Just as long as we have to train a super secret and highly elite team of counter-AI-predator soldiers, and the whole thing finishes as a showdown where the team leader confronts the talking mainframe in an underground secret bunker.
People seem to be very sensitive about computers doing things they think only humans should be able to do. They dismiss defeating a chess grand master or the Turing Test as toy problems. I guess you can count me as one of those people. I don't think it's a big deal that a computer can solve complex math problem or play chess well. Most people would have a difficult time with that. While math, science and engineering are great things and have provided a lot of benefit to us, I'm more interested in the sort of 'hunter/gatherer on the African Savannah' problems. Those to me seem to be the basis of human intelligence.
For instance, how do you see a trail as it winds over grassland and leads into the woods? How does one see a year old trail that is partially overgrown, or a new trail not completely tramped down. How do you track down an animal from smattering of scat, nibbles and tracks over rocks, dirt, grassland, and the tree line? How does a human being see a camouflaged predator slinking behind the tree line? How do you read the sky and know what the weather will be later that day? How do you look at a river and know if it's crossable or not?
Back at home, how do you play your relatives, friends, and enemies in the tribe so that you are elected leader when the Big Man passes away? Or how do you manage to convince your husband that your new pregnancy is his, and not your secret lovers'?
Computers seem to be like idiot savants. They are good at logic puzzles, things like factoring large number or memorizing the phone books. That's a very useful tool in our technological society, but I don't think it's the basis of human intelligence. Like some Autistic person, computers suck as the basics of social interaction, which any three year old understands the basic concepts of. I remember my friend's three year old putting on her parents clothes and getting dressed up when she heard that her parents were going to a Halloween party -- all without prompting. What kind of intelligence do you need to understand the concepts of 'a party' or 'dressing up'? Or simple thinks like standing on two legs or filling a glass of water -- never mind hunting and eating another animal, or following a trail.
I did an AI degree in the mid 90s and one of the things we covered was the definition of intelligence. After running through a few unsatisfactory definitions, my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else... Well, my definition includes things that organic nervous systems are good at, such as walking, migrating, or hunting.
Guess you missed the part where GP said "there are many perceptions to a truth". So how would we know that we were having different perspectives of a single truth, rather than many perceptions of many truths?
Are you going to suggest that there is some component of intelligence or perception that requires supernatural origins? Absolutely not. I don't know why you bring that up.
Because that's about the only position that allows you to come out of this argument without looking like a doofus. What I'm claiming is that all modern computer are basically Turing machines, and that human minds aren't Turing machines. Human minds are simply another kind of system or device, one that we don't yet understand, and therefore haven't yet built an artificial version of. It's no different than saying that human minds aren't a kind of steam engine, as was claimed at the turn of the 18th century.
First of all, we've been promised AI for a long time, and we don't have anything near it. Think about the amount of processing power that an ant has, and compare it's ability to navigate the environment. We have machines that have immensely more computing power, but still cannot perform the ambulatory feats of a simple ants ( and I'm not talking about swarming, just moving an ant body with six legs). Computers are good at solving classical intellectual problems that humans are generally bad at, such as factoring large numbers, calculating dates far in the future, or playing chess, but they suck that basic things that small, relatively computationally weak organisms can do, such as walking, flying, or species recognition. If computers really were the same kinds of devices as organic nervous systems were, we would expect them to be naturally good at the things that we find organic nervous systems being naturally good at, such as locomotion, or hunting. However, it turns out that they are only good at problems posed as boolean logic problems, such as calculus, and bad at everything else. If we manage to create a computationally weak device that can walk, fly, find food, and avoid predators, I will eat my words, but as of yet, we don't have such as device.
Secondly, Goedel's theorem, in my understanding, shows that the human mind can do things that no Turing machines can. Therefore, a human mind cannot be solely a turing machine ( although it may have one or some as part of its make-up ). I've read a lot of debates about this between philosophers and mathematicians, and I've also had a lot of arguments on slashdot. However, I side with Goedel when I claim that the human mind can perceive things that a Turing machine cannot. Therefore, we don't yet understand what the human mind is, and therefore we cannot build one, either.
Therefore, computers are responsible for more questions than Pablo and his contemporaries could ever possibly conceive. Nope, absolutely wrong. Computer cannot perceive questions or gaps in knowledge; they can only solve problems framed as a logic problem. A human being can pose a problem and program a computer to solve it, but the computer cannot come up with new questions; only a human analyzing that resulting data can perceive gaps in knowledge. So far the only device or system we know of that can ask a question is a human mind -- computers cannot. Computers and minds are fundamentally different types of devices. Pablo Picasso, you, I, and any four year old, has posed many more questions simply because of the fact that we *can* pose a question.
Why would you assume the quote "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." is about the ability to form questions? It's not an assumption, it's a conclusion. And I think it's fairly reasonable.
It could just as easily mean Picasso didn't think computers could give you "art". Why would you assume he was talking about art? I would think there's a fairly naive and ignorant answer for that: "Because he's an artist. Duh!"
Typically 'answers' go with 'questions'. Are you claiming that some reporter or someone asked him, "Picasso, what do you think of these new calculating devices called 'computers'?" and he said, "Oh, they're worthless, they cannot give you art, they can only give you answers?" Why would art be contrasted with answers? I think instead someone was asking him, "Picasso, with these new computers that can perform incredible calculations, they will surely solve all the questions of the universe and give us the grand unified theory of everything. What need will we have for more art once a computer has given us all the answers?"
Picasso thought that art was the freest form of human inquiry. His idea of art hearkens back to the time when art and science were the same endeavor, one of inquiry into the nature of the world. That's why Da Vinci painted and drew -- he thought that he was making a scientific inquiry into the nature of light and form. They were also making 'inquiries' into more philosophical questions, such as 'what is beauty', and trying to give an answer by making a painting. All of the portraits you see before the invention of the camera were an attempt to create an accurate image of that person. But at some point, the arts become separated from the science, which is sort of the split between science and engineering we have today. To be a scientist or artist back in the day, as a glassblower, for example, means you had some basic understanding of the chemical ( or alchemical, as it was at the time ) properties of glass, metal colorants, and heat, but also a practical ability to work the glass. You were a science practitioner. Philosophy and knowledge were not separated from a practice or craft.
But once you have the development of the camera, and other modern measuring equipment, the arts become unbound from science. No longer is a painter constrained by trying to accurately re-create reality; instead they are liberated to explore all sorts of philosophical and subjective questions, such as the nature of perception, or what is beauty. That's why in the 19th century we see all kinds of weird art movements that have nothing to do with objective reality -- postmodernism, surrealism, cubism, etc. And Picasso was on the forefront of several of those movements.
Here's a portion of what wikipedia says about cubism: "The cubists went farther than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time, in the same plane. This new kind of depiction revolutionised the way in which objects could be visualised in painting and art and opened the possibility of a new way of looking at reality."
First of all, calm down. Picasso was a painter, not a philosopher or an engineer. He's not telling you how to do your job.
Second of all, the value of this quote helps a person to understand a commonly misunderstood by computer geeks. Computers are basically abacuses. They do boolean logic. They create answers. However, intelligence asks questions. We don't have a tool yet that can ask a question, and until we do, the only intelligent system in the universe that know of will be the human mind. Too often, people, both programmers and non-programmers alike, think that a computer can solve all the problem. However, that doesn't reflect reality. Human intellect needs to perceive and pose the question, and then use a tool to solve that problem, such as progamming a computer to solve that problem.
But back in the working world, practical answers to real questions are quite valuable You have just shown exactly what Picasso was trying to enlighten you to. You need to have a good question first, in order to get a good answer. Or any answer, for that matter.
That quote just strikes me as one of those pseudo-intellectual sayings that seems brilliant until subjected to a moment of rational thought. So you have no use for questions? That tells me you haven't spent a moments time thinking about the implications of this quote.
I should tell you that I began using Linux as my sole desktop OS at home and as my sole OS at work in 1995...
No longer could I rely on Quicken for my banking records, so I tried several open source solutions before finally developing a spreadsheet that was easy to use, accurate, and could be sorted in more ways than I really needed. You were doing online banking in 1995? And you were running a version of Quicken in 1995 that was able to connect to your online bank?
I'm totally with you. I'm planning on joining the republican party in my state so I can vote for him in the primary. Once a couple of primaries pass I will donate to his candidacy, as long as he is still in the running. My greatest hope is that he can become president. My practical wish is that we can get him in the final debates, like Ross Perot in the '92 election.
I worry that the next generation (maybe even the current high school kids, now) won't even KNOW what they're missing in terms of basic american freedoms;( I had a sad realization the other day. At the end of Bush's presidency in 2008, a 9-year-old who became a 17-year-old would really only have known Bush as a model for the president. How sad.
Human life and memory seem so short -- the generations turn too quickly. Now I understand how vitally important it is to teach history.
Also, with the ridiculous passenger screening... taking shoes off, limiting liquids because of some bullshit half-imagined liquid bomb plot. Its all to scare the passengers, or perhaps to make them FEEL like someone is doing something. Or, it's just to get people used to random and crazy searches by the authorities as a normal part of daily life, without a peep of protest.
This seems like the exact reason why basic physics should be mandatory in schools. Okay...
Dear God. How exactly would a magnetic field contain neutral photons ? They will generate zero flux and will not interact with the field at all. Is this the kind of basic physics that the average student would understand in their mandatory class?
If you never learned calculus or any higher maths, how do you know that you would have never used them? Math is used for all kinds of research in history: population extrapolations, statistical correlations, dynamic modeling, hypothesis testing, etc. This may be a red herring argument. He didn't say that he didn't use math; all he said was that he's gotten what he's needed: arithmetic and geometry ( and I would bet he also uses some statistics ). Can you think of some examples where you would need trig or calculus to understand some historical phenomenon?
Can you tell whether you understand something or not? If he's grasped every graph or math-based explanation he's needed to, and knows only arithmetic and geometry, that means that he's never needed trig or calculus.
What about the times that people download it once (IT shops) and install it on hundreds of computers(ok not always that many, but enough to mess up these stats) Wouldn't that boost the numbers of long-term users?
If you have a home computer, and the user downloads firefox and keeps using it, you have a long-term usage ratio of 100% per download.
If a sysadmin downloads a single copy of firefox, installs it on 10 computers, and 3 long-term users develop out of that, you then have a 300% ratio per download. However, you only have a 30% ratio per installation. One download, 10 installs, 3 users.
And then, via implantation of the mandatory National ID chip, directly into your brain. Then you really WILL have that song stuck in your head. I'll just override the signals with massive doses of DMT and Salvinorum A.
Who owns those brain cells? The RIAA? Uncle Sam? I guess I'll have to hijack my own brain.
"When his defense asked,
'Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?' the answer was: 'His own.'"
Seems more likely that the legislators of tomorrow are the rich kids of today, who can afford as many CDs as they want. Sure they can afford them, but who wants those clunky old things? They probably have instead 5GB iPods stuffed full of music.
I think we will soon see the day when CD players will go the way of tape decks, and all of your music will be transmitted wirelessly from your online music accounts to your home computer, your portable music player, and your car stereo.
PHB which is probably more akin to the chimpanzee than anything vaguely human... in fact I'm sure of that last statement, PHBs are NOT human. Everything has to be black and white -- nothing can be grey in science. The truth is that science is all grey and we want to see in black and white. Oh, okay. Does this then explain the existence of the grey aliens, or Greys??
I don't know the details, but if a doctor in a private practice can afford an $40-80K vehicle drawing a salary from the practice, certainly the practice can afford a $40K+ machine as an expense, when it's making money off of it.
But don't expect to see one of these systems used by your local physician anytime soon. This VRI system will carry a price tag of over $40K. Is that really so much money that a local doctor can't afford it? I would expect a GP not to have it, just because he doesn't do enough long-disease screening to cover the cost. Probably the local hospital and a specialist would have it.
But is $40K a lot as far as medical devices cost? How much is the x-ray machine at the doctor's office, or the ultrasound equipment at the heart specialist?
How about a mechanical sphynx that targets pre-pubescent with random algebra, English, and social questions and if you fail ti eats you. Or spelling words.
The problem is that if you follow this to its logical conclusion, you'll have a health 'insurance' program that doesn't really insure anyone for their health problems. First it's BMI, then it's if they're a smoker, then it's what kinds of food do they eat, then it's their genetics. Soon the people who use it a lot will pay more, while the healthy people who don't use it will pay very little. When you get to that point, why have health insurance at all? Just pay the doctor or hospital when you get sick. That would be a completely fair system -- sick people would pay more. Everyone would pay exactly how much they use.
The point is that's not an insurance program. The point of an insurance program is to disperse risk over a group. One person in 20 gets cancer; but the group of 20 in the insurance pool pays for it, so that it doesn't totally bankrupt the cancer sufferer. If you start having less healthy people pay more, you're not spreading the risk around any more; you're focusing it. And like I said earlier, if that's your goal, just get rid of the insurance and pay the doctors and hospitals directly.
I don't believe in self-taught that much. Everybody absorbs knowledge from someone else, even unintentionally. Someone that tries to teach himself could spend months following the wrong paths when a more experienced person (or a book, by the way) could teach them how to do it in some days. I think we mostly agree. But what I was saying is that there are people who can learn on their own without someone explicitly teaching them and going over everything. It's a different think to interact with a book or a co-worker than with an instructor. Some people need the instructor, some don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as long as we have to train a super secret and highly elite team of counter-AI-predator soldiers, and the whole thing finishes as a showdown where the team leader confronts the talking mainframe in an underground secret bunker.
For instance, how do you see a trail as it winds over grassland and leads into the woods? How does one see a year old trail that is partially overgrown, or a new trail not completely tramped down. How do you track down an animal from smattering of scat, nibbles and tracks over rocks, dirt, grassland, and the tree line? How does a human being see a camouflaged predator slinking behind the tree line? How do you read the sky and know what the weather will be later that day? How do you look at a river and know if it's crossable or not? Back at home, how do you play your relatives, friends, and enemies in the tribe so that you are elected leader when the Big Man passes away? Or how do you manage to convince your husband that your new pregnancy is his, and not your secret lovers'?
Computers seem to be like idiot savants. They are good at logic puzzles, things like factoring large number or memorizing the phone books. That's a very useful tool in our technological society, but I don't think it's the basis of human intelligence. Like some Autistic person, computers suck as the basics of social interaction, which any three year old understands the basic concepts of. I remember my friend's three year old putting on her parents clothes and getting dressed up when she heard that her parents were going to a Halloween party -- all without prompting. What kind of intelligence do you need to understand the concepts of 'a party' or 'dressing up'? Or simple thinks like standing on two legs or filling a glass of water -- never mind hunting and eating another animal, or following a trail. I did an AI degree in the mid 90s and one of the things we covered was the definition of intelligence. After running through a few unsatisfactory definitions, my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else... Well, my definition includes things that organic nervous systems are good at, such as walking, migrating, or hunting.
First of all, we've been promised AI for a long time, and we don't have anything near it. Think about the amount of processing power that an ant has, and compare it's ability to navigate the environment. We have machines that have immensely more computing power, but still cannot perform the ambulatory feats of a simple ants ( and I'm not talking about swarming, just moving an ant body with six legs). Computers are good at solving classical intellectual problems that humans are generally bad at, such as factoring large numbers, calculating dates far in the future, or playing chess, but they suck that basic things that small, relatively computationally weak organisms can do, such as walking, flying, or species recognition. If computers really were the same kinds of devices as organic nervous systems were, we would expect them to be naturally good at the things that we find organic nervous systems being naturally good at, such as locomotion, or hunting. However, it turns out that they are only good at problems posed as boolean logic problems, such as calculus, and bad at everything else. If we manage to create a computationally weak device that can walk, fly, find food, and avoid predators, I will eat my words, but as of yet, we don't have such as device.
Secondly, Goedel's theorem, in my understanding, shows that the human mind can do things that no Turing machines can. Therefore, a human mind cannot be solely a turing machine ( although it may have one or some as part of its make-up ). I've read a lot of debates about this between philosophers and mathematicians, and I've also had a lot of arguments on slashdot. However, I side with Goedel when I claim that the human mind can perceive things that a Turing machine cannot. Therefore, we don't yet understand what the human mind is, and therefore we cannot build one, either.
Typically 'answers' go with 'questions'. Are you claiming that some reporter or someone asked him, "Picasso, what do you think of these new calculating devices called 'computers'?" and he said, "Oh, they're worthless, they cannot give you art, they can only give you answers?" Why would art be contrasted with answers? I think instead someone was asking him, "Picasso, with these new computers that can perform incredible calculations, they will surely solve all the questions of the universe and give us the grand unified theory of everything. What need will we have for more art once a computer has given us all the answers?"
Picasso thought that art was the freest form of human inquiry. His idea of art hearkens back to the time when art and science were the same endeavor, one of inquiry into the nature of the world. That's why Da Vinci painted and drew -- he thought that he was making a scientific inquiry into the nature of light and form. They were also making 'inquiries' into more philosophical questions, such as 'what is beauty', and trying to give an answer by making a painting. All of the portraits you see before the invention of the camera were an attempt to create an accurate image of that person. But at some point, the arts become separated from the science, which is sort of the split between science and engineering we have today. To be a scientist or artist back in the day, as a glassblower, for example, means you had some basic understanding of the chemical ( or alchemical, as it was at the time ) properties of glass, metal colorants, and heat, but also a practical ability to work the glass. You were a science practitioner. Philosophy and knowledge were not separated from a practice or craft.
But once you have the development of the camera, and other modern measuring equipment, the arts become unbound from science. No longer is a painter constrained by trying to accurately re-create reality; instead they are liberated to explore all sorts of philosophical and subjective questions, such as the nature of perception, or what is beauty. That's why in the 19th century we see all kinds of weird art movements that have nothing to do with objective reality -- postmodernism, surrealism, cubism, etc. And Picasso was on the forefront of several of those movements.
Here's a portion of what wikipedia says about cubism: "The cubists went farther than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time, in the same plane. This new kind of depiction revolutionised the way in which objects could be visualised in painting and art and opened the possibility of a new way of looking at reality."
Second of all, the value of this quote helps a person to understand a commonly misunderstood by computer geeks. Computers are basically abacuses. They do boolean logic. They create answers. However, intelligence asks questions. We don't have a tool yet that can ask a question, and until we do, the only intelligent system in the universe that know of will be the human mind. Too often, people, both programmers and non-programmers alike, think that a computer can solve all the problem. However, that doesn't reflect reality. Human intellect needs to perceive and pose the question, and then use a tool to solve that problem, such as progamming a computer to solve that problem. But back in the working world, practical answers to real questions are quite valuable You have just shown exactly what Picasso was trying to enlighten you to. You need to have a good question first, in order to get a good answer. Or any answer, for that matter. That quote just strikes me as one of those pseudo-intellectual sayings that seems brilliant until subjected to a moment of rational thought. So you have no use for questions? That tells me you haven't spent a moments time thinking about the implications of this quote.
How can we perceive that there is one truth?
No longer could I rely on Quicken for my banking records, so I tried several open source solutions before finally developing a spreadsheet that was easy to use, accurate, and could be sorted in more ways than I really needed. You were doing online banking in 1995? And you were running a version of Quicken in 1995 that was able to connect to your online bank?
I'm totally with you. I'm planning on joining the republican party in my state so I can vote for him in the primary. Once a couple of primaries pass I will donate to his candidacy, as long as he is still in the running. My greatest hope is that he can become president. My practical wish is that we can get him in the final debates, like Ross Perot in the '92 election.
Human life and memory seem so short -- the generations turn too quickly. Now I understand how vitally important it is to teach history.
Can you tell whether you understand something or not? If he's grasped every graph or math-based explanation he's needed to, and knows only arithmetic and geometry, that means that he's never needed trig or calculus.
If you have a home computer, and the user downloads firefox and keeps using it, you have a long-term usage ratio of 100% per download.
If a sysadmin downloads a single copy of firefox, installs it on 10 computers, and 3 long-term users develop out of that, you then have a 300% ratio per download. However, you only have a 30% ratio per installation. One download, 10 installs, 3 users.
"When his defense asked, 'Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?' the answer was: 'His own.'"
I think we will soon see the day when CD players will go the way of tape decks, and all of your music will be transmitted wirelessly from your online music accounts to your home computer, your portable music player, and your car stereo.
</sarcasm>
I don't know the details, but if a doctor in a private practice can afford an $40-80K vehicle drawing a salary from the practice, certainly the practice can afford a $40K+ machine as an expense, when it's making money off of it.
But is $40K a lot as far as medical devices cost? How much is the x-ray machine at the doctor's office, or the ultrasound equipment at the heart specialist?
The problem is that if you follow this to its logical conclusion, you'll have a health 'insurance' program that doesn't really insure anyone for their health problems. First it's BMI, then it's if they're a smoker, then it's what kinds of food do they eat, then it's their genetics. Soon the people who use it a lot will pay more, while the healthy people who don't use it will pay very little. When you get to that point, why have health insurance at all? Just pay the doctor or hospital when you get sick. That would be a completely fair system -- sick people would pay more. Everyone would pay exactly how much they use.
The point is that's not an insurance program. The point of an insurance program is to disperse risk over a group. One person in 20 gets cancer; but the group of 20 in the insurance pool pays for it, so that it doesn't totally bankrupt the cancer sufferer. If you start having less healthy people pay more, you're not spreading the risk around any more; you're focusing it. And like I said earlier, if that's your goal, just get rid of the insurance and pay the doctors and hospitals directly.
Skimmed over grandparent too quickly... disregard.
How about we have a national holiday for voting, right after a 'voting weekend', instead of having voting during a single work-day?