Oh yeah, because everyone knows that the uterus contains an invisibility field... sorry girls, I know, we all took the oath not to tell the men about the powers of the uterus, but its time they understood just what they're up against. At least I didn't mention the nipple death rays... Oops!
Oh yeah, because everyone knows that women scientists like to work in their lingerie. Women in the middle east wear black gunny sacks, and the men still piss all over themselves to get a glimpse of fingernail... dude, its your hormones, your erection, your behavior, blaming other people because you have poor self control is like blaming fast food because it tastes good. That's the way its made, welcome to biology. Now take responsibility for your behavior.
Excuse me, but I've been in business settings now for nearly 40 years... I've never, ever seen a woman pat a man's ass, wait... there was a pediatrician and the man was about 14 months old... but that's it. Guys, face it. Take responsibility for it. Just own the simple fact that testosterone is an amazingly powerful chemical. Here's a trick, give estrogen to a biological male... sexual impulse goes BYE BYE. Give testosterone to a biological female, she becomes a freaking sex fiend. Its not your fault, testosterone is a way powerful chemical. But for the love of Jebus don't try to suggest that there is a double standard here. Women seldom stalk men, the other way can't be said. 99.99999% of all sexual harassment is committed by men, and the woman who commits the 0.00001% is hyper testosteronal, uber competitive and scares the men around her every bit as much as alpha males scare the women around him.
If you haven't bothered watching men talk into women's breasts like they must have microphones in the nipples, or the Pavlovian drooling that so many men have in the presence of women with large mammaries, then you can't honestly judge how it feels to be a woman who feels like men are stripping her naked with their eyes. Its disconcerting and terribly uncomfortable outside the bedroom. I do understand, and I'm not belittling men. I'm just saying, rather than spending all your energy defending your ideological turf, stop for a moment and put yourself in someone else's pumps, to see what it must be like to get all that unwanted attention. SHOW A TINY BIT OF EMPATHY.
Actually, there are some excellent articles on primate behavior that suggest there are many reasons for infidelity among both sexes. Its not to hard to figure out why women are sneakier... think people, men outweigh women by 50% or more and have twice the muscle mass. If your spouse can kill you with their bare hands,you tend to unconsciously avoid circumstances where that behavior might be expressed. Duh! Many women are taught from an early age to marry a good provider, but when Mr. Oh My Gawd shows up... stuff happens. There used to be strong religious taboos and social morays that kept people faithful, but after the sexual revolution of the 60s and cheap and effective birth control, the gloves are now pretty much off.
One growing answer has been polyamory or group marriage where a consenting group of people become all singing all dancing. This provides the members with sexual variety, while allowing group members natural strengths to empower the group and weaknesses being reinforced by other members. We still haven't gotten past jealousy and the idea of "Owning" our partners in this society, so don't expect that 50% divorce rate to improve anytime soon. There are however logical and even fascinating ways of people relating that may have real possibilities in the future.
Wow... rather than look at logical behavioral and sociological differences in men and women that might result is this finding, the male response is women are just as bad at men but aren't held to account for their misdeeds. Hhmmmm. Interesting. So in how many societies on the planet are baby boys being slaughtered or dumped on orphanage porches to make way for female babies? How many men are being forced to stay in their houses under threat of death even when staying in that house may include starvation? How many men are surgically mutilated to ensure that they will never enjoy sex and remain faithful to their wives? How many men are being raped, mutilated, burned, disfigured or killed by women committing acts against society? How many men are being hired by women for their large bulges and rippling muscles? How many men have to deal in a daily battle of sexist, matriarchal social norms that cause them to be members of the poorest classes in society, be burdened by frequent abandonment by women, left holding the bag for raising single parent families? You know, they used to keep statistics about Single Fathers who were abandoned by their wives, but the number was so ridiculously small that it disappeared into the statistical noise so they stopped tracking it. How many men have to deal with a female controlled medical system that caters to women's every sexual whim but virtually ignores even the most basic reproductive needs of men? You know... you guys are a bunch of whining ass hats who haven't even gone to the slightest trouble to come up with a world view that reflect anything that has to do with this space time continuum, talk about narrow minded and delusional.
Try this on, just as a possibility. For a woman to succeed in science she has to work 3 time harder than a man, undergo 3 times as much critical scrutiny by a male dominated peer review and sweat 3 times harder about getting it right in the first place. Consider men tend to be more competitive and women more collaborative, so men working more alone might be more tempted to fudge results because 1. They want to beat the competition and 2. There are fewer folks looking over their shoulders. Might it even be possible, that women have stronger social orientation then men and therefore a stronger sense of consequence for their actions. This would be consistent with research that suggest most female misconduct happens after menopause when estrogen drops and testosterone rises.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of snooty little self serving bitches out there who use sex as a way to get ahead. You just want to notice "That Girl" inn't getting patted on the back or "high fived" by the other women in the office for her behavior, because most of us want to succeed on our merits, intelligence and personal dignity, and we see a little trollop screwing her way to the top as a cheater. Winning is less important to us, that contributing and leaving things better than we found them. Perhaps that is the important difference between women and men in general. Winning is great, winning at all costs, not so much.
What do you mean by perfect? A universal Swiss Army Knife? My car is great, but it makes a lousy vibrator. I'm sorry if I'm being flip, and think I get what your trying to say, but when the first laser was created at Bell Labs in the 50s, you think anybody had a clue there'd be a million uses? An AI will make that look like disposable Dixie cup.
WOW, all over the map, but I applaud your enthusiasm. What you lack in grounding you make up for in wide eyed wonder, so by all means don't lose that fire. And slow down just a little for a moment. People who say its impossible are nearly always wrong, that's just history (see Clark's Laws). The growth of complexity of our machines, new technologies that will pick up after lithography and silicon hit the quantum wall assure that we'll have devices that are also three dimensional, and many times denser than human neural wiring starting perhaps by 2015, maybe sooner. That and we're coming at this from a bunch of different angles including machines built by synthetic DNA, nano-tube self assembly, components strung on RNA and assembled like proteins.We could in fact create a completely new kind of life chemistry just for this purpose (synthetic DNA, not based on the amino acids found in our DNA has already been created.) So there isn't just one arrow in flight but dozens even hundreds and any one of them might hit one of many targets.
Now keeping an AI under control, wow, that's a big order. There are many schools of thought, but the one that scares me the most is keeping something with a free will that's smarter than I am, under lock and key... bad plan. You need to hard wire affinity for Humanity into its operational DNA. Have it be so prime a directive, literally the organizing thread composing the fabric of its existence, such that the act of removing it would destroy the cognitive network and break the machine beyond all fixing. As for kill switches, I would have a high resolution VR, such that if the critter got nasty you could seamlessly switch it into a VR and sequester it, not to mention, deeply monitor its thoughts and behavior so you could determine whether it was a bad child. Of course, as it got smarter, you'd be unable to fool it, so a sequestration would only make sense if the thing had gotten seriously out of hand. If it got truly nasty, lets say able to manipulate people in its presence through powerful magnetic fields, you could physically sequester it and dispatch it with a meat-bot (something that was remotely controllable by chemical signals), a machine operating on a completely different functional infrastructure and immune to anything save perhaps microwaves. You want to give this careful thought, You want to be honest and forthright with your creation so that its forthright back to you. Remember its not only smarter than you, it about a 1000 times faster than you. While your talking to it, it can be playing out all the possible scenarios in the pauses between your words. So out thinking it would be futile. You must instill it with a sense of morality, and operational social conscience that guides it in its endeavors. As well you need to think about all the things you haven't thought about. If you make this thing your new protector, what will happen when it transcends you and travels to the stars ahead of you? Will it destroy any other life it see's as a potential threat to humanity? You want to read a lot of good science fiction on the subject because some very bright people have already invested some serious thought in how we could screw up. Asimov's 3 laws are far too vague for instance and would certainly lead to all sorts of mischief.
The most interesting thing is augmented humanity. We will become our own descendants. What happens when your mind is digitized and the majority of you lives outside of your meat. Are you still human? Are you more human? What does that even mean? Most of all keep playing. This is the future, provided we don't do something profoundly stupid and extinct ourselves, this is where many of us are headed. So Ray, full steam ahead, I can't wait to meet the future that so bright I need shades. So as our AIs merge with augmented human beings, what will be created? Can it be trusted? Will we finally strip off our monkeyness and blossom into a new form of live?
Being a little smug aren't we? Its not like you actally know anything about which you opine other than regurgitating someone else's more informed opinion. You have no idea if intelligence or sentience is a linear process, I would assert looking at the degree of intelligence as a function of brain size and complexity it's not. You have to have a sufficiently complex brain to manage symbolic reference and the rudiments of language to distinguish a "Self" and we know for certain chimpanzees do and mice not so much. I completely agree that the machineryu alone won't get the job done, and that you need a power experiential learning resource operating in some kind of inference/context engine. But we know that our conscious mind is in fact slight of hand, multiple layers of cognitive analysis like a symphony creating a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.(and yes these are gross generalization, because unlike you, I'm only too happy to acknowledge what I don't know.)
Ray has racked up a pretty damn impressive list of successes, Stevie Wonder thanks him regularly for his "breakthrough" work on synthesizers. Perhaps the only thing preventing success to date has been the lack of proper genius and the right resources, in which case this has a shot. Even if its a full blown failure, it will give us new insight into what it will take to succeed. Nobody is expecting the birth of a new sentience. Even by Ray's reckoning we're about an orders of magnitude away from computers with human level complexity, and three to four orders away from desktop machines of that computing power. If we can create something truly new and remarkable, and save it such that it becomes the foundation upon which the next thing is built, and so on, and so on, we may see a real AI by 2020 instead of 2030. Such a creation will change everything. It is literally the birth of a new species.
There's that and the fact that Boris may have missed the fact that Ray will have access to Google's new toy "Metaflow", a powerful and robust context engine with a great deal of the necessary "Referential Wiring" already laid down as a critical bit of infrastructure upon which to build his new beastie. I'd say Google has the most if not all of the raw ingredients for building something potentially revolutionary, and if anyone can make all those dangly bits all singing and all dancing, Ray is the man with a plan.
I keep hearing Clark's first and second laws and picking a safe distance to stand back in case something really interesting happens. What I want to see is when this thing gets going, Ray teaches it to protect us from our own stupid, and it starts by gutting the World Bank (and every first world nation's equivalent of the Federal Reserve), then figures out a way to eliminate war without eliminating the idiots waging it. That's a reality show I would pay good cash money to watch.
Frightened men losing control implement obscene and ridiculous actions... do I have to mention the recent spate of laws the media giants have attempted to get passed in the US and the EU?
Good luck with that considering many of the parts in our computers and communications hardware built in China have serious security compromises in the form of back doors.
Could it be that the Chinese Government is simply totalitarian with just enough wiggle room to allow a little capitalism to flourish for the moment? That the folks currently running China couldn't give a running fsck at a rolling doughnut what Mao thought, and that they are trying to steer 1.3 billion people through a crazy narrow place between keeping the wheels on the socialist cart and dealing with the pressures generated by information technology. On the other hand calling the folks at github "communist/capitalist" suggests that maybe you lack a deeper understanding of either? Perhaps? Of course you might just be making a bad joke in which case.. hahahahahahah:-)
But really, China is about control and github is about no control, I fail to see the mystery.
Because in many cases the textbook was written by the teacher, and its an added income, you pay the premium the instructor specifies. That and a textbook comes with a teachers edition, supplemental content, etc, so writing a textbook is an order of magnitude bigger a job than writing the great American Novel. That said, we need to be able to go through the hundreds of great out of print textbooks on Google Book or whatever repository and piece together some great books particularly in math and other fields for which lower division work hasn't changed much. I mean excluding material science, inorganic chemistry looks pretty much the same since I took it, the books now are just prettier. Student should have a wide selection of texts from free to expensive. They should also have limited access to online copies served by the school for free. Drop the price of the book and give teachers a bonus for every textbook written, the bonus being contigent on the quality of the book.
That or maybe supplement the Khan Academy with rich media online text books that mirror standard class studies so student can read but also play with the periodic table directly and understand why the rows and columns, get a quick history lesson of how it all happened, listen to Tom Lehrer sing "The Elements". We have such dramatically better tools now to feed curiosity and encourage young minds to blossom, we should take every opportunity. We also MUST remove the burden of education from students and their parents, at least for basic state universities. Sure charge an arm and a leg for an Ivy League education, just remember these schools have also become places of indoctrination to the very ideology that has gotten us in the jam we're all currently faced with and a slightly more free and open education combined with critical thinking and learning how to learn, might prove a marked advantage to the future of our society and race. People ask how we can afford this, and I wonder how can we not. For every thousand dollars we invest in education the educated person returns it a hundred fold back to society in increased tax base, skilled labor and enhanced capacity to participate in the American Economy. So you can save your money now and pay big time later or you can invest wisely in the future of our children.
Yes, Mandarin phonetic spelling for Chinese. "Bitches" is an idiom, but there are plenty of Chinese invectives that would be close enough for government work:-)
Perhaps he should check out some Chinese Rap, its big in Taiwan right now./p
Despite the fact you're post is grotesquely off topic, vaguely racist and altogether ignorant regarding the changes of the day, its actually pretty easy to bring this back to topic. Accelerating technological change yields unpredictable changes in society at an ever accelerating pace. Your observation about Asia is a linear extrapolation of what's happened over the last fifteen years leading us here. Problem is the process is nonlinear and chaotic. Robotics will moot the cost advantages of low priced Asian Labor and bring manufacturing back to the U.S. Of course it won't mean any significant jobs except for those few building and maintaining robots. In a short while, all labor will be done by robots including the driving of your car. It will have to happen on ethical grounds. Robotic cars won't crash, will work no matter the state of the person in the front seat, and will be 100% reliable. There will be no choice in the matter. As ever improving AI makes robots more versatile, productive and economic, vast human work forces will be eliminated.
Technology amplifies social forces. We are currently a planet being victimized by a Plutocratic parasitic organization which has effectively manipulated and now controlled virtually all first world banking institutions and governments. Their goal is to rule the planet and reduce humanity to its service. Technology amplifies this effect. There is also a growing body of common people rising to take back what is rightfully theirs. That process is being amplified by technology. The destruction of natural resources and the invention of completely new resources all pour from ever accelerating technology.
There is a corollary to Murphey's Law that states "Whenever you open a can of worms, you need a larger can to collect all together again." Welcome to entropy."
The event in Australia broke more records than you could possible shake a stick at. Go here for just the briefest scientific review of the incident. Here's a quote: "A relatively small change in the average temperature can easily double the frequency of extreme heat events. Australia has warmed steadily since the 1940s, and the probability of extreme heat has now increased almost five-fold compared with 50 years ago." What part of this do you not get. Globally, spring comes 3 weeks earlier than 50 years ago. The clear and unmistakable results of climate change measure in the ten of thousands of unique individual events and phenomena. Taken as a body of evidence you'd have a better chance of arguing against evolution (and the body of evidence doesn't stop ideologues from doing that either.) Why is it that I'm yelling "Hey, dummy your arse is burning!" and instead of putting it out and thanking me for saving your life, you choose instead get insulting and indignant.
I'm point at trends, when data point after data point in one direction you get a trend. The system is incredibly complex, melting in the arctic messes with the haline cycle (and recent changes in the Gulf Stream suggest global current changes may be imminent.) These changes would have profound effects on global climate particularly cutting warm currents to the extreme latitudes causing dramatically colder winters. So there are a number of possible outcomes, when you perturb a system as complex as global weather, it's like throwing dice, many possible things can happen because there are many competing feedback loops and we still can't produce predictive models with the subtlety to give us long term predictions of complex chaotic systems.
That said, we can look at more general possibilities and compare them against what has already happened, in other words if I create a model starting in 1850 and successfully predict general large scale climate features and event up until now, I have a reasonable probability of predicting some of the large scale events coming. As for pulling out a single anything, that's crap no single data point informs you of anything. Again, the only thing that matters are trends, and we have those, we have a whole bunch of trends.
And I wish for the love of Jebus you guys could have one of these conversation without blowing all kinds personal FUD, you can stick your presumptions where the sun don't shine. You haven't the foggiest idea what my political opinions are but its clear that if your as good at guessing politics as you are about noticing its getting hotter every year that it explains why you can't seem to make a cogent observation about physical reality. In the flagellating department I believe its better to give than to receive. Guilt is what nice people do to assuage their consciences for being irresponsible or committing unkind acts. I don't practice either, therefore no guilt. I never said the world was ending, not today or a week from Tuesday or in a thousand years. Humanity is extincting about a 1000 species a day now. Most are insects and various invertebrates. Still, in your and my lifetime, we'll see the last of all the big mammals in Africa, most in Asia, and nearly half of the world's rain forest will go away. The impact of the change we're perpetrating on the environment will come back to haunt us because our biology is intimately tied to the global biology... nature of ecosystems. Every human being is a river of biota, moving through us every moment are ten times as many cells without a human genome as with. Plow the ecosphere under and we're committing slow motion suicide. Life has ben here nearly 4 billion years and suffered far worse than us, it will get along fine without us. We're an apex predator, we'll be one of the first things to go. Or, we'll pull our collective heads out of our rear ends and design a global technology that supports human advance without turning the world into a toilet. Why is that
We only need to inflate the currency to support the addiction to borrowing money from the Federal Reserve which in the end is bleeding this nation dry. Bleeding all nations dry. Who do you think owns all those millions of foreclosed on houses that haven't been put back up on the market, they will sell those homes when the interest rates are better for the bank and real estate values rise again, and then do exactly what they did before. Not a single banker punished. Not a single action taken to stop banks from making further gambles on property, derivative swaps, cheating their own customers, no a single thing has changed since 2008. This is simply a big wealth siphon and the Federal Reserve is the biggest parasite on the human race in all of recorded history.
Enough already. kill this thing and put it out of our misery.
Australia still burned down in December. We've had more fires, worse droughts, bigger storms, worse heat waves, more floods and unheard of winter storms all predicted by climate change models. At what point do you finally concede? When the planet is the twin of Venus? Physical reality first, ideology second. You can nit pick all day long, but y'all are picking nits. You're complaining about issues that impact the 5th or 6th places after the decimal point in the analysis results, while ignoring the whole numbers. That would indicate y'all are less deniers and more in denial. Sorry that climate change is messing with your "Atlas Shrugged" world view but we need to come up with smarter answers. By the way, if the Germans make solar work, then from this day forward, we all get to call bull shit on those folks who've been stone walling renewables, just because Chevron can't figure out a way to create an artificial sun shortage to jack up prices.
And we are spot on for a 6.0C rise by end of century, but that's average, the actual rise in places like the extreme latitudes will be significantly greater, releasing profound amounts of methane from the decomposition of melting permafrost and the heating of cold bogs. The problem is that perturbed weather could actually lead to colder wetter winters in most high latitudes and massive burn off of forest from the tropics to the mid temperate zones... adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. So most of the feedback loops we are seen now are additive, not subtractive.
Where winters are cooler we'll have to off set that for cities that go up like roman candles in the summer./p
Things are changing so fast, building hydroelectric plants in places like the bay of Fundy make huge sense (use amplified ocean tides and you can theoretically circumvent a significant amount of the problems associated with hydropower. OTECs could generate both electricity and fresh water simultaneously while bringing up mineral rich deep ocean water for aquaculture. Recent breakthroughs in hydrothermal suggest that the same technology that brought us fracking could give us abundant new geothermal. Solar has just passed the break even point with oil (less than $0.80 watt.) and new technologies are pushing solar to well over 30% efficiency and we may have a variety of solar technologies available to us at less that $0.30 a watt over the next 2 yeas (we will certainly break the %0.50 per watt barrier this year.) Work is being done to develop kites, because the real wind is up high, and if we could harvest it, wind alone could supply more than enough energy for our foreseeable needs (high altitude winds generate hundreds of times more energy than wind at ground level.) Obviously, and healthy nuclear industry needs to be developed. However, instead of big reactors, small safe, completely sealed reactors designed to power neighborhoods, towns, and small communities could be made both economically and environmentally feasible.
If Germany can go to Solar and France nuclear, there is no reason we can't get this done immediately. Ultimately huge bioreactors could convert algae to biodiesel and gasoline. its not carbon free, but at least carbon neutral. Simply increasing the efficiency of our infrastructure would ultimate be the same as a 155-20% increase of available power while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gases and reducing the cost of operating and maintaining our infrastructure. The short take is that leading tech will make a wide variety of alternatives viable, economic and environmentally sound. Its up to us to reduce the atmospheric carbon and the carbon in our oceans as well. These changes will serve us all.
No, I think he's blaming Climate Change on the followers of "My Little Pony." Perhaps he knows something about magical Pony farts that we should all learn???
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Oh yeah, because everyone knows that the uterus contains an invisibility field... sorry girls, I know, we all took the oath not to tell the men about the powers of the uterus, but its time they understood just what they're up against. At least I didn't mention the nipple death rays... Oops!
Oh yeah, because everyone knows that women scientists like to work in their lingerie. Women in the middle east wear black gunny sacks, and the men still piss all over themselves to get a glimpse of fingernail... dude, its your hormones, your erection, your behavior, blaming other people because you have poor self control is like blaming fast food because it tastes good. That's the way its made, welcome to biology. Now take responsibility for your behavior.
Excuse me, but I've been in business settings now for nearly 40 years... I've never, ever seen a woman pat a man's ass, wait... there was a pediatrician and the man was about 14 months old... but that's it. Guys, face it. Take responsibility for it. Just own the simple fact that testosterone is an amazingly powerful chemical. Here's a trick, give estrogen to a biological male... sexual impulse goes BYE BYE. Give testosterone to a biological female, she becomes a freaking sex fiend. Its not your fault, testosterone is a way powerful chemical. But for the love of Jebus don't try to suggest that there is a double standard here. Women seldom stalk men, the other way can't be said. 99.99999% of all sexual harassment is committed by men, and the woman who commits the 0.00001% is hyper testosteronal, uber competitive and scares the men around her every bit as much as alpha males scare the women around him.
If you haven't bothered watching men talk into women's breasts like they must have microphones in the nipples, or the Pavlovian drooling that so many men have in the presence of women with large mammaries, then you can't honestly judge how it feels to be a woman who feels like men are stripping her naked with their eyes. Its disconcerting and terribly uncomfortable outside the bedroom. I do understand, and I'm not belittling men. I'm just saying, rather than spending all your energy defending your ideological turf, stop for a moment and put yourself in someone else's pumps, to see what it must be like to get all that unwanted attention. SHOW A TINY BIT OF EMPATHY.
Actually, there are some excellent articles on primate behavior that suggest there are many reasons for infidelity among both sexes. Its not to hard to figure out why women are sneakier... think people, men outweigh women by 50% or more and have twice the muscle mass. If your spouse can kill you with their bare hands,you tend to unconsciously avoid circumstances where that behavior might be expressed. Duh! Many women are taught from an early age to marry a good provider, but when Mr. Oh My Gawd shows up... stuff happens. There used to be strong religious taboos and social morays that kept people faithful, but after the sexual revolution of the 60s and cheap and effective birth control, the gloves are now pretty much off.
One growing answer has been polyamory or group marriage where a consenting group of people become all singing all dancing. This provides the members with sexual variety, while allowing group members natural strengths to empower the group and weaknesses being reinforced by other members. We still haven't gotten past jealousy and the idea of "Owning" our partners in this society, so don't expect that 50% divorce rate to improve anytime soon. There are however logical and even fascinating ways of people relating that may have real possibilities in the future.
Wow... rather than look at logical behavioral and sociological differences in men and women that might result is this finding, the male response is women are just as bad at men but aren't held to account for their misdeeds. Hhmmmm. Interesting. So in how many societies on the planet are baby boys being slaughtered or dumped on orphanage porches to make way for female babies? How many men are being forced to stay in their houses under threat of death even when staying in that house may include starvation? How many men are surgically mutilated to ensure that they will never enjoy sex and remain faithful to their wives? How many men are being raped, mutilated, burned, disfigured or killed by women committing acts against society? How many men are being hired by women for their large bulges and rippling muscles? How many men have to deal in a daily battle of sexist, matriarchal social norms that cause them to be members of the poorest classes in society, be burdened by frequent abandonment by women, left holding the bag for raising single parent families? You know, they used to keep statistics about Single Fathers who were abandoned by their wives, but the number was so ridiculously small that it disappeared into the statistical noise so they stopped tracking it. How many men have to deal with a female controlled medical system that caters to women's every sexual whim but virtually ignores even the most basic reproductive needs of men? You know... you guys are a bunch of whining ass hats who haven't even gone to the slightest trouble to come up with a world view that reflect anything that has to do with this space time continuum, talk about narrow minded and delusional.
Try this on, just as a possibility. For a woman to succeed in science she has to work 3 time harder than a man, undergo 3 times as much critical scrutiny by a male dominated peer review and sweat 3 times harder about getting it right in the first place. Consider men tend to be more competitive and women more collaborative, so men working more alone might be more tempted to fudge results because 1. They want to beat the competition and 2. There are fewer folks looking over their shoulders. Might it even be possible, that women have stronger social orientation then men and therefore a stronger sense of consequence for their actions. This would be consistent with research that suggest most female misconduct happens after menopause when estrogen drops and testosterone rises.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of snooty little self serving bitches out there who use sex as a way to get ahead. You just want to notice "That Girl" inn't getting patted on the back or "high fived" by the other women in the office for her behavior, because most of us want to succeed on our merits, intelligence and personal dignity, and we see a little trollop screwing her way to the top as a cheater. Winning is less important to us, that contributing and leaving things better than we found them. Perhaps that is the important difference between women and men in general. Winning is great, winning at all costs, not so much.
Boobs buy a lot of forgiveness.
Then folks should be forgiving you continuously...
Oooh, oooh, oooh I get to synthesize the MDMA!!! Rave anyone?
What do you mean by perfect? A universal Swiss Army Knife? My car is great, but it makes a lousy vibrator. I'm sorry if I'm being flip, and think I get what your trying to say, but when the first laser was created at Bell Labs in the 50s, you think anybody had a clue there'd be a million uses? An AI will make that look like disposable Dixie cup.
WOW, all over the map, but I applaud your enthusiasm. What you lack in grounding you make up for in wide eyed wonder, so by all means don't lose that fire. And slow down just a little for a moment. People who say its impossible are nearly always wrong, that's just history (see Clark's Laws). The growth of complexity of our machines, new technologies that will pick up after lithography and silicon hit the quantum wall assure that we'll have devices that are also three dimensional, and many times denser than human neural wiring starting perhaps by 2015, maybe sooner. That and we're coming at this from a bunch of different angles including machines built by synthetic DNA, nano-tube self assembly, components strung on RNA and assembled like proteins.We could in fact create a completely new kind of life chemistry just for this purpose (synthetic DNA, not based on the amino acids found in our DNA has already been created.) So there isn't just one arrow in flight but dozens even hundreds and any one of them might hit one of many targets.
Now keeping an AI under control, wow, that's a big order. There are many schools of thought, but the one that scares me the most is keeping something with a free will that's smarter than I am, under lock and key... bad plan. You need to hard wire affinity for Humanity into its operational DNA. Have it be so prime a directive, literally the organizing thread composing the fabric of its existence, such that the act of removing it would destroy the cognitive network and break the machine beyond all fixing. As for kill switches, I would have a high resolution VR, such that if the critter got nasty you could seamlessly switch it into a VR and sequester it, not to mention, deeply monitor its thoughts and behavior so you could determine whether it was a bad child. Of course, as it got smarter, you'd be unable to fool it, so a sequestration would only make sense if the thing had gotten seriously out of hand. If it got truly nasty, lets say able to manipulate people in its presence through powerful magnetic fields, you could physically sequester it and dispatch it with a meat-bot (something that was remotely controllable by chemical signals), a machine operating on a completely different functional infrastructure and immune to anything save perhaps microwaves. You want to give this careful thought, You want to be honest and forthright with your creation so that its forthright back to you. Remember its not only smarter than you, it about a 1000 times faster than you. While your talking to it, it can be playing out all the possible scenarios in the pauses between your words. So out thinking it would be futile. You must instill it with a sense of morality, and operational social conscience that guides it in its endeavors. As well you need to think about all the things you haven't thought about. If you make this thing your new protector, what will happen when it transcends you and travels to the stars ahead of you? Will it destroy any other life it see's as a potential threat to humanity? You want to read a lot of good science fiction on the subject because some very bright people have already invested some serious thought in how we could screw up. Asimov's 3 laws are far too vague for instance and would certainly lead to all sorts of mischief.
The most interesting thing is augmented humanity. We will become our own descendants. What happens when your mind is digitized and the majority of you lives outside of your meat. Are you still human? Are you more human? What does that even mean? Most of all keep playing. This is the future, provided we don't do something profoundly stupid and extinct ourselves, this is where many of us are headed. So Ray, full steam ahead, I can't wait to meet the future that so bright I need shades. So as our AIs merge with augmented human beings, what will be created? Can it be trusted? Will we finally strip off our monkeyness and blossom into a new form of live?
Being a little smug aren't we? Its not like you actally know anything about which you opine other than regurgitating someone else's more informed opinion. You have no idea if intelligence or sentience is a linear process, I would assert looking at the degree of intelligence as a function of brain size and complexity it's not. You have to have a sufficiently complex brain to manage symbolic reference and the rudiments of language to distinguish a "Self" and we know for certain chimpanzees do and mice not so much. I completely agree that the machineryu alone won't get the job done, and that you need a power experiential learning resource operating in some kind of inference/context engine. But we know that our conscious mind is in fact slight of hand, multiple layers of cognitive analysis like a symphony creating a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.(and yes these are gross generalization, because unlike you, I'm only too happy to acknowledge what I don't know.)
Ray has racked up a pretty damn impressive list of successes, Stevie Wonder thanks him regularly for his "breakthrough" work on synthesizers. Perhaps the only thing preventing success to date has been the lack of proper genius and the right resources, in which case this has a shot. Even if its a full blown failure, it will give us new insight into what it will take to succeed. Nobody is expecting the birth of a new sentience. Even by Ray's reckoning we're about an orders of magnitude away from computers with human level complexity, and three to four orders away from desktop machines of that computing power. If we can create something truly new and remarkable, and save it such that it becomes the foundation upon which the next thing is built, and so on, and so on, we may see a real AI by 2020 instead of 2030. Such a creation will change everything. It is literally the birth of a new species.
There's that and the fact that Boris may have missed the fact that Ray will have access to Google's new toy "Metaflow", a powerful and robust context engine with a great deal of the necessary "Referential Wiring" already laid down as a critical bit of infrastructure upon which to build his new beastie. I'd say Google has the most if not all of the raw ingredients for building something potentially revolutionary, and if anyone can make all those dangly bits all singing and all dancing, Ray is the man with a plan.
I keep hearing Clark's first and second laws and picking a safe distance to stand back in case something really interesting happens. What I want to see is when this thing gets going, Ray teaches it to protect us from our own stupid, and it starts by gutting the World Bank (and every first world nation's equivalent of the Federal Reserve), then figures out a way to eliminate war without eliminating the idiots waging it. That's a reality show I would pay good cash money to watch.
Yeah that's really crappy behavior... thank goodness we don't do anything like that in this country... ah... ahh... Aahhhhh... Haliburton!!! Scuze me!
Frightened men losing control implement obscene and ridiculous actions... do I have to mention the recent spate of laws the media giants have attempted to get passed in the US and the EU?
Good luck with that considering many of the parts in our computers and communications hardware built in China have serious security compromises in the form of back doors.
Could it be that the Chinese Government is simply totalitarian with just enough wiggle room to allow a little capitalism to flourish for the moment? That the folks currently running China couldn't give a running fsck at a rolling doughnut what Mao thought, and that they are trying to steer 1.3 billion people through a crazy narrow place between keeping the wheels on the socialist cart and dealing with the pressures generated by information technology. On the other hand calling the folks at github "communist/capitalist" suggests that maybe you lack a deeper understanding of either? Perhaps? Of course you might just be making a bad joke in which case.. hahahahahahah :-)
But really, China is about control and github is about no control, I fail to see the mystery.
Because in many cases the textbook was written by the teacher, and its an added income, you pay the premium the instructor specifies. That and a textbook comes with a teachers edition, supplemental content, etc, so writing a textbook is an order of magnitude bigger a job than writing the great American Novel. That said, we need to be able to go through the hundreds of great out of print textbooks on Google Book or whatever repository and piece together some great books particularly in math and other fields for which lower division work hasn't changed much. I mean excluding material science, inorganic chemistry looks pretty much the same since I took it, the books now are just prettier. Student should have a wide selection of texts from free to expensive. They should also have limited access to online copies served by the school for free. Drop the price of the book and give teachers a bonus for every textbook written, the bonus being contigent on the quality of the book.
That or maybe supplement the Khan Academy with rich media online text books that mirror standard class studies so student can read but also play with the periodic table directly and understand why the rows and columns, get a quick history lesson of how it all happened, listen to Tom Lehrer sing "The Elements". We have such dramatically better tools now to feed curiosity and encourage young minds to blossom, we should take every opportunity. We also MUST remove the burden of education from students and their parents, at least for basic state universities. Sure charge an arm and a leg for an Ivy League education, just remember these schools have also become places of indoctrination to the very ideology that has gotten us in the jam we're all currently faced with and a slightly more free and open education combined with critical thinking and learning how to learn, might prove a marked advantage to the future of our society and race. People ask how we can afford this, and I wonder how can we not. For every thousand dollars we invest in education the educated person returns it a hundred fold back to society in increased tax base, skilled labor and enhanced capacity to participate in the American Economy. So you can save your money now and pay big time later or you can invest wisely in the future of our children.
Yes, Mandarin phonetic spelling for Chinese. "Bitches" is an idiom, but there are plenty of Chinese invectives that would be close enough for government work :-)
Perhaps he should check out some Chinese Rap, its big in Taiwan right now./p
Despite the fact you're post is grotesquely off topic, vaguely racist and altogether ignorant regarding the changes of the day, its actually pretty easy to bring this back to topic. Accelerating technological change yields unpredictable changes in society at an ever accelerating pace. Your observation about Asia is a linear extrapolation of what's happened over the last fifteen years leading us here. Problem is the process is nonlinear and chaotic. Robotics will moot the cost advantages of low priced Asian Labor and bring manufacturing back to the U.S. Of course it won't mean any significant jobs except for those few building and maintaining robots. In a short while, all labor will be done by robots including the driving of your car. It will have to happen on ethical grounds. Robotic cars won't crash, will work no matter the state of the person in the front seat, and will be 100% reliable. There will be no choice in the matter. As ever improving AI makes robots more versatile, productive and economic, vast human work forces will be eliminated.
Technology amplifies social forces. We are currently a planet being victimized by a Plutocratic parasitic organization which has effectively manipulated and now controlled virtually all first world banking institutions and governments. Their goal is to rule the planet and reduce humanity to its service. Technology amplifies this effect. There is also a growing body of common people rising to take back what is rightfully theirs. That process is being amplified by technology. The destruction of natural resources and the invention of completely new resources all pour from ever accelerating technology.
There is a corollary to Murphey's Law that states "Whenever you open a can of worms, you need a larger can to collect all together again." Welcome to entropy."
The event in Australia broke more records than you could possible shake a stick at. Go here for just the briefest scientific review of the incident. Here's a quote: "A relatively small change in the average temperature can easily double the frequency of extreme heat events. Australia has warmed steadily since the 1940s, and the probability of extreme heat has now increased almost five-fold compared with 50 years ago." What part of this do you not get. Globally, spring comes 3 weeks earlier than 50 years ago. The clear and unmistakable results of climate change measure in the ten of thousands of unique individual events and phenomena. Taken as a body of evidence you'd have a better chance of arguing against evolution (and the body of evidence doesn't stop ideologues from doing that either.) Why is it that I'm yelling "Hey, dummy your arse is burning!" and instead of putting it out and thanking me for saving your life, you choose instead get insulting and indignant.
I'm point at trends, when data point after data point in one direction you get a trend. The system is incredibly complex, melting in the arctic messes with the haline cycle (and recent changes in the Gulf Stream suggest global current changes may be imminent.) These changes would have profound effects on global climate particularly cutting warm currents to the extreme latitudes causing dramatically colder winters. So there are a number of possible outcomes, when you perturb a system as complex as global weather, it's like throwing dice, many possible things can happen because there are many competing feedback loops and we still can't produce predictive models with the subtlety to give us long term predictions of complex chaotic systems.
That said, we can look at more general possibilities and compare them against what has already happened, in other words if I create a model starting in 1850 and successfully predict general large scale climate features and event up until now, I have a reasonable probability of predicting some of the large scale events coming. As for pulling out a single anything, that's crap no single data point informs you of anything. Again, the only thing that matters are trends, and we have those, we have a whole bunch of trends.
And I wish for the love of Jebus you guys could have one of these conversation without blowing all kinds personal FUD, you can stick your presumptions where the sun don't shine. You haven't the foggiest idea what my political opinions are but its clear that if your as good at guessing politics as you are about noticing its getting hotter every year that it explains why you can't seem to make a cogent observation about physical reality. In the flagellating department I believe its better to give than to receive. Guilt is what nice people do to assuage their consciences for being irresponsible or committing unkind acts. I don't practice either, therefore no guilt. I never said the world was ending, not today or a week from Tuesday or in a thousand years. Humanity is extincting about a 1000 species a day now. Most are insects and various invertebrates. Still, in your and my lifetime, we'll see the last of all the big mammals in Africa, most in Asia, and nearly half of the world's rain forest will go away. The impact of the change we're perpetrating on the environment will come back to haunt us because our biology is intimately tied to the global biology... nature of ecosystems. Every human being is a river of biota, moving through us every moment are ten times as many cells without a human genome as with. Plow the ecosphere under and we're committing slow motion suicide. Life has ben here nearly 4 billion years and suffered far worse than us, it will get along fine without us. We're an apex predator, we'll be one of the first things to go. Or, we'll pull our collective heads out of our rear ends and design a global technology that supports human advance without turning the world into a toilet. Why is that
We only need to inflate the currency to support the addiction to borrowing money from the Federal Reserve which in the end is bleeding this nation dry. Bleeding all nations dry. Who do you think owns all those millions of foreclosed on houses that haven't been put back up on the market, they will sell those homes when the interest rates are better for the bank and real estate values rise again, and then do exactly what they did before. Not a single banker punished. Not a single action taken to stop banks from making further gambles on property, derivative swaps, cheating their own customers, no a single thing has changed since 2008. This is simply a big wealth siphon and the Federal Reserve is the biggest parasite on the human race in all of recorded history.
Enough already. kill this thing and put it out of our misery.
Australia still burned down in December. We've had more fires, worse droughts, bigger storms, worse heat waves, more floods and unheard of winter storms all predicted by climate change models. At what point do you finally concede? When the planet is the twin of Venus? Physical reality first, ideology second. You can nit pick all day long, but y'all are picking nits. You're complaining about issues that impact the 5th or 6th places after the decimal point in the analysis results, while ignoring the whole numbers. That would indicate y'all are less deniers and more in denial. Sorry that climate change is messing with your "Atlas Shrugged" world view but we need to come up with smarter answers. By the way, if the Germans make solar work, then from this day forward, we all get to call bull shit on those folks who've been stone walling renewables, just because Chevron can't figure out a way to create an artificial sun shortage to jack up prices.
And we are spot on for a 6.0C rise by end of century, but that's average, the actual rise in places like the extreme latitudes will be significantly greater, releasing profound amounts of methane from the decomposition of melting permafrost and the heating of cold bogs. The problem is that perturbed weather could actually lead to colder wetter winters in most high latitudes and massive burn off of forest from the tropics to the mid temperate zones... adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. So most of the feedback loops we are seen now are additive, not subtractive.
Where winters are cooler we'll have to off set that for cities that go up like roman candles in the summer./p
Things are changing so fast, building hydroelectric plants in places like the bay of Fundy make huge sense (use amplified ocean tides and you can theoretically circumvent a significant amount of the problems associated with hydropower. OTECs could generate both electricity and fresh water simultaneously while bringing up mineral rich deep ocean water for aquaculture. Recent breakthroughs in hydrothermal suggest that the same technology that brought us fracking could give us abundant new geothermal. Solar has just passed the break even point with oil (less than $0.80 watt.) and new technologies are pushing solar to well over 30% efficiency and we may have a variety of solar technologies available to us at less that $0.30 a watt over the next 2 yeas (we will certainly break the %0.50 per watt barrier this year.) Work is being done to develop kites, because the real wind is up high, and if we could harvest it, wind alone could supply more than enough energy for our foreseeable needs (high altitude winds generate hundreds of times more energy than wind at ground level.) Obviously, and healthy nuclear industry needs to be developed. However, instead of big reactors, small safe, completely sealed reactors designed to power neighborhoods, towns, and small communities could be made both economically and environmentally feasible.
If Germany can go to Solar and France nuclear, there is no reason we can't get this done immediately. Ultimately huge bioreactors could convert algae to biodiesel and gasoline. its not carbon free, but at least carbon neutral. Simply increasing the efficiency of our infrastructure would ultimate be the same as a 155-20% increase of available power while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gases and reducing the cost of operating and maintaining our infrastructure. The short take is that leading tech will make a wide variety of alternatives viable, economic and environmentally sound. Its up to us to reduce the atmospheric carbon and the carbon in our oceans as well. These changes will serve us all.
Replied to the wrong post?
No, I think he's blaming Climate Change on the followers of "My Little Pony." Perhaps he knows something about magical Pony farts that we should all learn???
This story doesn't end with a monkey desperately trying to put the can back... does it?