So don't be so quick with assuming that there's machine intelligence out there. There may not be, or they be so alien that neither of us recognizes the other as an intelligence.
Any biological alien intelligence is almost certainly just as alien to us. There's no reason to assume it would share our emotions.
However, quantum effects would not help either, because a quantum computer can solve exactly the same set of problems a classical computer can. It's just that it can solve certain tasks a lot faster. Since a mind based on quantum effects would basically be a quantum computer, it would therefore also be isomorphic to a formal reasoning system, just that it might reason about certain problems faster than a classical computer. The incompleteness theorem would therefore apply to it as well.
"Artificial" doesn't imply "imitation" but only "designed by an intelligent being". Just as an airplane is not the imitation of a bird, an AI does not need to be the imitation of our mind.
OK, say we find the cure to cancer, and the key to eternal life. This will be the time our planet will start to fill up with humans (because humans will still get born, but won't die naturally), at least until non-natural deaths (illnesses we haven't yet found a cure again, including new ones appearing, starvation because there's not enough food, being killed in wars due to overpopulation and lack of resources) take care of the growing population. That is, we will end up with a planet having even more people than now, and no one of them will search for a cure to cancer any more (because that has been found), but a certain fraction will probably still research AI. Unless of course the situation on this planet gets that terrible that they don't have the resources to research AI any more. In which case probably there will be soon a system employed (probably forcefully) where only selected few have access to those medicines, most people die again, and there are again resources available, which in part might also go to AI research again.
Or in short, even if we get eternal life first, there's still the possibility to get true AI afterwards.
And BTW, we don't know how our brain would work with eternal life. Maybe with eternal life, we would get senile minds in juvenile bodies.
I think it is interesting that while we, with all our technology and intelligence, *haven't* yet been able to make AI we assume that random mutations given enough time *did*.
Not simply random mutations. Evolution.
And of course, we don't have a computer that can emulate an entire population at molecular level, nor the time to let that gigantic computer run for millions of years.
Personally, I think *we* are AI - biological, no doubt, but artificial intelligence / created sentient beings nonetheless.
Which would imply the existence of another intelligence which made us. From which the question arises from where that intelligence came. Back to square one.
It doesn't need to be encrypted. A perfectly compressed message looks exactly like noise (because anything which distinguishes it from noise is a redundancy, and therefore indicates non-perfect compression).
On the other hand, one could expect some redundancy be added in the transmission for the purpose of error correction. The question is, of course, if that's a sort of redundancy we could notice with our methods (e.g. if after a few seemingly random data blocks there were an error correcting block containing some sort of parity (which by itself would be equally random-looking), would the SETI methods detect that pattern?
However, one thing which I think every communication would need is some sort of synchronization, so that the other side knows when the data transmission starts, and therefore where to start decoding (this is especially important if the data otherwise looks like noise). That one probably would look very non-random, because it needs to be easily identified by the receiver.
But the milepost is always moved on the premise that there's still something humans can do which machines can't (i.e. the milepost is put somewhere between the machine's ability and the human's ability). If machines ever reach the state that they can do everything a human can, then there will not be any room to move the milepost any further.
Only if you go damned fast (close to the speed of light, relative to the stars). And then you'll have the problem to be irradiated by normal interstellar matter and visible light turning into ultra-hard radioactive radiation. Not to mention that at that speed, even without slowed down time (or rather, from traveler's view, contracted space) you'd already have a very hard time to react to e.g. asteroids which happen to be on your way (you think your space ship will survive hitting an asteroids at near light speed?)
You are most probably not going to mine for energy sources in space. You are going to mine for rare elements. You can have plenty of energy, and yet run out of rare elements. And most of the infrastructure needed would remain in space forever, so except for the initial cost, you'd have quite moderate resource need.
If you add non-monetary profits, then this one also gets profit: The people doing it get wider recognition and certainly an ego boost, provided they succeed (but not succeeding usually implies no profit anyway).
Yeah, but playing the guitar is useful. Manned space flight was a stunt then, it's a stunt now. It serves no purpose whatsoever, except to give hardons to nerds and deluded Space Nutters who think we'll be mining asteroids next.
So you think giving hardons is useless? I can tell you that a whole industry is built on it!:-)
On a more serious note: Where do you suggest we get our minerals from when we have used up all supplies of some element found here on earth, if not through space mining?
After they successfully completed the task of getting a man in space, they'll start planning the next step: Figuring out how to return him back to earth.:-)
Yes, it's time to get a job in a German warehouse: As warehouse detective! Oh, and don't forget that it's certainly not forbidden to tag your wares with RFID. Indeed, this already is widely used to prevent theft (the RFIDs are disabled at the cash desks so they don't trigger alarms for bought stuff; I guess there's a trail of this so any mismatch between disabled RFID wares and cash contents can be tracked to the cash desk worker (after all, it doesn't matter for the warehouse whether the cash desk worker takes the ware unpaid, or takes the cash of a customer who paid).
Just nit-picking here: unless the law is at the very base of the relativity theory and the said limit is the speed of light, I don't quite understand the limit. Probably you meant: "you must not go over the limit" because obviously you actually can.
Well, in Germany there are roads where you cannot go over the limit. For the simple reason that there is none.:-) Oh, and depending on your car, you may not be able to go over the limit even if there is one.
Maybe you should have RTFA. This is not about monitoring the user's use of facebook over employer's equipment. It's about collecting data about (potential) employees from social networking sites. It restricts use of them to data you actually have control over. That is, they e.g. cannot collect everything your facebook friends say about you. I wonder, however, how this is intended to be controlled. After all, the potential employer won't tell you "you're not getting this job because someone on facebook claimed you're drunken all the time." Another thing is that it restricts demands on job applicants to have a medical examination to cases where this is actually needed for the job (if you are going to sell food, it's even required by law, OTOH for a programmer general health issues are not relevant (any that are relevant will inevitably show up at the interview).
The at workplace stuff includes things like not putting cameras in toilets (actually I'm surprised at that, because I would have expected that already forbidden) and in other places where you are not actually expected to be working. And if you put up cameras in places where it is allowed, you must tell your employees about it.
It did, directly after the war. That's why the German constitution fortunately contains a lot of restrictions on what the state can do. And if you look at the amount of laws which had to be retracted due to being unconstitutional, otherwise we would be much worse off now.
But the Bundesrat cannot, on its own, pass laws. The law-making entity is still the Bundestag which is elected by the people. Now a lot of laws additionally have to pass the Bundesrat, but those are laws which concern the right of the federal states. I'm pretty sure that details of the identity card are not included there, therefore the Bundestag should be able to decide on that alone.
Slashdot Mirror
The "sensory organs" are pure imagination as well. They are themselves only your imagination's interpretation of the signals you get.
Any biological alien intelligence is almost certainly just as alien to us. There's no reason to assume it would share our emotions.
However, quantum effects would not help either, because a quantum computer can solve exactly the same set of problems a classical computer can. It's just that it can solve certain tasks a lot faster. Since a mind based on quantum effects would basically be a quantum computer, it would therefore also be isomorphic to a formal reasoning system, just that it might reason about certain problems faster than a classical computer. The incompleteness theorem would therefore apply to it as well.
Non-radioactive radiation, like visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, ...
"Artificial" doesn't imply "imitation" but only "designed by an intelligent being". Just as an airplane is not the imitation of a bird, an AI does not need to be the imitation of our mind.
OK, say we find the cure to cancer, and the key to eternal life. This will be the time our planet will start to fill up with humans (because humans will still get born, but won't die naturally), at least until non-natural deaths (illnesses we haven't yet found a cure again, including new ones appearing, starvation because there's not enough food, being killed in wars due to overpopulation and lack of resources) take care of the growing population. That is, we will end up with a planet having even more people than now, and no one of them will search for a cure to cancer any more (because that has been found), but a certain fraction will probably still research AI. Unless of course the situation on this planet gets that terrible that they don't have the resources to research AI any more. In which case probably there will be soon a system employed (probably forcefully) where only selected few have access to those medicines, most people die again, and there are again resources available, which in part might also go to AI research again.
Or in short, even if we get eternal life first, there's still the possibility to get true AI afterwards.
And BTW, we don't know how our brain would work with eternal life. Maybe with eternal life, we would get senile minds in juvenile bodies.
Well, maybe we already built intelligent machines, but those are intelligent enough to hide their intelligence from us. :-)
Not simply random mutations. Evolution.
And of course, we don't have a computer that can emulate an entire population at molecular level, nor the time to let that gigantic computer run for millions of years.
Which would imply the existence of another intelligence which made us. From which the question arises from where that intelligence came. Back to square one.
So we should concentrate our search around red giants?
It doesn't need to be encrypted. A perfectly compressed message looks exactly like noise (because anything which distinguishes it from noise is a redundancy, and therefore indicates non-perfect compression).
On the other hand, one could expect some redundancy be added in the transmission for the purpose of error correction. The question is, of course, if that's a sort of redundancy we could notice with our methods (e.g. if after a few seemingly random data blocks there were an error correcting block containing some sort of parity (which by itself would be equally random-looking), would the SETI methods detect that pattern?
However, one thing which I think every communication would need is some sort of synchronization, so that the other side knows when the data transmission starts, and therefore where to start decoding (this is especially important if the data otherwise looks like noise). That one probably would look very non-random, because it needs to be easily identified by the receiver.
But the milepost is always moved on the premise that there's still something humans can do which machines can't (i.e. the milepost is put somewhere between the machine's ability and the human's ability). If machines ever reach the state that they can do everything a human can, then there will not be any room to move the milepost any further.
Only if you go damned fast (close to the speed of light, relative to the stars). And then you'll have the problem to be irradiated by normal interstellar matter and visible light turning into ultra-hard radioactive radiation. Not to mention that at that speed, even without slowed down time (or rather, from traveler's view, contracted space) you'd already have a very hard time to react to e.g. asteroids which happen to be on your way (you think your space ship will survive hitting an asteroids at near light speed?)
I expect she will get to know the result anyway. Unless she's living under a stone and never watches news.
You are most probably not going to mine for energy sources in space. You are going to mine for rare elements. You can have plenty of energy, and yet run out of rare elements. And most of the infrastructure needed would remain in space forever, so except for the initial cost, you'd have quite moderate resource need.
If you add non-monetary profits, then this one also gets profit: The people doing it get wider recognition and certainly an ego boost, provided they succeed (but not succeeding usually implies no profit anyway).
Yeah, but playing the guitar is useful. Manned space flight was a stunt then, it's a stunt now. It serves no purpose whatsoever, except to give hardons to nerds and deluded Space Nutters who think we'll be mining asteroids next.
So you think giving hardons is useless? I can tell you that a whole industry is built on it! :-)
On a more serious note: Where do you suggest we get our minerals from when we have used up all supplies of some element found here on earth, if not through space mining?
Nonprofit space exploration? Is there any other kind?
Some day, there will be. For example, asteroid mining companies exploring where to find lucrative asteroids to mine.
Just noted this:
If they want to put a man into space, how can they avoid biological payloads?
After they successfully completed the task of getting a man in space, they'll start planning the next step: Figuring out how to return him back to earth. :-)
Yes, it's time to get a job in a German warehouse: As warehouse detective!
Oh, and don't forget that it's certainly not forbidden to tag your wares with RFID. Indeed, this already is widely used to prevent theft (the RFIDs are disabled at the cash desks so they don't trigger alarms for bought stuff; I guess there's a trail of this so any mismatch between disabled RFID wares and cash contents can be tracked to the cash desk worker (after all, it doesn't matter for the warehouse whether the cash desk worker takes the ware unpaid, or takes the cash of a customer who paid).
It's a first post by an Anonymous Coward. Isn't that reason enough? :-)
Well, in Germany there are roads where you cannot go over the limit. For the simple reason that there is none. :-)
Oh, and depending on your car, you may not be able to go over the limit even if there is one.
Maybe you should have RTFA. This is not about monitoring the user's use of facebook over employer's equipment. It's about collecting data about (potential) employees from social networking sites. It restricts use of them to data you actually have control over. That is, they e.g. cannot collect everything your facebook friends say about you. I wonder, however, how this is intended to be controlled. After all, the potential employer won't tell you "you're not getting this job because someone on facebook claimed you're drunken all the time." Another thing is that it restricts demands on job applicants to have a medical examination to cases where this is actually needed for the job (if you are going to sell food, it's even required by law, OTOH for a programmer general health issues are not relevant (any that are relevant will inevitably show up at the interview).
The at workplace stuff includes things like not putting cameras in toilets (actually I'm surprised at that, because I would have expected that already forbidden) and in other places where you are not actually expected to be working. And if you put up cameras in places where it is allowed, you must tell your employees about it.
It did, directly after the war. That's why the German constitution fortunately contains a lot of restrictions on what the state can do. And if you look at the amount of laws which had to be retracted due to being unconstitutional, otherwise we would be much worse off now.
But the Bundesrat cannot, on its own, pass laws. The law-making entity is still the Bundestag which is elected by the people. Now a lot of laws additionally have to pass the Bundesrat, but those are laws which concern the right of the federal states. I'm pretty sure that details of the identity card are not included there, therefore the Bundestag should be able to decide on that alone.