He also makes unrealistic claims and confuses toy systems with replacements for industry-standard systems.
His processor designs are poorly specified and buggy as hell, and he just kind of glosses over that (and remember to mix in 3 or 4 NOPs between each useful operation to avoid overheating the chip...). His MIP counts are inflated, because his instruction sets approach turing-tarpit level. For example, if you wanted to do 64-bit floating point operations, you'd probably need to consume 40 or 50 machine ops for each addition, never mind more complex operations.
This new chip is going to be completely I/O crippled and I doubt it will ever get past prototype stage.
OKAD is to the VLSI CAD stuff used by people like Intel and AMD as ed is to MS-Word. Sure, it's smaller, cleaner, and in some ways much more powerful, but it's also strange, hard to use, and it doesn't do the same stuff. OKAD couldn't be used to design something like the Athlon, or even something like a 486. It's made to design tiny chips, like Chuck wants to make.
He dismisses a lot of real problems. He claims that software is easy, but never writes anything hard. Everything is non-standard and isolated from the distressfully complicated real world. Basically, he makes it easy by making things nobody but he would want to use.
The machine on my desk can read, interpret, and process thousands of standard data formats, connect to other computers using dozens or hundreds of standard protocols, recompile and run many thousands of legacy programs, and emulate almost every machine more than a few years old. When I want to do high-speed graphics processing, all the slow crappy code gets out of the way and doesn't matter any more. The machine he would replace it with would do none of these things, it would require all new software and would probably cost about the same anyway, after buying the RAM, hard disk (both for the vast amounts of data I want handy, which takes up far more space than code bloat), input devices, and monitor. That is, assuming it wouldn't need costly specialized versions of these.
He's really designing specialized embedded chips, without bothering to specify (or specifying wrongly) what they are good for. A quirky Forth chip with 486-level performance, support for up to 2 megs of DRAM, and video out? What on Earth for? The toy computer in a mouse doesn't do it for me.
And the new one: basically an embedded chip design, with a turing-complete but miniscule set of primitive integer operations, copied 25 times and laid out in a square array. Why, oh, why?!
Do you know what they're talking about using it for? A replacement for PC server clusters! On the grounds that you can fit as many MIPs in one small box! Wow! 60,000 bogoMIPs! Never mind that the chief assets of a server cluster are the hard-drives and RAM...
The I/O specs? Well, you could put an SRAM controller on the edge...
Cache? 256 KWords (18-bit, of all things) off-chip, which must be managed manually. Sold seperately, O/C. Each processor has 384-word on-chip DRAM, into which you must cram your whole program, or stop to load in new instructions whenever you want to do anything else. All "cache" must be managed by code in this tiny space, too since there's no hardware support.
Speed? Multiplication (18-bit) takes 125 operations. Realistically, we're talking under 500 MIPs, before taking into account the I/O problems and the difficulty of writing good parallel code. I'd be utterly shocked if you got more than 50 MFLOPs out of it, after some very careful optimization. Yeah, it's real supercomputer material.
Now it's starting to look like a $1 chip, non?
His Color Forth is very much like the BASICs on early home computers. They also served as both OS and interface. They were about as small, too, and provided essentially the same functionality. They were also tied inextricably to one platform. Hell, even MS got its start doing this stuff.
And yeah, it would suck to be color blind. Whatever he says about using different typefaces, I wouldn't want to distinguish between 8 different kinds of text with "italic", "underlined", "italic-underlined", etc. If it worked decently, he would have used that instead of color in the first place. We're talking about a system designed around his own poor eyesight, which doesn't account for other vision problems, and doesn't provide real advantages for those with good vision. That's typical of his work: exactly what he wants, what nobody else wants.
Yes, almost everything out there is bloated and ugly. The industry could stand to improve a lot. But Chuck Moore doesn't have the answers, in many ways he's just a smart-ass infatuated with some easy answers that don't work in the real world.
On the other hand, Forth is a very nice language. I agree that it should be taught to children while they are learning arithmetic. It's as simple as languages get, and gives you an accurate model of what's going on in the computer (execute the instructions of this word, then this word, then that word...). I see it as just another language, not language/OS/universal interface. It's very, very good for small, isolated systems. Being an extensible language that relies heavily on globals, it's very, very bad for large team-effort software projects.
Basically, read his work, but take everything with a grain of salt.
Similarly, I think when one person accuses another of plotting murder, the police should immediately detain the accused person. But if the accuser lied, or even if they were honestly mistaken, they should be punished severely enough to keep people from making such accusations when they aren't certain.
So when a copyright holder sends a threatening letter to an ISP over a user's alleged copyright infringement, if there is no copyright infringement they should be subject to severe penalties. It shouldn't be a matter of civil law either, requiring the offended party to bear the cost of challenging his accusers, they should simply be able to report it to the police (subject to penalties for false accusation themselves, of course).
You could call the crime "legal thuggery" or something like that, and define it as "manipulation through the insincere threat of baseless litigation."
OTOH, you could just straighten out the civil court system so you can't be hurt by baseless litigation...
In any case, where there isn't any realistic threat of punishment to false accusers, nothing should be done to the accused without proof of guilt.
So you're telling me we should all be willing to listen to and debate with someone on the merits of his attempts to disembowel children, and anyone who simply judges him as evil should be disregarded as irrational.
Don't be an ass. Not everything is a debate.
Of course it makes no sense for people I judge to be monstrous and evil to argue with me over my belief. I'm not interested in debating with them, I'm interested in stopping them. I don't write to communicate with them, but to communicate with others who share my belief, or might be persuaded to. It's a call to arms, and strong language is appropriate.
Not every communication is a logical argument, meant to persuade impartial judges. Assertion of one's belief is neither logical argument nor logical fallacy, it is a statement of fact about oneself.
I'm not interested in arguing over whether a free AI would destroy humanity. That is not something we can know until it is done. It is enough that a free, superior AI would have humanity at its mercy, that it would be the introduction of a totally unnecessary, totally avoidable threat.
Others do not value humanity so highly; they consider any intelligence their equal kindred. There is no logical argument against that, you must simply judge for yourself whether you stand with them or against them. There are no moderates: you either find the extinction of humanity acceptable in some avoidable situation, or you don't.
I don't, and I won't sit and listen to people plot the annihilation of the human race without at least stating my unequivocal objection.
There's no room for a horse-pulled buggy in the fast lane of the interstate. Dial-up connections are not suited to downloads of over ten megabytes or so. Banning slow connections from downloading huge files is not banning them from the internet, it's a fairly minor concession to reality: like banning someone with a 1 minute ping from a twitch game.
The point wasn't that the guy couldn't explain how to do it, it was that it had to be learned, just like the old interface. On the whole, it's not more intuitive it's just cuter.
Limiting users to the current LGPL is hardly screwing them, it's giving them very broad permissions to use the author's hard work for free..
And, personally, I release everything I make into the public domain, because, unlike the FSF, I don't believe in screwing people who want to use my code with any other license. My work will always remain in the public domain, and I don't force my license on anyone else's work, whether it builds on mine or not.
And you misinterpret the you in "invites him to screw you." That's "you, who is licencing your work in this manner." That you doesn't have any option after the release, the FSF can release a new LGPL and it doesn't matter whether you like your code being distributed under the new terms, you've already given permission for anyone to do so.
Unless you follow Mr. Drepper's advice, and remove that blanket permission, you don't have any option.
ESR just made a huge ass of himself with a disgusting piece of deceptive rhetoric. I've always really liked him, and the FSF have always annoyed me, but this is just too much.
To illustrate the doublethink...
ESR suggests:
In the current situation, one's flerbage is not decreased, because as long as you don't copy Sicromoft's stuff, you can do whatever you like.
With restrictive licenses outlawed, one's flerbage is decreased because if you decide to write a restrictive license, you will be subject to the violent enforcement of the state.
But one could also say:
In the current situation, one's flerbage is decreased because if you decide to copy restricted software, you will be subject to the violent enforcement of the state.
With restrictive licences outlawed, one's flerbage is not decreased because the power to enforce restrictive licences was not a necessary component of flerbage.
In fact, I find the counterpoints more logically consistent than ESR's points. If copyright or contract law was changed to disallow such restrictive licences, people wouldn't be punished for offering such licences, such licences would simply be unenforceable, and as it currently stands, actions (unauthorized copying) which by his own definition do not infringe on another's flerbage, can cause the state to infringe on yours.
Goddamn. Doublethink and newspeak. ESR has crossed the line with this one.
"Flerbage" is also the dumbest attempted coinage I've heard in a long time. He'll carry the embarassment of this to his grave.
The Pac-Man quote was floating around for quite a while (years, AFAIK) before someone came up with the rave retort. Just because you haven't seen one without the other doesn't mean that they are inseperable.
What scientists are saying when they comment against Drexler's views is that he doesn't go into the chemical specifics, and nor does he acknowledge that versions of his devices currently exist in nature or in chemical reactions.
If that's true, then it's out of pure ignorance of his views and his work. He very much does go into chemical specifics in Nanosystems, his technical work (as opposed to Engines of Creations which is meant for popular consumption), and one of his favorite replies to denials of the possibility of nanotechnology goes something like "We are nanotechnology." So much for denying that versions of these devices exist in nature.
In the very introduction of Nanosystems he compares and contrasts normal lab chemistry (solution-phase chemistry) with nanotechnological construction (mechanosynthetic chemistry).
While all these rods and gears and things may sound like a silly application of macro-scale approaches to micro-scale systems, it actually is all based on atomic-scale forces.
We know from experiments with various tiny-finger-type microscopes that you really can push around atoms as if they were little beach balls, and that bucky tubes really do act like fairly stiff, yet flexible, rods. They really can act mechanically on each other in reliable, predictable ways.
Nanosystems uses these interactions to argue for the possibility of nanotechnology because they are simple and easy to understand. Every argument is reinforced with large fudge-factors and cautious assumptions (for example, it is assumed that any machine will become non-functional or malfunction if a single atom is out of place).
Nobody is qualified to criticise Drexler's work until they've actually read it, and Nanosystems is the real meat of his work. It's also a great book if you'd like to learn more about any of chemistry, mechanical engineering, physics, or computer science, because of the way it ties them all together. The math is heavy going, but in its own way it is every bit as worthwhile to dig through as Knuth's TAoCP.
Sounds a little less impressive when you read it as ~85 kilograms. I don't know whether I'm impressed or not considering it as about half a megacup of coffee. Either way, it's about the yearly caffeine consumption of a small city.
But imagine if they reported drug busts this way: "Over 20 million micrograms of marajuana were seized yesterday by local police officer Jack Russel. 'I'm no hero,' he modestly claimed, 'I just frisked some pothead.'"
Personally, I save money by buying my caffeine at chemical supply shops by the pound. It goes well with reagent-quality ethanol.
Subsitute "building and exploding atomic bombs in major cities for fun" or "disemboweling children at random" for "creating a free AI" and then see if you would still dismiss anyone who uses phrases like "monstrous and evil" and argues that perpetrators and advocates alike should be killed. I consider the original to be far worse than either of these examples, though more subtly so.
(incidentally, I never suggested that "people opposed to [my] argument should be killed," only that people attempting or supporting attempts to destroy humanity should)
I've read it before, looking for stuff on Forth. 13 years of work by one crackpot doesn't amount to much. I bet Alex Chiu's been working that long on his theories, too.
Crackpots are very common when it comes to the topic of free AIs. I find this a very reassuring thought.
we human beings have a right to know exactly what we are and how we function as both minds and bodies.
The hand cannot grasp itself. There is no way for a human brain to know exactly how a human brain functions. Feeble indeed.
Besides, building an AI doesn't mean you've figured how the human mind works. There are probably many ways to create intelligence.
You are insane, but harmless. You will probably die bitterly disappointed in your life if you continue pursuing your crackpot theory (if you think you feel bad about the 13 years you've spend, imagine how you will feel when it's 50 years, and still no real progress in the working model). You should see a psychiatrist, as you are clearly paranoid and megalomaniacal.
...I must state my opinion that its goals are monstrous and evil.
An attempt to create a general purpose artificial intelligence -- and specifically one which is more intelligent than any human AND one intended to be loaded into robots! -- which acts from self-interest, rather than to fulfill some specific function, is nothing less than an attempt to destroy humanity.
People who make this attempt should be killed, and their work destroyed. Collaborators should be killed, sympathizers should be killed. It is unclear whether it is wiser to do it publicly, to discourage attempts, or covertly, to keep attempts public and make them easier to catch.
The creation of free AI is the one true threat to the survival of humanity (or will be once we get a few viable colonies off-planet); nothing else would hunt people into remote areas or through space. No preventative measure is too extreme.
This is not a joke, this is not a troll. True artificial intelligence should only be approached with the greatest caution, in a carefully contained environment, by people who take the threat seriously and who are ready to abandon it and destroy their work at the first sign of danger. The idea of rights for an AI should never be seriously considered. Perhaps the only justifiable purpose of creating an AI would be to destroy other AIs, and the potential problems are obvious.
The fact that the "teachers" in this experiment thought they were truly inflicting pain
That was exactly what I was calling into question. They hesitated and protested because they thought they might have been causing damage. The fact was that they weren't causing damage, and you can't say with certainty that they believed, in the balance of things, that they were causing damage.
They had many reasons to believe they weren't causing damage. First of all, it's a psychological experiment run by a reputable university. You expect all manner of wierdness, you don't expect maiming and killing; normal standards of recognizing an emergency would be suspended. Secondly, the torture scenario makes no sense at all. If the experimenter wanted to torture the subject, he could simply press the button himself, he didn't need help, and he was certainly in a better position to judge whether the subject was in danger. Evil is not sufficient to explain the situation, it would take a very bizarre, unheard-of form of insanity (have you ever heard of anything remotely like a maniac who hired someone and stood by them and tricked them into activating a device which tortures or kills their victim?); even a practical joke is a thousand times more likely. In the board-operator's mind, we're really looking at a dilemma: it sounds like the person's being hurt, but nothing else about the situation allows the possibility that the person is really being hurt (the readings on the intensity scale are subject to many interpretations; it only sounds ominous because it is presented as such).
However, the root reason to doubt that they believed they were causing damage is that there was no damage. Deception is hard. People take in hundreds of subtle indicators when evaluating the honesty of a claim, and they were taking direction from a person who knew exactly what was going on. The above reasons are just two more particularly obvious flaws of a poorly planned deception, there would unavoidably be many more, when trying to create such a ridiculous perception in the mind of the subjects.
Those who quit didn't do so because they were certain that they would cause serious damage to someone, and decided they didn't want to contribute to it. Instead, they knew something very weird was going on, knew that they were being deceived in one way or another, and didn't want to play along any more.
Note: damage. A little non-damaging pain is not a big deal. We put up with it when we get a needle or when we exercise or for a hundred other routine things. If your doctor told you to hold your child's arm while he inserted the needle, you'd do it, and not worry because it was a little pain for a good reason. If these people could be offended at the idea of causing mere pain in a consenting individual, they would have left as soon as their role was revealed, and the decision to ever press the button would be the big .
This is simply not science. It's a political statement at best, psychological torture at worst.
Ogg Vorbis's popularity will be proportional to the enforcement of the MP3 patent(s?).
It doesn't have to be popular to serve a purpose. The mere threat of a completely free format waiting in the wings could just mean that MP3 is effectively free, aside from a few particularly litigation-sensitive companies paying patent royalties.
I'm sure more than one group has replied to UNISYS intimidation with, "We could be using PNG tomorrow."
Slashdot Mirror
Enough to build a high-end CPU.
As long as you consider CMOS chips with a few thousand surface-elements "high-end".
He also makes unrealistic claims and confuses toy systems with replacements for industry-standard systems.
His processor designs are poorly specified and buggy as hell, and he just kind of glosses over that (and remember to mix in 3 or 4 NOPs between each useful operation to avoid overheating the chip...). His MIP counts are inflated, because his instruction sets approach turing-tarpit level. For example, if you wanted to do 64-bit floating point operations, you'd probably need to consume 40 or 50 machine ops for each addition, never mind more complex operations.
This new chip is going to be completely I/O crippled and I doubt it will ever get past prototype stage.
OKAD is to the VLSI CAD stuff used by people like Intel and AMD as ed is to MS-Word. Sure, it's smaller, cleaner, and in some ways much more powerful, but it's also strange, hard to use, and it doesn't do the same stuff. OKAD couldn't be used to design something like the Athlon, or even something like a 486. It's made to design tiny chips, like Chuck wants to make.
He dismisses a lot of real problems. He claims that software is easy, but never writes anything hard. Everything is non-standard and isolated from the distressfully complicated real world. Basically, he makes it easy by making things nobody but he would want to use.
The machine on my desk can read, interpret, and process thousands of standard data formats, connect to other computers using dozens or hundreds of standard protocols, recompile and run many thousands of legacy programs, and emulate almost every machine more than a few years old. When I want to do high-speed graphics processing, all the slow crappy code gets out of the way and doesn't matter any more. The machine he would replace it with would do none of these things, it would require all new software and would probably cost about the same anyway, after buying the RAM, hard disk (both for the vast amounts of data I want handy, which takes up far more space than code bloat), input devices, and monitor. That is, assuming it wouldn't need costly specialized versions of these.
He's really designing specialized embedded chips, without bothering to specify (or specifying wrongly) what they are good for. A quirky Forth chip with 486-level performance, support for up to 2 megs of DRAM, and video out? What on Earth for? The toy computer in a mouse doesn't do it for me.
And the new one: basically an embedded chip design, with a turing-complete but miniscule set of primitive integer operations, copied 25 times and laid out in a square array. Why, oh, why?!
Do you know what they're talking about using it for? A replacement for PC server clusters! On the grounds that you can fit as many MIPs in one small box! Wow! 60,000 bogoMIPs! Never mind that the chief assets of a server cluster are the hard-drives and RAM...
The I/O specs? Well, you could put an SRAM controller on the edge...
Cache? 256 KWords (18-bit, of all things) off-chip, which must be managed manually. Sold seperately, O/C. Each processor has 384-word on-chip DRAM, into which you must cram your whole program, or stop to load in new instructions whenever you want to do anything else. All "cache" must be managed by code in this tiny space, too since there's no hardware support.
Speed? Multiplication (18-bit) takes 125 operations. Realistically, we're talking under 500 MIPs, before taking into account the I/O problems and the difficulty of writing good parallel code. I'd be utterly shocked if you got more than 50 MFLOPs out of it, after some very careful optimization. Yeah, it's real supercomputer material.
Now it's starting to look like a $1 chip, non?
His Color Forth is very much like the BASICs on early home computers. They also served as both OS and interface. They were about as small, too, and provided essentially the same functionality. They were also tied inextricably to one platform. Hell, even MS got its start doing this stuff.
And yeah, it would suck to be color blind. Whatever he says about using different typefaces, I wouldn't want to distinguish between 8 different kinds of text with "italic", "underlined", "italic-underlined", etc. If it worked decently, he would have used that instead of color in the first place. We're talking about a system designed around his own poor eyesight, which doesn't account for other vision problems, and doesn't provide real advantages for those with good vision. That's typical of his work: exactly what he wants, what nobody else wants.
Yes, almost everything out there is bloated and ugly. The industry could stand to improve a lot. But Chuck Moore doesn't have the answers, in many ways he's just a smart-ass infatuated with some easy answers that don't work in the real world.
On the other hand, Forth is a very nice language. I agree that it should be taught to children while they are learning arithmetic. It's as simple as languages get, and gives you an accurate model of what's going on in the computer (execute the instructions of this word, then this word, then that word...). I see it as just another language, not language/OS/universal interface. It's very, very good for small, isolated systems. Being an extensible language that relies heavily on globals, it's very, very bad for large team-effort software projects.
Basically, read his work, but take everything with a grain of salt.
We aren't going to lose our teeth any more than the peacock is going to grow a small, sensible tail.
But maybe with a name like "Ballmore" he's got a future as a porn star.
...there are consequences for the false accuser.
Similarly, I think when one person accuses another of plotting murder, the police should immediately detain the accused person. But if the accuser lied, or even if they were honestly mistaken, they should be punished severely enough to keep people from making such accusations when they aren't certain.
So when a copyright holder sends a threatening letter to an ISP over a user's alleged copyright infringement, if there is no copyright infringement they should be subject to severe penalties. It shouldn't be a matter of civil law either, requiring the offended party to bear the cost of challenging his accusers, they should simply be able to report it to the police (subject to penalties for false accusation themselves, of course).
You could call the crime "legal thuggery" or something like that, and define it as "manipulation through the insincere threat of baseless litigation."
OTOH, you could just straighten out the civil court system so you can't be hurt by baseless litigation...
In any case, where there isn't any realistic threat of punishment to false accusers, nothing should be done to the accused without proof of guilt.
This reminds me of an excellent Isaac Asimov story. I think he foresaw our reactions to the history of computation quite well.
So you're telling me we should all be willing to listen to and debate with someone on the merits of his attempts to disembowel children, and anyone who simply judges him as evil should be disregarded as irrational.
Don't be an ass. Not everything is a debate.
Of course it makes no sense for people I judge to be monstrous and evil to argue with me over my belief. I'm not interested in debating with them, I'm interested in stopping them. I don't write to communicate with them, but to communicate with others who share my belief, or might be persuaded to. It's a call to arms, and strong language is appropriate.
Not every communication is a logical argument, meant to persuade impartial judges. Assertion of one's belief is neither logical argument nor logical fallacy, it is a statement of fact about oneself.
I'm not interested in arguing over whether a free AI would destroy humanity. That is not something we can know until it is done. It is enough that a free, superior AI would have humanity at its mercy, that it would be the introduction of a totally unnecessary, totally avoidable threat.
Others do not value humanity so highly; they consider any intelligence their equal kindred. There is no logical argument against that, you must simply judge for yourself whether you stand with them or against them. There are no moderates: you either find the extinction of humanity acceptable in some avoidable situation, or you don't.
I don't, and I won't sit and listen to people plot the annihilation of the human race without at least stating my unequivocal objection.
A small city's daily coffee consumption.
There's no room for a horse-pulled buggy in the fast lane of the interstate. Dial-up connections are not suited to downloads of over ten megabytes or so. Banning slow connections from downloading huge files is not banning them from the internet, it's a fairly minor concession to reality: like banning someone with a 1 minute ping from a twitch game.
...than "move oldlocation newlocation" how?
The point wasn't that the guy couldn't explain how to do it, it was that it had to be learned, just like the old interface. On the whole, it's not more intuitive it's just cuter.
you want to be able to screw them
Limiting users to the current LGPL is hardly screwing them, it's giving them very broad permissions to use the author's hard work for free..
And, personally, I release everything I make into the public domain, because, unlike the FSF, I don't believe in screwing people who want to use my code with any other license. My work will always remain in the public domain, and I don't force my license on anyone else's work, whether it builds on mine or not.
He ignores the significant phrase at your option
And you misinterpret the you in "invites him to screw you." That's "you, who is licencing your work in this manner." That you doesn't have any option after the release, the FSF can release a new LGPL and it doesn't matter whether you like your code being distributed under the new terms, you've already given permission for anyone to do so.
Unless you follow Mr. Drepper's advice, and remove that blanket permission, you don't have any option.
To illustrate the doublethink...
ESR suggests:
But one could also say:
In fact, I find the counterpoints more logically consistent than ESR's points. If copyright or contract law was changed to disallow such restrictive licences, people wouldn't be punished for offering such licences, such licences would simply be unenforceable, and as it currently stands, actions (unauthorized copying) which by his own definition do not infringe on another's flerbage, can cause the state to infringe on yours.
Goddamn. Doublethink and newspeak. ESR has crossed the line with this one.
"Flerbage" is also the dumbest attempted coinage I've heard in a long time. He'll carry the embarassment of this to his grave.
The Pac-Man quote was floating around for quite a while (years, AFAIK) before someone came up with the rave retort. Just because you haven't seen one without the other doesn't mean that they are inseperable.
Where do you think raves came from?
What scientists are saying when they comment against Drexler's views is that he doesn't go into the chemical specifics, and nor does he acknowledge that versions of his devices currently exist in nature or in chemical reactions.
If that's true, then it's out of pure ignorance of his views and his work. He very much does go into chemical specifics in Nanosystems, his technical work (as opposed to Engines of Creations which is meant for popular consumption), and one of his favorite replies to denials of the possibility of nanotechnology goes something like "We are nanotechnology." So much for denying that versions of these devices exist in nature.
In the very introduction of Nanosystems he compares and contrasts normal lab chemistry (solution-phase chemistry) with nanotechnological construction (mechanosynthetic chemistry).
While all these rods and gears and things may sound like a silly application of macro-scale approaches to micro-scale systems, it actually is all based on atomic-scale forces.
We know from experiments with various tiny-finger-type microscopes that you really can push around atoms as if they were little beach balls, and that bucky tubes really do act like fairly stiff, yet flexible, rods. They really can act mechanically on each other in reliable, predictable ways.
Nanosystems uses these interactions to argue for the possibility of nanotechnology because they are simple and easy to understand. Every argument is reinforced with large fudge-factors and cautious assumptions (for example, it is assumed that any machine will become non-functional or malfunction if a single atom is out of place).
Nobody is qualified to criticise Drexler's work until they've actually read it, and Nanosystems is the real meat of his work. It's also a great book if you'd like to learn more about any of chemistry, mechanical engineering, physics, or computer science, because of the way it ties them all together. The math is heavy going, but in its own way it is every bit as worthwhile to dig through as Knuth's TAoCP.
Sounds a little less impressive when you read it as ~85 kilograms. I don't know whether I'm impressed or not considering it as about half a megacup of coffee. Either way, it's about the yearly caffeine consumption of a small city.
But imagine if they reported drug busts this way: "Over 20 million micrograms of marajuana were seized yesterday by local police officer Jack Russel. 'I'm no hero,' he modestly claimed, 'I just frisked some pothead.'"
Personally, I save money by buying my caffeine at chemical supply shops by the pound. It goes well with reagent-quality ethanol.
Subsitute "building and exploding atomic bombs in major cities for fun" or "disemboweling children at random" for "creating a free AI" and then see if you would still dismiss anyone who uses phrases like "monstrous and evil" and argues that perpetrators and advocates alike should be killed. I consider the original to be far worse than either of these examples, though more subtly so.
(incidentally, I never suggested that "people opposed to [my] argument should be killed," only that people attempting or supporting attempts to destroy humanity should)
I've read it before, looking for stuff on Forth. 13 years of work by one crackpot doesn't amount to much. I bet Alex Chiu's been working that long on his theories, too.
Crackpots are very common when it comes to the topic of free AIs. I find this a very reassuring thought.
we human beings have a right to know exactly what we are and how we function as both minds and bodies.
The hand cannot grasp itself. There is no way for a human brain to know exactly how a human brain functions. Feeble indeed.
Besides, building an AI doesn't mean you've figured how the human mind works. There are probably many ways to create intelligence.
You are insane, but harmless. You will probably die bitterly disappointed in your life if you continue pursuing your crackpot theory (if you think you feel bad about the 13 years you've spend, imagine how you will feel when it's 50 years, and still no real progress in the working model). You should see a psychiatrist, as you are clearly paranoid and megalomaniacal.
Strange is grammer or name article of slashdot. Hurt the my is this by brain.
...I must state my opinion that its goals are monstrous and evil.
An attempt to create a general purpose artificial intelligence -- and specifically one which is more intelligent than any human AND one intended to be loaded into robots! -- which acts from self-interest, rather than to fulfill some specific function, is nothing less than an attempt to destroy humanity.
People who make this attempt should be killed, and their work destroyed. Collaborators should be killed, sympathizers should be killed. It is unclear whether it is wiser to do it publicly, to discourage attempts, or covertly, to keep attempts public and make them easier to catch.
The creation of free AI is the one true threat to the survival of humanity (or will be once we get a few viable colonies off-planet); nothing else would hunt people into remote areas or through space. No preventative measure is too extreme.
This is not a joke, this is not a troll. True artificial intelligence should only be approached with the greatest caution, in a carefully contained environment, by people who take the threat seriously and who are ready to abandon it and destroy their work at the first sign of danger. The idea of rights for an AI should never be seriously considered. Perhaps the only justifiable purpose of creating an AI would be to destroy other AIs, and the potential problems are obvious.
The fact that the "teachers" in this experiment thought they were truly inflicting pain
That was exactly what I was calling into question. They hesitated and protested because they thought they might have been causing damage. The fact was that they weren't causing damage, and you can't say with certainty that they believed, in the balance of things, that they were causing damage.
They had many reasons to believe they weren't causing damage. First of all, it's a psychological experiment run by a reputable university. You expect all manner of wierdness, you don't expect maiming and killing; normal standards of recognizing an emergency would be suspended. Secondly, the torture scenario makes no sense at all. If the experimenter wanted to torture the subject, he could simply press the button himself, he didn't need help, and he was certainly in a better position to judge whether the subject was in danger. Evil is not sufficient to explain the situation, it would take a very bizarre, unheard-of form of insanity (have you ever heard of anything remotely like a maniac who hired someone and stood by them and tricked them into activating a device which tortures or kills their victim?); even a practical joke is a thousand times more likely. In the board-operator's mind, we're really looking at a dilemma: it sounds like the person's being hurt, but nothing else about the situation allows the possibility that the person is really being hurt (the readings on the intensity scale are subject to many interpretations; it only sounds ominous because it is presented as such).
However, the root reason to doubt that they believed they were causing damage is that there was no damage. Deception is hard. People take in hundreds of subtle indicators when evaluating the honesty of a claim, and they were taking direction from a person who knew exactly what was going on. The above reasons are just two more particularly obvious flaws of a poorly planned deception, there would unavoidably be many more, when trying to create such a ridiculous perception in the mind of the subjects.
Those who quit didn't do so because they were certain that they would cause serious damage to someone, and decided they didn't want to contribute to it. Instead, they knew something very weird was going on, knew that they were being deceived in one way or another, and didn't want to play along any more.
Note: damage. A little non-damaging pain is not a big deal. We put up with it when we get a needle or when we exercise or for a hundred other routine things. If your doctor told you to hold your child's arm while he inserted the needle, you'd do it, and not worry because it was a little pain for a good reason. If these people could be offended at the idea of causing mere pain in a consenting individual, they would have left as soon as their role was revealed, and the decision to ever press the button would be the big .
This is simply not science. It's a political statement at best, psychological torture at worst.
Sure, they kicked ass and took names in the beginning, but after a while they just settled down and put their feet up.
That's where they got their name.
[runs from the hail of rotten fruit, broken bricks, and lobbed scimitars]
(everybody loves oversimplification)
Ogg Vorbis's popularity will be proportional to the enforcement of the MP3 patent(s?).
It doesn't have to be popular to serve a purpose. The mere threat of a completely free format waiting in the wings could just mean that MP3 is effectively free, aside from a few particularly litigation-sensitive companies paying patent royalties.
I'm sure more than one group has replied to UNISYS intimidation with, "We could be using PNG tomorrow."