>technology will always only be as smart as those who made it, never smarter.
On the contrary, the limits of our technological design should be much smarter than us, for several reasons. First, brute-force will never work, we will never be able to design an AI on the lowest level and get anywhere with it.
From a physical standpoint, to map out and model an AI in your head will take at least as much processing power as the AI will have. This rules out brute force by human intellect. Anything else relies on meta-design, designing the rules for how the lower level will be built by something else, like a computer or itself.
Because it's assumed a human can model meta-programming using a fraction of his/her brain inversely proportional to the number of levels above the bottom the meta-programming is, we should be able to design well beyond our mental capacity.
Just look at the way our brains work: we understand the most basic mechanics pretty well, although I admit that we still have to get a handle on why certain things are the way they are, much less how it combines to get anything done.
At the least, we know enough to create a competitive environment and let intelligence evolve itself (something nature managed without any intelligence at all). At best, we should be able to design something far more effective (for our needs) than nature has, as we're constantly illustrating in other technological fronts. [Lest I get flamed, I'm assuming God didn't "design" our brains, whatever you believe, and I said "more effective for our needs"; technology rarely serves anything but human desires] -Adrian
Take the piano. One of the best UI's out there, from the "expert-oriented" point of view; it may take years to learn, and few can master it, but those who do can use it like an extension of themselves.
UIs today are still too abstract to take advantage, like the piano does, of the human ability to fine-tune our physical interaction with the world. They force you to think everything out.
I'm not really arguing for such hard-to-learn UIs, but it certainly would be interesting to see some geared specifically towards intuitive speed and flexibility for experts rather than merely ease-of-learning for novices.
I'd be interested to see computer maestros of the future, controlling complex algorithmic manipulations with subtle flicks of the wrist.
I expect this question needs trimming before it can be considered as an actual interview candidate...
It seems generally clear that any serious attempt at AI will not be algorithmic in the sense that most computer programs are (instructions which even at their lowest level are clear enough to be understood by a human reading them), because intelligence is so complex and characterized by emergent rather than explicitly-programmed behaviour. Neural networks and self-evolving systems would be examples that recognize this reality and isolate the programmer from the actual decision-making of the AI.
My first question then, is do you agree with this premise: that a truly successful AI must be meta- (or meta-meta-) programmed, and once it has evolved/taught itself, the actual inner logic of the program will be too complex to be detangled and understood?
And, if this is true and we can understand the internal workings of a sufficiently-evolved AI only barely better than we do our own brains, what do you think the chances are that the conceptual models this AI brain creates will be similar enough to our own that we will be able to communicate? Communication between different cultures is difficult enough, imagine that between intelligences evolved in different environments, based on different wet/hardware, and by all odds having extremely different cognitive structures and ways of percieving the world.
I too have a decent collection of MP3s on my drive, but theft is STILL theft, no matter how much utterly boring verbiage Katz uses to justify it... As you put it Katz, "culture is already being transmitted freely all over the Net." That doesn't mean that downloading MP3s from the latest Filter album is justified.
I don't think very many people honestly believe that artists shouldn't be compensated for their work. Piracy is, and probably should be, a crime, certainly. The problem, I think, is not the copyright laws themselves, but the fact that the internet makes them completely unenforceable, and therefore ridiculous. We can hardly count on the goodness of people's hearts to enforce fair payment of artists or limitation of distribution when we have a medium that makes it easy to copy media for free. In the future, practically all information will be freely exchangeable unless we force invasive, inconvenient, privacy-compromising, and probably ineffective copy-protection.
IMHO, the only solution is a service model, whereby one purchases not the content, but the artists' time directly. SPP is actually very much like this; when you place donations in escrow for a future product, all you're doing is personally hiring the content author to spend a few minutes working on that product. Because information is worthless, in the sense that it costs nothing to copy and distribute, you pay for what produces the information, renting the brain that has the ideas, not the ideas themselves. ASP providers have the right idea.
I have to agree with what seems to be the direction of this argument; that one owns the rights to one's mind, but not to restrict the use of the thoughts which originated there. You can look at the logical side of it any way you want. The fact is, on the internet, everything is information, like thoughts, and there is no way to reliably police it without crippling the medium itself.
I do believe, however, that one has the right to sell the products of one's mind; really, one has the right to sell anything. A novel produced by a writer is not really an original creation of that writer. It is the product of the writer's brain, which is in turn the product of its environment. Should the writer have to pay royalties to his parents for having him? Just as above, no matter what your position, it must be agreed that it is impossible to give "credit where credit is due," without imposing arbitrary lines on where that credit is due.
The fundamental change that will have to occur is that people, artists, movie-makers, etc., will have to remember that they are selling themselves, as creative engines, not their output in the form of music or movies. I've heard of systems to handle this that will work; there's an excellent idea (forgot where I read it) for handling publishing on the internet without need for copyright laws. Basically, the public employs writers to write for them. If you like a writer, you donate X dollars to his next book. The publisher keeps these donations in escrow (and takes a cut) until the writer completes and publishes his book, then the writer is paid. Thereafter the book is free to have anything done to it; you can copy it, or sell it (although you wouldn't have much of a market when it can be obtained for free), or whatever. There's no worry about plaigarism, because the point is, the writer's brain is a good enough commodity that people pay him just to use it. Sure, it's like public tv; people will read the books who never contributed a cent. But the writer got paid, and that's what matters.
The same model could be applied to music. The question is, will enough people be willing to "donate" to writers? Well, think, if your favorite author said he wouldn't write a book until he got X dollars, and the money wasn't coming in, you'd send him a couple bucks. If everyone thinks that way... it works.
I think the problem is not with the corporations but the designers and the corporate attitude towards the web in general. When a company makes a web site, most are making a big, interactive advertisement. So, they treat it as such; their designers and content writers are, if not from an advertising firm, advertisers who crossed over to the web.
If you think corporate sites are bad, take a look at just about any popular web designers'. 90% of them are cluttered messes of jargon and obfuscation, albeit very nice to look at. Organization is hidden behind mysterious content sections entitled things like "Feed," if there are titles at all. Navigation menus are totally irrelevant buttons or pictures, the meaning of which can only be gleaned if you move your mouse over every damn one to see the rollover. You're lucky if there's any actual text not in a graphic.
Sorry to get on my soapbox. The point is, these are sites designed by artists and advertisers, not by information architects as they should be. Few corporations know about usability testing; few web design firms do either, for that matter. We can only hope as these people start discovering that they actually are losing appreciable business through poor usability (a Forrester study found that approximately 50% of sales at major corporate storefronts were lost because customers couldn't navigate the site), more attention will be payed to the user experience and less to empty flash.
This sounds very much to me like a rehashed -- albeit a very interesting and well-thought-out -- version of the anthropic principle. This is, in brief, a theory that states that the universe is as it is because it must be that way in order for us to exist; a tautology.
This is actually pretty obvious when one thinks about it. Certain things must be true for us to exist. All the anthropic principle means is that our existence is an end of itself; it doesn't matter how improbable conditions for life are, because, as mentioned in another post, we have no idea how rare we are.
In the case of this "quantum DNA" theory, the idea is the same. The universe we observe is simply the one in which the randomly-mutated DNA worked out to support life. While there are lots of possible futures where DNA was never created, we don't observe those because, well, we couldn't exist in those futures to observe them.
The problem is that this is still a tautology and really pretty meaningless in terms of sating the desire for knowing why these things happen on a deeper level. Oh well. -Adrian
Here's something that I've been wondering about. I, like Brin, thought that the guy in the hood was Palpatine in his Sith getup. But one of my friends is insistent that this is a different guy named Darth Sidious. What's the deal? And even if I'm right, I've heard about Darth Sidious elsewhere, who the heck is he?
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On the contrary, the limits of our technological design should be much smarter than us, for several reasons. First, brute-force will never work, we will never be able to design an AI on the lowest level and get anywhere with it.
From a physical standpoint, to map out and model an AI in your head will take at least as much processing power as the AI will have. This rules out brute force by human intellect. Anything else relies on meta-design, designing the rules for how the lower level will be built by something else, like a computer or itself.
Because it's assumed a human can model meta-programming using a fraction of his/her brain inversely proportional to the number of levels above the bottom the meta-programming is, we should be able to design well beyond our mental capacity.
Just look at the way our brains work: we understand the most basic mechanics pretty well, although I admit that we still have to get a handle on why certain things are the way they are, much less how it combines to get anything done.
At the least, we know enough to create a competitive environment and let intelligence evolve itself (something nature managed without any intelligence at all). At best, we should be able to design something far more effective (for our needs) than nature has, as we're constantly illustrating in other technological fronts. [Lest I get flamed, I'm assuming God didn't "design" our brains, whatever you believe, and I said "more effective for our needs"; technology rarely serves anything but human desires] -Adrian
Take the piano. One of the best UI's out there, from the "expert-oriented" point of view; it may take years to learn, and few can master it, but those who do can use it like an extension of themselves.
UIs today are still too abstract to take advantage, like the piano does, of the human ability to fine-tune our physical interaction with the world. They force you to think everything out.
I'm not really arguing for such hard-to-learn UIs, but it certainly would be interesting to see some geared specifically towards intuitive speed and flexibility for experts rather than merely ease-of-learning for novices.
I'd be interested to see computer maestros of the future, controlling complex algorithmic manipulations with subtle flicks of the wrist.
I expect this question needs trimming before it can be considered as an actual interview candidate...
It seems generally clear that any serious attempt at AI will not be algorithmic in the sense that most computer programs are (instructions which even at their lowest level are clear enough to be understood by a human reading them), because intelligence is so complex and characterized by emergent rather than explicitly-programmed behaviour. Neural networks and self-evolving systems would be examples that recognize this reality and isolate the programmer from the actual decision-making of the AI.
My first question then, is do you agree with this premise: that a truly successful AI must be meta- (or meta-meta-) programmed, and once it has evolved/taught itself, the actual inner logic of the program will be too complex to be detangled and understood?
And, if this is true and we can understand the internal workings of a sufficiently-evolved AI only barely better than we do our own brains, what do you think the chances are that the conceptual models this AI brain creates will be similar enough to our own that we will be able to communicate? Communication between different cultures is difficult enough, imagine that between intelligences evolved in different environments, based on different wet/hardware, and by all odds having extremely different cognitive structures and ways of percieving the world.
I too have a decent collection of MP3s on my drive, but theft is STILL theft, no matter how much utterly boring verbiage Katz uses to justify it ... As you put it Katz, "culture is already being transmitted freely all over the Net." That doesn't mean that downloading MP3s from the latest Filter album is justified.
I don't think very many people honestly believe that artists shouldn't be compensated for their work. Piracy is, and probably should be, a crime, certainly. The problem, I think, is not the copyright laws themselves, but the fact that the internet makes them completely unenforceable, and therefore ridiculous. We can hardly count on the goodness of people's hearts to enforce fair payment of artists or limitation of distribution when we have a medium that makes it easy to copy media for free. In the future, practically all information will be freely exchangeable unless we force invasive, inconvenient, privacy-compromising, and probably ineffective copy-protection.
IMHO, the only solution is a service model, whereby one purchases not the content, but the artists' time directly. SPP is actually very much like this; when you place donations in escrow for a future product, all you're doing is personally hiring the content author to spend a few minutes working on that product. Because information is worthless, in the sense that it costs nothing to copy and distribute, you pay for what produces the information, renting the brain that has the ideas, not the ideas themselves. ASP providers have the right idea.
I do believe, however, that one has the right to sell the products of one's mind; really, one has the right to sell anything. A novel produced by a writer is not really an original creation of that writer. It is the product of the writer's brain, which is in turn the product of its environment. Should the writer have to pay royalties to his parents for having him? Just as above, no matter what your position, it must be agreed that it is impossible to give "credit where credit is due," without imposing arbitrary lines on where that credit is due.
The fundamental change that will have to occur is that people, artists, movie-makers, etc., will have to remember that they are selling themselves, as creative engines, not their output in the form of music or movies. I've heard of systems to handle this that will work; there's an excellent idea (forgot where I read it) for handling publishing on the internet without need for copyright laws. Basically, the public employs writers to write for them. If you like a writer, you donate X dollars to his next book. The publisher keeps these donations in escrow (and takes a cut) until the writer completes and publishes his book, then the writer is paid. Thereafter the book is free to have anything done to it; you can copy it, or sell it (although you wouldn't have much of a market when it can be obtained for free), or whatever. There's no worry about plaigarism, because the point is, the writer's brain is a good enough commodity that people pay him just to use it. Sure, it's like public tv; people will read the books who never contributed a cent. But the writer got paid, and that's what matters.
The same model could be applied to music. The question is, will enough people be willing to "donate" to writers? Well, think, if your favorite author said he wouldn't write a book until he got X dollars, and the money wasn't coming in, you'd send him a couple bucks. If everyone thinks that way... it works.
If you think corporate sites are bad, take a look at just about any popular web designers'. 90% of them are cluttered messes of jargon and obfuscation, albeit very nice to look at. Organization is hidden behind mysterious content sections entitled things like "Feed," if there are titles at all. Navigation menus are totally irrelevant buttons or pictures, the meaning of which can only be gleaned if you move your mouse over every damn one to see the rollover. You're lucky if there's any actual text not in a graphic.
Sorry to get on my soapbox. The point is, these are sites designed by artists and advertisers, not by information architects as they should be. Few corporations know about usability testing; few web design firms do either, for that matter. We can only hope as these people start discovering that they actually are losing appreciable business through poor usability (a Forrester study found that approximately 50% of sales at major corporate storefronts were lost because customers couldn't navigate the site), more attention will be payed to the user experience and less to empty flash.
This sounds very much to me like a rehashed -- albeit a very interesting and well-thought-out -- version of the anthropic principle. This is, in brief, a theory that states that the universe is as it is because it must be that way in order for us to exist; a tautology.
This is actually pretty obvious when one thinks about it. Certain things must be true for us to exist. All the anthropic principle means is that our existence is an end of itself; it doesn't matter how improbable conditions for life are, because, as mentioned in another post, we have no idea how rare we are.
In the case of this "quantum DNA" theory, the idea is the same. The universe we observe is simply the one in which the randomly-mutated DNA worked out to support life. While there are lots of possible futures where DNA was never created, we don't observe those because, well, we couldn't exist in those futures to observe them.
The problem is that this is still a tautology and really pretty meaningless in terms of sating the desire for knowing why these things happen on a deeper level. Oh well. -Adrian
Here's something that I've been wondering about. I, like Brin, thought that the guy in the hood was Palpatine in his Sith getup. But one of my friends is insistent that this is a different guy named Darth Sidious. What's the deal? And even if I'm right, I've heard about Darth Sidious elsewhere, who the heck is he?