If there's one real take-home lesson of brain-design from cognitive science, it's that the brain tends to do everything several different ways in parallel, and then use the results from all of them.
Obviously it can't all be shape, there are plenty of words with identical shapes and yet these are distinguishable.
But it could certainly be true that we use shape and parallel letter recognition at the same time. Shape narrows the field of possibilities from millions to a small handful, and then parallel recognition chooses one of the options.
Whatever happens, you can be sure it's terribly complicated, extremely robust and very efficient.
Zindell's Neverness trilogy pushes the limits of imagination of what humankind is capable of in the extreme future.
And Greg Bear's publishes things such as Anvil of the Stars and Blood Music that also demonstrate how amazingly different our concepts of the future can be.
None of the things you talk about has much bearing on the singularity issue.
It's a pity more mods didn't recognize this.
Regarding the future being just a slight permutation of current times, consider what's different now compared with 1000 years ago.
Specifically, you didn't spend the last 12 hours farming or hunting to stay alive. We live in an industrial age in which there is a middle class in large parts of the world, people who don't have to worry about their next meal. This is a huge deal, and represents a major leap forward.
The idea of 70% of the inhabitants of a country the size of the US not having to worry about food would have seemed just as ridiculous to people in 1004 as the Singularity does to you now.
I like the way you started off with a real point to give us incentive enough to read your post until you got to the part where you spend 2 paragraphs bragging about how smart you are.
The reason you were bored in college programming classes is because you weren't a CS major. The courses provided to non CS majors are a far cry from what the majors get. It's in the fundamental theory classes where the bad habits we pick up while teaching ourselves to program in high school are replaced by the real discipline of computer science. In contrase, you were taking the more practical, applied classes. And yes, they are fairly boring for someone who already knows their stuff.
I'm glad naysayers like yourself were overlooked when funding for movies like:
LOTR Spiderman Xmen High Fidelity Fight Club
were approved for funding.
Yes, sometimes movie adaptations of books can fail miserably, but there are some stunning success stories, and I for one am glad that there are people with faith enough to see them through over the objections of people such as yourself.
The monkery-robot arm is not using muscle signals, it's using actual brain cells recorded in the lab.
And yes it works, but it's not as good as the monkey's actual arm. Also, it requires an actual electrode(s) inside the brain, which you'd not want to do to a person unless absolutely necessary due to the risk of many problems that can accompany brain surgery.
The biofeedback version of this using EEG also works, but again, is far less useful than a normal functioning arm. It turns out that your motor system is pretty clever, and expecting to better evolution's design with some two-bit scalp electrodes hooked to a few amplifiers is laughable.
Basically you are trying to create, with EEG equipment, recording vague, noisy signals through a skull, an output system that is superior to the motor control system designed by evolution that uses direct signal propagation.
Now these systems will be useful for those who lack these output streams (e.g. CJ disease). But for the rest of us, our hands are going to continue to be the best way to output information for decades at least.
An easy to maintain car is far more reliable than a horse. There's a million things that can go wrong with a biological organism that you can't hope to fix.
But with a simple car, and a fair bit of nohow, you could run that thing reliably for years.
Now one thing that horses do that cars don't is reproduce....
'Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that's more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today.'
I could spew meaningless crap like that all day for a fiver.
RFID tags on the merch. They realize it was stolen 2 months ago, check the logs to see exactly what time the tag left the door, and then look up the CCTV footage at that exact moment. Game, set and match.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe shutting down the space program and restarting it 5 years later is just what we need.
There are too many layers of bullshit bureacracy to allow NASA to do anything truly amazing. The stables need to be cleaned.
I read the FA. You misread it.
"The second key piece of experimental data to support the word shape model is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text."
If there's one real take-home lesson of brain-design from cognitive science, it's that the brain tends to do everything several different ways in parallel, and then use the results from all of them.
Obviously it can't all be shape, there are plenty of words with identical shapes and yet these are distinguishable.
But it could certainly be true that we use shape and parallel letter recognition at the same time. Shape narrows the field of possibilities from millions to a small handful, and then parallel recognition chooses one of the options.
Whatever happens, you can be sure it's terribly complicated, extremely robust and very efficient.
it's funny.
bull...shit
I'm willing to bet these aren't power users with 25 windows open at once multitasking like it's going out of style.
Zindell's Neverness trilogy pushes the limits of imagination of what humankind is capable of in the extreme future.
And Greg Bear's publishes things such as Anvil of the Stars and Blood Music that also demonstrate how amazingly different our concepts of the future can be.
None of the things you talk about has much bearing on the singularity issue.
It's a pity more mods didn't recognize this.
Regarding the future being just a slight permutation of current times, consider what's different now compared with 1000 years ago.
Specifically, you didn't spend the last 12 hours farming or hunting to stay alive. We live in an industrial age in which there is a middle class in large parts of the world, people who don't have to worry about their next meal. This is a huge deal, and represents a major leap forward.
The idea of 70% of the inhabitants of a country the size of the US not having to worry about food would have seemed just as ridiculous to people in 1004 as the Singularity does to you now.
All this and your head still fits through a door?
I like the way you started off with a real point to give us incentive enough to read your post until you got to the part where you spend 2 paragraphs bragging about how smart you are.
The reason you were bored in college programming classes is because you weren't a CS major. The courses provided to non CS majors are a far cry from what the majors get. It's in the fundamental theory classes where the bad habits we pick up while teaching ourselves to program in high school are replaced by the real discipline of computer science. In contrase, you were taking the more practical, applied classes. And yes, they are fairly boring for someone who already knows their stuff.
I'm glad naysayers like yourself were overlooked when funding for movies like:
LOTR
Spiderman
Xmen
High Fidelity
Fight Club
were approved for funding.
Yes, sometimes movie adaptations of books can fail miserably, but there are some stunning success stories, and I for one am glad that there are people with faith enough to see them through over the objections of people such as yourself.
The monkery-robot arm is not using muscle signals, it's using actual brain cells recorded in the lab.
And yes it works, but it's not as good as the monkey's actual arm. Also, it requires an actual electrode(s) inside the brain, which you'd not want to do to a person unless absolutely necessary due to the risk of many problems that can accompany brain surgery.
The biofeedback version of this using EEG also works, but again, is far less useful than a normal functioning arm. It turns out that your motor system is pretty clever, and expecting to better evolution's design with some two-bit scalp electrodes hooked to a few amplifiers is laughable.
Progress up to a point.
Basically you are trying to create, with EEG equipment, recording vague, noisy signals through a skull, an output system that is superior to the motor control system designed by evolution that uses direct signal propagation.
Now these systems will be useful for those who lack these output streams (e.g. CJ disease). But for the rest of us, our hands are going to continue to be the best way to output information for decades at least.
That is going to be one of the worst smelling rooms in the history of worst smelling rooms.
Cricket makes Baseball look like Tic-Tac-Toe in comparison.
You know, I'd take a John Kerry that sold out to MS over a Bush that hasn't in a heartbeat.
I know a few people who could use attitude stability with redundancy.
I'm sure monkeys could be trained to do this too. Deprive them of water long enough and you can get them to do anything.
Everyone has their price.
Try running this experiment on people who haven't had anything to drink for 12 hours and see how it turns out :)
Yet another beautiful experiment runs headlong into the brutal facts.
An easy to maintain car is far more reliable than a horse. There's a million things that can go wrong with a biological organism that you can't hope to fix.
But with a simple car, and a fair bit of nohow, you could run that thing reliably for years.
Now one thing that horses do that cars don't is reproduce....
As both a surfer and embedded systems engineer, I have to say this ranks as one of the most worthless products I have ever seen.
*pfffff* What do YOU know about it?
Kevlar is flexible because it has to be for field use, but don't kid yourself that it's as good as thick metal sheets.
'Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that's more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today.'
I could spew meaningless crap like that all day for a fiver.
This bit here:
/.er
"access content and services by simply touching 'smart objects' and connecting devices just by holding them next to each other"
reads like erotica to the average
The RIAA hammering through thousands of hundreds of thousands of court cases.
Meanwhile we are hard pressed to give rape & murder cases adequate attention.
On the other hand, guess all those new lawyers need something to do.
RFID tags on the merch. They realize it was stolen 2 months ago, check the logs to see exactly what time the tag left the door, and then look up the CCTV footage at that exact moment. Game, set and match.
How dumb were you as a kid that you couldn't sneak a baseball bat out of the house without your parents catching you?