journeys, and keep you from going off the road if you start to nod off at the wheel, etc.
If we reach the point where everyone is required to have so-called 'self driving cars', then ALL cars will be 'boring' by definition, and there won't be anything you'll be able to do to change that.
Never mind passenger cars that can out-race a Porsche. Never mind gigantic trucks for hauling freight. How about a nice small pickup truck? That's what I want and need. Oh and you can keep your cheesey 'self driving' nonsense, don't want it.
Net Neutrality will matter to everyone, everywhere, when the Internet is nigh-unto unusable from being so badly distorted by ISPs having free reign over how people are allowed to use it. Sadly the rank-and-file end users won't really notice until it's too late.
Unless YOU are one of the lead engineers working on so-called 'self-driving car' projects, YOU don't know a damned thing. Let's see how you feel about strapping your kids into a Google self-driving car and sending them on their way. I'll bet ANY amount of money you'd never do it, because when it comes right down to it, you won't trust them to a machine you can't control. I think you're a liar, or a fool, I think when it comes right down to it you're never going to strap yourself into a box on wheels with no controls for you to control the vehicle with. Nobody is that stupid. Go right ahead an deny human nature all you want though.
You don't get to take control of something and then wave away any responsibility. You want control? They you have to take the responsibility too. Don't want the responsibility? Then don't take control.
I agreee with you, but what'll happen in reality is lots and lots of denial when anything goes wrong, finger pointing, obfuscation, and flat-out lies, followed by no one compensating anyone for any damages whatsoever, especially end-users.
Quite frankly, if what you just outlined came to be reality, I'd dump the Internet entirely, and I think many other people would, too, which is why I'm starting to wonder if part of the 'Make America Great Again' plan is to destroy the Internet in the U.S.
Hold on there Citizen, that attitude is not going to Make America Great Again, and I think you know that! You have to pay, and pay, and PAY if you want greatness, because only Big Corporations and the Trump Administration can give you that! You should pay with a smile on your face, and thank them for the privilege of helping to Make America Great Again </sarcasm>.
No, friend, you don't understand how this works. The ISPs will charge Danegeld to content providers that want faster service (on top of what they pay for their basic connectivity), while you also pay the ISPs Danegeld for your connection to the Internet (as well as paying for access to the content providers). The amount of the Danegeld is always going up, too. So the ISPs get you and them coming and going. Under the Trump administration, this is called 'good business' and it's 'good for America'. You should pay with a smile on your face, and thank them for the privilege of helping to Make America Great Again </sarcasm>.
I'm glad you signed your comment with , otherwise I was tempted to flame you into the next millennium for being some sort of paid astroturfer for the ISPs.
I'm starting to wonder if part of Trumps' 'Make America Great Again' plan involves destroying the Internet in this country, because his lackies keep doing things that lead me to believe precisely that.
News programs, dummy, all the networks have news departments, and most local stations (except the tiniest of them) have local news departments and broadcasts; broadcast TV and radio has a responsibility to serve the public. Also things like State of the Union addresses, emergency broadcasts, etc. Go research the subject before you stick your foot in your mouth like that.
If I hadn't already commented on this subject I'd mod you up. I have it on the best of authority that we still have no clue how 'thought' really works in the human brain, let alone 'consciousness', so how can we build machines that truly think?
..and how do you describe to a computer what that means anyway?
You don't. Nothing we have is actually sentient, sapient, conscious, or has a conscience, for that matter. Some decisions regarding human beings can be made with pure logic alone, but many many more require much much more from the mind making the decision than just pure logic. Haven't there been more than enough cautionary tales from science fiction to illustrate this point? Or do we really have to, once again, learn a big important lesson the hard way? The more time that passes, the more I read, the more I think about the issue and the problems it presents us with, the more convinced I get: These machines that we (incorrectly!) call 'AIs', regardless of whether they're working with financial matters, autopilot for an aircraft, operating a ground vehicle, or working in an operating room, they must be supervised by a human being. Always. If and when the day comes that we have actual conscious, sentient, sapient, truly thinking human-level artificial minds, something that you can interrelate with on a human level, something that understands us, what it's doing, the possible consequences, has a conscience, etc, then so far as I'm concerned we can re-visit whether they can be actually 'autonomous' or not. Until then, forget it. You want to know what (allegedly!) displaced workers will be doing in the future? Supervising the machines!
it is completely irrelevant to know how it works if you simply craft a simulation behaves exactly the same.
Want to know why this is completely, totally, 100% relevant? Because you're going to put it in charge of 2000 pounds of metal and plastic on wheels that can go anywhere it wants to go, that's why. Let's see how you feel about what you think when some kid (maybe YOURS) gets killed because the half-assed thing screws up royally and plows into a crowd of people or somethjng equally horrific. You wan to put it in charge of something noncritical to human safety? Fine. Enjoy your toys. I want nothing to do with them otherwise. Come back when you have something I can have a conversation with, that understands me.
it is completely irrelevant to know how it works if you simply craft a simulation behaves exactly the same.
Again: WE DO NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO DO THAT BECAUSE WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW THAT EVEN WORKS! We don't even know WHY we're conscious. How do you expect to make a machine that emulates something you can't even quanitfy?
Do you have a PhD in computer science with a special focus on artificial intelligence? I think not, but I talk to people who have PhD's in neurology who are studying the human brain, and THEY are the ones telling me we have NO IDEA how sentience works yet. All they're doing with computers are just pale imitations that don't even come CLOSE.
You are missing the point. You don't have to understand something in order to replicate it.
Then why do we not have human-level mechanical minds you can interact with just like a human being? Why aren't there android cabbies driving you around, who you chat with about whatever? Because you're completely and totally wrong, that's why.
Can you sit down right now and write the equivalent of Windows 10, in it's entirety? Rhetorical question, no you can't. There is no one person who understands how ALL PARTS of Windows works, by the way. For you it's a black box. You're a monkey with a stick. Your analogy is invalid.
We do not understand how the human brain produces consciousness/cognition/sentience/sapience, because if we did then we would have mechanical minds that were the exact equivalent (or better!) of the human mind. Why don't you undestand this?
OTA television and radio will always exist because of federal government mandate, and rightly so. They exist so people at any income level can have access to television and radio, because they're information sources. There's even a federal law that says you can't outlaw antennas on people's homes, for the same reason. Your 'belief' is misguided and also technically incorrect.
think it would be quite amusing to watch the whole broadcast model just implode.
You would, would you? So, you're going to pay for my streaming accounts, and a better computer that'll actually run 1080p content, all because you want to make obsolete the antenna I put on my roof when I cancelled cable TV years and years ago? Thanks so much, corporate America appreciates you voting for them making even more money, charging for streaming ***AND*** making people watch commercials, too. Really appreciate that.
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I built the one from the original Popular Electronics article, with some modifications. The HP-made hexadecimal displays were $45 each back then; no way I could afford that, so I used LEDs. No toggle switches, cheap side switches. $20 for the 1802 processor was bad enough! Was a kid, had no job, just my allowance, and parents who were semi-hostile towards this whole 'electronics' thing. They thought it was all a waste of time, and I should be 'saving my money' (for what?) and learning to be a carpenter (like my father -- LOL that would have been a disaster!). Later I designed and built a board with 8kB of static RAM (2114's, 1k by 4 each), and bought a 2kB integer BASIC interpreter that came on two 2708 EPROMs. Interfaced an AY-5-1013 UART to it. Got and repaired a broken ASR-33 TTY with paper tape punch and reader, built a 20mA to RS232 converter, used the TTY as my terminal. Loaded the I/O for the BASIC interpreter from paper tape (wrote the I/O myself, wrote the machine code to write it out to paper tape, wrote the 'bootloader' that read it back in from paper tape, launched the BASIC interpreter). Had a bunch of inadequately heatsinked 7805's supplying 5V to everything. Somewhere in there I experimented with the CDP1861 video chip, but I could never really get it to work right, and the resolution was way too low to really be useful regardless. I was 15 years old. This was when computers were fun! :-)
* Mobile devices being hacked (yes this isn't 'mobile' but shares many attributes with such)
* Mobile devices being leveraged by law enforcement (FBI) and intelligence services (NSA, CIA, HLS) to surveil people of interest (regardless of whether you think you're 'of interest' or not)
* Device manufacturers (smart TVs, etc) having their devices record and report what they see/hear
* Google being 'evil'
* ISPs and online companies collecting personally-identifiable information
I'm sure if I wasn't pressed for time this morning I'd be able to come up with more relevant examples.
Meanwhile you have a device that sits there powered 24/7/365, that has a microphone in it, an Internet connection, and you have no idea if it's really not listening in on/recording/reporting everything going on in your house or not.
keywords
What if there are more 'keywords' it's listening for than you think? What if, theoretically, there's a whole list of keywords/keyphrases it's listening for that you're not aware of ('bomb', 'president', 'allahu akbar', 'god is great', '72 virgins', etc) and once triggered by them, it starts recording and reporting? Unless you've pulled a complete live memory image from the thing and analyzed it, do you really know what it is and is not doing, or are you just 'taking it on faith' that it's not possible for it to do that? Do you run Wireshark on the same network, even, and analyze all it's traffic, for, say, a month, to be sure what it is and is not phoning home about? Don't even bother giving me the 'we're not interesting enough to bother surveilling' or 'we're not doing anything wrong so we have nothing to fear' lines, either, because that's not relevant. Don't bother with the 'tinfoil hat' insults either. What I'm saying is credible, possible, and not totally unrealistic in this day and age, taking into consideration things I've mentioned above. It's not like I'm pulling 'what if' examples out of my ass and making up wild conspiracy theories, as previously stated there's plenty of precedent out there already.
..have you considered.. NOT having your gods-be-damned Google contraption turned on 24/7/365??? Seriously, people..
The vast majority of 'consumers' have no idea what's going on 'under the hood' of the hardware and software tech they're using and how the corporations that tech interacts with (or 'is ultimately controlled by', if you prefer), and if they did have a thorough understanding I guarantee you they'd be far less than 'happy' about it, they'd own less tech, and (with any luck at all) there'd be a strong outcry for vast, far-reaching reforms in the areas of product testing, product reliability, privacy, and security. I can also guarantee you that this would also very much include so-called 'self driving cars' and other areas of so-called 'machine intelligence' (I refuse to call it 'AI'). Corporations have no real legal, moral, or ethical responsibility for full disclosure about their products and practices to the public, and as a result people are lied to by way of omission every single day, all in the name of the Almighty Profit.
I don't believe we'll ever reach that point, either, and in fact I think that 'self driving cars' are mostly a meme and media hype, and will be for quite some time to come, in addition to most people not wanting to have anything to do with a vehicle they can't control themselves; it's just against human nature to not feel in control of your situation. Also there are of course so many circumstances where a so-called 'autonomous' vehicle just won't be capable of doing what needs to be done, or capable of navigating on it's own; what do you do when it can't find the off-road path you have to take, and it just stops cold and won't go any farther? There has to be manual controls, and you have to know how to drive. What if you go somewhere where you need to park in a makeshift 'parking lot' in the middle of a field? Also I'd like to see one of these parallel park successfully. And so on. There's too many 'exceptions' that I can't see any automated system handling. At best, for the next 10 to 20 years, I think it'll be just more sophisticated 'driver assist' systems, and more sophisticated 'cruise control' systems, that can handle long highway journeys, and keep you from going off the road if you start to nod off at the wheel, etc.
If we reach the point where everyone is required to have so-called 'self driving cars', then ALL cars will be 'boring' by definition, and there won't be anything you'll be able to do to change that.
Never mind passenger cars that can out-race a Porsche. Never mind gigantic trucks for hauling freight. How about a nice small pickup truck? That's what I want and need. Oh and you can keep your cheesey 'self driving' nonsense, don't want it.
Net Neutrality will matter to everyone, everywhere, when the Internet is nigh-unto unusable from being so badly distorted by ISPs having free reign over how people are allowed to use it. Sadly the rank-and-file end users won't really notice until it's too late.
Seeing as how probably nobody to speak of is using either one, does anyone really even care about this?
Unless YOU are one of the lead engineers working on so-called 'self-driving car' projects, YOU don't know a damned thing.
Let's see how you feel about strapping your kids into a Google self-driving car and sending them on their way. I'll bet ANY amount of money you'd never do it, because when it comes right down to it, you won't trust them to a machine you can't control. I think you're a liar, or a fool, I think when it comes right down to it you're never going to strap yourself into a box on wheels with no controls for you to control the vehicle with. Nobody is that stupid. Go right ahead an deny human nature all you want though.
You don't get to take control of something and then wave away any responsibility. You want control? They you have to take the responsibility too. Don't want the responsibility? Then don't take control.
I agreee with you, but what'll happen in reality is lots and lots of denial when anything goes wrong, finger pointing, obfuscation, and flat-out lies, followed by no one compensating anyone for any damages whatsoever, especially end-users.
Quite frankly, if what you just outlined came to be reality, I'd dump the Internet entirely, and I think many other people would, too, which is why I'm starting to wonder if part of the 'Make America Great Again' plan is to destroy the Internet in the U.S.
Hold on there Citizen, that attitude is not going to Make America Great Again, and I think you know that! You have to pay, and pay, and PAY if you want greatness, because only Big Corporations and the Trump Administration can give you that! You should pay with a smile on your face, and thank them for the privilege of helping to Make America Great Again </sarcasm>.
No, friend, you don't understand how this works. The ISPs will charge Danegeld to content providers that want faster service (on top of what they pay for their basic connectivity), while you also pay the ISPs Danegeld for your connection to the Internet (as well as paying for access to the content providers). The amount of the Danegeld is always going up, too. So the ISPs get you and them coming and going. Under the Trump administration, this is called 'good business' and it's 'good for America'. You should pay with a smile on your face, and thank them for the privilege of helping to Make America Great Again </sarcasm>.
I'm glad you signed your comment with , otherwise I was tempted to flame you into the next millennium for being some sort of paid astroturfer for the ISPs.
I'm starting to wonder if part of Trumps' 'Make America Great Again' plan involves destroying the Internet in this country, because his lackies keep doing things that lead me to believe precisely that.
News programs, dummy, all the networks have news departments, and most local stations (except the tiniest of them) have local news departments and broadcasts; broadcast TV and radio has a responsibility to serve the public. Also things like State of the Union addresses, emergency broadcasts, etc. Go research the subject before you stick your foot in your mouth like that.
If I hadn't already commented on this subject I'd mod you up. I have it on the best of authority that we still have no clue how 'thought' really works in the human brain, let alone 'consciousness', so how can we build machines that truly think?
..and how do you describe to a computer what that means anyway?
You don't. Nothing we have is actually sentient, sapient, conscious, or has a conscience, for that matter. Some decisions regarding human beings can be made with pure logic alone, but many many more require much much more from the mind making the decision than just pure logic. Haven't there been more than enough cautionary tales from science fiction to illustrate this point? Or do we really have to, once again, learn a big important lesson the hard way? The more time that passes, the more I read, the more I think about the issue and the problems it presents us with, the more convinced I get: These machines that we (incorrectly!) call 'AIs', regardless of whether they're working with financial matters, autopilot for an aircraft, operating a ground vehicle, or working in an operating room, they must be supervised by a human being. Always. If and when the day comes that we have actual conscious, sentient, sapient, truly thinking human-level artificial minds, something that you can interrelate with on a human level, something that understands us, what it's doing, the possible consequences, has a conscience, etc, then so far as I'm concerned we can re-visit whether they can be actually 'autonomous' or not. Until then, forget it. You want to know what (allegedly!) displaced workers will be doing in the future? Supervising the machines!
it is completely irrelevant to know how it works if you simply craft a simulation behaves exactly the same.
Want to know why this is completely, totally, 100% relevant? Because you're going to put it in charge of 2000 pounds of metal and plastic on wheels that can go anywhere it wants to go, that's why. Let's see how you feel about what you think when some kid (maybe YOURS) gets killed because the half-assed thing screws up royally and plows into a crowd of people or somethjng equally horrific. You wan to put it in charge of something noncritical to human safety? Fine. Enjoy your toys. I want nothing to do with them otherwise. Come back when you have something I can have a conversation with, that understands me.
it is completely irrelevant to know how it works if you simply craft a simulation behaves exactly the same.
Again: WE DO NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO DO THAT BECAUSE WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW THAT EVEN WORKS! We don't even know WHY we're conscious. How do you expect to make a machine that emulates something you can't even quanitfy?
...sarcasm...
Do you have a PhD in computer science with a special focus on artificial intelligence? I think not, but I talk to people who have PhD's in neurology who are studying the human brain, and THEY are the ones telling me we have NO IDEA how sentience works yet. All they're doing with computers are just pale imitations that don't even come CLOSE.
You are missing the point. You don't have to understand something in order to replicate it.
Then why do we not have human-level mechanical minds you can interact with just like a human being? Why aren't there android cabbies driving you around, who you chat with about whatever? Because you're completely and totally wrong, that's why.
Can you sit down right now and write the equivalent of Windows 10, in it's entirety? Rhetorical question, no you can't. There is no one person who understands how ALL PARTS of Windows works, by the way. For you it's a black box. You're a monkey with a stick. Your analogy is invalid.
We do not understand how the human brain produces consciousness/cognition/sentience/sapience, because if we did then we would have mechanical minds that were the exact equivalent (or better!) of the human mind. Why don't you undestand this?
OTA television and radio will always exist because of federal government mandate, and rightly so. They exist so people at any income level can have access to television and radio, because they're information sources. There's even a federal law that says you can't outlaw antennas on people's homes, for the same reason. Your 'belief' is misguided and also technically incorrect.
think it would be quite amusing to watch the whole broadcast model just implode.
You would, would you? So, you're going to pay for my streaming accounts, and a better computer that'll actually run 1080p content, all because you want to make obsolete the antenna I put on my roof when I cancelled cable TV years and years ago? Thanks so much, corporate America appreciates you voting for them making even more money, charging for streaming ***AND*** making people watch commercials, too. Really appreciate that.