Look at the behaviour of young children (like 2-3 years old) in a group. They hit each other. They push each other. They steal each other's toys. They pull each other's hair.
Kids are nasty, selfish creatures before they're socialized.
I believe that without proper socialization, human society would rapidly degrade into a "natural" winner-takes-all slugfest of brutality. Cooperation and communication is not "natural" -- it's taught. The same is true in the animal kingdom for the more social species -- they learn the benefits of cooperation and social structure.
Actually my thinking is more along the lines of it being better to implement expert systems for various subject domains using a common code structure/format that can be extended to use the same inference/logic engines for multiple subjects. To have a system where you can flexibly define the data required for each of the subject domains, coalesce them into an overall "intelligence" that can deal with those various subjects, and stop with the fantasy of a general purpose intelligence that can learn as we do.
While what I'm proposing may not be considered "intelligent" unless it can program itself with new data models and rule sets, it's far more likely to produce intelligence-light systems that are actually useful to the general public and to industry.
It's also worth noting that if one or more of the expert systems involved are used to parse natural language into general semantic structures, and to then transform those semantic structures into data models and rules for working with those data models, then you would have achieved artificial learning as well as artificial intelligence, thereby achieving the goal of a general-purpose intelligence.
As many have pointed out, the human brain is exceptionally good at pattern matching. The problem is that I don't believe pattern matching is an effective or intuitive means for specialized or generalized intelligence processing. It's good for simulations of the brain, but a simulation is not going to automagically develop intelligence. There is far too much of a learning and training process involved from birth to death of a human in the development of their intelligence and knowledge, so a generalized intelligence based on pattern matching is going to be implicitly at the mercy of the quality of it's education.
That's going to make it damned hard to replicate one successful intelligence in another unit. It could very well be that only one in some ridiculous number of pattern-matching AIs ever achieve a *useful* intellligence when based on pattern matching, much as only some small fraction of people ever become experts at even one field of study.
Consolidated expert systems, on the other hand, are experts in the fields that have been consolidated into their knowledge base. Their training is far less random, far less intuitive, and far more tightly directed towards useful features and functionality than a generalized learning algorithm could ever hope to be on it's own.
Perhaps it's not so much that I question the different approaches to AI as that I question the usefulness of generalized theoretical approaches and structures if they're not taken to functional fruition. Too many researchers give up after proving that a thing can be done instead of actually doing it. They're content to prove the potential of an algorithm; I'm not content unless the algorithm has been successfully applied to real world problems outside the lab.
"Like the brain" is a fundamentally wrong-headed approach in my opinion. Biological systems are notoriously inefficient in many ways. Rather than modelling AI systems after the way "the brain" works, I think they should be spending a lot more time talking to philosophers and meditation specialists about how we *think* about things.
To me it makes no sense to structure a memory system as inefficiently as the brain's, for example, with all it's tendancy to forgetfulness, omission, and random irrelevant "correlations". It makes far more sense to structure purely synthetic "memories" using database technologies of various kinds.
Sure, biologicial systems employ some interesting short cuts to their processing, but always at a sacrifice in their accuracy. We should be striving for systems that are *better* than the biological, not just similar, but in silicon.
I had the same thought right off. A paltry $200K for something that is supposed to serve the trillion dollar energy markets of the world? If this thing had any chance of working, there would be energy market investors lining up with the chump change they're asking for.
I recommend that we gather up all the world's warrior mentality politicians who are always dragging people into wars and bullshit, put them in uniforms, and send them on a mission through the event horizon to determine if there's another world on the other side of the wormhole, or if they just get squished like bugs.
Somebody has to do it: solve the Schroedinger question. Is it a wormhole or a black hole? Or is it a quantum object that changes between the two randomly as you observe it?
The politicians have a need to know. Send them soon.:P
Here's a better idea. Charge anyone who ships unpatchable and unpatched hardware with sponsoring terrorism, because it's their laziness causing the problem.
Why the hell should I be forced to buy, buy, and rebuy the same god damned hardware over and over to save them from patching their shitty systems that they sell?
The idea is not to write down what the lecturer says as fast as possible, but rather to pay attention to what they are saying, think about it briefly, rephrase it in your mind, and write down a brief summary note about the point that was made. Sure you have to write down formulas and equations accurately, but that's not "taking notes" -- it's copying from the board/overhead/projector.
When it came time to study, I'd rewrite and condense my notes even further.
By the time I got the notes for a semester class down to a few pages of tightly cribbed notes and shorthand, I had the material down more than well enough to pass the exam. Because I'd thought and rethought about it, not because I'd mindlessly copied material.
Type "cbc.ca" in the address bar? Screw that, they type CBC in their Google home page, wait for the search, then click on the cbc.ca link that comes up. Bass ackwards way of using the 'net in my book, but it works for them.
It's a good article, and all too true. Software is a house of cards at best, with your boss shaking the table, the hackers throwing ping-pong balls at the house, and the NSA coming down the hallway with a baseball bat.
When you're creating a business-critical system (i.e. the product you SHIP), you need to use languages and tools that you can get resources for, not some esoteric pie-in-the-sky theoretical bullshit.
I've always thought the banking systems should be replaced by decentralized servers, where each individual has a banking server. So instead of going to a central bank for processing, transactions would be issued to the server for the "account" instead.
I figure the government wouldn't like that much.
And most people wouldn't like it because you wouldn't have guaranteed deposits with such a system.
But you could just as easily shift the focus of the banking cartels to being the hosts for such decentralized servers, taking on the responsibility for security and backups on behalf of the account owner/holder.
Just as a for-example, imagine GNU Cash with a remote access protocol that lets other people's GNU Cash instances post transaction pieces to your box. So when your employer issues a direct deposit, instead of going to a bank, it goes to your server and gets deposited directly to your personal server and account using protocols along the line of Bitcoin.
I figure it's the only way to break the US stranglehold on the global banking systems.
No offense taken. I don't claim to be an Erlang expert; I hadn't even heard of the language before this project. None of the team members had worked with it. The only one who'd worked with it was the guy who architected and prototyped the system. As soon as he was done the prototype, he didn't renew the contract and buggered off.
But we had done "too much" to switch to a language we could all agree on. Oh hell, no. We had to keep on using that crap because somebody had Made A Decision and wouldn't backtrack and Lose Money.
In the end, they lost 4-5 times as much money when we couldn't make it go. And it serves them right -- sticking with a bad decision just because you've got an investment in it is stupid when everyone is telling you it's a bad decision and a bad investment. You need to listen to the TEAM DOING THE WORK, not an "expert" who buggered off before the real work started.
And I am far from an Erlang expert. Therein lay the problem. The only expert at the language who recommended using the language was the first one to fuck off and run away when the going got tough and it was too late to change course to a language the whole TEAM was familiar with, like Java or C#.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, by all means, let's have a crying six year old be the sole occupant of a car when it gets in an accident...
Look at the behaviour of young children (like 2-3 years old) in a group. They hit each other. They push each other. They steal each other's toys. They pull each other's hair.
Kids are nasty, selfish creatures before they're socialized.
I believe that without proper socialization, human society would rapidly degrade into a "natural" winner-takes-all slugfest of brutality. Cooperation and communication is not "natural" -- it's taught. The same is true in the animal kingdom for the more social species -- they learn the benefits of cooperation and social structure.
Actually my thinking is more along the lines of it being better to implement expert systems for various subject domains using a common code structure/format that can be extended to use the same inference/logic engines for multiple subjects. To have a system where you can flexibly define the data required for each of the subject domains, coalesce them into an overall "intelligence" that can deal with those various subjects, and stop with the fantasy of a general purpose intelligence that can learn as we do.
While what I'm proposing may not be considered "intelligent" unless it can program itself with new data models and rule sets, it's far more likely to produce intelligence-light systems that are actually useful to the general public and to industry.
It's also worth noting that if one or more of the expert systems involved are used to parse natural language into general semantic structures, and to then transform those semantic structures into data models and rules for working with those data models, then you would have achieved artificial learning as well as artificial intelligence, thereby achieving the goal of a general-purpose intelligence.
As many have pointed out, the human brain is exceptionally good at pattern matching. The problem is that I don't believe pattern matching is an effective or intuitive means for specialized or generalized intelligence processing. It's good for simulations of the brain, but a simulation is not going to automagically develop intelligence. There is far too much of a learning and training process involved from birth to death of a human in the development of their intelligence and knowledge, so a generalized intelligence based on pattern matching is going to be implicitly at the mercy of the quality of it's education.
That's going to make it damned hard to replicate one successful intelligence in another unit. It could very well be that only one in some ridiculous number of pattern-matching AIs ever achieve a *useful* intellligence when based on pattern matching, much as only some small fraction of people ever become experts at even one field of study.
Consolidated expert systems, on the other hand, are experts in the fields that have been consolidated into their knowledge base. Their training is far less random, far less intuitive, and far more tightly directed towards useful features and functionality than a generalized learning algorithm could ever hope to be on it's own.
Perhaps it's not so much that I question the different approaches to AI as that I question the usefulness of generalized theoretical approaches and structures if they're not taken to functional fruition. Too many researchers give up after proving that a thing can be done instead of actually doing it. They're content to prove the potential of an algorithm; I'm not content unless the algorithm has been successfully applied to real world problems outside the lab.
"Like the brain" is a fundamentally wrong-headed approach in my opinion. Biological systems are notoriously inefficient in many ways. Rather than modelling AI systems after the way "the brain" works, I think they should be spending a lot more time talking to philosophers and meditation specialists about how we *think* about things.
To me it makes no sense to structure a memory system as inefficiently as the brain's, for example, with all it's tendancy to forgetfulness, omission, and random irrelevant "correlations". It makes far more sense to structure purely synthetic "memories" using database technologies of various kinds.
Sure, biologicial systems employ some interesting short cuts to their processing, but always at a sacrifice in their accuracy. We should be striving for systems that are *better* than the biological, not just similar, but in silicon.
Oh, yes, and oil grasshoppers are so pretty.
Face it: You're just a NIMBY mofo who is happy to have the ugliness a few states away instead of near where it's used. Tough shit.
So use Firefox or Chrome. No big deal.
Just let me know when I can buy a mammoth steak for the BBQ. Sounds tasty. :P
New! Google Watch!
It can't tell you the time, but it monitors everything you do.
I had the same thought right off. A paltry $200K for something that is supposed to serve the trillion dollar energy markets of the world? If this thing had any chance of working, there would be energy market investors lining up with the chump change they're asking for.
It came to this because American politicians are short-sighted assholes who cut budgets.
I recommend that we gather up all the world's warrior mentality politicians who are always dragging people into wars and bullshit, put them in uniforms, and send them on a mission through the event horizon to determine if there's another world on the other side of the wormhole, or if they just get squished like bugs.
Somebody has to do it: solve the Schroedinger question. Is it a wormhole or a black hole? Or is it a quantum object that changes between the two randomly as you observe it?
The politicians have a need to know. Send them soon. :P
Here's a better idea. Charge anyone who ships unpatchable and unpatched hardware with sponsoring terrorism, because it's their laziness causing the problem.
Why the hell should I be forced to buy, buy, and rebuy the same god damned hardware over and over to save them from patching their shitty systems that they sell?
Hopefully his dreams weren't haunted by imagery as strange as his paintings.
$15 a year is barely enough to pay to register a domain. Any decent ISP is going to charge more like $20/month, not $15/year.
Just because MIT can do it for $15/year does not mean that is a reasonable cost for anyone else to expect to get away with.
No, instead you have the end of support for even LTS releases, and then you're hooped if the upgrade doesn't work.
Open source is definitely not superior to Windows in that regard.
I have yet to work for a company big enough to be rolling their own updates and patches, even though anyone could, in theory, do so.
You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.
The idea is not to write down what the lecturer says as fast as possible, but rather to pay attention to what they are saying, think about it briefly, rephrase it in your mind, and write down a brief summary note about the point that was made. Sure you have to write down formulas and equations accurately, but that's not "taking notes" -- it's copying from the board/overhead/projector.
When it came time to study, I'd rewrite and condense my notes even further.
By the time I got the notes for a semester class down to a few pages of tightly cribbed notes and shorthand, I had the material down more than well enough to pass the exam. Because I'd thought and rethought about it, not because I'd mindlessly copied material.
So which bank do you work for?
I already know many people who do just that.
Type "cbc.ca" in the address bar? Screw that, they type CBC in their Google home page, wait for the search, then click on the cbc.ca link that comes up. Bass ackwards way of using the 'net in my book, but it works for them.
It's a good article, and all too true. Software is a house of cards at best, with your boss shaking the table, the hackers throwing ping-pong balls at the house, and the NSA coming down the hallway with a baseball bat.
The purpose for the company's existance was to ship a product, not to train Erlang programmers.
The answer to both questions is "no".
When you're creating a business-critical system (i.e. the product you SHIP), you need to use languages and tools that you can get resources for, not some esoteric pie-in-the-sky theoretical bullshit.
I've always thought the banking systems should be replaced by decentralized servers, where each individual has a banking server. So instead of going to a central bank for processing, transactions would be issued to the server for the "account" instead.
I figure the government wouldn't like that much.
And most people wouldn't like it because you wouldn't have guaranteed deposits with such a system.
But you could just as easily shift the focus of the banking cartels to being the hosts for such decentralized servers, taking on the responsibility for security and backups on behalf of the account owner/holder.
Just as a for-example, imagine GNU Cash with a remote access protocol that lets other people's GNU Cash instances post transaction pieces to your box. So when your employer issues a direct deposit, instead of going to a bank, it goes to your server and gets deposited directly to your personal server and account using protocols along the line of Bitcoin.
I figure it's the only way to break the US stranglehold on the global banking systems.
No offense taken. I don't claim to be an Erlang expert; I hadn't even heard of the language before this project. None of the team members had worked with it. The only one who'd worked with it was the guy who architected and prototyped the system. As soon as he was done the prototype, he didn't renew the contract and buggered off.
But we had done "too much" to switch to a language we could all agree on. Oh hell, no. We had to keep on using that crap because somebody had Made A Decision and wouldn't backtrack and Lose Money.
In the end, they lost 4-5 times as much money when we couldn't make it go. And it serves them right -- sticking with a bad decision just because you've got an investment in it is stupid when everyone is telling you it's a bad decision and a bad investment. You need to listen to the TEAM DOING THE WORK, not an "expert" who buggered off before the real work started.
And I am far from an Erlang expert. Therein lay the problem. The only expert at the language who recommended using the language was the first one to fuck off and run away when the going got tough and it was too late to change course to a language the whole TEAM was familiar with, like Java or C#.