As the sibling poster said, neither of these options are viable. It's not a question of finding the right person, because the right person doesn't exist. The only way to get the power in the first place is to become a player. Once you do, the establishment has enough on you to keep you in line.
The way to make things change is not through voting, it is through public pressure. It doesn't matter who is in office. If enough of the public calls their congressmen strongly voicing their opinion, in this case against ACTA, the threat of losing the next election will force congress to do what we want them to do.
This requires people aware of the issue to discuss it with friends and family, and if they get riled up about it (or even if they don't) stress the importance of calling their representatives. Public pressure has consistently halted more bad legislation than strategic voting, and it's something you can do as often as bad legislation comes up.
(To make your job easier in the future, urge your congressmen to support the Read The Bills Act.)
I am an adult. I can be responsible for my own interests. I recognize that what I want is not always what is best for me, and I act on that recognition through self-control. When I fail, I accept the responsibility.
Any group of men who thinks they know my interests better than I do can speak with me and try to convince me that this is so, but it is I who makes the final decision. Provisions decided in secret without public knowledge or consent will result in nothing but more lawlessness. Anyone who approves this agreement clearly shows that he does not represent me.
No, I get it. It's like how I'd rather lose a pinky finger than a whole hand. But when there is a third option available, not losing any extremities whatsoever, I find complaints about the first two options a bit silly.
All I'm saying is, if the ratio is already 1000:1, I wouldn't be calling it "yet another decent portion of the internet." Maybe I'm just strange.
You exclude the possibility that the model for AGW is flawed and that the climate is changing for other reasons. As folks here are fond of pointing out, correlation is not causation.
The article fails to mention how long scientists have seen no contradiction between harsh winters and AGW. Is this something that has been predicted from the start, or is it a new development? If it is a new development, was it studied as its own phenomenon before modifying the AGW model to fit the data? That is, if this was not originally predicted, can we be reasonably sure that the AGW model isn't being shoehorned to fit contradicting data? The reasoning outlined in the summary makes sense, I would just like to know if it is ad hoc or not.
Silly me thought someone was going to attempt to learn their language--many species of squid use bio-luminescence to signal to each other in the depths, and the variety of patterns seen leads some scientists to believe that they have developed a rich visual language.
Of course "it" can't be used, which is why the next sentence starts with "The proper English choices."
The "singular they" article clearly states that it indicates indeterminacy "either in regard to number, or, controversially, regarding gender."
The co-opting of "they" for singular use does little except to appease the overly gender-sensitive (see the link I provide a little later in the thread), and I see nothing wrong with it in casual conversation. That is what this is, but it irks me to see a misinformed comment such as the one I replied to rated "Informative."
It's Valentine's Day. I have nothing better to do with my time =)
Garner's Modern American Usage admits that it's a great solution to a problem of sexist language...
The problem of sexist language is a problem of public misunderstanding and not of an actual institutional bias. I am linking this blog post because it contains a lengthy quotation from a noteworthy historian's defense for the continued use of masculine language in the generic case. The opening follows.
The reasons in favor of prolonging that usage are four: etymology, convenience, the unsuspected incompleteness of "man and woman," and literary tradition.
To begin with the last, it is unwise to give up a long established practice, familiar to all, without reviewing the purpose it has served. In Genesis we read: "And God created man, male and female." Plainly, in 1611 and long before, man meant human being. For centuries zoologists have spoken of the species Man; "Man inhabits all the climatic zones." Logicians have said "Man is mortal," and philosophers have boasted of "Man's unconquerable mind." The poet Webster writes: "And man does flourish but his time." In all these uses man cannot possibly mean male only. The coupling of woman to those statements would add nothing and sound absurd. The word man has, like many others, two related meanings, which the context makes clear.
Interested parties should follow the link for a few more paragraphs of strong, sensible defense; particularly interested readers should pick up the book that contains it as it is a wonderful tour of Western civilization from 1500 to the present.
Wikipedia disagrees. Singular third-person neutral possessive is "its."
The proper English choices for referring to a hypothetical individual are "his" or "her" or "his or her." "Their" is entirely different as pointed out humorously above and there is no need to co-opt it for something that is already well-handled.
I have briefly encountered genetic programming but failed to take it into account, mainly because the examples I've encountered have highly specific problem domains which, while very useful, do not approach anything close to consciousness (though if that's what you mean by "life-like" I'd definitely check it out).
The main reason I question the possibility of a conscious machine is not due to any specific method of programming; it is due to the huge difference between the biological processes dealing with the actual, physical movement of matter that results in consciousness and...a set of algorithms. Reality is messy and algorithms are clean. The brain is not a CPU and what I question is the ability to simulate it on one well enough to get consciousness as a result.
I have some other issues regarding sensory perception and the necessity of the body as well, but I wrote about that elsewhere. And, for the record, my statements aren't an argument so much as simply my position--I'm not out to convert anyone, just to converse.
It's an awfully giant leap from "we are very close to simulating the computations performed by cortical columns" to "we are very close to sentient computers."
I'm thinking of a cruel experiment to perform on a cat, and that is to cut out 9/10 of its sensory input. We'll leave its sight so it can navigate, provided it can stand up since its sense of balance got cut. How long do you think it will survive, even in a very protected atmosphere? How sentient do you think it will be compared to normal cats?
The intractable fact is that brains need bodies to operate consciously. The body is not present just to fuel the brain but to give it enough stimuli to keep it thinking--without the at-first-overwhelming torrent of sensations provided by the body, the conscious mind will fail to arise. You're going to need to figure out how to wire up that simulated brain to a sensory-rich apparatus, otherwise you will never see the sentience you seek.
Many of today's AI "experts" are really philosophers who hijacked the term AI in their search to better understand human consciousness. Their problem is that, while their AI studies might help them understand the human brain a little better; they are unable to transfer their knowledge about intelligence into computable algorithms.
I did indeed start laughing when I read this, because I find the problem to be that programmers are unable to transfer their knowledge about computable algorithms into intelligence. =)
I was a pretty firm believer in strong AI before I read up on the fundamentals of psychology and what we know about human consciousness. It doesn't make sense to speak of intelligence apart from consciousness, and consciousness is an awfully ambitious goal. I don't understand how we're supposed to go about creating it without first understanding it.
I never took statistics, so your talk of Chi^2 is (wait for it) Greek to me, but I do know this: your sequence looks less like the results of chance than either of the other two. At no point does your sequence have more than 2 of the same digit appearing in a row (run of 2), while both of the other methods do. If I'm interpreting your statistical analysis correctly, you looked only at the distribution and not the actual sequence, which is important: if any of the sequences had its numbers arranged from 1 to 6 its randomness would be highly suspect even if its distribution was consistent with randomness. The same is true for the opposite of having no adjacent identical numbers given the small pool you're working with. For your sample size I estimate that one run of 3 is probable, and certainly more than three runs of 2--see how the physical and virtual dice each have six of those?
I learned about this from my high school physics course. Our teacher gave us homework consisting of performing 100 coin tosses and turning in the results. He then proceeded to look at each paper and accurately tell if the student actually performed the experiment or merely wrote a "random" series of H's and T's. A similar experiment is detailed in the first third of this radio program: the experimenter had one group toss a coin and the other simply make theirs up, and she didn't know which was doing what. She said that the way she found who performed the coin tosses was to first look for a run of 4 or more. I'm sure it gets more complicated if she didn't see one in either group, but the point is that the order matters and randomness looks less random than you'd think--in 100 coin tosses the chance that you'll get 7 of the same face in a row is one in six, which is more likely than it feels like it ought to be.
There is a very good short story that deals with this exact premise called Manna, by Marshall Brain. His story shows two radically different ways of dealing with it: either by massively expanding welfare and state housing for those who are put out of work, or by letting machines handle the economy while humans are free to expend a rationed amount of energy credits in pursuit of their pleasure or interests. These are not the only options; just two that are interesting enough to explore in-depth. The former is unfortunately the likelier of the two.
Intelligence isn't just some simple value like tensile strength. It's about modeling and remodeling the world, drawing distinctions between similar things, seeing similarities where things are distinct, assigning values... things that are not straightforward and measurable.
This is very well put. Another way to say it is this: "intelligence" is an abstraction for a certain quality of action in the same way that "fruit" is an abstraction (or classification) for a certain variety of life. Just as there is no such thing as a generic fruit but only specific types whose qualities match the requirements of the abstraction, so with intelligent actions. The trouble begins when the abstraction is mistaken for something concrete.
Strong AI is a matter of inevitability. If nothing else, simulations of the human brain accurate down to the individual neuron could easily achieve this, even if it requires substantially more powerful computers than we have now.
Not really.
There's much more to the brain than neurons. They live in a chemical soup that affects neuronal activity in a manner that isn't fully understood but is not insignificant either. We know for a fact that the charge of the soup modifies and is modified by neuronal activity. The usual response to this revelation is "the simulation could be at the atomic level instead of the neuronal, and that would solve the problem." This is again too simple: part of what enables consciousness, a necessary component of intelligence, is a vast amount of sensory input. There is no evidence of consciousness arising in things that aren't attached to bodies, and a rudimentary understanding of psychology is enough to understand that consciousness is very much tied into the body. Now you're talking about simulating an entire person in an entire world--The Matrix--or creating a sensory-rich body for your artificial human, itself a task that should not be taken lightly.
If strong AI comes about, it is very implausible that it will be remotely human. I believe that consciousness is a biological phenomenon and that while we will do increasingly clever things with tech, true intelligence will not be one of them. If simulating the human mind is the only option available then the proposition is doomed.
that's really an absurd goal when we're so far away from having computers capable of that level of processing, assuming we even know what computer architecture is required for such a level of intelligence
Not to mention that we have little enough idea of what intelligence is, with or without the adjective "human."
By Market Price Through Greedy Amoral Stock Exchanges (=Capitalism), (Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil. Will let poor children die, will have people working for MONEY their whole life, bah)
I would have liked to see a more critical exploration of capitalism. Your other options are well-illustrated, but this looks purely reactionary. All of those systems result in poor children dying, you fail to explain why working for money is bad (though we probably agree on this point), and the repetition of "evil," especially given its absence everywhere else, looks like an emotional cover-up for a lack of any reasoned criticism.
I'm only calling this out because the rest of your post very much deserves its rating.
Yeah, I looked that up myself after first envisioning something similar to cow-tipping. It looked a lot tricker, but not worthy of being buzzed by a drone...unless the drone feels some affinity for the fly.
Let's start with a quote from the article, since I know you won't read it =p
The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron1, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body.
The first thing I thought was that these areas must be somewhat responsible for the sense of self. If we are in a deterministic universe, then we are all automatons and our sense of being is if not exactly an illusion then inconsequential--everything must take its course and "we" are simply what must happen next. By having those areas of the brain damaged, those people's individuality routines are diminished. The same thing can reportedly be obtained temporarily but to a much greater extent with LSD, with some users experiencing a complete "ego-death."
My next thought was, "Hang on, I don't believe in a clockwork universe." I may be a materialist, I haven't settled that question yet, but if so I am certain that the stuff of the universe is far stranger than science has discovered thus far, and may never discover. Given that belief, it reasonably follows that what these people experience is as externally motivated as sight or sound--after all, it is external stimuli for those senses that trigger electrochemical changes in the brain causing us to see or hear something, even if nothing is there. The troubling difference is that it takes extra stimulus (via electrode or abnormal brain activity) to trigger visual or auditory hallucinations, while "extra" spirituality is triggered by a lack of brain matter (or presumably less/no activity there). I have ideas that resolve this difficulty for me, but they need to simmer a while longer before being spoken.
If nothing else, the study gives legitimacy to the sensation of spirituality, which is a very good thing. Sensation is a very different concept from belief, and this sensation is different from religion (as stated in the article). Hopefully the study of spirituality will extend beyond direct manipulation of the brain. It has from time to time before, but it's generally been a taboo topic for the laboratory--it was viewed as the domain of pseudo-science to even peek.
Slashdot Mirror
As the sibling poster said, neither of these options are viable. It's not a question of finding the right person, because the right person doesn't exist. The only way to get the power in the first place is to become a player. Once you do, the establishment has enough on you to keep you in line.
The way to make things change is not through voting, it is through public pressure. It doesn't matter who is in office. If enough of the public calls their congressmen strongly voicing their opinion, in this case against ACTA, the threat of losing the next election will force congress to do what we want them to do.
This requires people aware of the issue to discuss it with friends and family, and if they get riled up about it (or even if they don't) stress the importance of calling their representatives. Public pressure has consistently halted more bad legislation than strategic voting, and it's something you can do as often as bad legislation comes up.
(To make your job easier in the future, urge your congressmen to support the Read The Bills Act.)
I am an adult. I can be responsible for my own interests. I recognize that what I want is not always what is best for me, and I act on that recognition through self-control. When I fail, I accept the responsibility.
Any group of men who thinks they know my interests better than I do can speak with me and try to convince me that this is so, but it is I who makes the final decision. Provisions decided in secret without public knowledge or consent will result in nothing but more lawlessness. Anyone who approves this agreement clearly shows that he does not represent me.
No, I get it. It's like how I'd rather lose a pinky finger than a whole hand. But when there is a third option available, not losing any extremities whatsoever, I find complaints about the first two options a bit silly.
All I'm saying is, if the ratio is already 1000:1, I wouldn't be calling it "yet another decent portion of the internet." Maybe I'm just strange.
Wait...so, 1000:1 was a good ratio?
Oh, you're safe--the same story appeared on NPR. =p
How much money are we gonna let these scientists waste?
A billion dollars?
How quaint! I am reminded of Dr. Evil.
You exclude the possibility that the model for AGW is flawed and that the climate is changing for other reasons. As folks here are fond of pointing out, correlation is not causation.
The article fails to mention how long scientists have seen no contradiction between harsh winters and AGW. Is this something that has been predicted from the start, or is it a new development? If it is a new development, was it studied as its own phenomenon before modifying the AGW model to fit the data? That is, if this was not originally predicted, can we be reasonably sure that the AGW model isn't being shoehorned to fit contradicting data? The reasoning outlined in the summary makes sense, I would just like to know if it is ad hoc or not.
Silly me thought someone was going to attempt to learn their language--many species of squid use bio-luminescence to signal to each other in the depths, and the variety of patterns seen leads some scientists to believe that they have developed a rich visual language.
Of course "it" can't be used, which is why the next sentence starts with "The proper English choices."
The "singular they" article clearly states that it indicates indeterminacy "either in regard to number, or, controversially, regarding gender."
The co-opting of "they" for singular use does little except to appease the overly gender-sensitive (see the link I provide a little later in the thread), and I see nothing wrong with it in casual conversation. That is what this is, but it irks me to see a misinformed comment such as the one I replied to rated "Informative."
It's Valentine's Day. I have nothing better to do with my time =)
Garner's Modern American Usage admits that it's a great solution to a problem of sexist language...
The problem of sexist language is a problem of public misunderstanding and not of an actual institutional bias. I am linking this blog post because it contains a lengthy quotation from a noteworthy historian's defense for the continued use of masculine language in the generic case. The opening follows.
The reasons in favor of prolonging that usage are four: etymology, convenience, the unsuspected incompleteness of "man and woman," and literary tradition.
To begin with the last, it is unwise to give up a long established practice, familiar to all, without reviewing the purpose it has served. In Genesis we read: "And God created man, male and female." Plainly, in 1611 and long before, man meant human being. For centuries zoologists have spoken of the species Man; "Man inhabits all the climatic zones." Logicians have said "Man is mortal," and philosophers have boasted of "Man's unconquerable mind." The poet Webster writes: "And man does flourish but his time." In all these uses man cannot possibly mean male only. The coupling of woman to those statements would add nothing and sound absurd. The word man has, like many others, two related meanings, which the context makes clear.
Interested parties should follow the link for a few more paragraphs of strong, sensible defense; particularly interested readers should pick up the book that contains it as it is a wonderful tour of Western civilization from 1500 to the present.
Wikipedia disagrees. Singular third-person neutral possessive is "its."
The proper English choices for referring to a hypothetical individual are "his" or "her" or "his or her." "Their" is entirely different as pointed out humorously above and there is no need to co-opt it for something that is already well-handled.
That's a subtle hint to Mod Parent Up!
Or don't. Whatever. Still funny.
I'd like to blame my failure to grasp the irony on the medium, but it's probably just that I'm up way past my bedtime. Mea culpa.
I have briefly encountered genetic programming but failed to take it into account, mainly because the examples I've encountered have highly specific problem domains which, while very useful, do not approach anything close to consciousness (though if that's what you mean by "life-like" I'd definitely check it out).
The main reason I question the possibility of a conscious machine is not due to any specific method of programming; it is due to the huge difference between the biological processes dealing with the actual, physical movement of matter that results in consciousness and...a set of algorithms. Reality is messy and algorithms are clean. The brain is not a CPU and what I question is the ability to simulate it on one well enough to get consciousness as a result.
I have some other issues regarding sensory perception and the necessity of the body as well, but I wrote about that elsewhere. And, for the record, my statements aren't an argument so much as simply my position--I'm not out to convert anyone, just to converse.
It's an awfully giant leap from "we are very close to simulating the computations performed by cortical columns" to "we are very close to sentient computers."
I'm thinking of a cruel experiment to perform on a cat, and that is to cut out 9/10 of its sensory input. We'll leave its sight so it can navigate, provided it can stand up since its sense of balance got cut. How long do you think it will survive, even in a very protected atmosphere? How sentient do you think it will be compared to normal cats?
The intractable fact is that brains need bodies to operate consciously. The body is not present just to fuel the brain but to give it enough stimuli to keep it thinking--without the at-first-overwhelming torrent of sensations provided by the body, the conscious mind will fail to arise. You're going to need to figure out how to wire up that simulated brain to a sensory-rich apparatus, otherwise you will never see the sentience you seek.
Many of today's AI "experts" are really philosophers who hijacked the term AI in their search to better understand human consciousness. Their problem is that, while their AI studies might help them understand the human brain a little better; they are unable to transfer their knowledge about intelligence into computable algorithms.
I did indeed start laughing when I read this, because I find the problem to be that programmers are unable to transfer their knowledge about computable algorithms into intelligence. =)
I was a pretty firm believer in strong AI before I read up on the fundamentals of psychology and what we know about human consciousness. It doesn't make sense to speak of intelligence apart from consciousness, and consciousness is an awfully ambitious goal. I don't understand how we're supposed to go about creating it without first understanding it.
I never took statistics, so your talk of Chi^2 is (wait for it) Greek to me, but I do know this: your sequence looks less like the results of chance than either of the other two. At no point does your sequence have more than 2 of the same digit appearing in a row (run of 2), while both of the other methods do. If I'm interpreting your statistical analysis correctly, you looked only at the distribution and not the actual sequence, which is important: if any of the sequences had its numbers arranged from 1 to 6 its randomness would be highly suspect even if its distribution was consistent with randomness. The same is true for the opposite of having no adjacent identical numbers given the small pool you're working with. For your sample size I estimate that one run of 3 is probable, and certainly more than three runs of 2--see how the physical and virtual dice each have six of those?
I learned about this from my high school physics course. Our teacher gave us homework consisting of performing 100 coin tosses and turning in the results. He then proceeded to look at each paper and accurately tell if the student actually performed the experiment or merely wrote a "random" series of H's and T's. A similar experiment is detailed in the first third of this radio program: the experimenter had one group toss a coin and the other simply make theirs up, and she didn't know which was doing what. She said that the way she found who performed the coin tosses was to first look for a run of 4 or more. I'm sure it gets more complicated if she didn't see one in either group, but the point is that the order matters and randomness looks less random than you'd think--in 100 coin tosses the chance that you'll get 7 of the same face in a row is one in six, which is more likely than it feels like it ought to be.
Randomness is tricky!
There is a very good short story that deals with this exact premise called Manna, by Marshall Brain. His story shows two radically different ways of dealing with it: either by massively expanding welfare and state housing for those who are put out of work, or by letting machines handle the economy while humans are free to expend a rationed amount of energy credits in pursuit of their pleasure or interests. These are not the only options; just two that are interesting enough to explore in-depth. The former is unfortunately the likelier of the two.
Intelligence isn't just some simple value like tensile strength. It's about modeling and remodeling the world, drawing distinctions between similar things, seeing similarities where things are distinct, assigning values... things that are not straightforward and measurable.
This is very well put. Another way to say it is this: "intelligence" is an abstraction for a certain quality of action in the same way that "fruit" is an abstraction (or classification) for a certain variety of life. Just as there is no such thing as a generic fruit but only specific types whose qualities match the requirements of the abstraction, so with intelligent actions. The trouble begins when the abstraction is mistaken for something concrete.
(Idealists will of course disagree.)
Strong AI is a matter of inevitability. If nothing else, simulations of the human brain accurate down to the individual neuron could easily achieve this, even if it requires substantially more powerful computers than we have now.
Not really.
There's much more to the brain than neurons. They live in a chemical soup that affects neuronal activity in a manner that isn't fully understood but is not insignificant either. We know for a fact that the charge of the soup modifies and is modified by neuronal activity. The usual response to this revelation is "the simulation could be at the atomic level instead of the neuronal, and that would solve the problem." This is again too simple: part of what enables consciousness, a necessary component of intelligence, is a vast amount of sensory input. There is no evidence of consciousness arising in things that aren't attached to bodies, and a rudimentary understanding of psychology is enough to understand that consciousness is very much tied into the body. Now you're talking about simulating an entire person in an entire world--The Matrix--or creating a sensory-rich body for your artificial human, itself a task that should not be taken lightly.
If strong AI comes about, it is very implausible that it will be remotely human. I believe that consciousness is a biological phenomenon and that while we will do increasingly clever things with tech, true intelligence will not be one of them. If simulating the human mind is the only option available then the proposition is doomed.
that's really an absurd goal when we're so far away from having computers capable of that level of processing, assuming we even know what computer architecture is required for such a level of intelligence
Not to mention that we have little enough idea of what intelligence is, with or without the adjective "human."
By Market Price Through Greedy Amoral Stock Exchanges (=Capitalism),
(Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil. Will let poor children die, will have people working for MONEY their whole life, bah)
I would have liked to see a more critical exploration of capitalism. Your other options are well-illustrated, but this looks purely reactionary. All of those systems result in poor children dying, you fail to explain why working for money is bad (though we probably agree on this point), and the repetition of "evil," especially given its absence everywhere else, looks like an emotional cover-up for a lack of any reasoned criticism.
I'm only calling this out because the rest of your post very much deserves its rating.
Yeah, I looked that up myself after first envisioning something similar to cow-tipping. It looked a lot tricker, but not worthy of being buzzed by a drone...unless the drone feels some affinity for the fly.
NASA stole his ship.
Let's start with a quote from the article, since I know you won't read it =p
The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron1, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body.
The first thing I thought was that these areas must be somewhat responsible for the sense of self. If we are in a deterministic universe, then we are all automatons and our sense of being is if not exactly an illusion then inconsequential--everything must take its course and "we" are simply what must happen next. By having those areas of the brain damaged, those people's individuality routines are diminished. The same thing can reportedly be obtained temporarily but to a much greater extent with LSD, with some users experiencing a complete "ego-death."
My next thought was, "Hang on, I don't believe in a clockwork universe." I may be a materialist, I haven't settled that question yet, but if so I am certain that the stuff of the universe is far stranger than science has discovered thus far, and may never discover. Given that belief, it reasonably follows that what these people experience is as externally motivated as sight or sound--after all, it is external stimuli for those senses that trigger electrochemical changes in the brain causing us to see or hear something, even if nothing is there. The troubling difference is that it takes extra stimulus (via electrode or abnormal brain activity) to trigger visual or auditory hallucinations, while "extra" spirituality is triggered by a lack of brain matter (or presumably less/no activity there). I have ideas that resolve this difficulty for me, but they need to simmer a while longer before being spoken.
If nothing else, the study gives legitimacy to the sensation of spirituality, which is a very good thing. Sensation is a very different concept from belief, and this sensation is different from religion (as stated in the article). Hopefully the study of spirituality will extend beyond direct manipulation of the brain. It has from time to time before, but it's generally been a taboo topic for the laboratory--it was viewed as the domain of pseudo-science to even peek.