You forgot to read the part where it says the SCOTUS is the supreme arbiter of constitutionality. If congress does it, and the Supreme Court says it's okay, then it's defacto constitutional, so says the constitution.
Makes sense. Even without an ear, the baby is basically living in a giant fluid filled sac connected only a couple feet away from the source of the noise.
What's novel here is that, for a long time ( about 100 years or so ), they thought that a human brain did almost nothing at a higher level ( like language acquisition ). The orthodox thinking was that about two years old, when neuron's myelin sheathes are fully formed, thus insulating the neurons, the baby can finally do some real cognition. But not before.
Now we're finding out that quite a bit is going on much earlier than anyone suspected.
I think you're making some false assertions. Did you see that program that was generating symphonies in the style of the greats? I'd say we already have programs that can churn out interesting works of art.
I didn't, but I think you sort of argue my point: those programs just imitated works of art that composers had already created. It's imitative, not creative. It's interesting, and it's a work of art, and they don't sound half-bad, but is it anything *new*?
If you're going to argue that that's all that human ever do, then how do we get new styles and genres? Where does Jazz and Orchestral Swing music come from? They aren't just re-hashing classical music, or stuff they've heard before.
That's what I'm arguing that humans have which computers have presently never demonstrated. They ability to create ex nihilo ( relatively speaking -- of course it's all still music, or art ).
But you'll say, of course "But that's just a well-posed problem, and it's brute forcing it anyway." Sure, but how can you describe what we do as anything but brute forcing? Musicians spend hours upon hours every week honing and refining their work. It's a brute force search if you ask me, with some optimization (which we can put into the program.)
Well, I agree that practice plays a part, but that can't be all there is, because some people are better than others. Some are geniuses, like Mozart. A computer has never a masterpiece, an epic, an opus.
So there has to be some algorithm or 'way' of creating music. Just playing scales for years isn't going to mean that you can be a great composer. I played guitar for 10 years before I realized I was tone-deaf, or at least, never going to be any good at it. Meanwhile, a few of my high-school buddies were better in a few months than I was after 10 years. And a lot of musicians never *write* music -- they just play something that's already written. Composing, or creating new works, is a different skill. So no, it can't just be brute force.
Part of the problem is that we have no formal way of measuring a creative work's originality or value. We can't say, "This piece from Mozart is a 10, where as all computers can come up with is at best a 3". At this point, it's a judgement call by human beings, but not entirely subjective: for people like Mozart, Picasso and Shakespeare, there is large agreement that they created great works of art. I have a hard time believing that considering great artists great is just some kind of elite herd mentality. There is genuinely shitty work out there, and it gets called out. Some stuff is disagreed upon by critics and scholars, but there is really great stuff out there. There may not be any formal definition of 'good art', but I don't think that doesn't mean there is no such thing.
And yes, the computers can't do it without training. But how many people do you know that do music without years of study and learning from others?
I'm not arguing computers do it without training. What I am arguing is that computers never invent new genres. To use a metaphor, they search out patterns within the existing domain, but they have not created a new domain.
I sort of agree with you, but not your assessment.
Not even smart animals like dogs or monkeys could add or subtract; only we smart humans could do that.
The problem is that all sorts of animals and dumb people can do things that computers cannot do. Such as walk down a hallway, or walk a trail in the woods, or catch a frisbee in mid-air, or pick out your species' mating call in a woodland cacophony. People thought that if computers can do the "hard" stuff, such as solving complex equations, surely it's no problem for a computer to tell a frown from a smile, right? Even mentally disabled people can do that. Instead, what we find out is that computers are like intellectual savants: the hard stuff is easy for them, but the easy stuff is impossible. When they can do it, it's the the most limited and restricted of circumstances. But almost any animal is capable of chasing down prey, or out-maneuvering predators, or some devilishly difficult "AI" problem, and doing it with very little brainpower.
When we have computer software composing best-selling music and writing best-selling novels or creating entire computer-generated movies from scratch, it will be obvious that such things are merely mechanical activities, requiring no actual intelligence.
I'll believe it when I see it. So far, any AI seems to be an algorithm for solving a well-posed problems. Think of the Dialogue with Meno's slave. Socrates is able to prove the reality of reincarnation by questioning a slave about the geometrical properties of squares. In answering these questions, the slave 'showed' he had advanced knowledge of geometry, which he was never taught, so that 'proved' he had learned it in a past life; Socrates merely helped him remember it.
Actually, what really happened is that the slave acted as a simple calculator, much like today's computers. Socrates was the man behind the curtain, so to speak. He broke the problem down into simple problems that a slave could answer. Likewise with today's programmers. They pose simple problems with algorithms for solving it, and viola! The slave knows geometry. Meanwhile, once Socrates is out of the picture, the slave is somehow dumb again.
Computers are good at solving well-posed problems. They aren't any good at creative works, such as dreaming up a new geometric proof, a GUT, a plot of a novel, a picture, painting, or any interesting visual work ( that's not just a simple expression of a mathematical formula, such as a fractal), or a decent tune.
I think any device that is able to do creative work will a qualitatively different from the Turing machines we're familiar with today. This type of device will have no problem walking down a hall or ginning up a tune, but might have problems with advanced trig.
For example, AI works and is a very strong technology, but only the SF authors and idiots expect their computer to have a conversation with them.
When did the definition of AI change in the past 50 years? Back in 1950, everyone know what AI meant. It was C3PO. Data. Bishop. A robot that could do almost anything a human could do.
A conversation might be a little out of the question, but surely, we thought, a robot would be able to do something as simple as walk down a hallway, like any mouse or roach can do. Or how about the simple image classification that pigeons are capable of -- classifying paintings by artists, including those it's never seen before?
Why would one have to be an idiot for thinking that computers could, somehow, someday, be capable of doing such things? After all, animals are dumb, and can't do math or play chess or solve complex equations, but they can do a lot of things that are very difficult for computers -- like finding a trail in the woods. How is it that computers, which can do things only very intelligent and educated people can do, *can't* do things that dumb, uneducated people and animals *can* do?
Personally, I believe they are qualitatively different problems.
AI already has successes. But, as an AI researcher friend of mine points out, once they succeed it's no longer 'AI'.
That's moving the goalposts. We all know what AI means -- robots that can wash dishes ( any dish in any sink ), fold clothes, vacuum a floor, pick vegetables, or walk down a sidewalk, and do all these stupid tasks that feel so obvious and intuitive to people, that, back in the 1950s, people thought that all we had to do was just hook together a camera, a computer, and robotic limbs.
In the past 50 years, the goalposts have been moved quite a bit.
Bill Gates at least knew what direction to take things, Microsoft is a software company.
I've heard this, but isn't it true that Gates didn't even mention the internet in the first edition of his 1995 biography, _The Road Ahead_? It was supposedly about the future of computing.
Well, realistically, how much code can someone actually write? I think the most influential people are going to be those those who can corral and co-ordinate the efforts of disparate people to work together one one big project that no single person can handle alone. They maybe never even write code themselves.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Well, that's sort of the point: people are ambivalent about it. Remember when cell phones were catching on, and so many people were like, "I'm never getting a cell phone!" "I saw a person in the grocery store today talking to their wife on a cell phone talking about what food to buy! What a waste." It's that way for all new technology. It's the whole fear of change thing.
Seems more likely a personification of fear of death.
However, I personally don't lend much credence to these mumbo-jumbo pseudo scientific explanations of things people do for the sheer fun of it. Some things don't have a deeper meaning.
I agree with you about the 'fear of death' interpretation. To me, it's always an interesting question, "why is *this* popular and not *that*?" If you can buy that Godzilla = Atomic bomb ( the fist Godzilla movie is basically Godzilla, wakened in the pacific by nuclear testing, smashes an entire city. It's building-stomping porn. Hiroshima, anyone? ), do you think there might be discernible reasons why zombies and vampires get so much popular attention over, say, werewolves? Not that there's a meaning, per se, but reasons?
The first line of defense is the balance of power, the second, voting, and failing that, revolution.
I guess if you want to get techno-philosophical, a representational democracy never has unchecked power -- or rather, they always do, because they do the will of the people. If they stopped doing the will of the people, they wouldn't be a de facto representational democracy.
Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?
This is not a crime per se, but a house ethics violation. It's an internal, private matter, as if your company was investigating you, not for a crime, but going against company policy. Congress policing itself, basically.
I can't believe the comments that say that government-funded media will be Soviet-style Propaganda machines.
Are you people out of your minds? Can anyone here name me one program or reporter more critical of the government than Bill Moyers? His programs get financed by PBS, a government corporation.
In fact, that's exactly what corporations want you to believe, because public funding will be the only thing that frees journalists from the corporate teat. It will effectively shut down the corporate media oligarchy we have today.
Are you all slaves for the corporations or whatever organization pays your salaries? Is that the only lens through which you can see the world?
The American Press is already owned by the government, just not directly.
The government doesn't own the press in the United States. Rather, they are both owned by corporations. The corporations want you to *think* that the government "owns" the press, and that the government is a Big Bad Boogeyman who must be defanged, because representational democracy is the only weapon the people have against unchecked corporate power.
Practicing Mormonism means going to temple for certain occasions and events. If you're not a member of the church in good relationship with them, they would prevent you from entering, perhaps even to the point of calling the police. So they would use law to prevent you from 'practicing beliefs', similar perhaps to using copyright to prevent non-members to learn secret information. Is Mormonism therefore a cult?
Such a bullshit argument. Ever heard of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy? Unfortunately, you don't get to disown members of your group/clan/religion because they did something bad. The truth is that many actual Christians were involved in committing terrible atrocities.
Okay, I see your point, but are you willing to concede that atheists were responsible for the deaths and persecutions of around a million people in the Soviet Union?
What's that you say?* Those Party Members weren't really atheists, or directly guided to do this by their atheism, but just used that position to further a money/power agenda? Well, that's the same argument our Christian friend wants to use. In other words, "No true Scotsman..."
* I don't know if you actually say this or not, but it's fun to argue this way!:)
You wouldn't fly if you saw what the majority of airports was using for radar:)
I hear comments like this all the time. "You wouldn't be doing X if you saw some-behind-the-scenes-information." Yet things still seem to function smoothly, for the most part. I'm convinced that the universe has a large nerf factor.
Do you believe that any religion or organization, such as the freemasons, or the Mormon church, is a cult, because they have secret teachings which are not public, and getting access to them does involve money, but not solely money?
Its disturbing to think that a 'religious organization', and I use that phrase loosely in reference to Scientology, would undertake something of that nature.
Well, looking at the history of religious organizations ( crusades, inquisition, etc ), isn't it rather expected?
But seriously. People have sex across interspecies barriers all the time; animal, vegetable, mineral, it doesn't matter. I doubt that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals looked at each other and said, Hey, I can't have sex with you, you're obviously a different species! Probably they thought to themselves, Two arms, two legs, looks about right, the bits are in the right places, why not?
I see what you're saying, but there is a good argument against Neanderthal/Homo Sapiens intercourse. Humans have sex with all kinds of animals, but two they certainly *do not* have sex with are chimpanzees and gorillas. Why not? Because they keep to themselves and they don't want or have anything to do with humans, and if they ever felt threatened or bothered, they will kill you with a wayward strike. Chimpanzees in particular are vicious motherfuckers, and will rip your arms out of their sockets and chew your face off if they get into a rage. They're *much* stronger than they look, and they have the psychological makeup of a psychopath. Gorillas aren't mean like chimpanzees, but still they won't put up with any of your bullshit.
It's sort of the same thing saying that a human being had never had sex with a lion, panther, baboon, or bear. They're just not as approachable in real life as they are in the movies.
Now, humans *have* had sex with other great apes, such as orangutans. In fact, I read on the internet a few years back about an orangutan that was kept in captivity as a prostitute in southeast Asia. It was very sad.
So to me it's an open question. Were Neanderthals more like gorillas, or more like orangutans, in terms of their sexual receptivity to humans? To me, it's an open question. If you look at this skeletal comparison, a Neanderthal is obviously a creature you don't want upset with you.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to read the part where it says the SCOTUS is the supreme arbiter of constitutionality. If congress does it, and the Supreme Court says it's okay, then it's defacto constitutional, so says the constitution.
Makes sense. Even without an ear, the baby is basically living in a giant fluid filled sac connected only a couple feet away from the source of the noise.
What's novel here is that, for a long time ( about 100 years or so ), they thought that a human brain did almost nothing at a higher level ( like language acquisition ). The orthodox thinking was that about two years old, when neuron's myelin sheathes are fully formed, thus insulating the neurons, the baby can finally do some real cognition. But not before.
Now we're finding out that quite a bit is going on much earlier than anyone suspected.
Like not leaving untreated wood lying in pile all winter,
What's the problem with this? It rots?
I think you're making some false assertions. Did you see that program that was generating symphonies in the style of the greats? I'd say we already have programs that can churn out interesting works of art.
I didn't, but I think you sort of argue my point: those programs just imitated works of art that composers had already created. It's imitative, not creative. It's interesting, and it's a work of art, and they don't sound half-bad, but is it anything *new*?
If you're going to argue that that's all that human ever do, then how do we get new styles and genres? Where does Jazz and Orchestral Swing music come from? They aren't just re-hashing classical music, or stuff they've heard before.
That's what I'm arguing that humans have which computers have presently never demonstrated. They ability to create ex nihilo ( relatively speaking -- of course it's all still music, or art ).
But you'll say, of course "But that's just a well-posed problem, and it's brute forcing it anyway." Sure, but how can you describe what we do as anything but brute forcing? Musicians spend hours upon hours every week honing and refining their work. It's a brute force search if you ask me, with some optimization (which we can put into the program.)
Well, I agree that practice plays a part, but that can't be all there is, because some people are better than others. Some are geniuses, like Mozart. A computer has never a masterpiece, an epic, an opus.
So there has to be some algorithm or 'way' of creating music. Just playing scales for years isn't going to mean that you can be a great composer. I played guitar for 10 years before I realized I was tone-deaf, or at least, never going to be any good at it. Meanwhile, a few of my high-school buddies were better in a few months than I was after 10 years. And a lot of musicians never *write* music -- they just play something that's already written. Composing, or creating new works, is a different skill. So no, it can't just be brute force.
Part of the problem is that we have no formal way of measuring a creative work's originality or value. We can't say, "This piece from Mozart is a 10, where as all computers can come up with is at best a 3". At this point, it's a judgement call by human beings, but not entirely subjective: for people like Mozart, Picasso and Shakespeare, there is large agreement that they created great works of art. I have a hard time believing that considering great artists great is just some kind of elite herd mentality. There is genuinely shitty work out there, and it gets called out. Some stuff is disagreed upon by critics and scholars, but there is really great stuff out there. There may not be any formal definition of 'good art', but I don't think that doesn't mean there is no such thing.
And yes, the computers can't do it without training. But how many people do you know that do music without years of study and learning from others?
I'm not arguing computers do it without training. What I am arguing is that computers never invent new genres. To use a metaphor, they search out patterns within the existing domain, but they have not created a new domain.
Not even smart animals like dogs or monkeys could add or subtract; only we smart humans could do that.
The problem is that all sorts of animals and dumb people can do things that computers cannot do. Such as walk down a hallway, or walk a trail in the woods, or catch a frisbee in mid-air, or pick out your species' mating call in a woodland cacophony. People thought that if computers can do the "hard" stuff, such as solving complex equations, surely it's no problem for a computer to tell a frown from a smile, right? Even mentally disabled people can do that. Instead, what we find out is that computers are like intellectual savants: the hard stuff is easy for them, but the easy stuff is impossible. When they can do it, it's the the most limited and restricted of circumstances. But almost any animal is capable of chasing down prey, or out-maneuvering predators, or some devilishly difficult "AI" problem, and doing it with very little brainpower.
When we have computer software composing best-selling music and writing best-selling novels or creating entire computer-generated movies from scratch, it will be obvious that such things are merely mechanical activities, requiring no actual intelligence.
I'll believe it when I see it. So far, any AI seems to be an algorithm for solving a well-posed problems. Think of the Dialogue with Meno's slave. Socrates is able to prove the reality of reincarnation by questioning a slave about the geometrical properties of squares. In answering these questions, the slave 'showed' he had advanced knowledge of geometry, which he was never taught, so that 'proved' he had learned it in a past life; Socrates merely helped him remember it.
Actually, what really happened is that the slave acted as a simple calculator, much like today's computers. Socrates was the man behind the curtain, so to speak. He broke the problem down into simple problems that a slave could answer. Likewise with today's programmers. They pose simple problems with algorithms for solving it, and viola! The slave knows geometry. Meanwhile, once Socrates is out of the picture, the slave is somehow dumb again.
Computers are good at solving well-posed problems. They aren't any good at creative works, such as dreaming up a new geometric proof, a GUT, a plot of a novel, a picture, painting, or any interesting visual work ( that's not just a simple expression of a mathematical formula, such as a fractal), or a decent tune.
I think any device that is able to do creative work will a qualitatively different from the Turing machines we're familiar with today. This type of device will have no problem walking down a hall or ginning up a tune, but might have problems with advanced trig.
For example, AI works and is a very strong technology, but only the SF authors and idiots expect their computer to have a conversation with them.
When did the definition of AI change in the past 50 years? Back in 1950, everyone know what AI meant. It was C3PO. Data. Bishop. A robot that could do almost anything a human could do.
A conversation might be a little out of the question, but surely, we thought, a robot would be able to do something as simple as walk down a hallway, like any mouse or roach can do. Or how about the simple image classification that pigeons are capable of -- classifying paintings by artists, including those it's never seen before?
Why would one have to be an idiot for thinking that computers could, somehow, someday, be capable of doing such things? After all, animals are dumb, and can't do math or play chess or solve complex equations, but they can do a lot of things that are very difficult for computers -- like finding a trail in the woods. How is it that computers, which can do things only very intelligent and educated people can do, *can't* do things that dumb, uneducated people and animals *can* do?
Personally, I believe they are qualitatively different problems.
AI already has successes. But, as an AI researcher friend of mine points out, once they succeed it's no longer 'AI'.
That's moving the goalposts. We all know what AI means -- robots that can wash dishes ( any dish in any sink ), fold clothes, vacuum a floor, pick vegetables, or walk down a sidewalk, and do all these stupid tasks that feel so obvious and intuitive to people, that, back in the 1950s, people thought that all we had to do was just hook together a camera, a computer, and robotic limbs.
In the past 50 years, the goalposts have been moved quite a bit.
Obama *is* a lawyer.
Bill Gates at least knew what direction to take things, Microsoft is a software company.
I've heard this, but isn't it true that Gates didn't even mention the internet in the first edition of his 1995 biography, _The Road Ahead_? It was supposedly about the future of computing.
Well, realistically, how much code can someone actually write? I think the most influential people are going to be those those who can corral and co-ordinate the efforts of disparate people to work together one one big project that no single person can handle alone. They maybe never even write code themselves.
The only question I think is worth asking here is whether or not it turns out to be more efficient or not.
I detect a little unnecessary redundancy there.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Well, that's sort of the point: people are ambivalent about it. Remember when cell phones were catching on, and so many people were like, "I'm never getting a cell phone!" "I saw a person in the grocery store today talking to their wife on a cell phone talking about what food to buy! What a waste." It's that way for all new technology. It's the whole fear of change thing.
Seems more likely a personification of fear of death.
However, I personally don't lend much credence to these mumbo-jumbo pseudo scientific explanations of things people do for the sheer fun of it. Some things don't have a deeper meaning.
I agree with you about the 'fear of death' interpretation. To me, it's always an interesting question, "why is *this* popular and not *that*?" If you can buy that Godzilla = Atomic bomb ( the fist Godzilla movie is basically Godzilla, wakened in the pacific by nuclear testing, smashes an entire city. It's building-stomping porn. Hiroshima, anyone? ), do you think there might be discernible reasons why zombies and vampires get so much popular attention over, say, werewolves? Not that there's a meaning, per se, but reasons?
The first line of defense is the balance of power, the second, voting, and failing that, revolution.
I guess if you want to get techno-philosophical, a representational democracy never has unchecked power -- or rather, they always do, because they do the will of the people. If they stopped doing the will of the people, they wouldn't be a de facto representational democracy.
Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?
This is not a crime per se, but a house ethics violation. It's an internal, private matter, as if your company was investigating you, not for a crime, but going against company policy. Congress policing itself, basically.
I can't believe the comments that say that government-funded media will be Soviet-style Propaganda machines. Are you people out of your minds? Can anyone here name me one program or reporter more critical of the government than Bill Moyers? His programs get financed by PBS, a government corporation.
In fact, that's exactly what corporations want you to believe, because public funding will be the only thing that frees journalists from the corporate teat. It will effectively shut down the corporate media oligarchy we have today.
Are you all slaves for the corporations or whatever organization pays your salaries? Is that the only lens through which you can see the world?
The American Press is already owned by the government, just not directly.
The government doesn't own the press in the United States. Rather, they are both owned by corporations. The corporations want you to *think* that the government "owns" the press, and that the government is a Big Bad Boogeyman who must be defanged, because representational democracy is the only weapon the people have against unchecked corporate power.
Or just a naturally tall person.
Practicing Mormonism means going to temple for certain occasions and events. If you're not a member of the church in good relationship with them, they would prevent you from entering, perhaps even to the point of calling the police. So they would use law to prevent you from 'practicing beliefs', similar perhaps to using copyright to prevent non-members to learn secret information. Is Mormonism therefore a cult?
Thanks so much for your response. All that is out there, really, is conspiracy theory, so this is very valuable. :)
Such a bullshit argument. Ever heard of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy? Unfortunately, you don't get to disown members of your group/clan/religion because they did something bad. The truth is that many actual Christians were involved in committing terrible atrocities.
Okay, I see your point, but are you willing to concede that atheists were responsible for the deaths and persecutions of around a million people in the Soviet Union?
:)
What's that you say?* Those Party Members weren't really atheists, or directly guided to do this by their atheism, but just used that position to further a money/power agenda? Well, that's the same argument our Christian friend wants to use. In other words, "No true Scotsman..."
* I don't know if you actually say this or not, but it's fun to argue this way!
You wouldn't fly if you saw what the majority of airports was using for radar :)
I hear comments like this all the time. "You wouldn't be doing X if you saw some-behind-the-scenes-information." Yet things still seem to function smoothly, for the most part. I'm convinced that the universe has a large nerf factor.
Question -- what happened with our air defenses on 9/11?
Do you believe that any religion or organization, such as the freemasons, or the Mormon church, is a cult, because they have secret teachings which are not public, and getting access to them does involve money, but not solely money?
Its disturbing to think that a 'religious organization', and I use that phrase loosely in reference to Scientology, would undertake something of that nature.
Well, looking at the history of religious organizations ( crusades, inquisition, etc ), isn't it rather expected?
But seriously. People have sex across interspecies barriers all the time; animal, vegetable, mineral, it doesn't matter. I doubt that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals looked at each other and said, Hey, I can't have sex with you, you're obviously a different species! Probably they thought to themselves, Two arms, two legs, looks about right, the bits are in the right places, why not?
I see what you're saying, but there is a good argument against Neanderthal/Homo Sapiens intercourse. Humans have sex with all kinds of animals, but two they certainly *do not* have sex with are chimpanzees and gorillas. Why not? Because they keep to themselves and they don't want or have anything to do with humans, and if they ever felt threatened or bothered, they will kill you with a wayward strike. Chimpanzees in particular are vicious motherfuckers, and will rip your arms out of their sockets and chew your face off if they get into a rage. They're *much* stronger than they look, and they have the psychological makeup of a psychopath. Gorillas aren't mean like chimpanzees, but still they won't put up with any of your bullshit.
It's sort of the same thing saying that a human being had never had sex with a lion, panther, baboon, or bear. They're just not as approachable in real life as they are in the movies.
Now, humans *have* had sex with other great apes, such as orangutans. In fact, I read on the internet a few years back about an orangutan that was kept in captivity as a prostitute in southeast Asia. It was very sad.
So to me it's an open question. Were Neanderthals more like gorillas, or more like orangutans, in terms of their sexual receptivity to humans? To me, it's an open question. If you look at this skeletal comparison, a Neanderthal is obviously a creature you don't want upset with you.