It really does depend on the meaning of understanding.
This is the same sort of sophistry that philosophers used to engage in when discussing qualia, until Dennett showed it was all bullshit and they're just emergent ephiphenomena.
Understanding just means a sufficient level of integration of some information with knowledge already extant in your mind -- the various semantic elements of what you understand are linked to the rest of your knowledge, so that you can relate these and also make use of the new information as a model of the target of your understanding (where most of the rules for emulating the model in your head derive from the analogies and relations to your previous knowledge). Said integration can occur to varying degrees, but that's equivalent to saying understanding can be shallower or deeper, which no one will disagree with.
How exactly do you refute a series on non-rhetorical questions anyway
Because, while I might (for the sake of argument) accept they're not outright rhetorical questions, they're also certainly not questions made in good faith -- they're implying that one can reasonably suppose there's a possibility of a difference between understanding and the functional competence exhibited by an entity that understands (equivalently, that, above some threshold, the appearance of intelligence can possibly be different from actual intelligence -- and feel free to replace "intelligence" with "understanding" and "consciousness" -- for while they're not the same things, they're related and the same class of arguments apply that such a difference is fantasy).
Human behavior is biologically constrained, and the biology only changes (very slowly) across generations. Self-improving AI would eventually be going through iterations at orders of magnitude faster rates, which destroys your analogy. With each iteration, the chance of the safety mechanisms you build in breaking increases. Also, see my other post under this article.
While the safety issues mentioned are very long-term (over a century, in my opinion), they are real. In terms of humans, change is slow, and the toning down of natural selection pressures on modern populations has probably put our evolution at a standstill in a lot of respects; the primary remaining selection pressures these days are sexual selection and artificial selection. These aren't particularly more powerful forces, and so human biology (and thus, psychology) will not change significantly until large-scale genetic engineering. Thus, the current fraction of people who are psychopaths (complete lack of empathy) are going to remain around just 1% of the general population. The reason this is relevant is that, aside from things learned through nurture (principles, codes of conduct, etc.), empathy remains the last line of defense, at a basic biological level, against "don't do evil even if you can get away with it". It takes a lot of poor parenting, indoctrination, and the sort of modern narcissism that marketing has taught the most recent generations, to completely overpower it for the majority of people.
So what about fully general artificial intelligence that you're allowing to self-improve over time? The probability that any specific safety mechanism you add to it will break down over iterations of self-improvement goes tends certainty. These iterations would be occurring at orders of magnitude faster rates than change in humans, so your comparison fails -- the rates of change are incomparable. Then the AI becomes a danger -- not because it will try to kill humans, but because it will not care about them along its efficient tunnel-vision pursuit of its primary goals, and we're bound to get in the way, or eventually compete for resources to even survive. One approach that might be suggested is to build AI that has empathy at a fundamental structural level, the way 99% of human brains do; however, that is not going to work because the implementation requires that there is sufficient similarity in minds and emotions, and since emotions are based on embodied cognition (wiki it -- it's regarding the tight integration between body and brain in the creation of mind) and the AI's substrate is going to be anything but like ours. Some of us may pity an ant being burned by a magnifying glass focusing the sun upon it, but we don't empathize with it, and we certainly don't let it get in the way of building a new strip mall.
How about comparing it to actually well-reviewed sci-fi movies of the past, such as Forbidden Planet or (the original 1950s) The Day the Earth Stood Still? And, unlike these movies and 2001, Star Wars is not really sci-fi, but fantasy -- if the force isn't magic, I don't know what is.
anyone who saw Star Wars once in 1977, and never watched it again until now, is clearly not a big fan of the sci-fi genre in the first place
That's just silly. Most readers of serious sci-fi I know would classify Star Wars as fantasy, not sci-fi. There's zero hard sci-fi in Star Wars, and the core element -- the force -- is magic.
These are a lot of "ifs" -- both the stated ones, and the ones implied (such as that there are singularities). Given that the singularity at the big bang can be removed ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ), probably so can those in black holes.
Two points: first my criticism was aimed at the author's interpretation of the talk
Let's look at the paraphrase of Gross' comments that continues beyond what you selectively quoted -- and which is all we have to go on until (and if) Gross puts his slides online:
Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much....According to Gross, quantum mechanics, for instance, cannot really be tested directly. But the Standard “Model” can.
I expect the second sentence to be pretty much exactly what Gross claimed, and one can take a guess at what was probably intended by this: what we're testing are specific theoretical models which are stated within larger frameworks. Your comment that classical and quantum mechanics have been tested translates, in the language Gross is using, to something along the lines of that various theoretical models that can be constructed within these frameworks have been tested (thus showing the utility of said frameworks), but that it's inaccurate to say that the overall framework itself has been tested. In other words, it's just a difference in semantics, and what Gross means when he refers to something like QM -- and you know this is really a difference in semantics, and you're nitpicking because you want to attack the philosopher in a reactionary response to the OP.
I've never seen people working on the holographic principle claim we live in AdS space. While I see string theory as unscientific, the holographic principle is at least one area that seems less deserving of derision, given its connections to Bekenstein's entropy (information) bound and the de Sitter space versions, Bousso's D-bounds, which are not dependent on string theory at all.
What's really sad is that this crap mostly comes not from the philosophers at the conference, but the string theorists (it's now become way too much of of stretch t call them scientists). I'm not a philosopher (I'm an engineer), but I am bothered by the reactionary responses of Slashdot nerds trying to place the blame on philosophers — such posts abound here.
Well, cosmological evidence strongly suggests that Dark Energy is the Cosmological Constant. I say this both in jest (for it replaces one mysterious term with another), and in seriousness (as I has significant practical consequences, albeit in the distant future, such as that accelerating expansion will not lead to a Big Rip, but, asymptotically, towards de Sitter spacetime).
How has it moved ahead?? TFA makes it pretty obvious that especially areas of physics have moved backwards in those respects by abandoning the revelations of Popper's critical rationalism, and moved to what? — not to something new that scientists alone came up with, but to bullshit ideas like "inductive support is probabilistic support" that was argued by Popper's _contemporary_ _philosophers_ Elby et al. (and defeated at each round).
It looks like you didn't RTFA. I think it's pretty obvious physics losing sight of Popper is what will delay breakthroughs in fundamental science — starting with the current example of so many academics becoming string theorists instead of scientists — and probably not ending there, as the complexities of modern scientific disciplines stretches humans' cognitive limitations and the grant-seekers seek the easy way out instead of staying within the realm of science.
Oh, the horror! Quick, let the Nobel Committee know, so they can recall the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics from this no-good Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, David Gross! Shame on him for getting three doctorates and fooling the Nobel Committee that he could have possibly developed enough depth in physics! And then, perhaps they could instead give the prize to you and Slashdot's other resident know-it-all, Roger M. Moore.
Who are you going to listen to, dear readers? David Gross, who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering asymptotic freedom, or Slashdot's very own Roger W Moore, who won... a few points from intellectually lazy moderators who cheered Mr Moore's eloquent dismissal of the Nobel-winning particle physicist's ideas as "tripe" and "absolutely no sense"?
That's a cool trick, but it won't work on their higher end locks like Protec and Protec2. Also, it will only work on locks installed in knobs where there is sufficient room behind the lock for the internals to be pushed out into. I submit that's going to be a rare occurrence.
The trick is to use a combination of products that attack or interfere with the pathogen by multiple independent pathways. That would require a confluence of various near-simultaneous mutations to overcome, which is far less likely and would take much longer to develop resistance for -- unless there is transfer from populations which have been exposed to the products individually. A common, if rarely acknowledged example, is garlic. There are more substances than just allicin in garlic that interfere with various bacteria and viruses, and some fungi, than just allicin; moreover, the body's metabolic processing of these sulfur-containing compounds creates a number of others that are also active -- and not all of them have the same targets. This makes evolving of resistance by many susceptible microorganisms very unlikely.
Cheap padlocks, sure, but if you get a high-end padlock from manufacturers known for high performance (e.g. Abloy), you'll find these workarounds don't work, and you need to cut it with a torch or destroy it with a shaped charge (good padlocks have the shackle shielded so depending on how it's positioned, you can't always get at it with a large enough bolt cutter that can handle a very hard alloy). And trying to pick an Abloy Protec is a waste of time -- a few experts with special tools (not regular lock picks) and a couple of hours to spare can do it -- maybe.
No, I don't. 25 kV @ 4 uF is 1,250 joules, which is plenty for this. Also, a 25 kV capacitor that's 4 F would require a forklift to get off the ground. You're forgetting that the energy storage (and, roughly, the size of the capacitor) is proportionate to the capacitance and the square of the voltage.
I see your anecdote and raise you another one: years ago, using an exploding wire disruptive switch in an LCR circuit (the C was 25 kV, 4 uF -- heavy but portable) and a really basic parabolic antenna, I permanently destroyed a portable CD player a few meters away.
Also, in military experiments, even diesel generators were disabled by EMP from a nuclear explosion when the stator windings shorted between turns. Your comment only applies to solid-state parts which are either 1) disconnected from wiring that has enough inductance, or 2) subjected to an insufficiently strong EMP. In two circuits with similar interconnect inductance, one using tubes and the other solid state devices, the tube one would be able to withstand an EMP several orders of magnitude stronger because a vacuum arc takes tens of kilovolts even in small tubes with heated filaments, whereas most solid state devices would be destroyed after a few volts.
If the wiring around the tubes had protection (say ultrafast spark gaps), the tubes would have come out unscathed, because even close-by electrodes in typical receiver tubes with the cathodes fully heated still need many tens of kV to cause a vacuum arc. A nuke-caused EMP can't directly cause that in a stand-alone tube unless you're in the blast radius -- the voltage was induced in the wiring. That means the damage to the tube comes from the wiring, not directly from the EMP, and so your comment is misleading.
The voltage spike was enough to cause internal arcs in operating tubes, vaporizing electrode material.
That they were operating is the first critical factor. Vacuum arcs between metallic elements that are not boosted by thermionic emission and are just driven by field emission require gradients on the order of gigavolts per meter, so even for small receiver tubes you'd need a difference of several million volts between the electrodes. With the cathode heated when the tube is operating, this is reduced by an order of magnitude. However, an EMP from a nuclear explosion that would generate something like this in an unconnected tube puts the equipment within the blast zone -- never mind worrying about the EMP. Thus, the second critical factor is the circuits the tubes were parts of, because induction into the wiring they were connected to is what it took to create a huge voltage differential between the electrodes -- which also tells you how to avoid the problem: ultrafast spark gaps, which, at least according to this paper can be as quick as picoseconds.
So the West should give more support to the Kurds so they can continue to massacre Christian minorities in Syria? Do some research. The Kurds are as bad as anyone else in that region.
Slashdot Mirror
It really does depend on the meaning of understanding.
This is the same sort of sophistry that philosophers used to engage in when discussing qualia, until Dennett showed it was all bullshit and they're just emergent ephiphenomena.
Understanding just means a sufficient level of integration of some information with knowledge already extant in your mind -- the various semantic elements of what you understand are linked to the rest of your knowledge, so that you can relate these and also make use of the new information as a model of the target of your understanding (where most of the rules for emulating the model in your head derive from the analogies and relations to your previous knowledge). Said integration can occur to varying degrees, but that's equivalent to saying understanding can be shallower or deeper, which no one will disagree with.
How exactly do you refute a series on non-rhetorical questions anyway
Because, while I might (for the sake of argument) accept they're not outright rhetorical questions, they're also certainly not questions made in good faith -- they're implying that one can reasonably suppose there's a possibility of a difference between understanding and the functional competence exhibited by an entity that understands (equivalently, that, above some threshold, the appearance of intelligence can possibly be different from actual intelligence -- and feel free to replace "intelligence" with "understanding" and "consciousness" -- for while they're not the same things, they're related and the same class of arguments apply that such a difference is fantasy).
Even if it responds intelligibly, and what it says makes complete sense, is that the same as understanding?
Good job poorly rehashing an argument made in 1980
which has been refuted time and again.
Human behavior is biologically constrained, and the biology only changes (very slowly) across generations. Self-improving AI would eventually be going through iterations at orders of magnitude faster rates, which destroys your analogy. With each iteration, the chance of the safety mechanisms you build in breaking increases. Also, see my other post under this article.
While the safety issues mentioned are very long-term (over a century, in my opinion), they are real. In terms of humans, change is slow, and the toning down of natural selection pressures on modern populations has probably put our evolution at a standstill in a lot of respects; the primary remaining selection pressures these days are sexual selection and artificial selection. These aren't particularly more powerful forces, and so human biology (and thus, psychology) will not change significantly until large-scale genetic engineering. Thus, the current fraction of people who are psychopaths (complete lack of empathy) are going to remain around just 1% of the general population. The reason this is relevant is that, aside from things learned through nurture (principles, codes of conduct, etc.), empathy remains the last line of defense, at a basic biological level, against "don't do evil even if you can get away with it". It takes a lot of poor parenting, indoctrination, and the sort of modern narcissism that marketing has taught the most recent generations, to completely overpower it for the majority of people.
So what about fully general artificial intelligence that you're allowing to self-improve over time? The probability that any specific safety mechanism you add to it will break down over iterations of self-improvement goes tends certainty. These iterations would be occurring at orders of magnitude faster rates than change in humans, so your comparison fails -- the rates of change are incomparable. Then the AI becomes a danger -- not because it will try to kill humans, but because it will not care about them along its efficient tunnel-vision pursuit of its primary goals, and we're bound to get in the way, or eventually compete for resources to even survive. One approach that might be suggested is to build AI that has empathy at a fundamental structural level, the way 99% of human brains do; however, that is not going to work because the implementation requires that there is sufficient similarity in minds and emotions, and since emotions are based on embodied cognition (wiki it -- it's regarding the tight integration between body and brain in the creation of mind) and the AI's substrate is going to be anything but like ours. Some of us may pity an ant being burned by a magnifying glass focusing the sun upon it, but we don't empathize with it, and we certainly don't let it get in the way of building a new strip mall.
Compare it to ...
How about comparing it to actually well-reviewed sci-fi movies of the past, such as Forbidden Planet or (the original 1950s) The Day the Earth Stood Still? And, unlike these movies and 2001, Star Wars is not really sci-fi, but fantasy -- if the force isn't magic, I don't know what is.
anyone who saw Star Wars once in 1977, and never watched it again until now, is clearly not a big fan of the sci-fi genre in the first place
That's just silly. Most readers of serious sci-fi I know would classify Star Wars as fantasy, not sci-fi. There's zero hard sci-fi in Star Wars, and the core element -- the force -- is magic.
These are a lot of "ifs" -- both the stated ones, and the ones implied (such as that there are singularities). Given that the singularity at the big bang can be removed ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ), probably so can those in black holes.
Two points: first my criticism was aimed at the author's interpretation of the talk
Let's look at the paraphrase of Gross' comments that continues beyond what you selectively quoted -- and which is all we have to go on until (and if) Gross puts his slides online:
Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much....According to Gross, quantum mechanics, for instance, cannot really be tested directly. But the Standard “Model” can.
I expect the second sentence to be pretty much exactly what Gross claimed, and one can take a guess at what was probably intended by this: what we're testing are specific theoretical models which are stated within larger frameworks. Your comment that classical and quantum mechanics have been tested translates, in the language Gross is using, to something along the lines of that various theoretical models that can be constructed within these frameworks have been tested (thus showing the utility of said frameworks), but that it's inaccurate to say that the overall framework itself has been tested. In other words, it's just a difference in semantics, and what Gross means when he refers to something like QM -- and you know this is really a difference in semantics, and you're nitpicking because you want to attack the philosopher in a reactionary response to the OP.
I've never seen people working on the holographic principle claim we live in AdS space. While I see string theory as unscientific, the holographic principle is at least one area that seems less deserving of derision, given its connections to Bekenstein's entropy (information) bound and the de Sitter space versions, Bousso's D-bounds, which are not dependent on string theory at all.
What's really sad is that this crap mostly comes not from the philosophers at the conference, but the string theorists (it's now become way too much of of stretch t call them scientists). I'm not a philosopher (I'm an engineer), but I am bothered by the reactionary responses of Slashdot nerds trying to place the blame on philosophers — such posts abound here.
Well, cosmological evidence strongly suggests that Dark Energy is the Cosmological Constant. I say this both in jest (for it replaces one mysterious term with another), and in seriousness (as I has significant practical consequences, albeit in the distant future, such as that accelerating expansion will not lead to a Big Rip, but, asymptotically, towards de Sitter spacetime).
How has it moved ahead?? TFA makes it pretty obvious that especially areas of physics have moved backwards in those respects by abandoning the revelations of Popper's critical rationalism, and moved to what? — not to something new that scientists alone came up with, but to bullshit ideas like "inductive support is probabilistic support" that was argued by Popper's _contemporary_ _philosophers_ Elby et al. (and defeated at each round).
It looks like you didn't RTFA. I think it's pretty obvious physics losing sight of Popper is what will delay breakthroughs in fundamental science — starting with the current example of so many academics becoming string theorists instead of scientists — and probably not ending there, as the complexities of modern scientific disciplines stretches humans' cognitive limitations and the grant-seekers seek the easy way out instead of staying within the realm of science.
Oh, the horror! Quick, let the Nobel Committee know, so they can recall the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics from this no-good Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, David Gross! Shame on him for getting three doctorates and fooling the Nobel Committee that he could have possibly developed enough depth in physics! And then, perhaps they could instead give the prize to you and Slashdot's other resident know-it-all, Roger M. Moore.
Who are you going to listen to, dear readers? David Gross, who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering asymptotic freedom, or Slashdot's very own Roger W Moore, who won ... a few points from intellectually lazy moderators who cheered Mr Moore's eloquent dismissal of the Nobel-winning particle physicist's ideas as "tripe" and "absolutely no sense"?
That's a cool trick, but it won't work on their higher end locks like Protec and Protec2. Also, it will only work on locks installed in knobs where there is sufficient room behind the lock for the internals to be pushed out into. I submit that's going to be a rare occurrence.
The trick is to use a combination of products that attack or interfere with the pathogen by multiple independent pathways. That would require a confluence of various near-simultaneous mutations to overcome, which is far less likely and would take much longer to develop resistance for -- unless there is transfer from populations which have been exposed to the products individually. A common, if rarely acknowledged example, is garlic. There are more substances than just allicin in garlic that interfere with various bacteria and viruses, and some fungi, than just allicin; moreover, the body's metabolic processing of these sulfur-containing compounds creates a number of others that are also active -- and not all of them have the same targets. This makes evolving of resistance by many susceptible microorganisms very unlikely.
Cheap padlocks, sure, but if you get a high-end padlock from manufacturers known for high performance (e.g. Abloy), you'll find these workarounds don't work, and you need to cut it with a torch or destroy it with a shaped charge (good padlocks have the shackle shielded so depending on how it's positioned, you can't always get at it with a large enough bolt cutter that can handle a very hard alloy). And trying to pick an Abloy Protec is a waste of time -- a few experts with special tools (not regular lock picks) and a couple of hours to spare can do it -- maybe.
No, I don't. 25 kV @ 4 uF is 1,250 joules, which is plenty for this. Also, a 25 kV capacitor that's 4 F would require a forklift to get off the ground. You're forgetting that the energy storage (and, roughly, the size of the capacitor) is proportionate to the capacitance and the square of the voltage.
I see your anecdote and raise you another one: years ago, using an exploding wire disruptive switch in an LCR circuit (the C was 25 kV, 4 uF -- heavy but portable) and a really basic parabolic antenna, I permanently destroyed a portable CD player a few meters away.
Also, in military experiments, even diesel generators were disabled by EMP from a nuclear explosion when the stator windings shorted between turns. Your comment only applies to solid-state parts which are either 1) disconnected from wiring that has enough inductance, or 2) subjected to an insufficiently strong EMP. In two circuits with similar interconnect inductance, one using tubes and the other solid state devices, the tube one would be able to withstand an EMP several orders of magnitude stronger because a vacuum arc takes tens of kilovolts even in small tubes with heated filaments, whereas most solid state devices would be destroyed after a few volts.
Aside from Eimac, who else is still making these monsters?
If the wiring around the tubes had protection (say ultrafast spark gaps), the tubes would have come out unscathed, because even close-by electrodes in typical receiver tubes with the cathodes fully heated still need many tens of kV to cause a vacuum arc. A nuke-caused EMP can't directly cause that in a stand-alone tube unless you're in the blast radius -- the voltage was induced in the wiring. That means the damage to the tube comes from the wiring, not directly from the EMP, and so your comment is misleading.
The voltage spike was enough to cause internal arcs in operating tubes, vaporizing electrode material.
That they were operating is the first critical factor. Vacuum arcs between metallic elements that are not boosted by thermionic emission and are just driven by field emission require gradients on the order of gigavolts per meter, so even for small receiver tubes you'd need a difference of several million volts between the electrodes. With the cathode heated when the tube is operating, this is reduced by an order of magnitude. However, an EMP from a nuclear explosion that would generate something like this in an unconnected tube puts the equipment within the blast zone -- never mind worrying about the EMP. Thus, the second critical factor is the circuits the tubes were parts of, because induction into the wiring they were connected to is what it took to create a huge voltage differential between the electrodes -- which also tells you how to avoid the problem: ultrafast spark gaps, which, at least according to this paper can be as quick as picoseconds.
So the West should give more support to the Kurds so they can continue to massacre Christian minorities in Syria? Do some research. The Kurds are as bad as anyone else in that region.