All the comments so far are some variation on "oh no, shooting LAZORS at someone!"
I've worked with both the pattern projection systems (like kinect) and the TOF imaging chips. The TOF systems are a more elegant solution, but don't seem to be all that superior in practice. Since they use interference they have a window of distances they're sensitive to, with a tradeoff of precision and how deep the window is.
Apek's robot looked like a human (because it was one) but the first real robots in the 1940s were basically clunky Roombas and CNC machines.
"Android" is an even older term that specifically refers to more or less human-appearing robots. Wikipedia notes that the first known use of the term was describing a wooden toy that looks like Pinocchio riding a bicycle.
Is it obvious? Most religions have in common the claim that they are true, and all others are false, and also the idea that every person has a soul, spirit or some essence that is part of or otherwise connected to a deity. Some also claim that a particular ethnic group represents "the chosen people," or, slightly more subtly, that certain types of people are inferior, cursed, or otherwise lesser in the deity's eyes. The non-heritability of specific religions seems obvious from a scientific point of view, but is not obvious from a religious one.
P.S. The analysis of PET images has many of the same problems as any other functional brain imaging technique. Functional PET experiments usually look at differences in the concentration of radio labelled glucose, the idea being that if a particular part of the brain is active more glucose will be delivered to satisfy the increased energy demand. For an active task like finger tapping versus rest the experiment and interpretation is (reasonably) straightforward. But how do you compare religiosity versus rest? Does the active state really represent spirituality, or is it something else (pleasure, fear, the subconscious rolling its eyes)? Also, complex behaviours are complex. Lots of different parts of the brain will have increased activity, and other parts decreased. Many different behaviours will be associated with changes in the same area. The concept of a specific "god spot" has been fairly well discredited. Aside from all that, the "god spot" was the observation that people with damage in the right parietal lobe show increased feelings associated with spirituality, and people describing those feelings show decreased activity in the same general region. Decreased activity. The "god spot" might better be called the "skepticism centre" or perhaps the "reality locus."
Whenever someone suggests that there's a gene, or even a particular brain region, for some higher level behavioural characteristic, you're pretty safe in assuming (taking on faith, if you will) that they're, at best, *vastly* over simplifying.
Assuming you mean the VMAT2 gene, one, unreplicated study, suggested that it might have as much as a 1% contribution to variance in scores on a self-transcendence scale. A third of that scale is a sub-scale measuring "self-forgetfulness", such as the tendency to forget oneself when concentrating on or absorbed in some task. Notably, tendency to believe in any specific religion was shown to be entirely culturally based.
It's all very, very sketchy, but some guy wrote a best selling book, so there's that.
No, it's not. You can have all the math chops in the world and it doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether "high level physics" is correct or not.
Science is this odd branch of philosophy that holds that ideas should be tested, and the ones that don't work discarded. Every time you use a computer you test the standard model of physics. The average person tests a good deal of our scientific knowledge more or less constantly. It's so reliable that the average person doesn't even realize they're doing that. Contrast that with religion, which is so unreliable that the occasional false positive or confirmation biased outlier is given a special name: "miracle."
Canada's current refining capacity slightly exceeds domestic demand. It's also very close to our current domestic crude oil production.
The people who would have to shell out billions for a refinery didn't for a very good reason.
The energy return on investment for tarsands oil make it pretty much unsustainable as an energy source. It IS a fuel source, like mining batteries, but it's only really viable because we have a giant gasoline infrastructure in place. That appears to be changing. Refineries are expensive, and have long payback periods.
I just moved, and the insurance company made sure to ask me whether I'd ever be renting out my new place with AirBnB or the like. Unless he specifically told his insurance company he'd be renting it out, chances are his household insurance is void. He should count himself lucky they didn't burn it down. Or burn down the neighbours'.
Not all 20 year olds are fuckwits. But anybody renting a large place on New Years for one night should raise a red flag. At least enough of one to do a drive by or two, particularly if you're just down the street at your mom's.
People are also shit at reasoning. Most people can't really do it at all. Some people can do it a bit. The ones who do it professionally use computers to check their work.
The game of Go is an abstracted military strategy simulator. You can't be even a mediocre Go player without being able to plan ahead.
I believe we've got a long ways to go towards general AI, certainly to *understanding* general AI, but I have yet to see an argument to support that position that doesn't boil down to handwaving and some variation of "my brain is magic."
Not even then. You could be a Boltzmann brain. Or the whole thing could just be an illusion. There's actually evidence that portions of what we think of as our consciousness IS an illusion.
I think we're going to learn some very interesting things about the mind, and most people aren't going to like them one bit.
Hm... you wouldn't be counting wind chill in that -30, would you? Have you ever slept outside when it's -30? I have. Minus 30, real temperature mind, not "with wind chill." It's fine with the right equipment. Most people wouldn't enjoy it. Now, do it for fifty some days in a row. While hauling all that equipment with you, across 1600 km.
It's the first time anybody's ever done it, for a reason.
At the distance of New Horizons, if something was tidally locked to the sun it would rotate once per orbital period... once every couple centuries. So too slow for us to detect with a light curve.
The paper you're referring to was another satirical one, illustrating how easy it is to make mistakes with fMRI analyses and get false *positive* results (dead fish respond to emotional stimuli). I'm not sure how that supports your contention that null results are routinely published.
It's very difficult to show flawed methodology by producing a null result. It's much easier to demonstrate a false positive, as in the salmon study.
Slashdot Mirror
All the comments so far are some variation on "oh no, shooting LAZORS at someone!"
I've worked with both the pattern projection systems (like kinect) and the TOF imaging chips. The TOF systems are a more elegant solution, but don't seem to be all that superior in practice. Since they use interference they have a window of distances they're sensitive to, with a tradeoff of precision and how deep the window is.
Most safety critical systems on trains ARE fully automatic.
About 75% of train accidents are due to human error. The situation is similar with aircraft.
Apek's robot looked like a human (because it was one) but the first real robots in the 1940s were basically clunky Roombas and CNC machines.
"Android" is an even older term that specifically refers to more or less human-appearing robots. Wikipedia notes that the first known use of the term was describing a wooden toy that looks like Pinocchio riding a bicycle.
Perhaps you should read a bit about the history of the term "robot?"
I guess it's time to retire the t-shirt with the RSA formula and make a new one with
y = a[sum(wx+b)] on it.
Is it obvious? Most religions have in common the claim that they are true, and all others are false, and also the idea that every person has a soul, spirit or some essence that is part of or otherwise connected to a deity. Some also claim that a particular ethnic group represents "the chosen people," or, slightly more subtly, that certain types of people are inferior, cursed, or otherwise lesser in the deity's eyes. The non-heritability of specific religions seems obvious from a scientific point of view, but is not obvious from a religious one.
P.S. The analysis of PET images has many of the same problems as any other functional brain imaging technique. Functional PET experiments usually look at differences in the concentration of radio labelled glucose, the idea being that if a particular part of the brain is active more glucose will be delivered to satisfy the increased energy demand. For an active task like finger tapping versus rest the experiment and interpretation is (reasonably) straightforward. But how do you compare religiosity versus rest? Does the active state really represent spirituality, or is it something else (pleasure, fear, the subconscious rolling its eyes)? Also, complex behaviours are complex. Lots of different parts of the brain will have increased activity, and other parts decreased. Many different behaviours will be associated with changes in the same area. The concept of a specific "god spot" has been fairly well discredited. Aside from all that, the "god spot" was the observation that people with damage in the right parietal lobe show increased feelings associated with spirituality, and people describing those feelings show decreased activity in the same general region. Decreased activity. The "god spot" might better be called the "skepticism centre" or perhaps the "reality locus."
Whenever someone suggests that there's a gene, or even a particular brain region, for some higher level behavioural characteristic, you're pretty safe in assuming (taking on faith, if you will) that they're, at best, *vastly* over simplifying.
Assuming you mean the VMAT2 gene, one, unreplicated study, suggested that it might have as much as a 1% contribution to variance in scores on a self-transcendence scale. A third of that scale is a sub-scale measuring "self-forgetfulness", such as the tendency to forget oneself when concentrating on or absorbed in some task. Notably, tendency to believe in any specific religion was shown to be entirely culturally based.
It's all very, very sketchy, but some guy wrote a best selling book, so there's that.
No, it's not. You can have all the math chops in the world and it doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether "high level physics" is correct or not.
Science is this odd branch of philosophy that holds that ideas should be tested, and the ones that don't work discarded. Every time you use a computer you test the standard model of physics. The average person tests a good deal of our scientific knowledge more or less constantly. It's so reliable that the average person doesn't even realize they're doing that. Contrast that with religion, which is so unreliable that the occasional false positive or confirmation biased outlier is given a special name: "miracle."
Canada's current refining capacity slightly exceeds domestic demand. It's also very close to our current domestic crude oil production.
The people who would have to shell out billions for a refinery didn't for a very good reason.
The energy return on investment for tarsands oil make it pretty much unsustainable as an energy source. It IS a fuel source, like mining batteries, but it's only really viable because we have a giant gasoline infrastructure in place. That appears to be changing. Refineries are expensive, and have long payback periods.
Drunk skulls make dents as well as sober skulls. The rules are there to protect everybody.
I just moved, and the insurance company made sure to ask me whether I'd ever be renting out my new place with AirBnB or the like. Unless he specifically told his insurance company he'd be renting it out, chances are his household insurance is void. He should count himself lucky they didn't burn it down. Or burn down the neighbours'.
Not all 20 year olds are fuckwits. But anybody renting a large place on New Years for one night should raise a red flag. At least enough of one to do a drive by or two, particularly if you're just down the street at your mom's.
People are also shit at reasoning. Most people can't really do it at all. Some people can do it a bit. The ones who do it professionally use computers to check their work.
The game of Go is an abstracted military strategy simulator. You can't be even a mediocre Go player without being able to plan ahead.
I believe we've got a long ways to go towards general AI, certainly to *understanding* general AI, but I have yet to see an argument to support that position that doesn't boil down to handwaving and some variation of "my brain is magic."
Not even then. You could be a Boltzmann brain. Or the whole thing could just be an illusion. There's actually evidence that portions of what we think of as our consciousness IS an illusion.
I think we're going to learn some very interesting things about the mind, and most people aren't going to like them one bit.
That's one of the reasons people don't use rules-and-symbols approaches to AI much anymore.
Hm... you wouldn't be counting wind chill in that -30, would you? Have you ever slept outside when it's -30? I have. Minus 30, real temperature mind, not "with wind chill." It's fine with the right equipment. Most people wouldn't enjoy it. Now, do it for fifty some days in a row. While hauling all that equipment with you, across 1600 km.
It's the first time anybody's ever done it, for a reason.
Different virtues, same pretentiousness.
You know you can get an adapter with both power and standard audio jack for $10-$15 on Amazon right?
The true hipster buys a product and then complains bitterly (years later even) about a missing feature that it obviously didn't have at purchase time.
That's one theory: market economics doesn't work.
The other theory is that the vast majority of people don't give a crap whether they plug their headphones into a round port or a rectangular one.
"In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data -- the so-called 'noisy TV problem.'"
BF Skinner wrote another paper that might be relevant:
'SUPERSTITION' IN THE PIGEON
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca...
OMG, you sound like that Franklin crank, or even that Jefferson whacko.
At the distance of New Horizons, if something was tidally locked to the sun it would rotate once per orbital period... once every couple centuries. So too slow for us to detect with a light curve.
The paper you're referring to was another satirical one, illustrating how easy it is to make mistakes with fMRI analyses and get false *positive* results (dead fish respond to emotional stimuli). I'm not sure how that supports your contention that null results are routinely published.
It's very difficult to show flawed methodology by producing a null result. It's much easier to demonstrate a false positive, as in the salmon study.