There is one HUGE gap between men and women that no one in the mainstream media talks about: incarcerated population. The number of men in prisons is 10 times greater than the number of women. And it's not just the US, it's across the world, all cultures. Why don't we talk about convincing more women to take the path of crime?
But seriously, higher rate of male convicts and a higher number of male CEOs have the same underlying reason: men are more likely to take risks.
I've met Draper personally, had a couple of conversations with him. I think his problem is not ethics. It's basically medical.
His mental picture of the world is very different from everyone else's: in his world anything he wants to be true is true. He wants Holmes to be a prosecuted genius and in his world she is. Then he acts on this fact.
When people praise or attack him for what he says it just feels misplaced. He needs help.
Just a few years ago we celebrated 100 years of GTR discovery. Imagine that in celebration of that event Economist would run an article on Hendrik Lorentz without mentioning Albert Einstein. Lorentz was indeed a great scientist and his contribution certainly enabled Einstein's discovery. But wouldn't such an article rise some eyebrows and make people think of bias against Einstein?
When the torrent protocol was invented some people believed it could be the new internet. It's obvious by now that it's never going to happen. Torrents are just harder to use than HTTP. They maybe can save some money in bandwidth costs at the expense of being less reliable and harder to use. In practice they offer only one real advantage to HTTP - by the nature of being distributed they allow for the illegal distribution of copyrighted content.
The same thing with the blockchain. The distributed transaction is alway more expensive than the centralized one if compared apples to apples, no exceptions. BlCh offers just one real feature: by the nature of being distributed it allows for circumvention of regulations. And that's the only sustainable use case that was discovered in 10 years of its use. All other use cases are nothing but marketing, FOMO, or fraud.
As for ETH changing the world, here is a question I usually ask when meeting a crypto enthusiast: "Loan me a 10 ETH for two weeks. We will write a digital contract that I'll return 15. Except, when the contract comes to term I will have no money in my purse. What are you going to do?".
Lottery usually has (a) certain guaranteed odds of winning, crypto has no guarantees. (b) Lotteries are usually licensed with a limited number of licenses at any time. There is literally no limit on the number of possible cryptocurrencies.
The value of major cryptos is unlikely to go to hard zero though. There is utility in BTC and friends which is circumvention of regulations. Someone will always want to launder money and sell drugs.
But it's very unlikely for a legit application of blockchain to exist at all because a distributed transaction with consensus is fundamentally more expensive than a centralized one with a trusted third party. All, and I mean absolutely all with no exceptions, all current companies/products in "legit" space are doing things with blockchain purely for marketing/FMO reasons. All of these apps can be done more efficiently without the blockchain.
a. Categories 1 (circumvent government restriction on circulation of fiat foreign currency) and 3 (use US dollars instead). b. You are not describing a use case. You are describing a feature. Describe a use case and it will fall into one of the 3 categories.
Blockchain exists for ~10 years and still there are no mainstream use cases where it replaced the incumbent tech, other than illegal activity. There is a fundamental reason for that.
BCh offers a single unique feature: distributed trusted transaction (DTT). DTT competes with a centralized transaction == transaction with a trusted third party (T3P). DTT is by definition distributed and as such is *always* more expensive than a T3P all other things being equal: reaching consensus with multiple parties is harder than with a single party. In order for DTT to be competitive with the old tech T3P, the distributed nature of DTT must offer some advantage for people to be willing to pay the required premium. So far the only use case where people or willing to pay this premium is circumvention of regulation, when the trusted third party does not exist. This brings us to this list of use cases:
1. Circumvention of regulation. This is the only meaningful use of DTT. China has capital flow controls which effectively bar companies and individuals from moving money out of China. To get around these regulations people buy video cards and electricity in China for CNY, mine cryptocoins, sell them in the States for USD. That's the largest market right now, much bigger than buying drugs on the likes of Silk Road. This use case also includes ICOs and other pump and dump schemes.
3. Marketing & FMO Add blockchain to the company name and see your valuation pop. "We must work on blockchain because it's the future". All kinds of blockchain projects in banks, etc which are going mainstream "any time now". All of them can be done easier/cheaper/more reliably with a T3P, no exceptions.
Do you know of any country which successfully blocked email short of closing down all of internet, like North Korea? I know quite a few countries which blocked WhatsApp, and FB, and YouTube.
Email works on a specific port (25 or 465 or 587) because changing it is a hassle, not because it's technically difficult. Nothing prevents a new protocol from working on a a random port like torrents or to be tunnelled through HTTP(S).
My point is that instant messaging should move away from proprietary walled gardens. Not just because it gives too much power to commercial entities but also because it creates single points of failure.
Most (all?) commercial messengers have a problem of being centralized. Block a few servers and the messenger is dead. Compare Telegram or Whatapp to generic email. A dictator can easily block messengers, but can't block email in general. It can block can block say Gmail or Yahoo mail but blocking individual email servers is much harder. Messengers need to move to the same model. We need something like https://github.com/tinode/chat to run our own servers. We need 1000s of telegrams and whatsapps running a distributed federated messaging network.
I believe you are mistaken. First, you assume the brain function is effectively calculable. It is not. At least not at the level relevant to this discussion. Second, I think you assume if a device is computationally equivalent to a Turing machine it must have software and hardware as distinct components. Church-Turing thesis does not claim that and I believe it generally is untrue.
Imagine an expanding air balloon. Is the function it calculates effectively calculable? What is hardware and what is software in this case?
Murder is a human concept. It's from the [thy shall not do stuff onto others that you do not want to receive yourself]. And if you step back, then it's an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival. One more step back, and you will notice that fear of death is also an evolutionary achievement. Another look, and perception of continuous life itself is an evolved psychological construct to protect sanity. Consciousness is not continuous. Your conscious self dies every night. AI does not need to fear death, does not need to have psychological crutches that humans use to stay sane. If life for an AI is overrated, murder is irrelevant.
On the surface you are correct. But variability of rate of radioactive decay is an extraordinary discovery, implications are huge. Up to now the constant rate of radioactive decay was fundamental. This discovery is on the scale of discovering dark matter. If confirmed (and it's a big if), this discovery will have very far reaching implications for physics. This is a really big deal. Carbon dating being suspect is just a small consequence.
Georgia is a small republic with very little traffic to web resources under normal conditions. Now they are getting likely several orders of magnitude more traffic. And these are the consequences. But of course the "cyberwarfare" is much juicier piece for journalists to chew on.
> We don't know how to set up useful neuron structures
In this particular case, yes, but in general I tend to disagree. There were successful simulations in which RNN learned to separate spatio-temporal patterns (that's the basis for intelligence - separation). They can be designed to have memory through (a) dendritic delay lines, (b) short term potentiation of synapses, (c) long-term synaptic plasticity. The (b) can be seen as a short term memory, the (c) is the long term memory. (a) is a working memory on the scale of ~1 second.
> The simulation exhibited some lifelike patterns like alpha-waves, > but apart from that, sorry, no thought or philosophy came out
When a baby is born it has all the brain structures, it runs in real time for weeks, demonstrates all kinds of brain waves. But try extracting thought or philosophy out of it:-). The purpose of Eugene's experiment was to demonstrate one can simulate life-size brain with contemporary hardware.
Brain simulation with modern hardware is just too hard because hardware is not fast enough. Models have to be sufficiently big. They have to be run for a while to allow for learning. Then there has to be many experiments to tweak model parameters and test various conjectures.
We need comparative cephalomics (cephalogy? sapientology?): change model parameters and observe consequences. That's not possible yet. Like comparative genetics was not possible 20 years ago. We are held back by hardware. Software will follow quickly.
> I don't know... [o]ne thing is clear though: the "software" copy > would definitely not be the same consciousness
You don't know but it is clear:-). Sure.
Suppose one neuron in your brain is replaced by a software emulation. Are you the same now or different? If you say different, please explain, because lots of neurons die during your life time. If two neurons are replaced? Three? Million? Billion? Where is the line?
> That's a *huge* claim; if it is true, you have AI now.
Not as huge as it may seem.
> Because -- as I explained in a previous post in this thread -- speed is absolutely irrelevant.
Quite relevant if it's ~10M times slower than real time. AI has to be economical too. It's practically possible to build a nematode-level general AI now, but it won't be competitive with special-purpose conventional software. Funding != proof of concept that needs another 20 years to become commercially viable.
Actually, in his other posts Walt sounds pretty credible. Brain is really non-Neuman. It's a massive network of trivial processors without separation of memory and programming logic. Synapses are data and code in one. His focus on specialized hardware also makes sense. It can potentially give him a couple of orders of magnitude advantage in price-performance, so something like dog-level AI could be possible in 5 to 10 years for under 10M. And dog-level AI is no small achievement.
It does not mean Walt has it completely right, or he is going to be successful, or he is the first to try this approach.
As far as I now the algorithms for building a brain are ~80% understood. The missing pieces are local rules or reenforcement learning (how to adjust synaptic weights for rewards/punishments), how to gate inputs to symbols, i.e. how to break continuous range of inputs into discreet thought symbols. More research is needed.
> we can just make it magically happen if we copy the structure of the human > brain? And this will be *easy*?
Yes, very easy and with pleasure. Millions of intelligent beings are produced every day without full understanding of the process. I am sure you even heard of it:-)
> >confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial, > > Really?
Yes, realy. Read any recent articles from Maass, Izhikevich, Sejnowski, Markram, or any other researchers on recurrent neural networks.
Here is another fact for you to think over. Human beings are encoded as DNA. The total size of the human DNA is about 400MB. That encodes everything, not just the brain.
> You think that the mechanisms of intelligence are simple?
Yes.
> Maybe you'd like to enlighten the scientific community by telling them what they are.
Scientific community is enlightened, don't worry about it. All you need to do is review say the last 5 years of research and you will be enlightened too. It shoud not take you more than a few months.
Not as difficult as one might think. I've had hotmail address since 1996. Over the last few years I moved almost completely to gmail. Here are my resons: * Spam. Hotmail spam filter is very poor. About 25% of false negatives (spam passed to inbox as legit mail), ~20% false positives (legit mail marked as spam). Gmail has less than 1% of false negatives and positives. * Ads everywhere. When I login, I am taken to an ad-filled page, not inbox. Logout - again taken to some ad filled nonsense. The pages with my mail are covered with flashing banners. Not so with gmail * Microsoft is evil. Really. When the size of their mailbox was limited to 10MB, they autodeleted spam after 30 days. They claimed it's for the benefit of the user, to make sure no important mail is lost. The space taken by spam counted towards the 10MB limit. Quite often the mail would start bouncing after receiving a few large spams. When they were forced to increased storage to 100MB they started deleting spam after just 5 days. I understand their logic - they used spam to make free accounts less usable to force people pay. When it became impossible they decided to save money on storage. They lied because it's the microsoft way. * UI sucks. They try to mimic Outlook UI. But the panes are not resizable (I am using FF). I can either choose to see 6 message subjects completely, or the first 25 characters of many message subjects. Why can't I resize the panes? * Poor support for non-ASCII mail.
Actually, the bank does own the money you deposit there. When you open an account and deposit the money, the ownership is transferred to the bank. You get a claim against the bank for the amount of the deposit. The bank becomes your debtor, but the actual money is no longer yours.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one HUGE gap between men and women that no one in the mainstream media talks about: incarcerated population. The number of men in prisons is 10 times greater than the number of women. And it's not just the US, it's across the world, all cultures. Why don't we talk about convincing more women to take the path of crime?
But seriously, higher rate of male convicts and a higher number of male CEOs have the same underlying reason: men are more likely to take risks.
I've met Draper personally, had a couple of conversations with him. I think his problem is not ethics. It's basically medical.
His mental picture of the world is very different from everyone else's: in his world anything he wants to be true is true. He wants Holmes to be a prosecuted genius and in his world she is. Then he acts on this fact.
When people praise or attack him for what he says it just feels misplaced. He needs help.
This is the link to the actual post by Cringely with the Apple prediction: https://www.cringely.com/2019/...
Just a few years ago we celebrated 100 years of GTR discovery. Imagine that in celebration of that event Economist would run an article on Hendrik Lorentz without mentioning Albert Einstein. Lorentz was indeed a great scientist and his contribution certainly enabled Einstein's discovery. But wouldn't such an article rise some eyebrows and make people think of bias against Einstein?
When the torrent protocol was invented some people believed it could be the new internet. It's obvious by now that it's never going to happen. Torrents are just harder to use than HTTP. They maybe can save some money in bandwidth costs at the expense of being less reliable and harder to use. In practice they offer only one real advantage to HTTP - by the nature of being distributed they allow for the illegal distribution of copyrighted content.
The same thing with the blockchain. The distributed transaction is alway more expensive than the centralized one if compared apples to apples, no exceptions. BlCh offers just one real feature: by the nature of being distributed it allows for circumvention of regulations. And that's the only sustainable use case that was discovered in 10 years of its use. All other use cases are nothing but marketing, FOMO, or fraud.
As for ETH changing the world, here is a question I usually ask when meeting a crypto enthusiast: "Loan me a 10 ETH for two weeks. We will write a digital contract that I'll return 15. Except, when the contract comes to term I will have no money in my purse. What are you going to do?".
Lottery usually has (a) certain guaranteed odds of winning, crypto has no guarantees. (b) Lotteries are usually licensed with a limited number of licenses at any time. There is literally no limit on the number of possible cryptocurrencies.
The value of major cryptos is unlikely to go to hard zero though. There is utility in BTC and friends which is circumvention of regulations. Someone will always want to launder money and sell drugs.
But it's very unlikely for a legit application of blockchain to exist at all because a distributed transaction with consensus is fundamentally more expensive than a centralized one with a trusted third party. All, and I mean absolutely all with no exceptions, all current companies/products in "legit" space are doing things with blockchain purely for marketing/FMO reasons. All of these apps can be done more efficiently without the blockchain.
EoM
Use case 3.
a. Categories 1 (circumvent government restriction on circulation of fiat foreign currency) and 3 (use US dollars instead).
b. You are not describing a use case. You are describing a feature. Describe a use case and it will fall into one of the 3 categories.
Did I ever say bitcoin?
Blockchain exists for ~10 years and still there are no mainstream use cases where it replaced the incumbent tech, other than illegal activity. There is a fundamental reason for that.
BCh offers a single unique feature: distributed trusted transaction (DTT). DTT competes with a centralized transaction == transaction with a trusted third party (T3P). DTT is by definition distributed and as such is *always* more expensive than a T3P all other things being equal: reaching consensus with multiple parties is harder than with a single party. In order for DTT to be competitive with the old tech T3P, the distributed nature of DTT must offer some advantage for people to be willing to pay the required premium. So far the only use case where people or willing to pay this premium is circumvention of regulation, when the trusted third party does not exist. This brings us to this list of use cases:
1. Circumvention of regulation.
This is the only meaningful use of DTT.
China has capital flow controls which effectively bar companies and individuals from moving money out of China. To get around these regulations people buy video cards and electricity in China for CNY, mine cryptocoins, sell them in the States for USD. That's the largest market right now, much bigger than buying drugs on the likes of Silk Road. This use case also includes ICOs and other pump and dump schemes.
2. Selling picks and shovels.
Derivative of (1). If 1 goes away, 2 will go away too.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quot...
3. Marketing & FMO
Add blockchain to the company name and see your valuation pop.
"We must work on blockchain because it's the future".
All kinds of blockchain projects in banks, etc which are going mainstream "any time now". All of them can be done easier/cheaper/more reliably with a T3P, no exceptions.
Do you know of any country which successfully blocked email short of closing down all of internet, like North Korea? I know quite a few countries which blocked WhatsApp, and FB, and YouTube.
Email works on a specific port (25 or 465 or 587) because changing it is a hassle, not because it's technically difficult. Nothing prevents a new protocol from working on a a random port like torrents or to be tunnelled through HTTP(S).
My point is that instant messaging should move away from proprietary walled gardens. Not just because it gives too much power to commercial entities but also because it creates single points of failure.
Most (all?) commercial messengers have a problem of being centralized. Block a few servers and the messenger is dead. Compare Telegram or Whatapp to generic email. A dictator can easily block messengers, but can't block email in general. It can block can block say Gmail or Yahoo mail but blocking individual email servers is much harder. Messengers need to move to the same model. We need something like https://github.com/tinode/chat to run our own servers. We need 1000s of telegrams and whatsapps running a distributed federated messaging network.
I believe you are mistaken. First, you assume the brain function is effectively calculable. It is not. At least not at the level relevant to this discussion. Second, I think you assume if a device is computationally equivalent to a Turing machine it must have software and hardware as distinct components. Church-Turing thesis does not claim that and I believe it generally is untrue.
Imagine an expanding air balloon. Is the function it calculates effectively calculable? What is hardware and what is software in this case?
Murder is a human concept. It's from the [thy shall not do stuff onto others that you do not want to receive yourself]. And if you step back, then it's an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival. One more step back, and you will notice that fear of death is also an evolutionary achievement. Another look, and perception of continuous life itself is an evolved psychological construct to protect sanity. Consciousness is not continuous. Your conscious self dies every night. AI does not need to fear death, does not need to have psychological crutches that humans use to stay sane. If life for an AI is overrated, murder is irrelevant.
On the surface you are correct. But variability of rate of radioactive decay is an extraordinary discovery, implications are huge. Up to now the constant rate of radioactive decay was fundamental. This discovery is on the scale of discovering dark matter. If confirmed (and it's a big if), this discovery will have very far reaching implications for physics.
This is a really big deal. Carbon dating being suspect is just a small consequence.
Georgia is a small republic with very little traffic to web resources under normal conditions. Now they are getting likely several orders of magnitude more traffic. And these are the consequences. But of course the "cyberwarfare" is much juicier piece for journalists to chew on.
> We don't know how to set up useful neuron structures
In this particular case, yes, but in general I tend to disagree. There were successful simulations in which RNN learned to separate spatio-temporal patterns (that's the basis for intelligence - separation). They can be designed to have memory through (a) dendritic delay lines, (b) short term potentiation of synapses, (c) long-term synaptic plasticity. The (b) can be seen as a short term memory, the (c) is the long term memory. (a) is a working memory on the scale of ~1 second.
> The simulation exhibited some lifelike patterns like alpha-waves,
:-).
> but apart from that, sorry, no thought or philosophy came out
When a baby is born it has all the brain structures, it runs in real time for weeks, demonstrates all kinds of brain waves. But try extracting thought or philosophy out of it
The purpose of Eugene's experiment was to demonstrate one can simulate life-size brain with contemporary hardware.
Brain simulation with modern hardware is just too hard because hardware is not fast enough. Models have to be sufficiently big. They have to be run for a while to allow for learning. Then there has to be many experiments to tweak model parameters and test various conjectures.
We need comparative cephalomics (cephalogy? sapientology?): change model parameters and observe consequences. That's not possible yet. Like comparative genetics was not possible 20 years ago. We are held back by hardware. Software will follow quickly.
> I don't know ... [o]ne thing is clear though: the "software" copy
:-). Sure.
:-)
> would definitely not be the same consciousness
You don't know but it is clear
Suppose one neuron in your brain is replaced by a software emulation. Are you the same now or different? If you say different, please explain, because lots of neurons die during your life time. If two neurons are replaced? Three? Million? Billion? Where is the line?
See, not so clear anymore
> human intelligence does depend on belief systems and knowledge,
> and those continually grow as we mature from infancy
I would not be so sure. Changes continuously - yes, to a degree. Grows continuously - no.
> But to create the equivalent of an 18 year old, you have to have
> what amounts to 18 years of accumulation of knowledge about the world
"What amounts to" is the key here. It does not need to be 18 years of learning in physical time.
I am pretty sure sleep is essential to learning. You got to have some theory for what brain does during sleep. What is it?
> and have explained my technology to my patent attorney
Patents are evil. If you are successful, you are going to get hit with patents from others, like Herbert Jaeger http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network
> That's a *huge* claim; if it is true, you have AI now.
Not as huge as it may seem.
> Because -- as I explained in a previous post in this thread -- speed is absolutely irrelevant.
Quite relevant if it's ~10M times slower than real time. AI has to be economical too. It's practically possible to build a nematode-level general AI now, but it won't be competitive with special-purpose conventional software. Funding != proof of concept that needs another 20 years to become commercially viable.
Actually, in his other posts Walt sounds pretty credible. Brain is really non-Neuman. It's a massive network of trivial processors without separation of memory and programming logic. Synapses are data and code in one. His focus on specialized hardware also makes sense. It can potentially give him a couple of orders of magnitude advantage in price-performance, so something like dog-level AI could be possible in 5 to 10 years for under 10M. And dog-level AI is no small achievement.
It does not mean Walt has it completely right, or he is going to be successful, or he is the first to try this approach.
As far as I now the algorithms for building a brain are ~80% understood. The missing pieces are local rules or reenforcement learning (how to adjust synaptic weights for rewards/punishments), how to gate inputs to symbols, i.e. how to break continuous range of inputs into discreet thought symbols. More research is needed.
> Or do you expect us to create an atom by atom simulation of the human brain?
:-)
> Both of these things are impossible fantasies.
Fantasy? Yes. Impossible? Don't be so sure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain
> we can just make it magically happen if we copy the structure of the human
> brain? And this will be *easy*?
Yes, very easy and with pleasure. Millions of intelligent beings are produced every day without full understanding of the process. I am sure you even heard of it
> >confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial,
>
> Really?
Yes, realy. Read any recent articles from Maass, Izhikevich, Sejnowski, Markram, or any other researchers on recurrent neural networks.
Here is another fact for you to think over. Human beings are encoded as DNA. The total size of the human DNA is about 400MB. That encodes everything, not just the brain.
> You think that the mechanisms of intelligence are simple?
Yes.
> Maybe you'd like to enlighten the scientific community by telling them what they are.
Scientific community is enlightened, don't worry about it. All you need to do is review say the last 5 years of research and you will be enlightened too. It shoud not take you more than a few months.
Actually, Eugene Izhikevich run a successful simulation of the entire human brain in 2005:
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.htm#Simulation%20of%20Large-Scale%20Brain%20Models
Simulation of 1 second took 50 days on a cluster of 27 PCs (~4.3M times slower than realtime). Eugene is a pretty smart guy, except not as prominent as Kurzweil. Here is Eugene's estimate for AI timeline:
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/human_brain_simulation/why.htm
You may also want to google for Henry Markram and his current project.
Not as difficult as one might think. I've had hotmail address since 1996. Over the last few years I moved almost completely to gmail. Here are my resons:
* Spam. Hotmail spam filter is very poor. About 25% of false negatives (spam passed to inbox as legit mail), ~20% false positives (legit mail marked as spam). Gmail has less than 1% of false negatives and positives.
* Ads everywhere. When I login, I am taken to an ad-filled page, not inbox. Logout - again taken to some ad filled nonsense. The pages with my mail are covered with flashing banners. Not so with gmail
* Microsoft is evil. Really. When the size of their mailbox was limited to 10MB, they autodeleted spam after 30 days. They claimed it's for the benefit of the user, to make sure no important mail is lost. The space taken by spam counted towards the 10MB limit. Quite often the mail would start bouncing after receiving a few large spams. When they were forced to increased storage to 100MB they started deleting spam after just 5 days. I understand their logic - they used spam to make free accounts less usable to force people pay. When it became impossible they decided to save money on storage. They lied because it's the microsoft way.
* UI sucks. They try to mimic Outlook UI. But the panes are not resizable (I am using FF). I can either choose to see 6 message subjects completely, or the first 25 characters of many message subjects. Why can't I resize the panes?
* Poor support for non-ASCII mail.
Actually, the bank does own the money you deposit there. When you open an account and deposit the money, the ownership is transferred to the bank. You get a claim against the bank for the amount of the deposit. The bank becomes your debtor, but the actual money is no longer yours.