There is a need to go to such a low level, unlesss you want to start it off with more data than is available in a strand of DNA.
DNA speaks in the language of proteins. You can't tell what sort of cell a piece of DNA is going to produce or how the cells it produces will be arranged without running the simulation all the way down to the protein level. We have no other cookbook for how to arrange these simulated cells once they exist except a long list that says "produce this protein, then this one, then one of these, then another one, then this...", and we've not any clue how those proteins get turned into a person. We can understand the process at the chemical level, and no higher. The finished product, of course, isn't like that at all. We understand humans on the levels of cells and organs, but DNA isn't so conveniently arranged.
Simulating cells is not sufficient. If it were, we could pour a couple gallons of blood into a bathtub and say "Behold, it is human." The organization of the cells matters just as much as the cells themselves. Simulating a human being to the level of even cellular precision would require that we be able to *scan* a human being at the cellular level to see how he's put together. If we actually knew the weightings of all the neuronal connections in a person's brain, then connectionist AI approaches might be able to produce real intelligence. To quote Levels of Organization in General Intelligence, "The classical hype of early neural networks, that they used 'the same parallel architecture as the human brain', should, at most, have been a claim of using the same parallel architecture as an earthworm's brain." You can't expect high-level organization from low-level simulations unless you want to simulate all the way down to DNA, where the information behind the complexity is really stored.
Or you build the complexity yourself, without relying on the hideously-designed mess that is Homo sapiens. But that's a different kettle of fish.
"AI that is capable of adapting in general and learning like a human will probably ultimately have the same psychological defects as a human, including a propensity for violence."
What's true of humans isn't true of all possible minds. Humans had a lot of animal instincts before general intelligence showed up, and we're not free of them yet. Our propensity for violence exists because it was evolutionarily adaptive for humans and for a lot of mammals before us. Future AIs will not be evolved in mammalian ancestral environments. The seed AI that you're worried about starting Skynet won't come from people that spread progeny by killing all the male soldiers in some other tribe and raping the women, or by beating the tribal leader in a fight to the death and gaining access to all his wives. These are aspects of human history, not AI history.
You might be interested in reading this section from the Singularity Institute publication Creating Friendly AI, which addresses this topic in more detail.
That's far too computationally intensive. You know the Folding@Home project? That just handles protein folding. That's the very first step of turning DNA into cells. There's a a gazillion and one steps involved in putting together a human being, and even the very first one, translating DNA into proteins, eludes us.
Yes, I should have included some kind of qualifier for speed. I do realize that properly designed human-emulation software can run on a computer from today, or 1970, or can be run by a guy with a pen and a sheet of a paper trained to mimic a general processor, at absurdly low rates of speed. That point is that you neeed a machine capable of running your program at a reasonable speed to be able to even develop the program. If a group of computer scientists from the 1970s were given detailed explanations of how modern processors and graphics cards work, and set out on the task of programming Doom 3 using the computers they had available in 1970, they were not be able to do it, even though theoretically, a pre-designed simulator of 32-bit processors and graphics cards and a copy of Doom 3 would run fine (just very, very slowly) on computers from the 1970s. A time traveller from the future could give us the answer and we could simulate the human brain very slowly, but the fact we can't run our software prohibits us from creating it. We can't run a simulation of the human mind in real-time, or at any reasonable speed. If computing power was somehow frozen at its current levels for the rest of time, we would never come up with human-equivalent AI. It is essential that we have increases in hardware performance to create human simulators, not just software.
The fact that you need better software doesn't change the fact that you need better hardware. Do you really think that proper software, run on today's home PCs, would be able to emulate human intelligence? That's pretty much what you'd need to think to say that the statement you quoted is false. You _do_ need better hardware.
On average, female mathematicians have measurably higher levels of testosterone than the rest of the female population. Calling them "mutants" would be a bit harsh, though, unless you want to broaden your definition of "mutant" to something including that many people. You might as well take it a step further can call Native Americans "mutant Asians" or the whole species "mutant Africans". But I'm getting off-topic. People are diverse. Mathematicians are an extreme minority when you consider the billions of people that simply lack the cognitive ability to be professional mathematicians, for whatever reason. Some people are smarter or dumber than others, some excessively so, but we don't deem them "mutants". The fact that a large number of women have enough testosterone in them to make their brains more masculine shouldn't come as a surprise.
There are demonstratable differences between male and female neurology that are visible at birth. Specifically, increased interhemispherical communication in the male brain. High levels of this kind of neural activity, which are also assumed to be one of the causes of left-handedness, drastically increases a child's ability to perform on mathematical and visuo-spatial tasks. These unusually high levels of communication between the hemispheres can be observed in almost all male and female mathematicians and others in math-oriented fields of study. It's virtually a prerequisite for complex mathematical thought, and it's found much more commonly, at birth, in the brains of baby boys. There's so just no room for sexism in explaining that particular difference.
Now, it's reasonable to think that there is sexism on top of this, or that this biological difference is fanning the fires of sexism. I don't doubt that one bit. I think there _are_ unnecessary social stigmas keeping women out of computer science, but we can't just assume that it's _entirely_ a social issue, and that if we work hard enough at stomping out sexism, that CS will be truly gender-blind. No matter how much we progress as a society to realize what women are truly capable of in the workplace, women will still be the ones having babies, and men will still be the world's best weight-lifters.
Another thing to consider is that many self-described computer geeks are actually functioning autistics. The increase in autism in Sillicon Valley and among the children of parents who are computer scientists, engineers, etc. is incredible. Autistics that are able to function in the world can't help but be geeky: preferring objects to faces, discreet logic and order over messy things like social interactions, etc. And there is simply no question that autism is more common in boys than girls, and you'd be very hard pressed to explain _that_ away as a result of social oppression.
I was not arguing against the fact that there exist some arbitrary social influences that keep women from joining CS. There may or may not be, I don't know. What I was arguing against was the statement that it is necessary that those be the _only_ influence on whether women go into computer science, and that there could not possibly be any other reason (genetic or otherwise) that could plausibly explain it.
I used the chess example because I was writing for an audience that probably doesn't have much faith in human biodiversity. Showing pictures and graphs concerning the distributions of activity in grey matter in newborn girls and boys might have been more convincing for some, but not for those who are just vaguely aware of that "fact" that men and women are entirely mentally equal but not so firmly set in it that they won't ignore a bit of common sense. Those who are already dedicated feminists probably wouldn't have responded well to anything.
For the record: I do not think it is a bad thing to motivate women to join computer science. There's nothing wrong with that goal at all. However, I do think it is unfair and impractical to hand positions over to a woman if a man is better qualified, and I think most would agree with me on that. What I am really objecting against the spreading of dissinformation about the differences between men and women in an attempt to get women to join computer science. It's a good end, but with the wrong means. Frankly, I think women should be insulted that those who are trying to attract women into CS think that women are so stupid that they must be lied to about the reasons why women don't join computer science. If the truth is less influential, so be it, but at least it's the truth.
Isn't it a little presumptuous to think that women must be equally _capable_ of succeeding in computer science, and that any observe discrepency between male and female success in the field must be the result of a "sense of isolation and inadequacy" to the exclusion of all else? This is like arguing that women aren't as successful as men at competitive weightlifting or hand-to-hand combat because of their "sense of isolation and inadequacy", and that it couldn't possibly be attributable to hormones and sex-linked genes. When you're dealing with fields of study like pure mathematics, chess strategy, computer science, or other subjects that are so incredibly dominated by men, you have to be open to the possibility that there are simple truths of evolutionary psychology that are preventing women from being successful in these professions. This isn't like wealth distrobution where you can just point the finger at sexism. If I recall correctly, among the top five-HUNDRED highest rated chess players in the world, there is only ONE woman. You don't see that level of male dominance anywhere in the real world outside of contests of pure physical strength, and probably not even there. You certainly don't see it in lists of the richest people in the world (there's two women in the top ten). If we assume that the cause of this is simply a "sense of isolation and inadequacy" or simple sexism, we have to ask ourselves if it really makes sense that chess players and organizations are really so much more sexist and induce such greater feelings of inadequacy, especially considering how much effort major chess organizations are putting in to attracting women to playing chess.
Of course, computer science is nowhere near as male-dominated as chess, but I was just using it to prove a point that there are some limited fields where the discrepencies between men and women can't be explained away culturally. There _must_ be some deeper reason why women don't play chess,,whether it's genes, nutrition, alien mind control, whatever, and we must accept the possibility that this reason is also applicable to computer science. Only once we understand the _real_ causes of differences between the sexes can be hope to change them. We can't eliminate sexism by deluding ourselves.
What you fail to see is that maintenancing a new machine that does some task is almost always more intellectually demanding than the original task. Also, it will never require as much manpower to repair the machines as it would have required to do the task without them. So if ten people are dispensing drinks to customers at some commercial location, and those ten workers are replaced by vending machines, you still need a vending machine repair person, but you don't need _ten_. Also, that person will require some increase in intellectual ability over the average seller of soft drinks, because fixing the machine is simply more complicated a task. Admittedly in this example the cognitive threshold is very low, but where you might be able to hire a borderline retard to sell drinks, you can't hire one to fix vending machines. Let me put it this way: If the company's implementation of the machine doesn't put people out of work, why are they implementing it? If I'm already paying ten people to do a job, why should I buy a fancy robot and then still be paying ten people to go around fixing it? You can be certain that as machines replace jobs the number of human workers will go down, and the ones that are left will be the ones smart enough to be able to do things that machines can't.
Statistically, whoever has the forum ID with the lower number of digits. Somehow I think the nine people that would have to duke it out to answer your question won't respond to this post, however.
Because, as we all know, video games may not be around in a few years.
Re:The english language is not static
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Because, of course, French existed before humans did, and was handed to us by God who deemed it necessary that we form a nation called France so l'Academie francaise could be formed to preserve it. It would be absurd to suggest that French every evolved from Latin by the compounding of errors and changes to the language. Pure nonsense.
I regret to inform you that all Slashdot comments are not posted by the same person. Not only are there different people on Slashdot, some of them have different opinions. It's a shocking revelation, I know.
Once again, the RIAA is going to make life hard for theirselves down the line as they continue to sue their own customer base. Not a good business pratice, never will be.
They are _not_ suing their customer base. How many people who share thousands of mp3s do you think regularly purchase CDs from the RIAA? I'm not saying there aren't people who download "just to sample" and buy the CD afterwards, but those aren't the people who are sharing enough to get sued. They aren't going to sue people who are still purchasing their products, end of story.
Otherwise known as circumaural headphones, and not even all of those will help you. You need to seek out closed headphones, which are usually either circumaural or intra-aural (earbuds). If you're in a quiet environment, closed circumaurals don't sound as nice as open circumaurals, because in closed ones the sound is vibrating around in whatever material is keeping the sound out/in, but in some cases they're necessary, such as loud rooms or rooms with other people. Just don't think that because you're buying a big pair of headphones that completely engulfs your ear that you're going to have isolation from the outside world or that the world won't be able to hear what you're listening to.
No, I'm sorry, but soft notes in classical music will damage your hearing at 104 dB. As will the sound of mice squeeking, a sheet of paper falling off a desk, one hand clapping, whatever. 104 dB is 104 dB no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a need to go to such a low level, unlesss you want to start it off with more data than is available in a strand of DNA.
DNA speaks in the language of proteins. You can't tell what sort of cell a piece of DNA is going to produce or how the cells it produces will be arranged without running the simulation all the way down to the protein level. We have no other cookbook for how to arrange these simulated cells once they exist except a long list that says "produce this protein, then this one, then one of these, then another one, then this...", and we've not any clue how those proteins get turned into a person. We can understand the process at the chemical level, and no higher. The finished product, of course, isn't like that at all. We understand humans on the levels of cells and organs, but DNA isn't so conveniently arranged.
Simulating cells is not sufficient. If it were, we could pour a couple gallons of blood into a bathtub and say "Behold, it is human." The organization of the cells matters just as much as the cells themselves. Simulating a human being to the level of even cellular precision would require that we be able to *scan* a human being at the cellular level to see how he's put together. If we actually knew the weightings of all the neuronal connections in a person's brain, then connectionist AI approaches might be able to produce real intelligence. To quote Levels of Organization in General Intelligence , "The classical hype of early neural networks, that they used 'the same parallel architecture as the human brain', should, at most, have been a claim of using the same parallel architecture as an earthworm's brain." You can't expect high-level organization from low-level simulations unless you want to simulate all the way down to DNA, where the information behind the complexity is really stored.
Or you build the complexity yourself, without relying on the hideously-designed mess that is Homo sapiens. But that's a different kettle of fish.
"AI that is capable of adapting in general and learning like a human will probably ultimately have the same psychological defects as a human, including a propensity for violence."
What's true of humans isn't true of all possible minds. Humans had a lot of animal instincts before general intelligence showed up, and we're not free of them yet. Our propensity for violence exists because it was evolutionarily adaptive for humans and for a lot of mammals before us. Future AIs will not be evolved in mammalian ancestral environments. The seed AI that you're worried about starting Skynet won't come from people that spread progeny by killing all the male soldiers in some other tribe and raping the women, or by beating the tribal leader in a fight to the death and gaining access to all his wives. These are aspects of human history, not AI history.
You might be interested in reading this section from the Singularity Institute publication Creating Friendly AI, which addresses this topic in more detail.
That's far too computationally intensive. You know the Folding@Home project? That just handles protein folding. That's the very first step of turning DNA into cells. There's a a gazillion and one steps involved in putting together a human being, and even the very first one, translating DNA into proteins, eludes us.
Yes, I should have included some kind of qualifier for speed. I do realize that properly designed human-emulation software can run on a computer from today, or 1970, or can be run by a guy with a pen and a sheet of a paper trained to mimic a general processor, at absurdly low rates of speed. That point is that you neeed a machine capable of running your program at a reasonable speed to be able to even develop the program. If a group of computer scientists from the 1970s were given detailed explanations of how modern processors and graphics cards work, and set out on the task of programming Doom 3 using the computers they had available in 1970, they were not be able to do it, even though theoretically, a pre-designed simulator of 32-bit processors and graphics cards and a copy of Doom 3 would run fine (just very, very slowly) on computers from the 1970s. A time traveller from the future could give us the answer and we could simulate the human brain very slowly, but the fact we can't run our software prohibits us from creating it. We can't run a simulation of the human mind in real-time, or at any reasonable speed. If computing power was somehow frozen at its current levels for the rest of time, we would never come up with human-equivalent AI. It is essential that we have increases in hardware performance to create human simulators, not just software.
The fact that you need better software doesn't change the fact that you need better hardware. Do you really think that proper software, run on today's home PCs, would be able to emulate human intelligence? That's pretty much what you'd need to think to say that the statement you quoted is false. You _do_ need better hardware.
On average, female mathematicians have measurably higher levels of testosterone than the rest of the female population. Calling them "mutants" would be a bit harsh, though, unless you want to broaden your definition of "mutant" to something including that many people. You might as well take it a step further can call Native Americans "mutant Asians" or the whole species "mutant Africans". But I'm getting off-topic. People are diverse. Mathematicians are an extreme minority when you consider the billions of people that simply lack the cognitive ability to be professional mathematicians, for whatever reason. Some people are smarter or dumber than others, some excessively so, but we don't deem them "mutants". The fact that a large number of women have enough testosterone in them to make their brains more masculine shouldn't come as a surprise.
There are demonstratable differences between male and female neurology that are visible at birth. Specifically, increased interhemispherical communication in the male brain. High levels of this kind of neural activity, which are also assumed to be one of the causes of left-handedness, drastically increases a child's ability to perform on mathematical and visuo-spatial tasks. These unusually high levels of communication between the hemispheres can be observed in almost all male and female mathematicians and others in math-oriented fields of study. It's virtually a prerequisite for complex mathematical thought, and it's found much more commonly, at birth, in the brains of baby boys. There's so just no room for sexism in explaining that particular difference.
Now, it's reasonable to think that there is sexism on top of this, or that this biological difference is fanning the fires of sexism. I don't doubt that one bit. I think there _are_ unnecessary social stigmas keeping women out of computer science, but we can't just assume that it's _entirely_ a social issue, and that if we work hard enough at stomping out sexism, that CS will be truly gender-blind. No matter how much we progress as a society to realize what women are truly capable of in the workplace, women will still be the ones having babies, and men will still be the world's best weight-lifters.
Another thing to consider is that many self-described computer geeks are actually functioning autistics. The increase in autism in Sillicon Valley and among the children of parents who are computer scientists, engineers, etc. is incredible. Autistics that are able to function in the world can't help but be geeky: preferring objects to faces, discreet logic and order over messy things like social interactions, etc. And there is simply no question that autism is more common in boys than girls, and you'd be very hard pressed to explain _that_ away as a result of social oppression.
I was not arguing against the fact that there exist some arbitrary social influences that keep women from joining CS. There may or may not be, I don't know. What I was arguing against was the statement that it is necessary that those be the _only_ influence on whether women go into computer science, and that there could not possibly be any other reason (genetic or otherwise) that could plausibly explain it.
I used the chess example because I was writing for an audience that probably doesn't have much faith in human biodiversity. Showing pictures and graphs concerning the distributions of activity in grey matter in newborn girls and boys might have been more convincing for some, but not for those who are just vaguely aware of that "fact" that men and women are entirely mentally equal but not so firmly set in it that they won't ignore a bit of common sense. Those who are already dedicated feminists probably wouldn't have responded well to anything.
For the record: I do not think it is a bad thing to motivate women to join computer science. There's nothing wrong with that goal at all. However, I do think it is unfair and impractical to hand positions over to a woman if a man is better qualified, and I think most would agree with me on that. What I am really objecting against the spreading of dissinformation about the differences between men and women in an attempt to get women to join computer science. It's a good end, but with the wrong means. Frankly, I think women should be insulted that those who are trying to attract women into CS think that women are so stupid that they must be lied to about the reasons why women don't join computer science. If the truth is less influential, so be it, but at least it's the truth.
Isn't it a little presumptuous to think that women must be equally _capable_ of succeeding in computer science, and that any observe discrepency between male and female success in the field must be the result of a "sense of isolation and inadequacy" to the exclusion of all else? This is like arguing that women aren't as successful as men at competitive weightlifting or hand-to-hand combat because of their "sense of isolation and inadequacy", and that it couldn't possibly be attributable to hormones and sex-linked genes. When you're dealing with fields of study like pure mathematics, chess strategy, computer science, or other subjects that are so incredibly dominated by men, you have to be open to the possibility that there are simple truths of evolutionary psychology that are preventing women from being successful in these professions. This isn't like wealth distrobution where you can just point the finger at sexism. If I recall correctly, among the top five-HUNDRED highest rated chess players in the world, there is only ONE woman. You don't see that level of male dominance anywhere in the real world outside of contests of pure physical strength, and probably not even there. You certainly don't see it in lists of the richest people in the world (there's two women in the top ten). If we assume that the cause of this is simply a "sense of isolation and inadequacy" or simple sexism, we have to ask ourselves if it really makes sense that chess players and organizations are really so much more sexist and induce such greater feelings of inadequacy, especially considering how much effort major chess organizations are putting in to attracting women to playing chess.
,whether it's genes, nutrition, alien mind control, whatever, and we must accept the possibility that this reason is also applicable to computer science. Only once we understand the _real_ causes of differences between the sexes can be hope to change them. We can't eliminate sexism by deluding ourselves.
Of course, computer science is nowhere near as male-dominated as chess, but I was just using it to prove a point that there are some limited fields where the discrepencies between men and women can't be explained away culturally. There _must_ be some deeper reason why women don't play chess,
This was meant as a reply to simp's "+5, Insightful" comment at the very beginning of this story. Must've misclicked.
What you fail to see is that maintenancing a new machine that does some task is almost always more intellectually demanding than the original task. Also, it will never require as much manpower to repair the machines as it would have required to do the task without them. So if ten people are dispensing drinks to customers at some commercial location, and those ten workers are replaced by vending machines, you still need a vending machine repair person, but you don't need _ten_. Also, that person will require some increase in intellectual ability over the average seller of soft drinks, because fixing the machine is simply more complicated a task. Admittedly in this example the cognitive threshold is very low, but where you might be able to hire a borderline retard to sell drinks, you can't hire one to fix vending machines.
Let me put it this way: If the company's implementation of the machine doesn't put people out of work, why are they implementing it? If I'm already paying ten people to do a job, why should I buy a fancy robot and then still be paying ten people to go around fixing it? You can be certain that as machines replace jobs the number of human workers will go down, and the ones that are left will be the ones smart enough to be able to do things that machines can't.
The joke's on them. He can't read the ad.
I don't remember, you insensitive clod.
Statistically, whoever has the forum ID with the lower number of digits. Somehow I think the nine people that would have to duke it out to answer your question won't respond to this post, however.
Because, as we all know, video games may not be around in a few years.
Because, of course, French existed before humans did, and was handed to us by God who deemed it necessary that we form a nation called France so l'Academie francaise could be formed to preserve it. It would be absurd to suggest that French every evolved from Latin by the compounding of errors and changes to the language. Pure nonsense.
Fortune cookies. I never thought I'd understand fortune cookies until I saw that episode. The fortunes just NEVER stick!
I regret to inform you that all Slashdot comments are not posted by the same person. Not only are there different people on Slashdot, some of them have different opinions. It's a shocking revelation, I know.
Shouldn't we work on getting FFX on the PC before FFXI?
Get an attorney.
If you didn't listen to such stupid music, this wouldn't bother you at all.
At least eighty percent of my CDs are classical music and this still bothers me.
Yeah, but that's what you get when you buy a CD too, a much too loud abomination of what the artist recorded.
s /8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C
Couldn't agree more.
Information on the 'too loud' problem for the less-informed: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/article
Once again, the RIAA is going to make life hard for theirselves down the line as they continue to sue their own customer base. Not a good business pratice, never will be. They are _not_ suing their customer base. How many people who share thousands of mp3s do you think regularly purchase CDs from the RIAA? I'm not saying there aren't people who download "just to sample" and buy the CD afterwards, but those aren't the people who are sharing enough to get sued. They aren't going to sue people who are still purchasing their products, end of story.
Otherwise known as circumaural headphones, and not even all of those will help you. You need to seek out closed headphones, which are usually either circumaural or intra-aural (earbuds). If you're in a quiet environment, closed circumaurals don't sound as nice as open circumaurals, because in closed ones the sound is vibrating around in whatever material is keeping the sound out/in, but in some cases they're necessary, such as loud rooms or rooms with other people. Just don't think that because you're buying a big pair of headphones that completely engulfs your ear that you're going to have isolation from the outside world or that the world won't be able to hear what you're listening to.
No, I'm sorry, but soft notes in classical music will damage your hearing at 104 dB. As will the sound of mice squeeking, a sheet of paper falling off a desk, one hand clapping, whatever. 104 dB is 104 dB no matter what.