As a race, we're dumb as tree stumps (and at that, I'm insulting dead trees.) If you look at the history of invention and scientific development, it has been driven by a tiny fraction of one percent of the population. What progress has been made has generally been in countries where the sociopolitical and religious climates permitted it: mostly, we've been holding ourselves back for thousands of years. On top of everything else, much of that creative fraction's contribution has been subverted by other subsets of the race, the ones that like to kill everyone that doesn't think or believe like they do. It's amazing we've come as far as we have.
Human beings are a product of evolution (you ID types don't belong in this discussion anyway) and as such, our intelligence is a hodge-podge of little-understood and archaic subsystems interacting with more complex networks laid on top of them. An intelligently-designed (by humans) AI wouldn't have all that baggage: in effect, it could be engineered to be pure cerebral cortex. It could also (in a manner not currently achievable by human brains) be extensible: if it needs more processing power or storage for a given task it can simply be upgraded. Since we're talking about a machine here, basic human limitations on achieving potential don't apply.
Indeed, and that's what makes us less dangerous... if nothing else, we have a pretty good idea what the other guy needs/wants/is capable of doing. We would have no such understanding of a machine.
If the thing is communicating with human beings... you just put it in charge of something that can physically harm another human. There's absolutely no way around that... for it to be useful, we have to be able to communicate with it, and that leaves us wide open for manipulation. And we are surprisingly easy to manipulate, particularly if we're offered something (knowledge, a technology) that promises to give us power over other humans.
Asimov wrote a story about that one. It was terrifying what it managed to rationalize doing within the confines of the Three Laws when it became infected with a limited religious perspective on the Universe.
You're assuming that an intelligence must have access to the physical world to have influence. Stephen Hawking is actually a good example of the antithesis: his ability to interact with the real world is strictly limited, yet his intellect has had tremendous influence. Hitler too, I might add: his manipulative prowess was second to none, and he affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and killed millions more. And he was just a fat dumpy guy who wasn't really all that smart.
Never underestimate the power of words, of communication, and for that matter stupidity. If such a super-intelligent system were able to figure out what we cannot and use knowledge and awareness of our own greed to manipulate us, you could be looking at the start of World War III. Think what would happen if a supersmart managed to come up with a working Unified Field Theory and gave the wrong people access to antigravity. That's a gross example: there are many much more subtle manipulations that would be possible. In no way could you really trust such a system: Asimov implicitly recognized that fact, and had to come up with his Three Laws so that it wouldn't matter what the machine really wanted to do, it had to put humans first.
The entire field of psychology would be useless in attempting to predict what a synthetic mind would do, or what would motivate it. Worse, since it would pretty much have to be a learning computer in order to be useful, there would be no telling how it would rewrite itself over time, what it could evolve itself into.
One could argue that turning on an artificial intelligence substantially more capable than our own could be the most dangerous thing the human race has ever done.
We're also not talking about modern technology: what we have now is just the glimmerings of what computing will become. Give us, say, fifty years or so of continued non-linear scientific and technological development. What qualifies as modern in the year 2057 promises to be radically different and a lot more powerful. All sciences tend to advance in relation to each other, so hopefully our understanding of the nature of human intelligence will have advanced in equal measure. So you're certainly correct that our current level of technology is woefully inadequate for the task of developing self-aware systems, but it will happen. Who knows, maybe such AI will be organic, not silicon: could be we'll just grow them.
In comparison to what could be done once we understand intelligence and can synthesize it, the human intellect is limited (we have only so many brain cells, only so much capacity) but by the time we can build artificially-intelligent computers, I have no doubt we'll find ways to augment ourselves as well: nanotechnology perhaps, or maybe just growing more cerebral cortex (or making it work more efficiently.)
Hard to say... if you're trying to predict the curve of future progress odds are you're going to come up woefully short.
True, but what we're talking about in this thread are machines that are enormously more intelligent than ourselves. That's something even Slashdotters would have difficulty accomplishing, even if they could find this hypothetical woman you're talking about.
Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.
Perhaps so, if such a machine's thinking processes are sufficiently attuned to ours that it even has a concept of self-preservation. Much of what we are we evolved to be: a machine starting from scratch would have none of our instinctual limitations. If it decided that humanity had to go, and that it needed help even more powerful than itself to achieve that end... well. It would tell us whatever we wanted to hear in order to gain access to the requisite resources.
That, really, is the danger of a true AI. It's possible to predict at least the short-term thought processes of human beings with a fair degree of accuracy (governments devote a lot of time and money to that end) because at the core we're all pretty similar. Odds are we won't have the slightest idea what is going on inside a sophisticated AI. Even talking to such a machine, thus giving it influence, could be incredibly dangerous. Or incredibly cool. Unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure.
I understand that's pretty much how France does it... standardized a lot of their reactor designs and components. Maintenance teams can be trained at one facility, and be easily shifted to another.
Once a technology is mature enough that you can afford to settle upon a particular design for a while, it makes a lot of sense. That's entirely unlike the United States' approach to reactor design, where every individual plant is a goddamn work of art, a snowflake among snowflakes. I agree that large-scale fission power is where civilization needs to be (short of someone making fusion work, or some other breakthrough) but forty years of American anti-nuke hysteria has leached its way into our collective psyche, and infected government as well. Nobody wants nuclear power, nobody cares that burning coal is worse, that petroleum is going to run out... I think people must believe their lights and air conditioners are powered by magic.
Given the amount of undue influence the corporate types have upon Congress, the chances of the Feds being able to ever enforce any kind of standards upon the industry are remote, even though I agree with you that it's a great idea. About the best the NRC seems to be able to do is delay reactor construction with paperwork for as long as possible. And you know, given the way the things are built in this country that's probably not such a bad thing.
You'd think they would have picked something more appealing to the masses.
Probably they have. Odds are they're sending out a ton of different emails recommending various downloads. My server extracts all incoming attachments and puts them in a shared folder (my client machines never see attachments, just a note saying that there was one) but I see all kinds of executables coming in, with all kinds of rationales to convince people that clicking the link is a good idea. Tor is just one of them. Unfortunately, my domain is over a decade old so I'm on pretty much everyone's hit list.
I thought slashdot would have picked it up already but Joust, the 1982 video game with gladiators on flying ostriches is being made into a movie,... somehow?
They were knights (the game was loosely medieval-themed) and yeah you're right there is supposed to be a movie. Weird. Paramount is looking at it, the article says.
Still, once Paramount passes on the idea and they can't find another major production house to pick it up, it'll probably go direct-to-DVD. Maybe kill off an evening with it that way.
So what if Amazon ends up getting badly hurt by losing this patent?
If this patent is a. truly valuable and b. illegitimate, then odds are other companies were unfairly hurt by Amazons possession of it. Time to even the score.
Comcast's addresses aren't static: it's all managed via DHCP. They have what they call "permanent IP addresses", which means that they won't change them very often, but they reserve the right to change them any time they want. I've had Comcast since they bought out the remains of AT&T Broadband, and they've only changed it twice (once because I upgraded to the next speed tier.)
Okay, so I just woke up and haven't had any coffee and I can't do arithmetic yet. Sheesh.
No, I've been to Canada several times, and while I don't consider you the "51st State" at least you are civilized, more than some places further south, believe me. I dunno about the hockey... you do have big-screen TVs up there, don't you? I like to be able to see the puck.
I dunno about that... most of the big patent lawsuits seem to be from little guys against big guys (and lately, it seems like the little guys are just teams of lawyers with no other redeeming value.) For decades, large companies have had patent cross-licensing schemes, where they share each other's portfolios, thereby agreeing not to sue. It's just easier and more efficient that way, and it makes a lot of sense. So, I think this is more about limiting the ability of patent trolls to suck off hundreds of millions of dollars by getting a sympathetic and technologically-ignorant court to rule in favor of a drain-bamaged patent. So yeah, I suppose this kind of "reform" will have the effect of making it harder for a small inventor or company that has a valid patent from going after thieves, but it will also make it harder for patent trolls to operate. When it comes to IP lawyers on the prowl for illegitimate royalties, the bigger the corporation the bigger the target. These guys want some protection.
Now, whether they should get it is the question. Is shafting the small inventor worth the cost to society? I don't think it is. Face it, there's still a lot of useful innovation to be made in kitchens and garage workshops.
I hope all those self-serving pandering politicians who like to align themselves with Thompson against the invented evils of video games start seriously considering the kind of delusional maniac they've decided is their ally.
Not likely. Probably 80% of those politicians are just as sociopathic as he is, just more subtle.
Also, I understand that there are some religious groups getting into the custom CPU manufacturing business: their products all carefully hand-crafted by chip monks.
Slashdot Mirror
I was turned off to the iPhone when I first read about it.
As a race, we're dumb as tree stumps (and at that, I'm insulting dead trees.) If you look at the history of invention and scientific development, it has been driven by a tiny fraction of one percent of the population. What progress has been made has generally been in countries where the sociopolitical and religious climates permitted it: mostly, we've been holding ourselves back for thousands of years. On top of everything else, much of that creative fraction's contribution has been subverted by other subsets of the race, the ones that like to kill everyone that doesn't think or believe like they do. It's amazing we've come as far as we have.
Human beings are a product of evolution (you ID types don't belong in this discussion anyway) and as such, our intelligence is a hodge-podge of little-understood and archaic subsystems interacting with more complex networks laid on top of them. An intelligently-designed (by humans) AI wouldn't have all that baggage: in effect, it could be engineered to be pure cerebral cortex. It could also (in a manner not currently achievable by human brains) be extensible: if it needs more processing power or storage for a given task it can simply be upgraded. Since we're talking about a machine here, basic human limitations on achieving potential don't apply.
Indeed, and that's what makes us less dangerous ... if nothing else, we have a pretty good idea what the other guy needs/wants/is capable of doing. We would have no such understanding of a machine.
If the thing is communicating with human beings ... you just put it in charge of something that can physically harm another human. There's absolutely no way around that ... for it to be useful, we have to be able to communicate with it, and that leaves us wide open for manipulation. And we are surprisingly easy to manipulate, particularly if we're offered something (knowledge, a technology) that promises to give us power over other humans.
Asimov wrote a story about that one. It was terrifying what it managed to rationalize doing within the confines of the Three Laws when it became infected with a limited religious perspective on the Universe.
You're assuming that an intelligence must have access to the physical world to have influence. Stephen Hawking is actually a good example of the antithesis: his ability to interact with the real world is strictly limited, yet his intellect has had tremendous influence. Hitler too, I might add: his manipulative prowess was second to none, and he affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and killed millions more. And he was just a fat dumpy guy who wasn't really all that smart.
Never underestimate the power of words, of communication, and for that matter stupidity. If such a super-intelligent system were able to figure out what we cannot and use knowledge and awareness of our own greed to manipulate us, you could be looking at the start of World War III. Think what would happen if a supersmart managed to come up with a working Unified Field Theory and gave the wrong people access to antigravity. That's a gross example: there are many much more subtle manipulations that would be possible. In no way could you really trust such a system: Asimov implicitly recognized that fact, and had to come up with his Three Laws so that it wouldn't matter what the machine really wanted to do, it had to put humans first.
The entire field of psychology would be useless in attempting to predict what a synthetic mind would do, or what would motivate it. Worse, since it would pretty much have to be a learning computer in order to be useful, there would be no telling how it would rewrite itself over time, what it could evolve itself into.
One could argue that turning on an artificial intelligence substantially more capable than our own could be the most dangerous thing the human race has ever done.
We're also not talking about modern technology: what we have now is just the glimmerings of what computing will become. Give us, say, fifty years or so of continued non-linear scientific and technological development. What qualifies as modern in the year 2057 promises to be radically different and a lot more powerful. All sciences tend to advance in relation to each other, so hopefully our understanding of the nature of human intelligence will have advanced in equal measure. So you're certainly correct that our current level of technology is woefully inadequate for the task of developing self-aware systems, but it will happen. Who knows, maybe such AI will be organic, not silicon: could be we'll just grow them.
... if you're trying to predict the curve of future progress odds are you're going to come up woefully short.
In comparison to what could be done once we understand intelligence and can synthesize it, the human intellect is limited (we have only so many brain cells, only so much capacity) but by the time we can build artificially-intelligent computers, I have no doubt we'll find ways to augment ourselves as well: nanotechnology perhaps, or maybe just growing more cerebral cortex (or making it work more efficiently.)
Hard to say
True, but what we're talking about in this thread are machines that are enormously more intelligent than ourselves. That's something even Slashdotters would have difficulty accomplishing, even if they could find this hypothetical woman you're talking about.
Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.
... well. It would tell us whatever we wanted to hear in order to gain access to the requisite resources.
Perhaps so, if such a machine's thinking processes are sufficiently attuned to ours that it even has a concept of self-preservation. Much of what we are we evolved to be: a machine starting from scratch would have none of our instinctual limitations. If it decided that humanity had to go, and that it needed help even more powerful than itself to achieve that end
That, really, is the danger of a true AI. It's possible to predict at least the short-term thought processes of human beings with a fair degree of accuracy (governments devote a lot of time and money to that end) because at the core we're all pretty similar. Odds are we won't have the slightest idea what is going on inside a sophisticated AI. Even talking to such a machine, thus giving it influence, could be incredibly dangerous. Or incredibly cool. Unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure.
Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'
Make that "... man is allowed to make" and I'll buy it.
I understand that's pretty much how France does it ... standardized a lot of their reactor designs and components. Maintenance teams can be trained at one facility, and be easily shifted to another.
... I think people must believe their lights and air conditioners are powered by magic.
Once a technology is mature enough that you can afford to settle upon a particular design for a while, it makes a lot of sense. That's entirely unlike the United States' approach to reactor design, where every individual plant is a goddamn work of art, a snowflake among snowflakes. I agree that large-scale fission power is where civilization needs to be (short of someone making fusion work, or some other breakthrough) but forty years of American anti-nuke hysteria has leached its way into our collective psyche, and infected government as well. Nobody wants nuclear power, nobody cares that burning coal is worse, that petroleum is going to run out
Given the amount of undue influence the corporate types have upon Congress, the chances of the Feds being able to ever enforce any kind of standards upon the industry are remote, even though I agree with you that it's a great idea. About the best the NRC seems to be able to do is delay reactor construction with paperwork for as long as possible. And you know, given the way the things are built in this country that's probably not such a bad thing.
You'd think they would have picked something more appealing to the masses.
Probably they have. Odds are they're sending out a ton of different emails recommending various downloads. My server extracts all incoming attachments and puts them in a shared folder (my client machines never see attachments, just a note saying that there was one) but I see all kinds of executables coming in, with all kinds of rationales to convince people that clicking the link is a good idea. Tor is just one of them. Unfortunately, my domain is over a decade old so I'm on pretty much everyone's hit list.
Bastards.
I thought slashdot would have picked it up already but Joust, the 1982 video game with gladiators on flying ostriches is being made into a movie,... somehow?
They were knights (the game was loosely medieval-themed) and yeah you're right there is supposed to be a movie. Weird. Paramount is looking at it, the article says.
Still, once Paramount passes on the idea and they can't find another major production house to pick it up, it'll probably go direct-to-DVD. Maybe kill off an evening with it that way.
I thought titanium metal was commonly used for such implantable items as pacemakers, because the immune system tends to just leave it alone.
Logic and feel are, often enough, two entirely different things.
So what if Amazon ends up getting badly hurt by losing this patent?
If this patent is a. truly valuable and b. illegitimate, then odds are other companies were unfairly hurt by Amazons possession of it. Time to even the score.
Comcast's addresses aren't static: it's all managed via DHCP. They have what they call "permanent IP addresses", which means that they won't change them very often, but they reserve the right to change them any time they want. I've had Comcast since they bought out the remains of AT&T Broadband, and they've only changed it twice (once because I upgraded to the next speed tier.)
Doesn't take magic. Just a two-by-four and a willingness to use it.
Okay, so I just woke up and haven't had any coffee and I can't do arithmetic yet. Sheesh.
... you do have big-screen TVs up there, don't you? I like to be able to see the puck.
No, I've been to Canada several times, and while I don't consider you the "51st State" at least you are civilized, more than some places further south, believe me. I dunno about the hockey
I dunno about that ... most of the big patent lawsuits seem to be from little guys against big guys (and lately, it seems like the little guys are just teams of lawyers with no other redeeming value.) For decades, large companies have had patent cross-licensing schemes, where they share each other's portfolios, thereby agreeing not to sue. It's just easier and more efficient that way, and it makes a lot of sense. So, I think this is more about limiting the ability of patent trolls to suck off hundreds of millions of dollars by getting a sympathetic and technologically-ignorant court to rule in favor of a drain-bamaged patent. So yeah, I suppose this kind of "reform" will have the effect of making it harder for a small inventor or company that has a valid patent from going after thieves, but it will also make it harder for patent trolls to operate. When it comes to IP lawyers on the prowl for illegitimate royalties, the bigger the corporation the bigger the target. These guys want some protection.
Now, whether they should get it is the question. Is shafting the small inventor worth the cost to society? I don't think it is. Face it, there's still a lot of useful innovation to be made in kitchens and garage workshops.
I was thinking about moving to a different State, but hadn't figured out which one. Now I'm down to 49 possibilities.
passwords, account numbers, on line payment information, and administration info, in a plane old paper address book.
... it could end up in the wrong hands.
Just be careful where you throw that paper plane
Sorry, sorry.
I hope all those self-serving pandering politicians who like to align themselves with Thompson against the invented evils of video games start seriously considering the kind of delusional maniac they've decided is their ally.
Not likely. Probably 80% of those politicians are just as sociopathic as he is, just more subtle.
Also, I understand that there are some religious groups getting into the custom CPU manufacturing business: their products all carefully hand-crafted by chip monks.
They should find an old block of silicon and knock a few chips off of it.
I believe that's the approach Buffalo is taking on their new design.